43 | Blending Performance Measurement and Program Evaluation in Government

Although performance measurement and program evaluation are both ostensibly about assessing the effectiveness of government, they have historically meant different things in terms of what gets assessed and who does the assessing. Performance measurement is more commonly associated with ongoing monitoring and reporting of program accomplishments and is typically conducted by program or agency staff. Program evaluation, on the other hand, is more commonly associated with periodic or ad hoc studies conducted by experts outside of an agency or program. But are those distinctions still relevant today? That’s one of the questions journalists Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene discuss in their new book, The Promises and Pitfalls of Performance-Informed Management. In this episode of On the Evidence, Barrett and Greene talk about how state and local governments use performance measurement and program evaluation to inform management decisions, providing contemporary case studies along with historical context about how the field has evolved over the past three decades. The episode covers the following topics: - The integration of different but related disciplines of performance auditing, performance measurement, and program evaluation (19:42–22:23) - The increasing availability of data and its effect on performance-informed management (22:26–26:40) - Changes over time in how states value, understand, and use data in decision making (28:40–30:15) - What the book might have covered about the two major stories of 2020—the COVID-19 pandemic and concern over persistent racism in the United States—if it had been published a few months later (30:14–37:05) Other resources that we discuss on the episode are available here: https://bit.ly/35UYGbx Barrett and Greene's full Q&A with Mathematica's Chief Executive Officer Paul Decker is available here: https://bit.ly/3kliU1S