This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Joseph Coletti, Fiscal Policy Analyst for the John Locke Foundation.

One reason former president Ronald Reagan said that government is the problem is that government programs are rarely measured for effectiveness. Often a program with a number of recipients is considered successful. Other times, the amount of money spent on the program or some other input is considered a sign of the program’s quality.

With his latest budget proposal, Gov. Mike Easley has provided “results-based information.” This is a useful step for all North Carolinians to be able to understand how the politicians and bureaucrats in Raleigh are spending our taxed income.

As the late Peter Drucker wrote, however, we cannot just measure anything: “What we measure and how we measure determine what will be considered relevant, and determine, thereby, not just what we see, but what we – and others – do.” For that reason, it is important to measure the measures and see if they really do provide information about program results.

Schools

Schools exist to educate children. The Department of Public Instruction would spend $31 million of its $121 million in the governor’s budget to “ensure a uniform, basic education for all students
PreK-12 [sic].” Over half of that money would be used for “the state testing program to ensure student achievement in NC public schools.” One might reasonably expect this to be the section of DPI’s budget that explains how much North Carolina’s children are learning.

Instead, the four measures for the $121 million education management fund all focus on teacher qualifications – license requests, percentage of teachers who are fully licensed, percentage with advanced degrees, and the number of teachers (not percentage) with national board certification from the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). But these criteria do not always translate into better student achievement. Teachers may be the most important input to a student’s education, but measuring their qualifications in determining student results is about as useful as measuring the quality of steel in determining which car to buy.

To quote Drucker again:

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

Even if quality teachers do not constitute quality education, they are at least related to education. The number of hours of original programming by UNC-TV is not related at all to university education. With all the programming available through cable and satellite channels that nobody watches, should we really measure anything based simply on the number of hours of programming? More fundamentally, original television programming does nothing to help the students in the state’s colleges and universities gain an education. Spike TV, ESPN, and BET are watched more than UNC-TV on college campuses.

Prisons

Prisons are another key function of state government. The governor’s budget shows the cost per inmate and the number of inmates admitted and released each year. These measures indicate that the prison population has increased along with the cost per prisoner. One would reasonably wonder why the number of inmates is rising more rapidly than the number of released inmates. Is it a function of a growing population, stricter sentencing, or an increasing crime rate? To what degree is prison not a deterrent to commission of crimes?

There is no measure of how many how many former prisoners become new inmates, called the recidivism rate. Because there is no measure of overall recidivism in the budget, there is no measure of the effectiveness of prison academic, substance abuse, transition, or vocational programs at keeping prisoners from committing new crimes. No measures mean no ways to judge how effective these programs are, which programs are effective, or which programs should receive more funding.

Certificates of Need (CONs)

Health care is consistently the most important issue to North Carolinians. One significant contributor to high health care costs in North Carolina is certificate of need (CON) regulations, which require proof of a market large enough for a new provider to expand or purchase new equipment without doing financial harm to incumbent providers. Imagine if your business had to go through this process every time it wanted to purchase a new copier or if Baja Fresh had to prove its new store would not harm the existing Qdoba. But the measures in the governor’s budget show the number of applications received and the number of “need determinations” requested. There is nothing about the harmful effects of CON regulations on competition or health care quality.

As these examples from public schools, prisons, and health care show, measuring the wrong thing does little more to improve state government than not measuring anything. The good news is that legislators can use these measures to start asking questions about the programs and why we do not have better measures. They can even start with a less controversial measure. Rather than the number of press conferences the governor has, the budget includes the number of press releases from the governor’s office. Not surprisingly, this has been increasing.