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Do efforts to cut down on administrative costs in education, make life harder for teachers? An excellent report from the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University takes an in-depth look at the ongoing teacher hiring and retention crisis in that state. Adjusted for inflation, pay is down substantially and step increases, which were reduced during the recession, have not been adjusted upwards sufficiently since then. Between 2013 and 2016, 42 percent of teachers left after three years or less of starting to teach. The parallel statistic for charter schools was 52 percent. One clear tension in Arizona and elsewhere is that teacher workload has increased, while salary buying power has dropped. The drive for increased accountability has contributed to the increased workload. But another reason may be the reduction in administrative positions. A mom-and-apple-pie solution for more effective education spending is to shift administrative dollars to classroom spending. Spending more in the classroom sounds swell, but the report from Morrison makes it clear a higher percent of spending devoted to the classroom means a higher workload for teachers. Here’s what the report says: “Efforts to move money into the classroom from administrative and support services may have the unintended effect of increasing the workload on teachers. If an assistant principal in charge of tracking attendance is let go so that his salary can go directly to classroom expense, his duties will likely get parceled out to teachers, further increasing their workload as they now fill out attendance reports. Similarly, removing librarians from the system may transfer their duties to classroom teachers.” The chart below makes it clear how much workload and pay contribute to the teacher exodus in Arizona. A lack of political support for education and problems with administration stand out as well.

Back in January of 2013, the City of Seattle first contemplated a new $43 million customer care and billing information technology system for its two utilities, Seattle City Lights and Seattle Public Utilities. By the project’s launch a year later, the scope had expanded and the cost had grown to $66 million. Currently, the final budget for the New Customer Information System (NCIS) is $109 million. The time to complete also stretched from the originaly estimated 21 month schedule in January 2014 to 32 months in the real world. The Seattle City Council turned to the Seattle Office of City Auditor to find out why project cost and schedule grew and why council members weren’t informed along the way. The NCIS audit, which was released in April, is a great primer for any government official who is involved in managing an IT project. Many of its findings are familiar to us, as they recur in reports and audits about project management. In our view, the most universally applicable points made in this audit can be summed up in these four statements: The initial schedule was unrealistic. The audit details the drive to establish an aggressive timeline “to save costs.” This meant reducing the projected schedule by three months from the 2013 estimate, even though the project’s scope had risen significantly by its launch in January 2014. Nearly all the cost overrun came from additional labor costs when the project timeline subsequently grew by 11 more months. Elected leaders were not thoroughly informed about the frailty of original cost estimates. In a complex IT project, there is always shakiness in initial project estimates, this “cone of uncertainty” grows even bigger when two separate departments and multiple applications are involved, as was the case here. There were also limited procedures in place to inform the Council when the budget and timeline started to grow. Important risk factors were identified, but not addressed in a timely way. The audit describes the work of a well-respected Quality Assurance expert, who was part of the project team, and identified 10 high risks for the project, including a workload that was too high for existing staff and resources. According to the audit, meeting minutes for the project’s Executive Steering Committee show that the workload issue was brought up in August of 2014 and in 13 subsequent meeting reports. But actions never sufficiently addressed that problem. As the QA expert wrote in a May 2015 report, “this issue has been the root cause for slippage in many other areas of the project and is the primary driver for the decision to re-plan the Go-Live date.” Initial training of project staff was insufficient. As the audit says, “some City team leads had little or no project management experience or experience with implementing a new IT system, let alone one of this scale. While City IT staff were provided with some training, it focused primarily on an overview of new software applications.”

As we’ve mentioned in recent columns and posts, state and local governments are increasingly facing competition with the private sector and nonprofits when they try to recruit new employees. It doesn’t help that many young people are cynical about government, perceiving it to be bureaucratic, stodgy and slow paced. Local and state governments are fighting this image with videos that show the wide range of jobs and (especially) the potential for satisfying work. We periodically want to highlight recruiting videos that we think are effective. Our thanks, once again, to the Alliance for Innovation, for suggesting the two we’ve provided below. The first is from Ontario, California. The second is from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

There’s been a big — and to us, unpleasant — change in the atmosphere that hovers over the 50 states over the last 25 years or so. Potentially divisive emphasis on politics has been on the ascendency. And we don’t see that as helping create more successful programs or better citizen services. A little background is in order. Our first major inroad into the state and local government field came with the creation of our “grading the states” efforts at Financial World magazine, which morphed into the far more exhaustive, thorough and academically grounded work on the Government Performance Project, which was featured in Governing Magazine. The effort was to evaluate the management capacity of the fifty states in human resources, finance, infrastructure and so on.  There was very little mention of politics in any of this work. And subsequently, we’ve concentrated our efforts on management and policy, not politics. When we started we were able to take pride in the fact that we frequently didn’t know whether the various state governors were Democratic or Republican. That didn’t seem germane to discussions of management. Others may have drawn correlations between our work and a political analysis, but we never found it necessary to do so. Slowly, but surely, times have changed. No longer can you avoid political divisions and their impact on policy in particular, and management to a lesser degree. No matter how black and white our evidence-based research may seem to be, there’s generally an overcast of red and blue. For instance, while the decision to accept Medicaid expansion funds under the Affordable Care Act should have been based on policy and fiscal management-oriented factors, it turned out that the vast majority of the red states rejected the federal dollars and the majority of the blue states went in the other direction. Along with a few others, Governor John Kasich of Ohio broke ranks with the Republican states, and was regarded as a maverick by many. We guess this is the way of the world. And things are still nowhere near as oriented to partisanship as the federal government. But still, we miss the old days.

We just spent the last couple of days with the Council of State Governments (CSG) in Lexington, KY, for a packed two days of discussions about civic education in the states. CSG, where we are senior fellows, has a strong commitment to enhancing civic education. This week, it brought together a small highly informed group to discuss strategies for work in this area and ways that the organization can provide help to the states. A characteristic CSG gathering, the group was made up of legislators, members of the judiciary, executive branch leaders, as well as civic education experts.  States represented included Arizona, California, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky,  Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia. We moderated and facilitated a couple of sessions. Here are our three big takeaways from the two days: Individual course requirements for civic education and assessment are important, but we also need to find ways to spread civic education through the school experience, starting in kindergarten and continuing through college (and after) Creating a more informed citizenry is not the province of any one group, but needs to be bolstered by decision-makers, managers, teachers, parents, legislators, judges, corporations, schools, colleges, etc., working together in multiple partnerships. There are a tremendous number of resources available to help grow civic knowledge, but we need more ways to communicate the amazingly innovative, informative, entertaining and action-oriented efforts underway through the country. Many of the sessions were led by Paul Baumann, director of the National Center for Learning and Civic Engagement at the Education Commission of the States. He and his colleague, project leader Jan Brennan, gave the group a terrific list of reading material that we wanted to share here. Here are the major reports they suggested: Guardian of Democracy: The civic mission of Schools, Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, 2011 A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future, The National Task Force on Democratic Learning and Civic Engagement, American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2012 State Civic Education Policy Framework, Paul Baumann, Maria Millard & Leslie Hamdorf, Education Commission of the States, National Center for Learning & Civic Engagement, 2014 State Civic Education Policy: Gap analysis tool for education leaders and policymakers (companion to framework document), Jan Brennan, Education Commission of the States, National Center for Learning & Civic Engagement, 2016 Civic Education: A Key to Trust in Government, Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene, The Council of State Governments, 2016 College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, National Council for the Social Studies, 2013 Guidebook: Six Proven Practices for Effective Civic Learning, Lisa Guilfoile, Brady Delander & Carol Kreck, Education Commission of the States, National Center for Learning &  Civic Engagement, 2016 A Crisis in Civic Education, American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 2016 All Together Now: Collaboration and Innovation for Youth Engagement, Commission on Youth Voting and Civic Knowledge, Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 2013 Fault Lines in Our Democracy: Civic Knowledge, Voting Behavior, and Civic Engagement in the United States, Richard J. Coley & Andrew Sum, Educational Testing Service, 2012

We bet that no government function has as many essential conflicts  in mission as procurement, which seeks to achieve the best deals possible while also ensuring quality of the products, timeliness of delivery, helping small businesses and minority businesses and more. An April transparency report from the State Auditor’s office in New Mexico  squarely targeted one of these conflicts. Through a survey of its audited agencies, the auditor’s office looked at purchases and contracts above a $60,000 threshold to see how much was spent in-state and out-of-state in 2015 and 2016. Some areas had a livelier in-state contracting presence than others. For maintenance contracts, only 32 percent went to out-of-state companies. For social services, it was just 4 percent. But the auditor found that for information technology contracts, 81 percent were going to out-of-state vendors. For some state buyers like the University of New Mexico Hospital, not a cent above the $60,000 threshold went to in-state vendors for IT. There are many reasons to choose an out-of-state vendor.  The most obvious is that the goods or services are not available in state. This is true in New Mexico for some specialized accounting or elections software and large Enterprise Resource Management systems. But as auditor Tim Keller points out, contracting with New Mexico companies can increase jobs, tax revenues and future opportunities. He believes the state could do a way better job of tracking in-state vs. out of state spending. One point particularly stood out in the report. In-state vendors may simply not be aware of the state contracting opportunities that exist.Ensuring that in-state vendors know about contract opportunities is key, as is helping to build in-state capacity. The auditor’s analysis found that 44 percent of procurements in IT were sole source, meaning that they did not go through a competitive bidding process. Only 10 percent of these went to in-state vendors. Even when contracts were competitively bid through a Request for Proposal (RFP) process, more than half had only one bidder. “While this may reflect errors in reporting, it may also indicate a lack of awareness of RFP opportunities, a lack of willing bidders, or the excessively narrow tailoring of RFPs so that only one company is truly eligible to respond,” the report explains.

Many state and local governments are trying to re-brand themselves. Here are two videos that show how governments, large and small, are trying to deliver a friendly, positive and purpose-driven message about working for the public sector. The first is from the small city of Sequim, Washington. We’ve watched it about a dozen times and can barely suppress our desire to move there. The video was suggested to us by the always helpful and knowledgeable Karen Thoreson, president of the Alliance for Innovation. We heard about the second video when we interviewed Susan Gard, chief of policy for the Department of Human Resources in San Francisco, for our recent Governing column, “Are Nonprofits the New Go-To Choice for Altruistic Jobseekers?” The City and County of San Francisco did extensive market research before setting on the motto it now uses in its recruiting efforts: “A career with the city is a Career with a Purpose.” Gard explained what the city’s research efforts taught them. “The one thing people are looking for above pay, above benefits, they’re looking for meaningful work.” “We don’t offer stock options. We don’t have ping pong tables, but we offer purpose. Our tagline is connecting people with purpose." We invite other cities, counties, states, school districts, etc., to send us short recruiting videos that they think stand out. We’ll feature ones we like in future posts.

We’ve written a number of columns in Governing about the increasing effort being put into recruiting great new employees to the public sector. This shouldn’t be so hard. Lots of surveys show that young people have a yen for doing meaningful work that helps their communities. Our most recent Governing column, for example, focused on some of the reasons not-for-profits seem to be hot competitors with the public sector for public-spirited graduates. One cause, that we just touched on, related to a lack of trust in government. “Without doubt, the anti-government rhetoric at the national level has spilled over to the state and local level,” says Don Kettl,  professor and former dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. “There is a broad problem of trust in government and the ability of government to get things done.” We’ve always been careful to distinguish between government and politics. We have spent the last 25 plus years covering the former, not so much the latter. Still, the impact of politics is hard to set aside. We recently talked with Shauna Shames, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers.  Her book, “Out of the Running”, was just published in January by New York University Press. Between 2012 and 2014, she surveyed about 800 students in public policy and law school in Massachusetts; she conducted 50 interviews with students as well.  Her research confirmed what others have also found. “There is plenty of data that just the idea of politics is off putting,” she says. “There’s the idea of compromise and the whiff of corruption.” We asked her whether she thought the perception of politics had oozed over into students’ feelings about government work. She believes it has, describing the “ick factor” as a very real phenomenon that relates to government, not just political campaigns. She says students are suspicious about the effect of political contributions on government work. They worry about a lack of privacy in government and fear it is tainted by the intense and acrimonious partisanship of recent years and “the meanness and acrimony.” While the students she talked with were most concerned about the federal government, the negative perceptions leaked over into their feelings about state and local government as well. Government recruiters have a lot of work to do in changing those perceptions.

Last week, we highlighted the work of the Iowa ombudsman office, one of only five state ombuds offices with broad statewide jurisdiction. With its broad purview, it can spot, investigate and report on troubling issues.  And here’s a powerful case in point, emanating from winter of 2017, when the ombudsman published a biting special report about Iowa’s professional licensing boards. We suspect legislation will follow next session. Iowa has 36 licensing boards covering a wide variety of medical professionals, as well as barbers, landscape architects, massage therapists, plumbers, water treatment operators, sign language interpreters, and many others. They are generally in charge of creating the requirements for entry into a profession, but they also are responsible for policing that profession and dealing with citizen complaints. The ombudsman found those citizens often get little satisfaction. Substantive cases revealed very similar frustrations. “Not only had the boards failed to take action against the professionals they complained about, but the boards also offered no meaningful explanations for their decision.” Here’s the entire answer that one complainant received: “The Board has ended its investigation and closed the matter, with no further action to be taken. This was done in consultation with the Iowa Attorney General’s office, during this week’s board meeting.” Typically, there was not a word as to the nature of the investigation or the reason no action was taken. According to the special report, “People who file complaints in the genuine belief that they were wronged never learn the basis of a board’s dismissal.” We can understand the need for confidentiality in a professional licensing board’s investigation, as does the ombudsman’s office. Professionals need protection from investigations that would unfairly damage their reputation. Typically, cases are heard in closed sessions to protect licensees’ privacy. But the report found that the closed nature of deliberations had resulted in sloppy practices. With a focus on four unnamed boards, the report slams repeated instances of questionable, even biased, board behavior. Boards ignored conflict of interest provisions, took no minutes of closed-door sessions, destroyed records, and failed to follow up on investigatory leads. Full boards often rubber stamped recommendations to dismiss complaints without due consideration. The report has a hard-hitting conclusion. “We strongly believe that the environment in which these boards have been allowed to exist – behind closed doors – has fostered uninspired work and unprofessional conflict . . . In short, it has been a system unaccountable.” Fittingly, the ombudsman quotes from the 18th Century writings of Thomas Paine. “A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”

We’ve read multiple audits about the flaws in contract administration in cities, counties and states. The findings often have a similar theme – too little attention is paid to contracts after they are bid. Performance objectives, even when they exist, are ignored. Payments exceed agreements. Project schedules stretch past contractual completion dates. Documentation is often terrible. All these problems, and many more, crop up in this month’s summary report of contract administration in Long Beach, California. As the report points out, the risks of poor practices are extensive. At least $574 million was spent by the city on contracted services in 2015. That’s about 40 percent of its total spending for that year. The auditor, Laura Doud, and her staff compared the city’s own practices to “best practices” with depressing results. The summary report was based on eight contract-related audits that occurred between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, as well as nine limited-scope audits that were targeted as part of the auditor’s 2015 work plan. Contracts involved both goods, such as the purchase of firefighter protective equipment or personal computer replacement , and a variety of services, such as consulting and training,  custodial help, professional security services, and graffiti abatement. The limited scope audits yield plentiful examples of typical contracting problems in this very well-documented report. An appendix with best practices also provides a useful guide for managers in Long Beach and elsewhere. Among the problems cited: The city doesn’t have a central database or contract monitoring system. This makes it hard to find even basic information and since contracting is highly decentralized it’s even difficult to know how much is contracted out. Each department has different processes, resulting in a lack of citywide consistency. Poorly drawn scopes of work and inadequate reporting requirements make it difficult to determine whether contracts achieve desired results. Major changes to work scope, changes to contractual payment terms, and the addition of unrelated work without a new contract, compromise competitive practices. The report describes in depth how the inadequate monitoring of contracts has led to payment for services that were not satisfactory, as well as to payments far in excess of contract agreements. For example, the summary report cites a limited scope audit of a water department contract in which 65 percent of “miscellaneous security services” were billed at higher rates than were spelled out in the contract. According to the report, “The most concerning findings repeatedly identified were the limited verification of vendor’s work, allowing work to be performed without a contract in place, and paying for work based on pricing that is no longer current or competitive.” The city now aims to rectify its contracting problems with a massive training program for employees who often have been given oversight and monitoring responsibilities with little knowledge of what that entails. The training will be given in three parts, with topics including “the importance of specifications and scopes of work, roles and responsibilities, and guidelines on how to evaluate performance, identify deficiencies and document anomalies.”

We sometimes see videos about state and local government topics that we think are particularly well done. This one comes from The Oregonian and describes some of the problems with Oregon’s various efforts at property tax reform. Reform efforts are often designed to provide property tax relief, but sometimes they have unexpected effects. Any time you mess with a tax system there are always winners and losers. The three-minute video is informative and carries lessons for tax reformers in other states.

We are always on the lookout for policies or practices that exist in only a handful of governments, but appear to work very well. A great example is the Iowa Ombudsman office. It’s only one of five state-administered organizations in the U.S that have broad jurisdiction to handle a wide variety of citizen problems. The other state ombudsman offices with broad jurisdiction are in Alaska, Nebraska, Arizona and Hawaii. As we wrote in Governing in August 2016, many other governments have ombudsman offices in select agencies, often related to children services, special education, corrections or nursing home care.  These specialized offices are proliferating. But broad jurisdiction has significant plusses. “The scope of our purview is the advantage,” says new Iowa ombudsman Kristie Hirschman. “The advantage of a classical, independent broadly-based ombudsman office is we can handle all types of complaints, whether it’s somebody calling because the city won’t pave their street, the county won’t give a building permit or the state is taking away their children.” Her office was established in 1970 and has substantial investigatory powers, including the ability to put people under oath, issue subpoenas and look at meeting records from closed sessions. By statute, one of her assistant ombudsmen are devoted full-time to corrections. Her office’s 2016 annual report came out this month and shows the scope of its work and also how very frustrating it can be, in some cases, for citizens or businesses to deal with government. In 2016, there was a substantial increase in both corrections and Medicaid managed care complaints. Although the total number of 2016 cases opened was up only about 3 percent, the number of corrections cases went up 22 percent and Department of Human Services Medical and managed care cases rose 63 percent. The rise in the latter stemmed from a shift to a new health delivery and payment system – Iowa moved to managed care Medicaid delivery in April of 2016. Only about 13 percent of complaints brought to Hirschman’s office are fully or partially substantiated. Those that are, show the intense frustration that can sometimes occur when dealing with insensitive, hurried or unsupportive government officials. Take the man who received a $215 bill from his city due to an overgrown lawn. There was no prior warning, no date as to when the violation had occurred, very little supporting detail and no information on how to appeal the bill, which he believed was levied incorrectly. When he called the city to complain, he was given the name of a person to call to discuss the matter. That was a dead-end, as that individual turned out to be on an extended leave. Eventually, he called the ombudsman for help. One enormous plus of the Iowa office is that the phone line is not heavily automated. Callers reach a person they can talk with. Complaints do not need to be submitted in writing, either. When the ombudsman’s office started investigating, the city could not explain how it arrived at a $215 charge, which was presumably levied for mowing the allegedly overgrown lawn. Photos by the work crew showed that only a small patch was overgrown, not the whole lawn. A city attorney agreed to refund all but $50. In addition, the inquiry led to changes in city practices. New rules added a requirement that prior warnings be given, that specific fees be explained, that residents be notified of their appeal rights and that a contact is provided for a resident who wants to follow up. Although Hirschman was just appointed ombudsman in January, she has worked for the office for 22 years. She said a key way for agencies to avoid complaints was to provide clearer explanations of their actions and rules. “We’re all guilty to a degree,” she says. “We are so familiar with a subject that we forget other people aren’t familiar with it. Communication and patience is critical in regards to agency interactions with citizens they serve.”