"These commissioned papers address advances in measuring inflation and adjusting for it; the emergence of a new focus upon spending at the school level; new, private sources of funding for public education; and a review of the state of the art of assessing educational productivity." In addition to excellent summaries of the papers in this series, the Introduction and Overview in the Table of Contents offers a discussion of the use of new features at the Education Finance Statistics Center Website to help users optimize their data collection. For references to other papers in this same series, see the July 24, 1998 Scout Report.