Monday, October 11, 2010

Where's the NAEP for Government?

 NAEP stands for National Assessment of Educational Progress.  It's a set of tests to see what students know and can do in different fields; thus, it's indirectly an assessment of schools, which is the way it's mostly used.

Assessing teachers is hard.  We've all had good teachers and bad teachers, and some of the teachers who were good for us maybe weren't so good for other students in the class.  And maybe some of what we learned wasn't really what our parents or the local community wanted us to learn, and thought they were paying the teachers to learn.

So is assessing government bureaucracy hard.  Compared to education, there's probably even more disagreement over the value of various programs.  The GPRA of 1993 was an initial attempt to try to assess performance. I'm dubious of its value, but now Sen. Lieberman and others are trying to revise and update it. I'm still dubious.  To make this real, there should be an administration strategic plan and a Congressional strategic plan. Obviously what Obama wants the EPA to do is different than what Sen. McConnell et. al. want the EPA to do.  If the EPA does a plan that's the lowest common denominator of the two, it won't say much.  But even then, if Obama and McConnell were paying attention to the strategic plan, that would be a big improvement.  I suspect the reality is neither will pay much attention to it, meaning it's mostly an exercise in bureaucratic paper creation and shuffling.

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