Editor's Notebook

How do you think impartial experts would rate your agency 's performance? Does it deserve an A, B, C, D or worse? Has performance improved-or deteriorated-over the last two years?

These are tough questions. There's little consensus on how performance should be measured in the public sector. They are also important questions, bearing on the public's trust in government and the long-term health of democratic institutions.

There can be no doubt that there's a lot of room for improvement in the performance of government. That's the principal idea behind enactment three years ago of the Government Performance and Results Act, under whose provisions all federal agencies must produce strategic plans before the end of September.

It's also the idea that animates a new private-sector project-tentatively titled "Grading Governments"-in which Government Executive is to play a leading role. The project is generously funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Over the next four years, the grant will fund studies of 40 federal agencies, all 50 state governments and 40 major units of local government.

At the federal level, we will look at agencies' performance in five key management categories: financial management, human resource management, deployment of information technology, executive capacity (including leadership), and managing for results (including how well agencies measure their own performance). We will produce composite ratings to provide an overall measure of how well an agency is performing.

During a pilot phase this year, surveys in the management categories, developed by the Maxwell School, will be field tested in five federal agencies. In 1998, when the first group of 20 agencies will be studied, these surveys will be important in determining agency ratings. Also important will be the journalistic skills Government Executive brings to bear on the project. We'll be out interviewing to find out why some agencies got good grades while others didn't, and we'll be asking if agencies with good management also produced good results for their customers and for the public.

The project has three major goals. The first is to interest the public in how government is doing. The second is to encourage agencies (and state and local governments) to learn from one another, through identifying and publicizing promising management practices. And the third is to recognize improvements in government performance over time, which will occur in 2000 when we re-evaluate the first group of 20 agencies.

We are proud to be working with Pew and with the Maxwell School, which has assigned two of its top public administration professors, Patricia Ingraham and Philip Joyce, to the project. We are delighted too that this team includes another partner from the publishing world-Governing magazine, whose high-quality coverage of state and local government issues earned it a National Magazine Award nomination last year. Together we hope we can make a difference in how citizens view the governments that serve them.