Читать книгу Economic Evaluation in Education - Henry M. Levin - Страница 40

1 What are the “costs” associated with the following situations?The school your children attends is temporarily closed because of building violations.The district decides to reduce the number of schools a family can apply to for high school.The school sponsors an outdoor party for the student body that destroys a major portion of the lawns and shrubbery.A rise in school crime and vandalism requires that some teachers be used to patrol the campus rather than teach.The birth of a child places heavy demands on your family schedule so that you must defer the completion of courses for a master’s degree.

2 You observe a mentoring program over several years and across several sites. The program is 1 year long, and you observe very little year-over-year and site-by-site variation in implementation and costs. You are therefore able to estimate that programs that serve few to no students (e.g., during start-up years) cost about $10,000, sites that serve 25 students in a year cost $12,500, and sites that serve 100 students in a year cost $20,000. Therefore, you use linear regression methods to estimate the cost function as C = 10,000 + 100q, where C represents total cost and q represents the number of students served by a site in a year.What is the fixed cost of the program?What is the variable cost?What is the average cost per participant?What is the marginal cost?Under what circumstances would you use each of the estimates in a through d?

3 A school district has asked you to evaluate a reading tutoring program targeting struggling readers in upper elementary grades. Students take regular reading classes with their peers and also receive tutoring by trained college student volunteers in groups of four on a pull-out basis, meaning that the tutors bring students to a small classroom for 45 minutes of class time daily for more individualized instruction. Tutors are trained by university literacy faculty for 20 hours and use an instructor guidebook, student workbooks, and works of children’s literature for each student in their instruction. Students use their own notebooks and pencils from reading class to complete assignments and take notes.Which costs of the program are incremental? Which are not? Why?Under what circumstances would you want to consider the incremental cost versus the total cost of the program?