The mission of public policy programs: A report on recent experience

This is the report of a meeting on graduate training and research programs in public policy organized by the Ford Foundation on September 10, 1975. The meeting was attended by various representatives of the Ford Foundation along with the following representatives of public policy schools: Graham Allison, Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; William B. Cannon, Former Dean, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas; John P. Crecine, Former Professor, Institute of Public Policy Studies, University of Michigan; Otto A. Davis, Dean, School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie-Mellon University; Joel L. Fleishman, Director, Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs, Duke University; Edward K. Hamilton, Professor, Program in Public Management, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; Donald E. Stokes, Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; Aaron Wildavsky, Dean, Graduate School of Public Policy, University of California (Berkeley); Charles Wolf, Jr., Head of Economics Department, and Director of Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, The Rand Corporation; Douglas T. Yates, Jr., Associate Dean, School of Organization and Management, Yale University.The author acted as the rapporteur of the meeting and offers the following account with the permission of those whose views and experience are directly represented. The author owes a special acknowledgement to Peter Bell of the Ford Foundation who made many useful comments on the original account and saved the author from numerous factual errors.     

Comments on John Uhr, 'Testing the Policy Capacities of Budgetary Agencies: Lessons from Finance'

These comments derive from a seminar specifically on evaluation policy review organised by the Public Policy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, in May 1996. Both John Uhr and Hal Colebatch presented their views on the evaluation process and it was felt appropriate to include Hal Colebatch's comments here. John Uhr declined the offer to reply, indicating he would allow the original article to stand on its merits.     

Assessing faculty research productivity in graduate public policy programs

This study assesses the faculty research productivity of 23 graduate public policy programs, and is based upon data from the Social Sciences Citations Index. The results clearly show that a handful of policy programs have outstanding research records: UC Berkeley, Princeton, Michigan, Chicago, Duke, Carnegie-Mellon, Rand, Syracuse, and, of course, Harvard. Most of the rest also have quite commendable records by this criterion.Inquiries regarding this study should be addressed to Professor Fred Thompson, Graduate Program in Public Policy and Administration, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, where Michael Farber is currently a second-year student. Patricia Powers graduated in 1983 and is currently employed by ICF in Washington, D.C.     

Graduate education in public policy

Contemporary social transformation and accelerated politicization are inducing and requiring changes in the epistemological structure and the substantive content of the social and political sciences. To accommodate to and to facilitate these changes there is here proposed an interdisciplinary program of graduate education in Public Policy which is designed (1) to aggregate the most relevant materials and usable generalizations of the sociopolitical sciences and (2) to strike a balance between viable theory and tested experience. Although the curriculum is intended to be primarily contemporaneous and futuristic, it incorporates comparative and historical as well as normative and positivistic materials and methods. A variegated and qualified body of students is expected to be recruited for the proposed program as its principal intellectual and creative component.     

Cases and Controversies: How Novitiates Are Trained to Be Masters of the Public Policy Universe

Public policy schools were established 30 years ago to provide analytic and management skills to aspiring policy professionals. A centerpiece of policy management training has been the action‐centered teaching case, modeled after the cases long used in business schools. Though other aspects of public management teaching and research have been vigorously debated, little attention has been paid to the content of teaching cases.Taking these texts as a central element in policy student socialization, the authors ask what implicit lessons they convey. A close reading of 10 best‐selling cases from the Kennedy School of Government finds the policy world to be the domain of high‐level, lone protagonists beset by hostile political forces; collaborative problem‐solving is rare, street‐level actors insignificant, and historical, social, and institutional contexts of minimal importance. The article discusses the implications of this construction and raises questions about its appropriateness for the training of future public servants. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

IMPLICATIONS OF WHISTLEBLOWING FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION EDUCATION

Whistleblowing, or going public, is an issue which has received a great deal of media attention and scholarly consideration. Public administrators of the future will surely have to confront it. The author of this article divides whistleblowing into individual, organization, and environmental levels of analysis. Each level has its own unique considerations which must be understood separately before they can be understood comprehensively. Moreover, the author asserts that the study of whistleblowing fosters awareness of ethics, provides the skills needed to effectively cope with dissent, and imparts legal knowledge about the discipline of public administration to students.     

Measuring unnecessary delay in administrative proceedings: The actual versus the predicted

This article discusses various ways of systematically measuring the time one would expect various administrative proceedings to consume relative to the time they actually consume taking into consideration the diverse complexity of such proceedings. The article uses the problem of administrative delay to illustrate the broader problem of creating a dependent criterion variable that measures the gap between the actual, empirical, or real situation on the one hand and the predicted, normative, or ideal situation on the other.Thanks are owed to the following who played a part in the preparation of this article but who are not responsible for the results: (1) the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure for which the author was an assistant counsel when he conducted the research; (2) the Yale Law School-Russell Sage Program in which the author was a Law and Social Science Fellow when he wrote the article; (3) the 1971 Conference on Measuring Public Policy Impact at Florida State University where the article was initially presented; and (4) the National Science Foundation which partly financed the writing under grant GS-2875 as one of a series of policy science studies on measuring and achieving effects of alternative legal policies.     

Curriculum Development for Public Sector Financial Management

Inadequate curriculum materials frequently impede the teaching of public sector financial management to graduate and mid-career students. The Curriculum Development Project at the School of Public Affairs of the University of Maryland has produced a draft curriculum that emphasizes the use of microcomputers and associated analytical skills in integrating topics in finance, accounting and budgeting.     

Postsecondary preparation and remediation: Examining the effect of the early assessment program at California State University

In this paper we investigate how participation in the Early Assessment Program, which provides California high school juniors with information about their academic readiness for college‐level work at California State University campuses, affects their college‐going behavior and need for remediation in college. Using administrative records from California State University,–Sacramento and the California Department of Education, we find that participation in the Early Assessment Program reduces the average student's probability of needing remediation at California State University by 6.1 percentage points in English and 4.1 percentage points in mathematics. Rather than discouraging poorly prepared students from applying to Sacramento State, EAP appears to lead students to increase their academic preparation while still in high school. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The impact of the Texas top ten percent law on college enrollment: A regression discontinuity approach

We use regression discontinuity methods on a representative survey of Texas high school seniors to discern the impact on flagship‐enrollment behavior of the Texas top 10 percent law, which guarantees admission to any Texas public university to students who graduate in the top decile of their class. By comparing students at and immediately below the cut‐point for automatic admission, we find that the top 10 percent law affects flagship enrollment of Hispanic students eligible for the admission guarantee, as well as rank‐eligible graduates from high schools where minority students predominate and from high schools with the state average share of economically disadvantaged students. Our findings are robust to various model specifications and different bandwidth choices using local linear estimation. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviews in this article:
Eleanor P. Wolf, Trial and Error: The Detroit School Segregation Case .
Robert A. Dentler and Marvin B. Scon, Schools on Trial: An Inside Account .
John Brigham and Don W. Brown (eds.) Policy Implementation .
George C. Edwards III, Implementing Public Policy .
Robert T. Nakamura and Frank Smallwood. The Politics of Policy Implementation .
Randall B. Ripley and Grace A. Franklin, Bureaucracy and Policy Implementation .
Laurence Rutter, The Essential Community: Local Government in the Year 2000 .
Hadley Arkes, The Philosopher in the City: The Moral Dimensions of Urban Politics .     

A comparative cost analysis of commodity foods from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the National School Lunch Program

Schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program receive a portion of their federal funding as commodity foods rather than cash payments. This research compared the product costs and estimated total procurement costs of commodity and commercial foods from the school district perspective using data from 579 Minnesota ordering sites in school year (SY) 2008–2009. Though comparison of product prices indicates that commercial foods were an average of 17 percent more expensive than equivalent commodity foods, once full estimated procurement costs were included, the commercial products became 9 percent less expensive per food case than commodity products. Base case results were sensitive to the cost of risk to hold inventory. When this input was tested at zero, the estimated cost to procure commercial foods was 2 percent higher per case than commodity foods, though total commercial procurement costs remained less than commodity costs by 3 percent. It is estimated that Minnesota schools collectively spent an additional $1.7 to $3.7 million to procure USDA commodity foods in SY 2008–2009. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Life at a Teaching University

Many new political science faculty at teaching universities are recent PhD recipients, and are coming to these institutions from research-oriented universities. There are considerable differences between the training for graduate students received at research universities and the expectations for faculty at teaching universities. This essay reflects on the author’s first year at a teaching university and offers six themes that may assist other new faculty in the transition from life as a graduate student at a research institution to life as an assistant professor at a teaching university.     

The uneven playing field of school choice: Evidence from new zealand

New Zealand's 10‐year experience with self‐governing schools operating in a competitive environment provides new insights into school choice initiatives now being hotly debated in the United States with limited evidence. This article examines how New Zealand's system of parental choice of schools played out in that country's three major urban areas with particular emphasis on the sorting of students by ethnic and socioeconomic status. The analysis documents that schools with large initial proportions of minorities (Maori and Pacific Island students in the New Zealand context) were at a clear disadvantage in the educational market place relative to other schools and that the effect was to generate a system in which gaps between the “successful” and the “unsuccessful” schools became wider. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Knowing and doing: an integrated approach to education and training in South Africa

The Postgraduate Diploma in Management at the Graduate School of Public & Development Management (P&DM), University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, arises from our enthusiasm for a paradigm shift in the education of entry level public sector managers in South Africa; this is an approach that has developed out of moves towards a new public service that is development friendly and customer-oriented. The move away from traditional lecture-based classroom activities to interactive learning methods has given rise to much reflection on teaching, learning and appropriate assessment at P&DM. This has resulted in an appreciation for continuous learning as we pursue our quest to improve our facilitation in line with the needs of a student group that will graduate to face the immense challenges of making institutions work in a newly democratic polity. Our graduates are tasked with transformation in a rapidly moving environment. For them, a commitment to life-long learning is the most important attitude they can develop and for us it is the most important outlook we can nurture. This article focuses on three integrated areas: the Administrative Skills Course, which aims at establishing underlying skills on which students should build throughout the year; the Case Study Programme, which provides a simulation of real problems and issues faced by managers in the public sector; and the Internship Programme, which provides the opportunity for the integration of classroom learning and workplace practice. We focus primarily on the teaching methods and the integrative nature of these courses and programmes, highlighting aspects that have worked well and those that have not. The ongoing development of these programmes has been informed by relatively informal evaluations. We feel that the time has come for more rigorous investigation into the effectiveness of our teaching and both have research in progress. The design and findings of research in progress will be published at a later date.     

Does whole‐school reform boost student performance? The case of New York City

Thousands of schools around the country have implemented whole‐school reform programs to boost student performance. This paper uses quasi‐experimental methods to estimate the impact of whole‐school reform on students' reading performance in New York City, where various reform programs were adopted in dozens of troubled elementary schools in the mid‐1990s. This paper complements studies based on random assignment by examining a broad‐based reform effort and explicitly accounting for implementation quality. Two popular reform programs—the School Development Program and Success for All—were not found to significantly increase reading scores but might have been if they had been fully implemented. The More Effective Schools program was found to boost reading scores, but this effect seems to disappear when the program “trainers” leave the school. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The need for a third party in u.s. politics

Abstract

This article is based on a presentation to the “Future Directions for American Politics and Public Policy” seminar at Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, on May 6, 1993. The theme of the article is that a national third party is necessary in order to advance a social welfare agenda that would improve measurably the quality of urban life, and resolve the problem of race and racism in the United States. The author proposes that despite important changes in race relations, including the elimination of a multi‐generational system of legally‐sanctioned political apartheid, society still reflects continuing and intensifying race and class divisions and tensions. Neither the Democratic or Republican parties have the political will or base to offer policies that would effectively eliminate racial hierarchy in this country. It is argued that the development of a national and organzationally viable third party is essential in order to challenge the philosophical and political tendencies of the major parties regarding social welfare and race, economic development and growth, and foreign affairs. In addition to using a few historical examples to make this case, the author also critiques the exploitation of race as an electoral tool by both major parties.     

加强新时期高校研究生管理工作

近年来随着我国研究生教育突飞猛进的发展以及研究生招生规模的不断扩大,传统的管理方法的局限性日益凸显。研究生面临着学习、生活、就业压力等各种压力,高校研究生管理和教育面临新的机遇和挑战。基于此,提出改进管理机制和提高管理队伍素质、加强导师对学生的指导与交流、丰富研究生管理内容三方面路径来加强高校研究生管理工作。     

Women,the labor market,and the declining relative quality of teachers

School officials and policymakers have grown increasingly concerned about their ability to attract and retain talented teachers. A number of authors have shown that in recent years the brightest students—at least those with the highest verbal and math scores on standardized tests—are less likely to enter teaching. In addition, it is frequently claimed that the ability of schools to attract these top students has been steadily declining for years. There is, however, surprisingly little evidence measuring the extent to which this popular proposition is true. We have good reason to suspect that the quality of those entering teaching has fallen over time. Teaching has for years remained a predominately female profession; at the same time, the employment opportunities for talented women outside teaching have soared. In this paper, we combine data from five longitudinal surveys of high school graduates spanning the classes of 1957 to 1992 to examine how the propensity for talented women to enter teaching has changed over time. While the quality of the average new female teacher has fallen only slightly over this period, the likelihood that a female from the top of her high school class will eventually enter teaching has fallen dramatically. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The effect of attending full‐day kindergarten on English learner students

A significant and growing English learner (EL) population attends public schools in the United States. Evidence suggests they are at a disadvantage when entering school and their achievement lags behind non‐EL students. Some educators have promoted full‐day kindergarten programs as especially helpful for EL students. We take advantage of the large EL population and variation in full‐day kindergarten implementation in the Los Angeles Unified School District to examine the impact of full‐day kindergarten on academic achievement, retention, and English language fluency using difference‐in‐differences models. We do not find signficant effects of full‐day kindergarten on most academic outcomes and English fluency through second grade. However, we find that EL students attending full‐day kindergarten were 5 percentage points less likely to be retained before second grade and there are differential effects for several outcomes by student and school characteristics. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.