Government Executive - Authors - Rochelle L. Stanfield

HUD Ache

Rochelle L. Stanfield — Thu, 01 Oct 1998 00:00:00 -0400

rstanfield@njdc.com

ne day last May, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo waved a pen and raised HUD's magic number from 7,500 to 9,000. An audible sigh of relief wafted through HUD headquarters in Washington and at the agency's offices around the country. Maybe, some optimists thought, this new number would end years of employee turmoil and be the key to HUD's long search for effective management. But others scoffed that 9,000 was an inadequate number and held no more magic than earlier figures. And some skeptics, dismissing the whole exercise as political posturing, doubted whether a magic number exists at all.

The number Cuomo changed refers to the employment level at the department, a figure that has taken on a magical quality at HUD and across the government since the Clinton administration embarked on its effort to slash the federal workforce in 1993.

In December of 1994, then-Secretary Henry G. Cisneros proposed to cut HUD's staff almost in half by fiscal year 2000, to 7,500 employees, as a way to make the department more efficient and save it from the congressional ax that had hovered over it for years. The workforce--already on the decline from more than 17,400 employees in 1979 to 13,500 in 1992--shrank to 10,500 in 1997. It had dwindled further, to about 9,100, by May when Cuomo decided to stop the cuts--at least for now.

"The new HUD is 9,000 strong," he wrote in a special message to the staff on May 20. "Each and every person is an essential member on our team. We will move forward together, facing challenges and opportunities as one family."

In a subsequent interview, Cuomo explained that the 7,500-employee target depended on wholesale streamlining and merging of HUD programs that Congress had yet to consider. "We can make the department smaller if we consolidate programs," he said. "Until Congress takes action consolidating programs, however, we will be at the current staffing level of 9,100."

By mid-August, the 7,500 goal had receded further into a hazy future. Cuomo announced that all current HUD employees had been given permanent assignments. "Everyone has an important, long-term role in the HUD family," he wrote in a message to HUD staff on Aug. 13.

But the General Accounting Office and HUD's own inspector general have questioned whether the arbitrary number of 9,100 employees is adequate to operate the department's programs effectively.

"For at least the last five years, our reports have continuously questioned the adequacy of staffing," HUD IG Susan Gaffney testified at a June 2 hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Housing Opportunity and Community Development. "Necessary work activities, such as property inspections and financial statement reviews, are not being done . . . [and] in some cases the department is compensating for staff voids through contracting."

Magic Number

Does 7,500 remain the ideal size? Was it always an impossible goal? Is 9,100 more realistic? No one knows, but the topic is grist for many arguments in Congress, within HUD and among public administration analysts.

For that reason, in HUD's fiscal 1998 appropriation measure Congress commissioned the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to help the agency figure out how to systematically calculate its true staff requirements. Because of staff shuffles and program reorganizations at HUD, the magic number remains elusive.

"There is really no way for anyone to come up now with a number of what staff resources they might need in 2000," says Gregory J. Ahart, NAPA's senior consultant on the HUD project, which is due to be completed by the end of the year. "I think everybody is in agreement on this, including HUD." So NAPA is working with several HUD offices to design a model for calculating staff needs.

For nearly two decades, HUD's size has been based on political calculation rather than administrative requirements. Downsizing HUD has been part of a bigger game of reorganizing HUD, which in turn has been the traditional departmental response to threats to eliminate the agency altogether.

Opponents have called for HUD's abolition practically since its creation in 1965. In late 1994, flushed with their victory in the fall congressional elections, the Republicans escalated their long-simmering threat to eliminate several Cabinet agencies, including Education, Energy and HUD. The notion of offering HUD up as a sacrifice floated around the White House. Cisneros' promise to halve the department as part of a sweeping reorganization plan was a dramatic, last-ditch effort to save the agency from its own administration as well from Congress.

The White House relented and began to support HUD, and Congress failed to make good on its abolition threats. Even so, the agency was still under attack when Cuomo took over at the beginning of President Clinton's second term. So, in mid-1997, Cuomo kicked off his own comprehensive management reform plan, called HUD 2020.

"There's certainly an element of 'improve or die' in the [reform] equation," says David Osborne, the public management consultant who helped craft not only HUD 2020 but Vice President Al Gore's governmentwide reinvention effort.

The Cuomo scheme called for radically restructuring the department's organization and operations. HUD 2020 streamlined the department's mission statement and divided employees into two categories: "public trust officers," the bureaucrats who run the programs; and locally based "community builders," an elite new corps of customer-relations specialists assigned to deal with mayors, community groups, builders and other HUD constituents.

The new structure envisioned the consolidation of dozens of HUD programs and the privatization of others, enabling HUD to reach the downsizing target of 7,500 employees.

The impetus for reinventing and trimming down HUD might have been political, but the administrative weaknesses decried by the politicians were real. HUD has always offered a big, slow-moving target for anti-government snipers. Its responsibilities--housing and community development--are by their nature expensive and extremely complicated. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), for example, manages more than $450 billion in mortgage insurance. Many HUD programs, such as public housing and fair housing enforcement, are controversial. And the agency has compounded its other problems with a history of inept management, heavy-handed regulations, scandal, waste, fraud and abuse.

Indeed, NAPA concluded a 1994 study of HUD with an unusually ominous recommendation: "If, after five years, HUD is not operating under a clear legislative mandate and in an effective, accountable manner, the President and Congress should seriously consider dismantling the department and moving its core programs elsewhere."

The combined effects of the Cisneros and Cuomo reorganizations and the dislocation caused by constant downsizing have created turmoil in the ranks of HUD employees. But the effort seems to have appeased at least some opponents in Congress. When House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich, R-Ohio, suggested eliminating departments this spring, HUD was not on his list. And HUD has received its biggest budget in a decade for fiscal 1999.

Others are still gunning for the department, however. At a Senate housing subcommittee hearing on the HUD 2020 plan last spring, Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C., said, "I hope HUD doesn't think it is going to exist until the year 2020."

The Fewer the Better

HUD decided to downsize first, and then devised a reorganization plan to accommodate the personnel reductions. That might be a politically expedient approach, but public administration specialists see it as illogical, backwards and insupportable.

"HUD's target staffing levels were not based upon a systematic analysis of needs," Judy A. England-Joseph, director of housing and community development issues at GAO, testified at a May Senate hearing. "Our finding is consistent with that of HUD's inspector general, who reported that the department's target of 7,500 staff was adopted without first performing a detailed analysis of HUD's mission and projected workload."

NAPA reached similar conclusions in its 1994 report, saying HUD lacked a means to systematically determine staff requirements. NAPA recommended several ways to build such capacity, but that advice "was basically ignored," Ahart says. His current project is HUD's attempt to respond at last.

Instead, HUD reformers hacked away at the parts of the agency that presented the largest targets. The biggest operation at HUD is the FHA; not surprisingly, that's where most of the cuts came. The FHA's single-family-housing program began in 1994 with 2,700 employees. But HUD 2020 decreed that by 1999 it should have no more than 759.

Some former FHA managers say the process of reaching the reductions was arbitrary. "Somebody came down to me one day [in late 1997] and said, 'You need to cut staff by 30 percent,' " says a former official who asked not to be identified. "There was no discussion around what does that mean, what's reasonable. Just, 'You need to cut that.' There was a feeling that the plans were being developed in a vacuum without input from the folks who did the work--but that, when things didn't work out, they were the ones who were going to be held responsible."

Cuomo tried to minimize the impact of the reductions on HUD employees. He negotiated agreements with HUD's two major unions to make the cuts by 2002 without layoffs. He offered buyouts--taken by hundreds of HUD's most experienced employees--and set up a nationwide job market for HUD employees to transfer among HUD offices.

"From the beginning, we said that nobody would be fired," Cuomo told the Senate housing subcommittee in May. "We knew that our employees are our biggest asset. So, we went through two rounds of buyouts, with no reductions-in-force and with no directed reassignments. . . . Implementing such an employee-friendly process was the humane thing to do."

Turmoil still ensued. Despite the buyouts, the liberal transfer policy and natural attrition, the department had 1,300 excess employees last spring, designated "unplaced," whose jobs were to be terminated in 2002.

"Morale is garbage because people keep leaving and there are not enough people to do the work," said a veteran employee in a HUD field office, who asked not to be identified. "And the unplaced people are sitting around, and don't have real jobs. It's insanity."

In May, with the stroke of a pen, Cuomo ended the "unplaced" designation and promised everyone currently in the agency a permanent job, a task that was completed by August. Union official Tim Coward, president of the National Council of HUD Locals, says, "Now that we have put word out that everybody is 'placed,' I would expect to turn the corner on the morale problem."

While HUD 2020 eliminated thousands of jobs, it simultaneously opened the door to several hundred new people, the customer-relations field personnel called "community builders." The reorganization plan called for 600 community builders, half veteran HUD transferees and half new hires from the communities they would serve. This new blood will be crucial to revitalizing HUD, many observers believe.

"Over the last 20 years, as HUD has been downsizing, there really wasn't an ongoing infusion of new talent," says Nicolas P. Retsinas, who served as assistant HUD secretary for housing and FHA commissioner from 1993 until early this year.

How Many Will It Take?

Critics of HUD's management practices say the effort now should not be to downsize the department any further, but to calculate the number of employees needed to operate the agency efficiently. GAO, the HUD IG and others don't believe 9,100 is that number.

HUD managers "don't know whether 9,100 is enough," England-Joseph says. When GAO auditors delve into a program, they find that the 2020 design doesn't address what she calls "the real meat" of running that program. So one day, she says, HUD managers will realize, "Oh! You know, we do need more people."

England-Joseph and others point to the reorganization of FHA, which supervises HUD's portfolio of multi-family apartment buildings (other than public housing) and provides mortgage insurance and real estate management for single-family homes. HUD 2020 consolidated the FHA's 81 field offices into four processing centers and opened a single center in Oklahoma City to deal with loans for single-family homes that are in default. The plan also calls for contracts with private firms to handle foreclosures when nothing can be done to save the loan.

Private-sector management experts praise outsourcing as the new way to do business. But government auditors who have looked at how HUD handles these programs contend that the agency doesn't have the kind of resources and expertise that private firms find crucial in adopting these practices. England-Joseph's auditors found that oversight and supervision of several FHA programs that used contractors and were managed by the 81 field offices before reorganization, for example, were woefully inadequate.

"The condition we saw with these contractors was indicative of HUD's lack of capacity to oversee them and hold them accountable--and that was when they had 81 offices," she said. "Even then, [the field offices] didn't have enough people to oversee these contractors. And they've been cut out now; they don't exist anymore." With just four locations, "it's going to be next to impossible to oversee contractors around the country. It's like they didn't think it through."

Others are more optimistic about HUD's prospects in contractor oversight, but are still wary of privatization. "The question is, can HUD really put a lot of that work out to various partners in industry?" says Casimir J. Kolaski, who was director of HUD's housing office in Boston until he took a buyout late last year. "If they can do that, then I think it can work."

The ability of HUD headquarters to direct the whole show is of more concern to some of HUD's customers than the field operation. "There's been a real brain drain in Washington," says Dan Burke, vice president of the Chicago Community Development Corp., an affordable-housing development company. "If a matter is highly complex or controversial or needs clarification from Washington, there's really nobody home."

Like many private companies, HUD is turning to technology as a substitute for manpower. For years, GAO and the HUD IG have criticized the FHA for failing to adequately inspect HUD-assisted multi-family projects. A major part of the problem was insufficient inspectors to cover all the properties. Instead of adding more inspectors, HUD 2020 introduced computers to the inspection process. Inspectors are being equipped with hand-held computers called "palmpads." The inspectors simply fill in the blanks on the computer's checklist and the machine figures out whether the property passed or failed inspection.

The palmpads have generated considerable excitement among HUD reformers. But skepticism persists. "I've never seen a property where you can make a decision like that based on a single number," says Vincent F. O'Donnell, director of development for the Community Economic Development Assistance Corp., a Boston-based agency that works with nonprofit housing organizations in Massachusetts. "It's over-reliance on what I call the spurious precision of a technological instrument that doesn't have in it the capacity to deal with nuance."

HUD officials concede that HUD 2020 may need some fine tuning. "HUD has further to go. We're not bumping up against perfection yet," Cuomo said in an interview. "But we are moving and we have progressed, and that's the bottom line."

William C. Apgar, assistant secretary for policy development and research, who arrived at HUD a year ago from Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, says, "the basic principles of management reform that we're teaching up at the Kennedy School--they're being played out here. It's not that they invented them here, but they're making them work here."

Osborne agrees. HUD 2020 "seeks to rebuild HUD's credibility, outsource to the private sector where it makes sense, better align its workforce with its workload, and do it all in partnership with its unions," he wrote in the preface to a strategic assessment of the reform plan, released in May. The strategy "required an extraordinary amount of discipline and focus. But it was HUD's only choice, and perhaps last chance, to get its house in order." In Osborne's opinion, it's working. "If HUD continues down the road it is going today . . . the agency that was a symbol for government scandal in the 1980s could very well be a model for reinvention in the 1990s," he wrote.

Gaffney, who disagrees with Cuomo and Osborne on many issues, concurs that a great deal of change has taken place within HUD. "My office has closely watched the reform effort as it has progressed over the last 10 months," she told a Senate subcommittee last May. "The reform has had a profound impact on nearly every aspect of the department's operations. Staff has been downsized, offices consolidated, and new organizations are being established. We must move forward," she warned, "because HUD is not staffed to turn back at this point."

Rochelle Stanfield is a staff correspondent at National Journal.

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Cuomo tries to clean house at HUD

Rochelle L. Stanfield — Mon, 15 Jun 1998 00:00:00 -0400

Andrew M. Cuomo, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, may be at a crossroads. A year ago, he launched a massive reorganization and management reform effort to save his department. His own political future may well ride on the outcome. "There's certainly an element of 'improve, or die' in the equation," said David Osborne, Vice President Al Gore's favorite public management consultant, who coined the phrase "reinventing government" and helped design the HUD plan.

The 40-year-old Cuomo is in a delicate position. He has to create excitement about an unglamorous task and convince skeptics in the Administration, Congress and the public that the Cabinet's most dysfunctional agency is making a comeback. So he's been putting on an elaborate show to demonstrate early success. But Cuomo also has to be careful not to exaggerate his accomplishments, and thereby give his enemies evidence to support their contention that the overhaul is merely a public relations gimmick.

Thus, when Cuomo on May 6 opened a model HUD storefront office in Washington, D.C., to showcase what is supposed to become a more user-friendly bureaucracy, he made this extravagant observation: "At HUD, the 21st century has arrived ahead of schedule. . . . Here, we can see that we're not just talking about reform--we're making it happen, with new innovations that turn our hopes for a new, more responsive and effective HUD into reality."

In a subsequent interview, however, Cuomo acknowledged that "HUD has further to go. We're not bumping up against perfection yet." He said that while people argue about the amount of progress the department has made, "implicit in those arguments is that we are moving and have progressed. And that's the bottom line."

HUD has always offered a big, slow-moving target for antigovernment snipers. Its responsibilities--housing and community development--are by their very nature extremely expensive and excruciatingly complicated. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), for example, manages more than $450 billion in mortgage insurance. Many HUD programs are controversial: Voters don't like big public housing projects, but they also don't want poor families living in their neighborhoods. And the agency has compounded its other problems with a history of inept management, heavy-handed regulations, scandal, waste, fraud and abuse.

"We've all lived through the mess that existed" because of poor management at HUD, said Monica Hilton Sussman, a former HUD associate general counsel who now is a partner with the Washington law firm of Peabody & Brown. "You'd send out a letter to the owner [of a HUD-subsidized property] and it's, like, five addresses ago. The left hand and the right hand of the computer system don't even know where the goddamned property is located, who the owner is or who is in charge.

"So, is it the kind of thing that has to be straightened out? Absolutely," she continued. "And I give [Cuomo] a lot of credit for trying to deal with it. Frankly, for a politician, it's not the glitziest stuff to deal with."

Opponents have called for HUD's abolition practically from its creation in 1965. When the Republicans took over Congress in January 1995, the elimination of HUD was high on their priority list, and a notion floated around the White House to offer up HUD as a sacrifice.

But as a result of the reform efforts by President Clinton's first HUD Secretary, Henry G. Cisneros, and Cuomo, those attacks have largely subsided. The budget resolutions passed this spring by the House and Senate leave HUD intact (although House Budget Committee chairman John R. Kasich, R-Ohio, continues to suggest that the Commerce and Energy Departments be shut down). But the threats to HUD haven't gone away.

"In a sense, the Congress has said there is a truce that exists," said Sen. Connie Mack III, R-Fla., chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Housing Opportunity and Community Development. "But I think it is fair to say . . . that HUD's future frankly depends on whether they can pull this off."

Some of Mack's colleagues are less patient. The day after Cuomo opened the storefront office, Mack held a hearing on the Secretary's reorganization plan, which is called HUD 2020. "I believe [this] should be HUD's last management reform hearing," Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C., one of the agency's most consistent antagonists, said in his opening remarks. "I hope HUD doesn't think it is going to exist until the year 2020."

Faircloth quoted the dire recommendation that the usually circumspect National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), a private, Washington-based research organization, made on HUD in 1994: "If, after five years, HUD is not operating under a clear legislative mandate and in an effective, accountable manner, the President and Congress should seriously consider dismantling the department and moving its core programs elsewhere."

"This report is now four years old," Faircloth said. "The clock is ticking, and I don't see much promise on the horizon." (NAPA has not conducted a follow-up study, so the academy staff won't comment on HUD's progress.)

Also in 1994, the General Accounting Office (GAO) designated HUD a "high-risk" department because of poor management and financial practices, inadequate organization and unskilled staff. Subsequent GAO audits acknowledged improvements, but didn't lift the label. Now Cuomo wants HUD 2020--which cuts the department's staff, consolidates its regional structure and modernizes its operations in line with the private sector's--to erase that stain within the next year. That's a very ambitious goal, GAO officials say.

"When we put HUD on the high-risk list, we didn't do it frivolously," said Judy A. England-Joseph, the GAO's director of housing and community development issues. "There are very deep problems at HUD. If [the problems were such] that they could get off the list in a year or 18 months, we wouldn't have put them on."

The Balloon Man

HUD 2020 has a larger agenda than just correcting management flaws. As Cuomo acknowledged in the document outlining the plan, it is also aimed at restoring the department's "credibility--with Congress, with local government and with the customer. They must all believe that HUD has the competence and capacity to perform its functions."

He could have added to that list the Clinton White House, demoralized HUD staff, and skeptics within the housing and community development organizations. Cuomo is trying to use management reform to show that HUD can do more with less, as a way to convince the White House and Congress to give him more. It's not an easy trick.

Cuomo's predicament elicits many metaphors, with those describing a balancing act, a juggler and a tightrope walker among the favorites. Perhaps the most insightful metaphor, however, is the depiction by a former HUD official who compared the department to a balloon stuck in a tree. Cuomo's first task was "to dislodge the balloon so it's floating again. He's accomplished that," said this ex-official, who asked not to be named. "But he doesn't have the foggiest idea how to get the balloon to go where he wants it to. So, it's going to be at the mercy of the winds. And there are a lot of people out there waiting to shoot it down."

The first essential audience that Cuomo had to win over was the White House. Of course Cuomo's Democratic pedigree--he's the son of former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and he's married to a Kennedy (Kerry)--didn't hurt. He's also had a close personal relationship with the Vice President. Indeed, Gore has appeared at several events to plug HUD 2020. But Cuomo also had to convince the White House to make HUD issues--and funding--a priority. That's been a tougher sell.

Cuomo's even had difficulty getting the White House to fill top jobs in his department; many are held by "acting" officials. Yet Clinton's fiscal 1999 budget request, released in February, appeared to demonstrate that Cuomo has won some strong supporters in the Administration. It was HUD's best budget in a decade. Not only would it provide the funds to renew all the expiring contracts for rental assistance, for example, it would also support 100,000 new rental vouchers. (No new vouchers have been issued since 1995.) The housing and urban lobbies cheered.

Later in the spring, however, to pay for an emergency disaster-relief bill, Congress--with the White House's acquiescence--took more than $2.3 billion from the contract renewal pot, promising to put the money back in the fiscal 1999 appropriations bills. The House and Senate Appropriations Committees are beginning to write those bills now. Cuomo isn't likely to get everything he wants, but preliminary Senate subcommittee action would give HUD more than many observers had expected. The subcommittee would replace the renewal money and provide 10,000 additional vouchers.

Meanwhile, Cuomo has been involved in a civil war with Susan M. Gaffney, HUD's inspector general and one of his toughest critics. The battle has become so fierce that housing advocates joke about it. The Feb. 27 issue of the newsletter put out by the National Council of State Housing Agencies, for example, posed this question: "How many people does it take to run a Cabinet agency? How about two: a Secretary to decide things and an IG to tell him later that everything he or she decided was wrong."

Gaffney, who refused to be interviewed, has testified about HUD 2020 at a series of congressional hearings, always finding fault. Before Mack's subcommittee on June 2, she said: "HUD 2020 is a far-ranging and complex reform effort that lacked a sufficient analytic basis at the outset and assumed that material weaknesses in HUD's infrastructure could be corrected at the same time that massive personnel and organizational changes were implemented. Not surprisingly, implementation of this effort has been slow."

Cuomo in the interview responded: "You have some very bright people who actually studied HUD reform objectively and then looked at GAO and IG [criticisms] and say that the IG's and GAO's points make no sense."

In a formal evaluation released on May 6, Osborne, a private-sector consultant who was an adviser to the departmental drafters of HUD 2020, praised the plan as "a model for reinvention in the 1990s." He also took a direct hit at the inspector general: "Our experience has been that because bold, strategic reinvention plans are so different from the traditional audit mind-set of most inspectors general, IGs are rarely the most valuable sources for evaluations of management reform plans."

To fully implement HUD 2020, Cuomo needs legislation to consolidate some programs and allow for some privatization of the department's activities. And congressional action depends on the personal and political dynamics of a New York triangle: Cuomo himself; Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato, R-N.Y., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee; and Rep. Rick A. Lazio, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Banking and Financial Services Housing and Community Opportunity Subcommittee.

For a variety of reasons that no one can fully explain, these three New Yorkers have been unable to get together on another major piece of legislation that affects the way HUD does business: a sweeping public housing reform bill that has passed both chambers several times in the past four years, but can't make it out of conference committee and to the President's desk. Neither D'Amato nor Lazio would agree to be interviewed for this article. Observers say that Cuomo and D'Amato have made peace with each other; on HUD matters, D'Amato defers to subcommittee chairman Mack, with whom Cuomo has made compromises. Lazio, however, has insisted on his own approach. As one Capitol Hill aide put it, "He's not about getting to 'yes.' "

"The [public housing reform] legislation is what is going to drive this train," said Robert Rigby, the executive director of the Jersey City (N.J.) Public Housing Authority. "How the Secretary organizes HUD is the Secretary's prerogative. We're interested in the results."

Not There Yet

Even Cuomo's fan Osborne acknowledges that HUD 2020 is still a work in progress. "They've got a good plan that they've begun implementing," he said. "But they haven't done it yet. It will take them 5-10 years to do it."

How efficiently Cuomo makes the transition to a modern, streamlined HUD and, perhaps more important, how the department operates in the meantime are major issues that critics such as Inspector General Gaffney keep raising. "Merely having a plan doesn't correct the internal control problem," she testified at the June 2 Senate hearing. "Not until staffing and resources are put in place and [are] working will the department have successfully addressed this issue."

At the heart of HUD 2020 was a magic number: 7,500. To save the department from the threat of abolition during Clinton's first term, then-Secretary Cisneros promised to reduce HUD's staff (which at the time was more than 13,000) to 7,500 employees by 2000. By the time Cuomo was promoted to Secretary in early 1997 from his first-term job of assistant secretary for community planning and development, HUD's staff had been cut to about 10,500.

Cuomo in mid-1997 negotiated an agreement with HUD's unions to reduce the staff to 7,500 systematically, without layoffs, by 2002. Nonetheless, turmoil ensued. Hundreds of the most experienced employees took buyouts; others moved from the shrinking FHA shops to other slots in the agency. But hundreds of others, labeled "the unplaced," remained in limbo. They were guaranteed a paycheck until 2002, but their current jobs had officially been terminated.

By the time of Mack's May 7 hearing, HUD's personnel complement numbered about 9,100 and Cuomo had changed course: He announced that's where it would remain. A few days later, he officially transformed "the unplaced" into "placed." It seemed that 7,500 was no longer a magic number. "We can make the department smaller if we consolidate programs, but that will require congressional action," Cuomo said in the interview. "Until Congress takes action consolidating programs, we will be at this level."

Cuomo's move may calm some nerves at HUD. Union official Tim Coward, president of the National Council of HUD Locals, said, "I think, now that we have put word out that everybody is 'placed,' I would expect to turn the corner on the morale problem."

Now HUD's auditors worry whether the agency can operate smoothly with only 9,100 employees. "We know that they don't know whether 9,100 is enough," said GAO official England-Joseph. "Once [GAO auditors] get in and delve into a program, we discover that the 2020 design doesn't address the real meat of [running] the program. So [HUD managers are] going to realize, 'Oh! You know, we do need more people.' "

HUD 2020's biggest personnel cuts are from the labor-intensive FHA programs that provide mortgage insurance and real estate management for single-family homes. This reorganization consolidated the insurance functions of 81 field offices into four processing centers and opened a single center in Oklahoma City to deal with loans in default. The plan calls for contracts with private firms to handle foreclosures. Management professionals praise these steps as the new way to do business, already adopted by major private financial institutions.

"The question is, can HUD really put a lot of that work out to various partners in [private] industry," said Casimir J. Kolaski, who was director of HUD's housing office in Boston until he took a buyout late last year. "If they can do that, then I think it can work."

England-Joseph isn't so sure. She worries about HUD's ability to supervise these operations. "HUD lacked the capacity to oversee contractors and hold them accountable when HUD had 81 field offices. They just didn't have enough people," she said. "Now that they've centralized to four locations, it's going to be next to impossible."

Others are less concerned about the drop in HUD field personnel than the decline at HUD headquarters. "There's been a real brain drain in Washington," said Dan Burke, vice president of the Chicago Community Development Corp., an affordable-housing development company. "If a matter is highly complex or controversial or needs clarification from Washington, there's really nobody home."

Also in keeping with private-industry practices, HUD 2020 intends to substitute technology for manpower. To beef up the inspection of HUD-assisted multifamily properties, Cuomo has announced the acquisition of handheld computers. Inspectors would enter information into the computer, which would figure out whether the property passed or failed.

"I've never seen a property where you can make a decision like that based on a single number," said Vincent F. O'Donnell, director of development for the Community Economic Development Assistance Corp., a Boston-based agency that works with nonprofit housing organizations in Massachusetts. "It's over-reliance on what I call the spurious precision of a technological instrument that doesn't have in it the capacity [to deal with nuance]."

The HUD 2020 innovation that has received the most publicity so far is the decision to split HUD personnel between "public trust officers," the bureaucrats who run the programs, and locally based "community builders," an elite new corps to deal with mayors, community groups, builders and other HUD constituents. Some old housing hands remain skeptical, questioning whether these community builders will simply be public relations specialists or delay decision making by inserting another bureaucratic layer. "It's not a matter of, are they warm and fuzzy?" said Rigby, the public housing official from Jersey City. "It's a matter of, do they have the authority to make a decision?"

HUD officials concede that 2020 may have some bugs to work out and is certainly not yet a fait accompli. But some of them are excited about its prospects. William C. Apgar, assistant secretary for policy development and research-designate, arrived at HUD last October from Harvard University. "The basic principles of management reform that we're teaching up at the [John F.] Kennedy School [of Government at Harvard]--they're being played out here," he said. "It's not that they invented them here, but they're making them work here."

Cuomo acknowledges that "progress is a relative term." At an April 22 conference sponsored by Government Executive, Cuomo asked: "What did the snail say when he went for a ride on the back of a turtle? WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!"

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Identity Crisis

Rochelle L. Stanfield — Tue, 25 Nov 1997 00:00:00 -0500

When Tiger Woods is polled in the 2000 census, he will no longer be forced into a racial pigeonhole. The young golf champ doesn't want to be described as an African-American, as he usually is, but as a multiracial "Cablinasian"--a person of caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian ancestry.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has decided, after years of agonizing, to shift the way the government collects racial information. This promises to be a fundamental change that goes to the heart of the emotional, political and legal wrangles over how Americans identify--and view--themselves.

No longer will federal forms demand that you pick just one of four racial categories (white; black; American Indian or Alaskan Native; or Asian or Pacific Islander) and declare whether you are of Hispanic origin. Starting with the next decennial census, you will be able to check as many boxes as apply, from a slightly altered menu of five racial categories (including the new category of Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, which has been split off from Asian), in addition to saying whether you are Hispanic.

At first, the change won't affect all that many Americans. Estimates of what proportion of the population is of multiple ancestry range from just over 1 per cent to almost 7 per cent. But the proportion of interracial marriages is increasing dramatically, and the numbers could be much bigger within a few decades. Already, in some large cities, the concentration of mixed-race populations in some neighborhoods could make a difference in city council and school board districts.

OMB, which oversees all federal paperwork, arrived at its decision after spending four years conducting test runs and other research, holding public hearings, creating a 30-member federal interagency committee and collecting the conflicting opinions of civil rights leaders, state and local officials, business executives, social scientists and a gaggle of other interested parties.

That was the easy part. Now, OMB and the federal agencies that use racial data must answer even harder questions: How will they tabulate the results? How will they report them? And there's not much time to figure it all out.

"It took a couple of years to decide . . . to allow [people to check] more than one [box]," Isabelle Katz Pinzler, acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, acknowledged at a Nov. 6 meeting of a National Conference of State Legislatures task force on redistricting. "Now all the rest of these issues are going to have to be decided in a couple of months. We are in a real crunch."

A lot is riding on the tabulations. They'll have far-reaching implications for redrawing congressional, state legislative and local council districts; for enforcing civil rights laws; and for planning and targeting a host of health, social and economic programs.

Say, for example, Tiger Woods or someone like him checks the boxes for white, black, American Indian and Asian. How would he be counted under the Voting Rights Act for the purpose of congressional redistricting? If he's placed in a combined category, would that offer the same legal protections as a minority category--such as black or Hispanic--covered by the statute? Would he be put in one category? If so, which one? Or would he be apportioned among four categories? How?

"We can't make any decisions yet on how to handle something like that," said Ellen Tewes, deputy legislative attorney in the Tennessee legislature's Office of Legislation. She reflects the views of many of her counterparts in other states: "I don't have any answers now. And it probably won't be resolved until there is litigation."

And that's only one side of a multifaceted problem. For instance, since many casual observers perceive Woods to be African-American, would the Justice Department consider him black when enforcing employment discrimination laws? That's the direction in which Justice is leaning, according to Pinzler, but the courts will probably be asked to decide that question as well.

Or, if the Centers for Disease Control wanted to target a health problem that disproportionately affects Asian-Americans, how would a multiple response like Woods's be factored into the equation?

In deciding to allow multiple racial responses, OMB policy makers struck a compromise. Old-line civil rights groups wanted to keep the traditional race categories, and a handful of new groups representing people of mixed race lobbied to add a single, "multiracial" box. Officially, the agency rejected the multiracial category on statistical grounds. Someone of mixed white-and-Asian ancestry, for example, wouldn't have enough in common with someone of mixed black-and-Indian ancestry to make the catch-all classification statistically useful, by OMB's explanation.

The process that led to the compromise was "comprehensive, thorough and done in a professional manner," insisted Sally Katzen, who supervised the undertaking as the administrator of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The next phase, too--deciding on how to tabulate the data--"is being driven by career statistical professionals who bring to the process their professionalism and not some political agenda."

Politics, however, is lurking. The traditional civil rights groups fear that a multiracial category would result in a loss of constituents. Many supporters of a single, multiracial category who also oppose race-based policies such as affirmative action hope to fragment the longstanding, rigid racial identities.

"My own take is that this is not a statistical issue, it's a political issue," said Edward J. Spar, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, in Alexandria, Va. "The politics are in the details and the devil is in the politics, not in the statistics."

Mix and Match

Like any compromise, the decision to allow multiple responses allowed each side of the debate to claim victory--initially, at least. "Although Asian-Americans and American Indians have expressed some concerns, I think many people felt it was a rather elegant response to a difficult problem," said Wade J. Henderson, the executive director of the Washington-based Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "You allowed people the freedom to choose, without making a judgment on what that represented."

But, as with many compromises, the decision has also sparked mistrust all around, as the interested parties contemplate how to put the new rule into effect.

Civil rights groups worry that government agencies tabulating the data, when confronted with a plethora of racial combinations, are likely to lump the smaller ones into a single category labeled "multiple response." Indeed, OMB's background paper on its decision suggested that course as an agency option. If that happens, "as far as I'm concerned, you've just back-doored yourself into a multiracial category," said Karen Narasaki, the executive director of the Washington-based Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.

But the advocates of a single multiracial category are no less suspicious that government statisticians might stick some people who claim more than one race into a single-race category. Susan Graham, the executive director of Project RACE in Roswell, Ga., among the most vocal of those advocates, expressed her concerns in an editorial on the group's Web site: "Will [people who check more than one box] be retrofitted back in to ONE box? We are certain the NAACP will have a hand in this, as well. As one NAACP official said, 'Let those mixed people check all the boxes they want--but COUNT them as black.' Is this fair and accurate? No. Is this racist and discriminatory? Yes."

The intent, as OMB's Katzen described it, is for federal statistical agencies to present as much detail as possible by listing the many racial combinations and then mixing and matching them to suit particular statistical or administrative needs.

It will be complex and confusing, she conceded. "This is an increasingly sophisticated world we're dealing with and simplistic, one-size-fits-all solutions, I think, are less in favor. . . . Life is complicated. People are complicated."

With that complexity could come both practical and legal problems. "Most likely, you'll get more combinations than you've got colors on the screen, if you want to map [racial identity]," statistician Spar commented.

Perhaps more important are the concerns about confidentiality. Federal law requires the Census Bureau to keep the facts and figures about any individual strictly private. Providing statistics about people of rare racial mixes could help others guess who they are. So federal agencies are certain to lump those groups together, whatever they do with groups of more-common racial mixes.

Another side issue relates to self-identification. The whole racial classification system is predicated on people declaring their own race, no matter what they look like or who their parents are. Except when they can't. OMB's directive allows for a designated "observer" to determine a person's race--"if necessary." The example that OMB director Franklin D. Raines often cites is the need to specify a person's race on a death certificate, for which self-identification is clearly impossible. But these observers--employers, school officials or the like--may make the judgment in other circumstances, although no one seems sure just which ones or how many. This troubles interest groups on both sides of the debate.

"We call this 'eyeballing,' " Project RACE's Graham wrote. "A school administrator, federal agency employee, employer, etc., can LOOK AT YOU AND DETERMINE YOUR RACE. . . . This is one of the most unfair and prejudiced of all racial injustices."

The National Council of La Raza, a Washington-based Hispanic advocacy group, is worried about the practice for a different reason. On most federal forms, the question about Hispanic origin is asked separately, before the question about race. But when an observer does the identifying, the two questions are combined. Since Hispanics--people whose ancestors' native tongue was Spanish--are of various races, "there could be major distinctions between those who self-identify and those who are observed," said Eric Rodriguez, a La Raza policy analyst. Studies in predominantly Hispanic communities in California show that people of mixed Hispanic and Anglo ancestry more often identify themselves as Hispanic. An observer might not.

Academics who take a more detached view tend to play down the hand-wringing. "This is a tempest in a little teapot," said University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee) history professor Margo Anderson, an expert on the census. "The cultural and identity and symbolic politics are what get people's juices flowing. This isn't going to make that much difference," at least right away.

Trial runs the Census Bureau and other agencies conducted over the past four years found that given the option, fewer than 2 per cent of Americans identified themselves as multiracial. Allowing multiple responses did not significantly change the number of people who identified themselves as black or white. But it did reduce the number of people who called themselves Asian-American or American Indian. Compared to people of other races, a much higher proportion of Asians and Indians marry outside their group.

Groups that represent Asian-Americans and American Indians naturally find these implications troubling. At the same time, black and Hispanic groups don't find them comforting. African-American activists, in particular, point to the continuing stigma of being black in America. Merely allowing people to check more than one racial category, they contend, will encourage many African-Americans to do so.

"There is an unspoken fear that by giving people the option to claim multiple ancestry, you will play into a desire that people have, not so much for cultural self-determination, but for being something other than black," a longtime civil rights advocate said. "By giving people the option, you will in fact diminish the number of people who claim to be African-American--not because the definition has changed, but because people have an option to escape. It's not that they think their lives will improve, but they'll be able to say to themselves, 'This is not me. I'm different.' "

First Stop: The Courts

When it comes to allowing multiple responses, there's consensus on one thing. "Everyone knows for sure that there's going to be litigation," La Raza's Rodriguez said. "It's sort of like, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't--and there's not much you can do."

Civil rights groups, exhausted from their battles over affirmative action--most recently the thwarting of the nomination of Bill Lann Lee as assistant attorney general for civil rights--aren't eager for a new round of judicial fights.

"This is basically going to reopen a lot of civil rights enforcement issues," Narasaki said. "The litigators are telling me that they're going to be spending their time in court now, relitigating a lot of issues. There couldn't be a worse time to be trying to do that."

Indeed, Pinzler prefaced her remarks to state legislators recently by acknowledging, "The Department of Justice, of course, is not in a position to dictate how the courts will apply the data that result from the changes."

Those involved in redistricting, particularly in the 18 (mainly southern) states that are covered by the Voting Rights Act, fret that allowing multiple responses could complicate their task after the 2000 census. Language in the 1965 law prohibits "retrogression"--the adoption of a state law that diminishes the voting power of any covered minority group. Results of the 2000 census may do that. Say a congressional district had a 51 per cent black majority after the 1990 census, and say the majority shrinks--because of new tabulation methods--to 49 per cent. State legislators are nervous about a legal challenge.

Katzen insists that statistical "crosswalks" will let numbers crunchers make historical comparisons between the 1990 census and the 2000 census. But legislators express concern that these statistical connections may not stand up in court. If there's not "a good bridge from the 1990 data to the new 2000 data using this different way of collecting," asked Tim Storey, the resident expert on redistricting at the National Conference of State Legislatures, "how do you measure retrogression? How do you tell if the states are drawing more or less districts [with a majority of minority voters] than they should have vis e vis the 1990 maps?"

Timing is also a problem. Under another provision of the Voting Rights Act, Justice or a federal court must approve districting changes in advance if they bring a decline in so-called majority-minority districts.

"There can be a fight on that," explained Jeffrey M. Wice, a Washington attorney who consults with Democrats on redistricting matters. "Different folks in the the legislative redistricting bodies might try to . . . maintain, strengthen or dismantle these districts.

"So, we were hoping that the Justice Department would have provided some early guidance to the OMB decision makers," he continued. "But that hasn't happened yet."

Based on the research, officials at OMB and Justice predict that African-American identification won't change enough to undermine existing black-majority congressional districts. Any changes the 2000 census brings, they say, will happen in the handful of districts with pockets of Asian-Americans or Indians.

"There were no statistically significant differences [in the test runs] in the numbers reported for blacks, for example, which is the area in which we're hearing questions about voting rights," Katzen said. "That leads me to believe that, proceeding as we are, we'll be getting very comparable information and not changing the relationships."

But nobody knows for sure.

Redistricting probably won't be affected this time around, historian Anderson said. But, she conceded, many imponderables on racial identification remain. "Is there such a thing as a multiracial community?" she said. "Or, are there multiracial people living inside the white, Spanish, Asian and black communities? We don't know yet because we haven't been able to literally see it."

On this quandary, civil rights groups and redistricting practitioners are worried that OMB's tests don't really predict how people will mark their census forms on April 1, 2000.

"I don't believe we're going to have a very good sense of what could happen, because we won't have any tests to show where there could be pitfalls [in the tabulations]," Rodriguez said. "We don't have a lot of evidence. What we have is theories. We'll have to think hypothetically about how this is going to look--and that could make things very difficult" when state legislatures redraw the district boundaries.

Or when civil rights groups go to court to enforce laws that ban discrimination in housing or employment. "I am very sympathetic to the whole issue of multirace," Narasaki said. "I have nieces of different races, and so I understand the emotional issue about self-identification.

"But the point is, you collect the racial and ethnic data for a reason," she continued. "If you can't tabulate it, you've undermined the ability of the federal government to provide information that will help set policy and help ensure that the civil rights laws are effectively enforced. That's the bottom line."

To reinforce that bottom line, the lawyers on all sides of the debate are sharpening their brief-writing pencils and pulling out their yellow legal pads. To back them up, there's another cadre of professionals who are breathlessly warming up their computers.

"Just the way changes in the [tax code] keep accountants in business, this is going to keep the statistical and social-science analysts in business for the next 10 years, at least," Spar said. "Now is the time to go to graduate school in social science."

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Testing! Testing!

Rochelle L. Stanfield — Mon, 22 Sep 1997 00:00:00 -0400

"This should be something that has nothing to do with party politics," President Clinton said on Sept. 8 as he described one of his top political priorities. "There's no politics in this, only our children."

He was touting his plan for voluntary national achievement tests that would examine all fourth-graders for reading competence and all eighth-graders for mathematics proficiency to determine whether they meet tough standards in those subjects. He was surrounded, campaign-style, by photogenic elementary school students at a ceremony in the colorful auditorium of a public school in Gambrills, Md., halfway between Washington and Baltimore.

The setting on Capitol Hill had been very different a few days earlier when Rep. William F. Goodling, R-Pa., chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, testified passionately against the President's test scheme: Goodling was surrounded by grown-ups in somber suits and silk ties against a background of dark wood and leather in a Senate hearing room. But the GOP lawmaker's words were almost the same as the President's.

"This has nothing to do with politics," Goodling said repeatedly. "Politics should stop at the schoolhouse door."

But the politicking isn't likely to stop over a national testing program--or any other education program sponsored by the federal government. That's because schooling, unlike most other topics, touches a nerve in the American people. What subjects children are exposed to and how they are taught provoke visceral reactions that are tailor-made for the pols of the land.

So, naturally, politics was in overload in the way that Congress reacted to Clinton's plan, which calls for implementing a national testing program by simply spending money that the Education Department already had. The department spent $13 million this fiscal year and proposed to spend another $16 million in fiscal 1998 to develop the tests, and as much as $90 million in fiscal 1999 to administer them.

Congress has split on the issue. On Sept. 17, the House adopted by a healthy margin--295-125--a Goodling amendment to the Education Department's fiscal 1998 spending bill that would prevent the department from spending any money to develop the tests. More than 70 Democrats signed onto Goodling's protest.

A week earlier, the Senate had overwhelmingly approved funding for the tests in its version of the spending bill, exacting as a concession from the White House a change in the independent board that would oversee the administration of the tests.

The two versions now go to conference, where an attempt will be made to iron out the differences. If the House version prevails, the White House has held out the option of a veto.

Lost in the fight over the appropriation, however, are fundamental policy questions that underlie the political sniping: How would national tests help improve American education? What would they measure that existing tests don't? If new tests are the solution, does the President's plan fill the bill?

Politics Not As Usual

Education policy considerations probably prompted the President's plan--along with the urging of advisers helping Clinton shop around for relatively easy ways to nail down so-called legacies. But the school testing proposal has brought to the surface conflicts that are political in practically every sense of the word: party and ideological politics, divisions between the executive and legislative branches, splits within Congress, federalism issues over local control of the schools, and arcane pedagogical politics.

"It may be just politics, but it's not normal politics," Marshall S. Smith, acting deputy Education secretary, said in an interview. (He and presidential special assistant Michael Cohen were the intellectual parents of the President's plan, which was enunciated in Clinton's February State of the Union message.) Indeed, the test proposal divides friends and draws together enemies.

The plan has mainstream, centrist appeal. Business organizations are all for it. The academic standings of American students must be raised if this country is to compete effectively in a global economy, their argument goes, and that requires tough national education standards, with tests to gauge whether students are measuring up. In fact, although Clinton as governor of Arkansas had promoted high standards and tests to measure whether students met them, this new plan is really another case of his appropriating a Republican idea. President Bush and his Education Secretary, Lamar Alexander, had proposed a more comprehensive set of tests in 1991.

The public also seems to favor national standards and tests. Thus, the latest version of the annual Phi Delta Kappa/ Gallup Poll of public attitudes toward public schools, released last month, found that 77 per cent of the respondents favored national standards, 67 per cent endorsed standardized testing to measure achievement and 66 per cent even gave the nod to a national curriculum. That politics is a factor showed up when the pollsters attached Clinton's name to the testing plan; the approval rating dropped to 57 per cent.

Goodling maintained in an interview, however, that a poll he had conducted earlier this month showed that only 22 per cent of respondents favor tests constructed at the federal level, compared with 74 per cent who wanted state or local entities to control the tests.

The notion of a national test sends shivers down the spines of the Religious Right, family advocacy groups and conservative Republicans in general, who see in it the specter of federal intrusion into state, local and family prerogatives. Vocal opposition to the plan, mounted at the last minute by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., was viewed by many as his attempt to regain favor with conservative congressional forces that earlier in the year had spurned him. Yet Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., a conservative who had planned to sponsor Goodling's amendment in the Senate, changed his mind and instead sponsored the amendment modifying the board that would administer the tests.

Democrats are also split. Some liberal Members of Congress, governors and mayors have come to accept standards and tests as the only way to save inner-city schools. That is the conclusion reached by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., an early skeptic of national testing who aggressively pushed for the President's plan.

But many African-American and Hispanic Members of Congress, along with civil rights and other advocacy groups, were no happier with Clinton's plan than the conservatives were. They saw the tests as simply one more public brand of inferiority that would stigmatize poor, minority and disabled students, especially in the absence of equalized financial support for disadvantaged schools.

"No testing should be instituted unless we also push some new effort to guarantee that every student gets a break in terms of learning," Rep. Major R. Owens, D-N.Y., a senior member of the Education Committee and of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in an interview. Owens had signed a letter, which Goodling circulated among Members, opposing the test plan.

Goodling's opposition to the testing comes from a complex mixture of pressure from conservative members of his committee and the fear of stigmatizing the disadvantaged, layered on top of his 22 years as teacher, principal and superintendent of schools with the school administrator's inherent dislike of standardized tests that compare schools or school districts.

The education establishment is split on testing. Echoing some of Goodling's sentiments, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers' union, had opposed national tests until this summer, when it adopted a lukewarm approval of some exams for certain purposes. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), on the other hand, had been an early advocate of the tests, spurred on by its late president, Al Shanker, who saw them as the only way to jump-start achievement in the inner cities.

But Goodling's political problems with the issue go beyond the plan itself. He resented the need to make policy decisions on an appropriations bill, he said, and he was bothered by the cavalier approach of the White House and Education Department.

Indeed, the Administration's handling of the proposal probably escalated what was sure to be contention into open warfare. Instead of courting congressional Republicans such as Goodling and seeking broad bipartisan support of the idea at the outset, Clinton simply announced his plan as a fait accompli.

And in a desperate drive to hold the first tests in 1999 (that is, during Clinton's term), the Education Department let contracts for test development instead of handing the project over to an independent, bipartisan entity outside the federal government, as Goodling and just about everybody else in the education community expected. In so doing, the department opened itself to criticism and speculation about test questions, teaching methods and educational theory.

"I think they could have avoided an awful lot of the grief they are now getting from conservatives if they had approached this differently from the beginning, but they were arrogant," said education analyst Chester E. Finn, Jr., a former assistant Education secretary and Hudson Institute scholar, who is now president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington, and who favors national tests but opposes the Clinton plan. "If national testing goes down in flames, it will be because of conservatives who hate the word `national' and liberals who hate the word `testing.'"

Not Another Test!

Why do we need another test at all, critics ask, arguing that American students are already tested too much.

"To tell the 50 percent of the students who have been told 100 times that they're not doing well, to tell them one more time that they're not doing well--what does that do to improve the situation?" Goodling demanded.

In fact, others complain, the proposed tests could make a bad situation even worse. "This is not just any old testing," Owens said. "Testing to some kind of a national standard is going to be high-stakes testing, and it's going to put a stigma on the students who don't do well--a number that will follow those students wherever they go."

Not so, reply testing proponents, who insist that these tests will be helpful to students, parents and teachers and that they are necessary precisely because they will be different from any current test.

No single test is given to every fourth-grade or eighth-grade student in the country, so there's no way to tell how the academic advancement of fourth-graders in Detroit differs from the progress of fourth-graders in San Jose, or to tell how close either group comes to meeting a national reading standard. Popular commercial standardized tests--the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, for example--provide comparisons of those who take it. But those tests are graded on a curve; they don't show whether the test takers meet a national standard.

A series of tests sponsored by the Education Department, called the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), are pegged to national standards. But only a sample of children take the tests, and the results have been computed only at the national and state levels. A few school districts are now getting their own NAEP results, but not for individual schools or students. The President's plan would convert NAEP's fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math tests into such individual exams.

"Through that one, single test administration, you would have the possibility that students in one school would know how their scores on that test compare with [those of other] students in their state, in school districts outside their state, indeed, [in] the nation as a whole," explained Gordon M. Ambach, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, an enthusiastic backer of the plan.

Such reporting will just lead to invidious comparisons between rich and poor schools and districts, Goodling retorts.

"That misses the point!" Ambach shot back. "What everyone is really interested in is measuring a whole variety of high-wealth districts to see which ones are producing better students, and then to measure a whole bunch of low-wealth districts to see which ones are producing higher scores." Districts with low scores would be more likely to adopt the winning practices of those that are in a similar economic position and get high scores, he said.

"These tests will make the notion of high standards very concrete," acting deputy Education secretary Smith added. "We will be able to give examples of the kinds of knowledge and skills that students will have to have to be able to do well on these tests. And we can make that information available to parents, teachers and the students themselves. In the United States, we don't very often connect the kind of student work you need to know how to do with the kind of [standardized] test we're going to give."

Critics point out, however, that in the absence of a national curriculum--which remains a huge no-no--that isn't a realistic goal. The eighth-grade mathematics test is likely to include algebra questions, although most school districts don't teach algebra in eighth grade. If the districts stick with their own curricula, the test won't be fair to the students. Smith and others hope the test will force states and school districts to teach more algebra--but some educators call that a backwards way to develop a curriculum.

"The whole purpose of these tests," Smith went on, "is to improve the lives of all children."

To Goodling, that objective "is sort of the usual Washington arrogance," he said. Setting education standards is a state responsibility, he insisted. "Here we have all these states upgrading their curriculum, testing to see whether the children are learning, and somehow or other [in the view of the Clinton Administration], that isn't good enough."

The problem, proponents of a national test say, is that what the states are doing generally isn't good enough. Whenever Education Secretary Richard W. Riley makes a speech, testifies or appears on television about this subject, he pulls out a chart showing how fourth-graders rank on state reading assessments versus how they rank on NAEP, the national sample assessment that would form the basis of the new tests. In Riley's home state of South Carolina, for example, 82 per cent of the children met the state standard; only 20 per cent met the NAEP standard. Only in Delaware was the state standard tougher than the NAEP yardstick.

Sandra Stotsky, a Brookline-based education researcher at Harvard and Boston Universities, who co-chaired a committee to draft English-language arts instruction standards for Massachusetts, takes a rather dim view of what most states are doing. "We have so many bad standards documents, poor, inadequate, weak standards documents out there," she said after reviewing the English standards adopted by 28 states, for a report published by Finn's Fordham Foundation. "So I am inclined to favor a national test in grade-four reading."

Not only do state standards range widely, but many states have an implicit policy encouraging the practice of social promotion--or advancing students with their age-mates regardless of the quality of their schoolwork. An AFT study of 85 school districts, released on Sept. 9, concluded that social promotion is "rampant."

Such variance may have been true in the past, but "the whole debate in states has shifted," said Patricia Sullivan, director of education legislation for the National Governors' Association in Washington. "There is less comfort with having poor quality standards than there used to be, because of the comparisons that are being made."

Meanwhile, business leaders say they need job applicants who graduate from schools that adhere to consistent national standards backed up by tests.

"Any major business that has offshoots all over the country doesn't set a different standard for participation in the workplace [in each area]," said Milton Goldberg, executive vice president of the Washington-based National Alliance of Business. "It has common standards, and it has common assessments. We've got to raise academic standards and student performance in this country, and raising standards without having assessments related to those standards is going to make the standards almost meaningless."

Who Writes the Questions?

If national tests are to be given, all sides agree that great care must be taken to assure that they are not federal tests. So why did the White House allow a "federal" taint to mar the proposed tests by going ahead on its own to award contracts for test development?

When considering the launching of the test initiative, the White House, aides say, tried to remove as much politics as it could. That's why Clinton proposed to test only reading and math achievement. What could be more apolitical than such basic skills? And that's also why the Administration proposed adapting NAEP, about as credible and respected a set of tests as exists in the country.

Although NAEP is under the general auspices of the Education Department, these tests are constructed, supervised and administered overall by a 26-member independent bipartisan body called the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which is composed of governors, state legislators, business representatives and a variety of educators. The logical tactic would have been to turn control of the proposed new tests over to NAGB.

There was one big problem: That was illegal. Congress had forbidden NAGB from testing individual children; it could administer tests only to small groups of students. The White House could have asked Congress to give NAGB the authority to administer this test. Goodling says that's what he expected would happen. No one will say definitively why that course of action wasn't taken, but there were political considerations: The Administration didn't want to open up a political can of worms. As it turned out, the worms got loose anyway because the White House didn't ask Congress for authority. And timing was a problem; Clinton wanted the tests given in 1999, so the Education Department needed to move quickly. Seeking a change in NAGB's authority would have taken much more time.

Instead, the Education Department asked the research arm of the Council of Chief State School Officers to convert NAEP into a single test for individual students. Currently, any one child is asked only one-sixth of the questions on NAEP. The council's job was to pare down the number of questions so one child could reasonably answer them all in 90 minutes. The reason the Education Department asked the council to head the effort was that for years, the council has held the contract to decide on the kind of questions that NAEP asks.

"We set up a very distinguished NAGB-like panel," the council's Ambach said. "It has representatives from the governors, the state legislatures, business--everyone."

To actually write the test, the department let contracts to a consortium, including the Educational Testing Service, which supervises NAEP operations; independent consulting firms; and huge commercial test publishers, including Harcourt Brace and the California Test Bureau/McGraw Hill. If NAGB or another independent body had been in charge, these same entities would probably have been given the job. The problem was political--it was the federal government who hired them.

"It is so rare that the government is criticized for moving too quickly," acting deputy Education secretary Smith said. "But that's what's happened."

Goodling mounted his offensive against the procedure, and Riley backed down and agreed to ask Congress to give NAGB authority to oversee the tests. The White House-Senate compromise would expand NAGB to include three governors (now there are two)--two of them members of the party not in the White House. But that concession was not sufficient to satisfy Goodling, who pushed his amendment barring financing for the tests through the House.

Goodling calls the national test plan "Smith's Folly." In response, Smith smiles sheepishly. "When I think of other things that were called follies--Seward's Folly for the purchase of Alaska and Fulton's Folly [the steamboat]--I have to think that I'm in good company," he said. "And I think these tests will be just as important."

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Mapping Government's Reach

National Journal and Rochelle L. Stanfield — Mon, 05 May 1997 00:00:00 -0400

rstanfie@njdc.com

Someday, brilliantly designed and spectacularly colorful computer-generated maps are likely to portray every nuance of government subsidies and incentives. They don't yet.

Promoters of computer mapping insist, however, that supersophisticated designs are just around the corner. After all, they note, using these maps for simple tasks such as community planning, public education and mobilizing public opinion is a recent phenomenon.

Computer-generated maps rely on sophisticated software called the Geographic Information System (GIS). Just a few years ago, GIS was extremely expensive and inordinately difficult to use. It also required a very powerful computer, out of reach of most non-profit organizations and all but the largest local governments.

"The technical and cost problems have been largely overcome," said Michael A. Stegman, assistant Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary for policy development and research. The map-making software can be used on most computers "and a lot of the data are available from a variety of sources."

HUD is one of them. A few years ago, the department provided relatively primitive mapping software to localities and nonprofit organizations involved in two grant programs. It was part of a pet project of both Stegman and Secretary Andrew M. Cuomo when he was assistant secretary for community planning and development. HUD has now upgraded the software, made it a lot easier to use and included a map library in a package that it plans to market for $249 later this spring.

What local officials need is more government data translated into a form that the mapping software can read. "Frankly, another challenge we have is to get more-specific data," Cleveland Heights (Ohio) councilman Kenneth Montlack said. "It's a very difficult task to track down all the sources of funds and to figure out what dollars get spent where."

Cuyahoga County planning director Paul A. Alsenas, for example, wanted to construct a map that showed traffic patterns on major roads around the county, but the county engineer had not yet converted that data into digital form. "So we had to buy data from a company in Texas that should be available from folks a block and a half away from us," Alsenas said. "But at least we got it."

By themselves, the most startling maps won't forge political coalitions. "Let's not think that technology and maps will change the world," Stegman said. "You need charismatic leaders and strategists who know how to use this tool, who understand the fault lines of American society and how to bridge them, and who can now use this vehicle as a resource to mobilize public opinion."

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Why An Agency Blinked

National Journal and Rochelle L. Stanfield — Mon, 07 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0400

The Census Bureau blinked. Under pressure to be more customer-friendly--and to spend less public money than it did in its 1990 head count--the Census Bureau plans to scale back the number of subjects covered by its census 2000 questionnaires.

Big users of census statistics have mixed reactions to the plans, which were unveiled on March 31.

"I'm unhappy because the counties really need the data and I want everything for my counties," said Jacqueline Byers, research director for the Washington-based National Association of Counties. "But I understand why the Census Bureau is doing it."

The bureau is cutting back its questions because Congress--and many Americans who live beyond the Capital Beltway--want it to. The more questions asked in the decennial census, the angrier and less cooperative people are about voluntarily filling out the forms and returning them in the mail.

That means the Census Bureau has to spend more money to get what is most likely to be less accurate data. The combination of a resentful public and a bloated bureau budget make Congress really mad. Although a decennial census is mandated in the Constitution, Congress decides what questions get asked.

The decennial survey comes in two sizes. The short form goes to every household in the country. In the year 2000, if Congress concurs with the bureau's plan, the census will ask questions on only seven subjects--down from 12 in 1990, and the fewest number in 180 years. The long form, which goes to about one household in six, would cover 27 additional subjects. The Census Bureau would accomplish the streamlining by transferring five subjects from the short form to the long form, adding one new subject to the long form and dropping five 1990 long-form subjects altogether.

Most of the topics shifted or shafted deal with housing. Subjects moving from the short to the long form, for example, include home value, monthly rent, and number of rooms and units in buildings. Dropped altogether are questions dealing with water, sewage and condominiums.

Not surprisingly, housing specialists are the most exercised about the change.

"If we start losing this data now, it's going to be harder and harder to understand the housing dynamics in this country," said Barry Zigas, executive director for housing impact at Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored home-financing company. "It's ironic. The Administration is committed to a strong effort to increase homeownership, and at the same time, it's dropping this data collection" needed to meet that commitment.

Planners in other fields use these data--such as house value or number of rooms--as a proxy for other kinds of economic indicators. "Indirectly, it affects our industry," said Joan G. Naymark, director of research and planning for Dayton Hudson Corp. in Minneapolis, one of the country's largest retail chains.

The difference between the information obtained from the short and the long forms is in reliability for small geographic areas. Short-form statistics are valid down to the block level; long-form statistics only to the "census tract" or neighborhood level. Planners, whether for county governments or shopping mall developers, like to know the economic characteristics of places block by block.

Nonetheless, "we can live with this if the census is done correctly," Naymark said. "If the long form happens and happens on Census Day [April 1, 2000] and is accurate."

Simply scaling back may not be enough for some Members of Congress. Rep. J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight subcommittee that oversees the census, for example, has floated the notion of separating the short and long forms--collecting only the short form information on Census Day, while obtaining the long-form information at a different time.

Most statistical experts oppose that scheme, maintaining that the result would be less accurate data obtained at a greater cost. Hastert's approach would require two collection procedures with double the overhead, critics say. And even if more people responded to the short form, far fewer than usual would be likely to complete the long form.

The Census Bureau cut back the number of questions by applying a tough standard to each proposed topic. Only statistics that Congress has directed the bureau to collect or that can't be obtained otherwise made the cut.

"That's the wrong ruler," said David A. Crowe, staff vice president for housing policy of the National Association of Home Builders in Washington. "That's too narrow a focus" to apply to the government's statistical gathering, he added.

In any event, simply slashing the number of questions might not result in appreciably broader participation in the next survey, Census Bureau officials concede. So they also intend to use clearer language, explain the reasons for the questions and in general make their forms easy to comprehend and complete.

Even if participation soars, some specialists won't be satisfied because, they say, data quickly become obsolete these days. "The world is changing so fast, said Marie V. Bousfield, a demographer in the Chicago's municipal planning department. "What we really need is continuous measurement, not a snapshot."

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