Daniel F McCaffrey

The authors investigate whether the tenure of program managers contributes to Nunn-McCurdy breaches. They also examine the existing decentralized systems used to track cost growth to determine whether additional guidance and control are needed to make acquisition category II programs performance more transparent. Finally, they investigate whether key assumptions, so-called framing assumptions, could be useful risk management tools.

Value-added assessment (VAA) systems use statistical techniques to analyze test-score data; VAA data is intended to help educators make more informed decisions about curriculum and instruction. The authors examined the rollout of Pennsylvania's VAA program, and found that, in its pilot phase, the program had little effect on student achievement and received limited use by most principals and teachers at schools participating in the program.

Focusing on the Louisiana public school system, this report explores the experiences of students displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita: their movements among schools, the durations of enrollments at each site, and time out of school. It also documents the effects of these movements on the state's public education system during the first academic year following the hurricanes, as reported by 415 school principals in survey responses.

This study compares the effectiveness of 11 U.S. community-based substance abuse treatment programs for adolescents. After accounting for pretreatment differences between the youths entering each program, no persuasive evidence was found to suggest that any program produced superior outcomes. The significance of the findings for current efforts to develop outcomes-based treatment performance measurement systems is highlighted in the discussion.