Salary: The total amount regularly paid or stipulated to be paid to an individual, before deductions, for personal services rendered while on the payroll of a business or organization.

Salary workers: Any person who worked one or more days during the previous year and was paid on the basis of a yearly salary is considered a salary worker.

Sales taxes: Tax imposed upon the sale and consumption of goods and services. It can be imposed either as a general tax on the retail price of all goods and services sold or as a tax on the sale of selected goods and services.

SAT Assessment: (See Scholastic Assessment Test.)

Scale score: Uses a set scale (e.g., 0–500 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics assessments) to assess overall achievement in a domain, such as mathematics. NAEP and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 (ECLS–K) use Item Response Theory (IRT) models to determine the scale. (See also Score.)

Scholarships and fellowships: This category of college expenditures applies only to money given in the form of outright grants and trainee stipends to individuals enrolled in formal coursework, either for credit or not. Aid to students in the form of tuition or fee remissions is included. College work-study funds are excluded and are reported under the program in which the student is working. In the tabulations in The Condition of Education, Pell grants are not included in this expenditure category.

Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT): An examination administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and used to predict the facility with which an individual will progress in learning college-level subjects. The SAT differs from the ACT in that it assesses students’ aptitude in English, reading, and mathematics generally rather than their curricular knowledge.

School administrators: Those staff members whose activities are concerned with directing and managing the operation of a particular school. They may be principals or assistant principals, including those who coordinate school instructional activities with those of the local education agency (LEA) and other appropriate units.

School district: An education agency at the local level that exists primarily to operate public schools or to contract for public school services. Synonyms are “local basic administrative unit” and “local education agency.” (See also Local education agency [LEA].)

School lunch program: (See National School Lunch Program.)

School year: The 12-month period of time denoting the beginning and ending dates for school accounting purposes, usually from July 1 through June 30.

Science: The body of related courses concerned with knowledge of the physical and biological world and with the processes of discovering and validating this knowledge.

Science literacy: An individual’s scientific knowledge and use of that knowledge to identify questions, to acquire new knowledge, to explain scientific phenomena, and to draw evidence-based conclusions about science-related issues; understanding of the characteristic features of science as a form of human knowledge and enquiry; awareness of how science and technology shape our material, intellectual, and cultural environments; and willingness to engage in science-related issues, and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen.

Score: Scores are scale scores, generally estimated using Item Response Theory (IRT) by modeling the probability of answering a question in a certain way as a mathematical function of proficiency or skill. A set scale is created (e.g., 0–500 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress), with a set median and standard deviation. The results on the assessment are then related to the median of the scale such that almost all results are within two standard deviations of the median. (See also Scale score.)

Secondary school: An elementary/secondary school with one or more of grades 7–12 that does not have any grade lower than grade 7. For example, schools with grades 9–12, 7–9, 10–12, or 7–8 are classified as secondary.

Self-care: A care arrangement in which parents allow children to be responsible for themselves when a parent or another adult is unavailable for supervision.

Serious violent crime: Rape, sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated assault. (See also Serious violent incidents.)

Serious violent incidents: Include rape or attempted rape, sexual battery other than rape, physical attack or fight with a weapon, threat of physical attack with a weapon, and robbery with or without a weapon. (See also Serious violent crime.)

Service-learning: An educational activity, program, or curriculum that seeks to promote students’ learning through experiences associated with volunteerism or community service.

Short-written answer: Short-written answer is a subcategory of extended response. The answer can be a word, a phrase, or a sentence or two. (See also Extended response.)

Sight words: As used in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998 (ECLS–K), this reading skill is one in which the reader can recognize common words by sight.

Significantly different: (See the Reader’s Guide.)

Social science: A body of related courses concerned with knowledge of the social life of human groups and individuals, including economics, geography, history, political science, psychology, social studies, and sociology.

Social studies: A group of instructional programs that describes the substantive portions of behavior, past and present activities, interactions, and organizations of people associated together for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes.

Socioeconomic status (SES): A measure of an individual or family’s relative economic and social ranking. In the analyses in this publication, SES is constructed based on father’s education level, mother’s education level, father’s occupation, mother’s occupation, and family income. Also, students are classified into high, middle, and low SES based on a standardized composite index score of their parents’ education level, mother’s and father’s occupation, family’s income, and certain household items. The terms “high SES,” “middle SES,” and “low SES,” respectively, refer to the upper, middle two, and lower quartiles of the composite index score distribution. By definition, one-quarter of each cohort of students will be in the bottom SES quartile, even if education levels, average family incomes, and the number of persons in more prestigious occupations change.

Special education schools: A public elementary/secondary school that (1) focuses primarily on special education, including instruction for any of the following: hard of hearing, deaf, speech impaired, health impaired, orthopedically impaired, mentally retarded, seriously emotionally disturbed, multi-handicapped, visually handicapped, deaf and blind; and the learning disabled; and (2) adapts curriculum, materials, or instruction for students served. About 2 percent of schools in the Common Core of Data files are special education schools.

Specific learning disability: A specific learning disability is a disorder of one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations. This includes conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. (See also supplemental note 8.)

Speech or language impairments: A communication disorder such as stuttering, impaired articulation, a language impairment, or a voice impairment that adversely affects a child’s educational performance.

Stafford Loan program: The Stafford Loan program is the largest of federal student loans. For students with financial need, the federal government subsidizes the interest while the student is enrolled. Unsubsidized loans are available to students without regard to financial need.

Standard deviation: The standard deviation measures the spread of a set of data around the mean of the data. In a normal distribution, approximately 68 percent of scores fall within plus or minus one standard deviation of the mean, and 95 percent fall within plus or minus two standard deviations of the mean.

Standards-based examination: Standards-based examinations are aligned with curriculum content or student performance requirements that have been established by a state and/or local education agency at a particular grade.

Statistically significant: (See the Reader’s Guide.)

Status dropout rate: The status dropout rate is a cumulative rate that estimates the proportion of young adults who are dropouts, regardless of when they dropped out. The numerator of the status dropout rate for any given year is the number of young adults ages 16–24 who, as of October of that year, had not completed high school and were not currently enrolled. The denominator is the total number of 16- to 24-year-olds in October of that same year. (See also Dropout and Longitudinal dropout rate.)

Stopout: (See Dropout.)

Student services: Funds expended for admissions, registrar activities, and activities whose primary purpose is to contribute to students’ emotional and physical well-being and to their intellectual, cultural, and social development outside the context of the formal instructional program.

Subbaccalaureate degree: Award granted for the successful completion of studies at either 2-year or less-than-2-year institutions. Subbaccalaureate degrees typically include associate’s degrees and certificates.

Support services: The sum of current fund expenditures on student services (e.g., guidance, health); instructional services (e.g., curriculum development, staff training); general and school administration; operation and maintenance; transportation; food services; and enterprise operations.

Support services expenditures (elementary/secondary): Current expenditures for activities that support instruction. These services include school building operation and maintenance, school administration, student support services, student transportation, instructional staff support, school district administration, business services, research, testing, and data processing.