March 15, 2005

Grading the States

Program Reviews States’ Ability to Manage Money, People, Information, and Infrastructure

By Matt Nehmer

It’s report card time for the nation’s state governments. GW is one of five universities partnered with the Government Performance Project, which gave all 50 states letter grades for their ability to manage money, people, information, and infrastructure. Results from the survey, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, can be found in the February edition of Governing magazine.

Philip Joyce, associate professor of public administration, is GW’s principal researcher on the project. He led a team of five School of Public Policy and Public Administration graduate students — Charlotte Kirschner, Richard Bulman, Alice Levey, Lori Metcalf, and Katie Simon — who spent more than a year evaluating how the 50 state governments use information to manage.

The “information” criteria was one of four used in the survey. Joyce and students were charged with analyzing the strategic direction of state governments and how they collect information to support a policy direction. Georgia State University analyzed the “money” criteria, Lynchburg College focused on the “people” category, and the University of Illinois-Chicago researched state “infrastructure.” Donald Kettl, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, was the overall academic coordinator for the project.

Locally, Virginia was at the top of the honor roll, scoring an overall “A-minus,” a grade matched only by Utah. Maryland earned a “B” overall.

This isn’t the first time Joyce has worked on a “grading” project. From January 2000 to June 2002 he was a principal researcher on the Federal Performance Project, which awarded letter grades to federal government agencies.

To view the results of “Grading the States ’05” visit http://results.gpponline.org.

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu