Online Learning

K-12 Online Learning: A Survey of U.S. School District Administrators

The Sloan Consortium’s first ever survey of online learning in elementary and secondary education, K-12 Online Learning: A Survey of U.S. School District Administrators, predicts rapid growth in online education. The nationwide survey, conducted during the 2005-2006 academic year, finds that almost two out of three (63 %) school districts had one or more students enrolled in either a fully online or a blended course, which combines online learning with traditional face-to-face instruction.

The new study estimates that 700,000 K-12 students were engaged in online courses in the 2005-2006 academic year…Survey results show online learning is meeting the specific needs of a range of students including those who need extra help, those who want to take more advanced courses and those whose districts do not have enough teachers to offer certain subjects.

+ Almost two-thirds of the responding public school districts are offering online courses:* 63.1% had one or more students enrolled in a fully online or blended course.* 57.9% had one or more students enrolled in a fully online course.* 32.4% had one or more students enrolled in a blended course.

Direct to Highlights Direct to Full Text (30 pages; PDF)

Source: The Sloan Consortium

Congressional Pig Book

From Citizens Against Government Waste:
The 2007 Government Pig Book

http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_pigbook2007

The Congressional Pig Book is CAGW's annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget.

The 2007 Pig Book identified 2,658 projects at a cost of $13.2 billion in the Defense and Homeland Security Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2007. Only two of the 11 appropriations bills were enacted by Congress and the remaining nine were subject to a moratorium on earmarks.

A "pork" project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures. To qualify as pork, a project must meet one of seven criteria that were developed in 1991 by CAGW and the Congressional Porkbusters Coalition.

Congresspedia

Congresspedia

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Congresspedia

Congresspedia is the "citizen's encyclopedia on Congress" that anyone can edit.

Congresspedia is part of SourceWatch, a wiki-based website documenting the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda.

GovTrack.us

GovTrack.us — a 2006 Webby Award nominee mentioned in both The New York Times and The Washington Post — brings together legislative data from existing government sources and presents it in a user-friendly format, and provides the ability to track legislative events as they happen via email updates and RSS/Atom feeds. GovTrack provides its services for free.

As a nexus of information about the United States Congress, GovTrack brings together information on the status of federal legislation, voting records, and campaign contributions. The site automatically tracks legislative events and categorizes them into thousands of subjects, such as "nuclear energy" and "medicine," so that users can subscribe to follow just the events that interest them. Events, like the passage of bills, are sent to users on a daily or weekly basis by email, or through RSS/Atom feeds.

Information is retrieved from a variety of government websites, primarily THOMAS and also sites listed on this page, on a daily basis.


http://www.govtrack.us/

Federal Government Spending

This website, created by OMB Watch, is a free, searchable database of federal government spending.

http://fedspending.org/

FedSpending.org relies on the federal government's data for this website. The data is largely from two sources: the Federal Procurement Data System, which contains information about federal contracts; and the Federal Assistance Award Data System, which contains information about federal financial assistance such as grants, loans, insurance, and direct subsidies like Social Security.

From the website:

"With over $14 trillion in federal spending, this more open and accessible tool for citizens to find out where federal money goes and who gets it is long overdue. We believe this website is a good first step toward providing that access."

Children's Health Information

New Resource for Children’s Health Information

Statehealthfacts.org

Includes a children’s health section that offers customized fact sheets for each state, a directory of all children’s health topics on the site, and the latest children’s health research from KCMU and headlines from kaisernetwork.org.
Source: StateHealthFacts.org (Kaiser Family Foundation)

Some of the latest stats updated on StateHealthFacts.org
Number of Medicare Advantage Contracts
2007+ Total Medicare Advantage Enrollment
2006+ Infant Mortality Rate (Deaths per 1,000 Live Births) by Race/Ethnicity
2001-2003+ State Mandated Benefits

50 State Bluebook Guide

State Bluebooks

Table with links to "blue books" for most U.S. states.

These books are directories to each state's government, with material on topics such as branches of government, departments, and elections.

URL:

http://wwwapp.bradley.edu/library_reference/index.php/State_Blue_Books