Faculty News

Jed Kee and Kathryn Newcomer
Jed Kee and Kathryn Newcomer, professors of public policy and public administration in the Trachtenberg School, just published a book, Transforming Public and Nonprofit Organizations: Stewardship for Leading Change, released in June by Management Concepts. The book has a forward by Admiral Thad Allen, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard and a GW MPA alum.

Kathryn Newcomer
On May 8, 2008 in recognition of her research, scholarshisp and teaching,  Dr. Kathryn E. Newcomer  GW faculty member, and Director, Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration Program,
Associate Director, The Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, and Director, The Midge Smith Center for Evaluation Effectiveness received The Elmer B. Staats Award for Accountability in Government. This award, named after the previous Comptroller General of the U.S.,  recognizes individuals or organizations for excelling in studies or analyses of the effectiveness of government programs. Criteria include the innovative nature of the studies, its scope and impact, and the recognition of its importance by peers in the field.

Nancy Augustine
Professors Augustine and Hal Wolman are among the co-authors of the article, "The Influence of Neighborhood Poverty During Childhood on Fertility, Education, and Earnings Outcomes," which was published in Housing Studies this past September. The other authors of the paper are George Galster (Wayne State University), Dave E. Marcotte, and Marv Mandell (University of Maryland at Baltimore County).

Edward Berkowitz
Professor Berkowitz had his Documentary History of Social Security published in September, 2007 by the Congressional Quarterly Press. Also during the month of September, he spoke on the presidency before the policy fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Berkowitz also consulted with the House Committee of Homeland Security over the summer.

Lori Brainard
Professors Brainard and Jennifer Brinkerhoff co-authored an article entitled “Sovereignty Under Siege, Or a Circuitous Path for Strengthening the State?: Digital Diasporas and Human Rights.” The article was published in the International Journal of Public Administration. She also presented the paper “Government-Citizen Relations in a Virtual Community: Informational, Transactional, or Collaborative?” (with John McNutt, University of Delaware) at the annual conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Association (ARNOVA) in Atlanta in November. Professor Brainard also chaired a panel discussing “Socializing New and Junior Faculty,” at the annual meeting of the National Association of School of Public Administration and Affairs to be held in Seattle this October.

Jeffrey Brand-Ballard
Professor Brand-Ballard delivered the Constitution Day address at the College of Wooster (Ohio), under the title, "Must Judges Respect the Constitution?" this past September.

Jennifer Brinkerhoff
Professor Brinkerhoff (Associate Professor, Public Administration and International Affairs) recently published two journal articles. The first is “Diaspora Identity and the Potential for Violence: Toward an Identity-Mobilization Framework.” Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, Vol. 8, No. 1 (January 2008): 67-88. The second, “Partnering to Beckon them Home: Public Sector Innovation for Diaspora Homeland Investment” (Public Administration and Development, Vol. 28, No. 1 (February 2008): 54-66), is co-authored with GW School of Business faculty Liesl Riddle (International Business) and Tjai Nielsen (Management). Her latest book chapter is “Partnership as a Means to Good Governance: Toward an Evaluation Framework” (In Pieter Glasbergen, Frank Biermann, Arthur Mol, eds. Partnerships, Governance and Sustainable Development: Reflections on Theory and Practice. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishers, 2007: 68-89). She was also invited to write for USAID’s Microenterprise Development Office and the UK Department for International Development (jointly sponsored) Migration Remittance Newsletter, where she explored “Are Diasporas a Partial Solution to Poverty Alleviation and National Development?” (November 2007 issue).

In October 2007, she was invited to speak in the Hague on “Diaspora and Development Research: A Comment on the State of the Moment” for the Policy seminar on Migration and Development: Diasporas and Policy Dialogue, organized by the African Diaspora Policy Centre for the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague.

Her Fall 2007 conference presentations included a panel (and presentations) she organized on her recently published co-edited book, NGOs and the Millennium Development Goals: Citizen Action to Reduce Poverty (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) for the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) Conference, Atlanta, GA, November 15-17, 2001; and a presentation on “The Importance of Experience in preparing students for international development careers” at the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration Conference, Seattle, WA, October 11-13, 2007.

Stephanie Cellini
Professor Cellini was recognized with an honorable mention for the best dissertation in public policy by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management at the November 2007 APPAM research conference. Professor Cellini has a chapter in the forthcoming Handbook of Vocational Education Research entitled "Vocational College Research: Case Studies of the United States." Felix Rauner and Rupert Maclean, eds.  Springer Publishers: The Netherlands. She also presented "Can School Quality Be Bought? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design," at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management's (APPAM) Annual Research Conference and again at The George Washington University U.S. Urban Studies Seminar.  Professor Cellini also presented "Funding Schools or Financing Students: Public Subsidies and the Market for Two-Year College Education," at the George Washington University Microeconomics Workshop and "Regression Discontinuity: the Silver Standard (or Using Regression Discontinuity in Policy Research)," at the George Washington Institute for Public Policy (GWIPP) Methods Seminar. 

Dylan Conger
Professor Conger received a research grant from the Changing Faces of America’s Children Young Scholars Program by the Foundation for Child Development. With support from the Foundation, Professor Conger will study how long it takes students to become English proficient and how the time to proficiency varies according to students’ background characteristics, the grade at which they enter school, and the type of English instruction they receive. Along with colleagues Patrice Iatarola of Florida State University and Mark Long of the University of Washington, she also received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to study the links between high school course-taking and secondary and post-secondary outcomes.  Dr. Conger published “Immigrant and Native-born Differences in School Stability and Special Education: Evidence from New York City,” in International Migration Review and “Which Schools Have the Most Segregated Classrooms? A Look Inside New York City Schools,” in an edited volume entitled Child Poverty in American Today: The Promise of Education.  She also gave three presentations this year, including "Racial Differences in High School Course-Taking in Florida,” at New York University and “Racial Isolation in School: What Are School District Administrators and Social Scientists Overlooking?” at the American Education Finance Association (AEFA) and American Educational Research Association (AERA) conferences.  Dr. Conger served as a discussant on one panel at AEFA and two panels at AERA. She was a panelist at the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration's Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management workshop on doctoral education in public affairs. She is currently the program committee chair for the section on Legal, Judicial, and Intergovernmental Issues for the annual conference of AERA.

Joseph Cordes
Professor Joseph Cordes co-edited the volume Nonprofits and Business: A New World of Innovation and Adaptation with C. Eugene Steuerle which is scheduled to be published by the Urban Institute Press in 2008. With fellow Trachtenberg School faculty member Robert Goldfarb, he also co-authored the article  “Decreasing the ‘Bad’ for Mixed Public Goods and Bads: The Case of Public Sculpture,” which is the lead article in the Spring 2007 issue of the Eastern Economic Journal. Professor Cordes also presented several papers co-authored with Trachtenberg School doctoral students, and colleagues from the Trachtenberg School and the George Washington Institute of Public Policy. These include: “Tax Expenditure Limitations and their Effects on Public Finances” (with Bing Yuan, Michael Bell, and David Brunori) and “Preferential Tax Treatment of Property Used for Social Purposes: Fiscal Impacts and Public Policy” (with Lori Metcalf), presented at the October 2007 Lincoln Land Institute/George Washington Institute of Public Policy Property Tax Roundtable; and “The Effects of Homeland Security Grants on State and Local Spending for Public Safety Preparedness,” (with Charlotte Kirschner) at the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management.

Along with David Brunori and Lori Metcalf Professor Cordes also received a $40,000 grant from the Pew Center on the States to collect and analyze data on state tax incentives for economic development. Results of this study will be incorporated into a larger study undertaken by the Pew Center on the States to examine ways in which state taxes and incentives lead - or do not lead - to vibrant state economies.

Robert S. Goldfarb
Professors Robert S. Goldfarb and Joseph Cordes co-authored the article, “Decreasing the ‘Bad’ for Mixed Public Goods and Bads: The Case of Public Sculpture,” published in the Spring 2007 issue of the Eastern Economic Journal. He also worked with Bryan Boulier and Tejwant Singh Datta on “Vaccination Externalities,”  which was published in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy. Professor Goldfarb presented “Illuminating Differing Visions of the Modeling-Empirics Nexis: Solow Versus Lipsey,” (with Jon Ratner) at the History of Economics meetings at George Mason University in June. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the ASSA meetings in Chicago in January, 2007.

Donna Infeld
Professor Infeld taught Health Policy and Program Evaluation at Renmin University of China as a Fulbright Scholar for the fall 2007 semester.  Renmin University (People's University) has the oldest MPA Program in China.  She will return to GW for the spring semester.

Phil Joyce
Phil Joyce completed work on the 8th edition of Public Budgeting Systems (with Robert Lee and Ronald Johnson), which was published in August, 2007. In addition, he published a chapter entitled “Linking Performance and Budgeting Under the Separation of Powers: The Three Greatest Obstacles Created by Independent Legislatures,” in an International Monetary Fund volume on Performance Budgeting: Linking Results and Funding, published this September. He traveled to Ottawa in June to teach a course on cost-benefit analysis for the International Program for Development Evaluation Training (IPDET), jointly sponsored by the World Bank and Carleton University (Canada). Professor Joyce is spending this fall working on the latest iteration of the Government Performance Project (GPP), with a $150,000 grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The GPP evaluates the management of the 50 state governments. The results will be reported in March, 2008 in Governing magazine. Five TSPPA graduate students are currently working on the GPP: Alice Levy, Victoria Bruce, Saurabh Lall, Mackenzie Hawkey, and Robin McLaughry.

Ralph Mueller
Prof Mueller is as an ACE Fellow and Special Assistant to the Provost at the University of Miami, FL during the 2007-2008 school year.

Kathryn Newcomer
In her role as president of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) Kathryn Newcomer delivered the address, “La Certeza de la Incertidumbre en la Gestion Publica Alrededor del Mundo,” at the Annual Conference of the Inter-American Network of Schools of Public Affairs in Bogotá , Colombia. She fully participated in the three day conference there. She also presented a paper with co-author Laila El Baradie entitled “Identifying Leaders’ Training and Development Needs Using the Human Capital Management Perspective: An Application to Egyptian Public Organizations” at the Conference on Leading the Future of the Public Sector: The Third Transatlantic Dialogue at the University of Delaware. Professor Newcomer gave a speech on the leadership role of NASPAA in training public leaders at the Delaware conference. She has recently published a chapter entitled “Assessing Program Performance in Nonprofit Agencies,” in The International Handbook of Practice-Based Performance Management, Sage, 2007.

In addition, Professor Newcomer delivered two keynote speeches. The first, given at  the Annual Evaluation Conference put on jointly by the American Evaluation Association and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia was entitled "Performance Measurement for Program Improvement? The Status of Evaluation in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors in the U.S." The second titled “The Status of Evaluation in the Federal Government: The Shape of Things to Come?”was presented at the 2nd Annual Environmental Evaluators’ Networking Forum in Washington, DC.  During the summer and fall of 2007, Professor Newcomer also served on a National Academy of Sciences Panel charged with evaluating the Post Doctoral Fellowship Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In early October Dr. Newcomer volunteered her services to provide training on outcomes assessment to United Way agencies in Washington, D.C. and Manassas, Virginia.

Gregory Squires
Professor Squires co-authored “Fences and Neighbors:  Segregation in 21st –century America,” with John E. Farley in Jeff Goodwin's and James M. Jasper's (Ed) The Contexts Reader.  New York and London:  W.W. Norton & Company. He also worked with Samantha Friedman, and Catherine E. Saidat on “Experiencing Residential Segregation: A Contemporary Study of Washington, D.C.” in Marlene Kim's (Ed) Race and Economic Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. New York:  Routledge. Professor Squires gave two presentations in Washington, D.C.  The first was delivered at the Institute of Policy Studies and entitled “Predators: The Rise of Inequality and Uneven Access to Financial Services.” The second "Surging Inequality and the Rise of Predatory Lending,” was presented at “Take Back America 2007.”

His lectures also took him abroad to Berlin and Krakow. In Berlin, he presented “Inequality and Access to Financial Services,” at the International Conference of the Law and Society Association and at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, he presented "There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster."  Professor Squires also played the dual role of organizer and lecturer at two conferences, one in New York and one in D.C.  He delivered “Katrina Was Not a Natural Disaster:  What Went Wrong in the Gulf Coast,” to the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation in New York and “Hurricanes Katrina & Rita – Participatory Approaches to Rebuilding Communities,” at the Capitol Hill forum.

Christopher Sterling
Professor Sterling spoke at the 50th annual conference of the Society for the History of Technology in Washington, D.C. in November. He discussed the FCC's changing role in approving technical standards. Professor Sterling also has a forthcoming book entitled Military Communications: From the 21st Century to the Present (ABC-CLIO) with some 330 entries in 600 pages,  scheduled to appear in fall 2007.

Michael Wiseman
In March Professor Wiseman was invited by the Department for Work and Pensions in the United Kingdom to be part of a U.S. Congressional and academic delegation to an international conference in London. The conference title was “The New Deals – The Next 10 Years” (The “New Deals” are components of the Labour government’s welfare reform strategy). In addition to conference meetings, the trip included briefings on policy issues/directions by the DWP Strategy Team, DWP staff, and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Professor Wiseman also met with Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Professor Wiseman and Trachtenberg School doctoral student Katrina Connolly have also been working with the Office of Family Assistance of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for the Children and Families and the Social Security Administration’s Office of Disability and Income Support Programs. They are developing innovations for improving processing of applications for the Supplemental Security Income program. Among other things, the project has required developing protocols for data exchange between the two agencies and plans for demonstrations at various locations around the country.

Also Professor Wiseman and Brad Trenkamp delivered a paper, “Food Stamps and Supplemental Security Income,” at the 47th Annual Workshop of the National Association for Welfare Research and Statistics in Charleston, West Virginia. In addition to his appointment in the Trachtenberg School, Professor Wiseman is a Visiting Scholar in the Social Security Administration’s Office of Policy, where Brad Trenkamp works as a policy analyst.

Hal Wolman
Professor Wolman served as an Academic Visitor in the Department of Politics at the London School of Economics from May to August of 2007. He also was a Visiting Academic Fellow in the School of Government at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand from January to April of 2007. Professor Wolman along with Tessa Brannan, Catherine Durose, and Peter John has a forthcoming article entitled “Assessing Best Practice as a Means of Innovation,” which will be appearing in Local Government Studies.  With George Galster, Dave Marcotte, Marv Mandell, and Nancy Augustine, Prof. Wolman co-authored the article “The Influence of Neighborhood Poverty During Childhood on Fertility. Education, and Earning Outcomes," in the September issue of Housing Studies.  Prof. Wolman also co-authored the report "States and Their Cities: Partnerships for the Future," with Ned Hill, Patricia Atkins, Pamela Blumenthal, Leah Curran, Kimberly Furdell, Jo Anne Schneider, and Elaine Weiss for the Fannie Mae Foundation earlier this year.