Measuring Performance: A Big Change for Albany
by Robert B. Ward

Governor-elect Spitzer’s announcement that he will institute numerous ethical and operational reforms, even without action by the Legislature, drew well-deserved attention and applause last week. But the development that may be of most lasting importance attracted little notice.

That’s the promise to “institute regular and rigorous evaluations of the Executive agencies, including requiring that agencies adopt performance measurements, establish goals, and track their performance over time.”

New York’s government is big and powerful. In virtually every area of modern life – education, transportation, health, the environment, public protection, care for the helpless and others – state agencies control resources and exert influence on an enormous scale. As elected officials and interest groups tell us continually, the use of those resources is vitally important to real people. Sometimes, it’s literally a matter of life and death.

Yet, once the budget is adopted, leaders in government typically pay all too little attention to how well those resources are used, and what benefits New Yorkers get as a result.

An admirable exception: the school report cards initiated by Education Commissioner Richard Mills and the Board of Regents. Mills likes to say that the report cards are intended to start conversations – among school administrators, teachers and parents – on how well each school meets students’ needs and where it can improve. I happen to live in a well-regarded suburban/rural district. There, the advent of school report cards forced educators to confront lower-than-expected reading scores for many students. Teachers responded with a much stronger focus on writing and reading. In the last five years, one elementary school in the district saw the proportion of 4th-graders meeting reading standards rise from 51 to 90 percent, and those exceeding standards from 4 to 28 percent. Measuring results prompted new strategies, which in turn produced remarkable gains in student learning.

“Measuring performance is a routine practice in the business world, because business leaders know that you cannot improve the bottom line if you do not have established performance goals,” Governor-elect Spitzer and Lieutenant Governor-elect Paterson said in announcing their reform package. “The State government should adopt these same practices, so that we can make government more efficient and cost-effective, thereby reducing the need for additional taxpayer dollars.”

The list of potential gains from this smart-government reform is as long as Albany’s agenda is broad. For starters, New York can do much better with its $45 billion Medicaid program. Health-policy analyst John Rodat and others have pointed out there’s enormous variation in the cost of Medicaid and health results around the state. Using consistent benchmarks in every region – the proportion of poor mothers who receive appropriate prenatal care and the likelihood of hospitalization for asthma, to name just two – could make our Medicaid program much more cost-effective.

New York City’s famed CompStat system of measuring crime and police performance is widely credited with making the Big Apple one of the safest large cities in the world. Other important city services, including subways and medical-emergency response, maintain high quality in part because of the focus on performance driven by the annual Mayor’s Management Report.

To their credit, some state-agency leaders have begun using performance measures as management tools. As world-class corporations have learned, though, such quality-improvement efforts are most effective when driven from the very top of the organization.

One reason for that: Institutions and people, whether in government or private companies, tend to resist performance measurement. The Legislature enacted a law in 1996 requiring hospital report cards, similar to those for schools. The hospital industry opposed the initiative, citing the challenge of developing apples-to-apples comparisons for institutions that treat varying levels of illness and injury. Finally, in 2006 – long after the legal requirement for report cards took effect – the Health Department made its hospital profiles available to the public. Similar resistance is likely to arise in other areas. A strong push from the chief executive will ensure that accountability does not fall victim to needless delay.

As the saying goes, any job worth doing is worth doing well. That’s true of government services, which are especially important to the poor and helpless among us. In New York, the level of concern for any issue – helping the needy, improving our kids’ schools, protecting the environment – has traditionally been judged simply by the number of taxpayer dollars involved. It’s heartening to see the incoming Governor set a higher standard.

Robert B. Ward is director of research for the Public Policy Institute, the research affiliate of the Business Council of New York State, and author of New York State Government: Second Edition, just published by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.