Grading the States

A message from the publisher

So here we are again, four years later, with a new report card on management in the states. This is our third such effort, but it differs in significant ways from the first two. Instead of assessing state performance in five areas, it has been whittled down to four — money, people, infrastructure and information. And the criteria for each area have been completely overhauled, reflecting our desire to assess actual performance rather than good process.

For that reason, no one should make a direct comparison between the new grades and those received in the past. I wish it were possible, but our own process has evolved, and I believe significantly improved. So to paraphrase the introduction to this report, any then-and-now comparison made by government officials, the press or anyone else would be misleading and incorrect.

The Government Performance Project (GPP) was conceived as an academic-journalistic partnership that would regularly assess how states compared in the quality of their management. One important change this year has been in the academic effort. Instead of relying on one university as a partner, we chose a “dean of the faculty” to select four professors whom we felt were the very best in their fields. Those four professors used their own graduate students as staff.

The system worked well. Our academic “dean” is Don Kettl, of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania. You might be familiar with his name if you read our Potomac Chronicle column on the relationship between the states and the feds, or if you’re from Wisconsin, where for years he was a high-profile figure at the university in Madison.

This year, there is another dimension to this project that is very important. For the first time, you will be able to look at all the appendixed material about how every state fared on every criterion in each of the management areas — 1,000 different assessments. That information and much more is available on the GPP Web site at http://results.gpponline.org, or through Governing’s online report here.

As I’ve always said in this column in introducing these massive management reports, please don’t just rip through the magazine looking for your state. Read the introduction and the reports on each of the management areas. They give you the best and most current assessment of the quality of public performance in our states.

Finally, Governing owes much gratitude both to those on the project and to those of you who put in longer hours than I’m sure you have liked filling out our survey, supplying documents and answering our questions. On our side, it is Don Kettl and his “faculty,” project editors Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene, reporters Zach Patton and J. Michael Keeling, project manager Susan Tompkins and state-relations coordinator Anita Sharma. The entire GPP team is listed here. On the state side, it’s people like you. Thanks to all.

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