Measuring Accountability for Results in Interagency Collaboratives

This article examines the intersection of two types of innovations that are increasingly common in public administration—accountability for results and interagency collaboration. Recent scholarship suggests four approaches that collaborators can use to increase their accountability for results. The article proposes measures of these four approaches to assess a collaborative's capacity for accountability, and uses them to compare the accountability of human services collaboratives in 10 states. The findings indicate that collaboratives tend to use the four approaches together with one another. In combination, the various approaches may help collaborators manage their stake holders' expectations about their actions and accomplishments. Further research is needed to determine whether a collaborative's capacity for accountability for results actually correlates with improvements in outcomes.     

The Forgotten Summer: Does the Offer of College Counseling After High School Mitigate Summer Melt Among College‐Intending,Low‐Income High School Graduates?

Despite decades of policy intervention to increase college entry and success among low‐income students, considerable gaps by socioeconomic status remain. To date, policymakers have overlooked the summer after high school as an important time period in students’ transition to college, yet recent research documents high rates of summer attrition from the college pipeline among college‐intending high school graduates, a phenomenon we refer to as “summer melt.” We report on two randomized trials investigating efforts to mitigate summer melt. Offering college‐intending graduates two to three hours of summer support increased enrollment by 3 percentage points overall, and by 8 to 12 percentage points among low‐income students, at a cost of $100 to $200 per student. Further, summer support has lasting impacts on persistence several semesters into college.     

Law for Life: Preliminary Thoughts

Law for Life is a training programme in contract law, unfair dismissal law and the English court system. It is aimed specifically at employees who in the course of their work are required to underdstand and apply the law regardless of whether or not they have received any formal legal training. One of the primary reasons for developing Law of Life was to provide training to the SME sector. Very often such companies do not have any in-house legal advisors and research has estimated that 70% of them do not provide any training for their employees in any aspect of their work. This suggests that smaller companies are relying on informally training, and even untrained personnel, in areas requiring legal expertise. Research carried out in the Luton area had indicated that SMEs tended to adopt a pragmatic approach to legal matters, addressing them as and when they arose. Law for Life was developed as a direct response to these findings. Recognizing that the SME sector is highly competitive, operates at minimum staffing levels and that SMEs are not generally in a position to release employees for staff training Law for Life had to be tailored to suit the needs of the SME sector. This meant that in order for Law for Life to be accessible to SME employees it had to be offered as a distance-learning package.