A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students

Number 13

September 1995

The ED Gopher

It's late at night; you've got a briefing to give tomorrow morning; and you don't have the information you need at hand. Who are you going to call? The U.S. Department of Education gopher! The U.S. Department of Education's National Library of Education is working to make a wide variety of reports, news releases, and other documents available online through the Internet.

Our gopher address is gopher.ed.gov. If you are unable to access our site directly, you can reach it from a main gopher tree by selecting North America -> USA -> General -> U.S. Department of Education.

What Is Available?

The information available on line is varied, and is constantly being updated. As of May 1995, the gopher site included

• Full-text versions of key legislation, including the Goals 2000: Educate America Act and the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994;

• A collection of academic standards and documents about the development of standards, use of standards, and other standards-related issues, including descriptions of ED-funded projects for the development of state-level curriculum frameworks and content standards;

• Family involvement information, including full-text versions of the Helping Your Child series, a series of booklets on different education topics designed to help parents support their children's learning;

• Education Consumer Guides that provide brief descriptions of key educational programs, teaching and learning methods, and assessment techniques such as Success For All, Reading Recovery, Comer Schools, and Performance Assessment; and

• ED press releases, selected speeches and testimony by the Secretary of Education, and guides to ED programs.

• The Condition of Education. The Condition contains 60 indicators of the condition of education. Each indicator is presented on two pages, with findings summarized in textual, tabular, and graphical formats. The 60 indicators are organized into six sections: Access, Participation, and Progress; Achievement, Attainment, and Curriculum; Economic and Other Outcomes of Education; Size, Growth, and Output of Educational Institutions; Climate, Classrooms, and Diversity in Educational Institutions; and Human and Financial Resources of Educational Institutions.

• The Digest of Education Statistics. The Digest contains a wealth of statistics on elementary/secondary enrollment, higher education, teachers, student performance, international comparisons of achievement, graduates and degrees, and educational expenditures.

• Education in States and Nations: 1988. This volume includes 16 education indicators grouped into four categories: background, participation, outcomes, and finance. The presentation of each indicator includes an explanation of what it measures, why it is important, and key results from a comparison of countries and states. In addition to the explanations and key results, the presentation of each indicator includes separate tables for states and countries and a graph that displays states and countries together.

• Youth Indicators. Youth Indicators contains statistics that address important aspects of the lives of youth--family, work, education, health, behavior, and attitudes. It is intended to be of use to agency officials and others in public life concerned with integrating human services for youth and their families. Whenever possible, tables go as far back as 1950, or even earlier, providing needed historical context for today's issues. Each indicator contains a table, chart, and brief descriptive text.

A Few Final Words

• The material in our gopher can be downloaded to your PC for reading or for "cutting and pasting" into other documents. The exact procedures for downloading will vary depending on your site and the software you are using to access the system.

• Some of our online files (generally, the big ones) are compressed ("zipped") and need to be "unzipped" before you can read them. (These files will have the word "zip" in the title line.) If you do not have decompression software, you can download it from our site: gopher to U.S. Department of Education -> About this Gopher -> ED Utilities for Files in this Gopher. This directory contains compression/decompression software for a variety of microcomputer systems.

• While you're online, be sure to check out what ERIC (the Educational Resources Information Center) has to offer. In addition to ERIC Digests, Access ERIC Brochures, ERIC Bibliographies, and lesson plans, there's AskERIC, an Internet-based question answering service for teachers, library media specialists, administrators, and others interested in education.

Please note:

• The U. S. Department of Education does not offer public access gopher clients. You must either have an appropriate gopher client at your site or be able to telnet to a public access client elsewhere.

• You cannot access the ED public servers by telneting to the site. You will be denied telnet access.

• Be sure to check the dates on all materials you access through the Internet. Some sites leave old information online or do not update files frequently.

AR 95-7027

This Consumer Guide is produced by the National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students, Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education

Richard W. Riley, Secretary of Education
Sharon P. Robinson, Assistant Secretary, OERI
Judith I. Anderson, Acting Director, At-Risk Institute

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