Measuring Government Performance: Sloan Foundation Winds Down Involvement

Ted Greenwood has been on the front lines of performance reporting for more than 15 years, as his employer, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has funded dozens of projects with the aim of demonstrating whether governments are doing a good job.

One of the Sloan Foundation’s goals is to make municipal governments more responsive to citizens, and Greenwood has been at the helm of performance reporting projects at Sloan since the very beginning, when many academics and government officials viewed it as a passing fad.

Performance measurement has proven to have staying power, and while it’s not as commonplace as Greenwood and other observers would have hoped, it’s gained an important foothold among municipal governments.

Greenwood believes the movement will grow, but it will have to happen without the financial backing of the Sloan Foundation, the leader in supporting assessment of public services across the country. The foundation has invested $43 million in government performance over 15 years. At its peak, Sloan was granting $4.5 million in projects every year. Sloan has funded AGA’s Service Efforts and Accomplishments program since its launch in 2003.

Greenwood says Sloan is winding down its involvement in the issue and turning to other priorities as chosen by the foundation’s president and board of directors. “Foundations are notoriously fickle,” he said. The philanthropic, grant-making organization, which was formed in 1934 in New York City by the then-CEO of General Motors, is involved in a huge array of projects in science, technology, economic institutions and quality of life issues.

Greenwood said the foundation initially looked at the government performance issue with the idea of determining how well the federal government was doing. It didn’t take long, however, to understand how difficult that task would be. Local government activities would be easier to measure, and the foundation focused its attention there.

One of the first grants was issued to the Fund for the City of New York’s Center on Government Performance, led by Barbara Cohn Berman. Her project involved using focus groups to determine what the public cares about when it comes to municipal services in New York City. An independent consultant gathered the citizen feedback, and the information turned out to be extremely useful to city officials interested in improving services.

“We were convinced—and we still are convinced—that it’s very hard to get government to report on itself at all, but it’s even harder to get them to report in a manner that is honest, consistent and complete and in a way that’s of interest to the citizens,” Greenwood recalled, adding that it’s difficult for ANY organization to be objective about itself. Much of Sloan’s early grant-making activities focused on expanding the citizen-based “style” of performance measurement —done from outside government, preferably with government’s cooperation.

Advocacy groups and good government organizations around the country received grants. As just one example, Sloan funded a 2000 survey of subway car announcements for the New York Public Interest Research Group’s Straphangers Campaign, dedicated to improving bus and subway service in New York City. The survey was conducted by 58 volunteers, who made 6,000 observations on 20 subway lines over three months. The survey found that in 78 percent of subway delays, riders received no information at all, or the announcement was “inaudible,” “garbled” or “useless.” By 2006, Sloan was still funding the survey, and the 78 percent figure had dropped to 65 percent.

Success of early ventures was mixed, Greenwood said. “Some of it really worked. We became convinced that these groups can do performance measurement and they are more oriented to the citizens.” But he also noted that performance measurement by non-government groups is expensive and, therefore, often impractical. “We became convinced that the only way to make this happen on a large scale across the country was to have governments do it, preferably as citizen-informed performance measurement and reporting.” In this style, governments involve the public in developing the performance measures and in deciding how they will be reported. Also, governments must seriously consider citizen reaction to performance reports. “The fox would still be guarding the chicken coop, but at least they’re doing it in public, which makes it quite different,” Greenwood said.

Attention then turned back to the governments themselves and the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). Sloan funded GASB’s research activity for more than eight years, and GASB staff developed suggested guidelines for what they call Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reports. Greenwood was disappointed that GASB’s criteria merely said that governments should report on what they had done to gather citizen input. If nothing had been done, and that was reported, the criterion was met. GASB is now developing voluntary guidelines for voluntary reporting of performance information. Although these guidelines will be “enormously useful,” the current draft version does not specifically call for citizen involvement, Greenwood said.

This year will be the last for Sloan funding as the foundation is turning to other priorities. While Greenwood said, “I don’t think it’s true that we’ve done all we could do, ” he also says he feels “generally positive” about the direction in which the performance measurement field is moving.

He’d also like to see performance reporting become a “professional norm.” In other words, it should be expected of government managers and taught widely in master’s-level public administration programs. The other way norms get established is through professional associations, such as AGA, the International City County Management Association and other organizations that provide training on performance measurement and reporting.

One area he calls an “unsolved problem,” is encouraging media outlets to report on government performance and, as daily newspapers close down or curtail operations around the country, that task will only get harder. On the positive side, much work is being done to present government performance information in a more readable, attractive, easy-to-understand format on the Web. “That’s making a big difference for citizens and for reporters,” Greenwood says.

Performance measurement has evolved since the early 1990s, and Greenwood believes President Obama’s strong emphasis on accountability will push the movement forward. He notes, however, that it will take more than the president’s support of transparency—performance management will also be strengthened by increasing public expectations that governments will measure and publicly report on their successes and failures.

“I think we’re in a very different position now than we were in 15 years ago,” Greenwood said, “and it’s not just because of us. Many other organizations have played a big role.” —Christina Camara, AGA.