Evaluation I

For Thursday, Schuck, ch. 13.

James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy (New York: Basic Books, 1989), ch. 9, cited in Schuck, 323-324

Outputs: what employees do on a day-to-day basis.

Outcomes: how the world changes because of the outputs

	Outputs are visible to managers	are hard for managers to see
Outcomes are easy to measure	production organization (tax system) simple repetitive stable tasks; specialized skills.  Easy to stress measurable outputs & outcomes over hard-to-measure (satisfaction)	craft organization (Forest Service, wartime military) application of general sets of skills to unique tasks, but with stable, similar outcomes. Relies heavily on ethos and sense of duty of workers.
are hard to measure	procedural organizations (OSHA, peacetime military -- see Powell passage below) specialized skills; stable tasks, but unique outcomes. SOPs are especially important	coping organization (colleges, police departments) application of generic skills to unique tasks, but outcomes cannot be evaluated in absence of alternatives.  "

Colin Powell on working the numbers:

If, for example, you are going to judge me on AWOL rates, I’m going to send a sergeant out by 6:30 a.m. to bloodhound the kid who failed to show up for 6:00 a.m. reveille.  The guy’s not considered AWOL until midnight.  So drag him back before then and keep that AWOL rate down.  I vigorously set out to better every indicator by which my brigade was statistically judged.  And then went on to do the things that I thought counted.

Issue One: Capacity

• Congressional agencies
• Inspectors General

Issue Two:  What do we measure?

•  "Passing" and outcome measures

Issue Three: Causality

• An alternative explanation for the drop in crime. (And an updated analysis)

Issue Four:  Reactivity

• Teaching to the test
• Compstat
•  Juking the crime stats in real life?

The spike in Native Americans 

In episode 42, members of the Soprano crime family meet Chief Doug Smith, a sleazy casino operator.

SIL: No offense, chief, but, uh... you don't look much like an Indian.
SMITH: Frankly I passed most of my life as white, until I had a racial awakening and discovered my Mohonk blood. My grandmother on my father's side, her mother was a quarter Mohonk.
TONY: And all this happened when the casino bill got passed, right?
SMITH: Better late than never.

Survey: 34% of white Americans who applied to colleges or universities admit to lying about being a racial minority on their application