The Comparable Wage Index (CWI) is a measure of the systematic, regional variations in the salaries of college graduates who are not educators. It can be used by researchers to adjust district-level finance data at different levels in order to make better comparisons across geographic areas. The CWI was developed by Dr. Lori L. Taylor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University and William J. Fowler, Jr. at NCES. Dr. Taylor's research was supported by a contract with the National Center for Education Statistics. The complete description of the research is provided in the NCES Research and Development “A Comparable Wage Approach to Geographic Cost Adjustment” (NCES 2006-321). This documentation describes four geographic levels of the CWI, which are presented in four separate files. These files are the school district, labor market, state, and a combined regional and national file. The school district file provides a CWI for each local education agency (LEA) in the NCES Common Core of Data (CCD) database. For each LEA there is a series of indexes for the years 1997 - 2004. The file can be merged with school district finance data, and this merged file can be used to produce finance data adjusted for geographic cost differences. This file also includes four agency typology variables. The additional files allow for similar geographic cost adjustments for larger geographic areas. NCES has sponsored the development of other geographic adjustment indexes in the past; the latest was for the 1993-94 school year.
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