The Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education specializes in calculating the long- and short-term costs, along with probable payoffs, of different educational strategies, reports Debbie Viadero for Education Week.

So far, the center has looked into the costs and benefits of preschool and dropout-prevention programs, while also investigating the public savings (about $4 billion a year) that could result from strategies that bring the high school graduation rate for black males up to that of white males.

While cost-benefit analyses have long been a staple of business, health care, environmental studies and national defense, such studies are undertaken far less often in education. The center has found that if educators were inclined to pay more attention to costs, the savings could be considerable.

For example, when the center looked at an experiment on computer-aided instruction from the 1960s, they found that the research results prompted scholars to urge educators to buy more computers and software programs, an expense that increased the annual budget by 25 percent. However, the researchers failed to notice that one of the control schools got the same results by hiring more teachers' aides and using worksheets, which only increased the budget by 6 percent.

With dwindling budgets nationwide, savings like these could provide great flexibility to districts. In addition, when looking nationwide, any effort that could halve the number of dropouts would provide save a potential $45 billion a year in lost revenues and opportunities.

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