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Good government is a risky business

Few competent public officials go unpunished.

By Robert Maranto and Patrick J. Wolf

When Washington public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee recently "resigned to spend more time with her family," as the saying goes, it reminded us of Sayre's Law. The late, great Columbia University political scientist Wallace Sayre put it this way more than a half-century ago: "Public and private management are fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects."

The public and private sectors differ in terms of time horizons (election cycles vs. long-term planning), personnel (tenured vs. accountable), bosses (535 members of Congress vs. one CEO), and media relations (fishbowl vs. trade secrets). Most important, they have starkly different measures of performance.

In the private sector, success means making money. True, clever CEOs can fudge the numbers for a time, but for business frauds, jail awaits. Because government helps keep business honest, private-sector profits ultimately determine success.

But in the public sector, success is whatever campaigning politicians and distracted voters deem it to be - whether public organizations are working well, working badly, or not working at all. Government does not do a very good job of policing itself. And prominent public-administration academics routinely rank results as far less important than process - that is, following even the most trivial rules and procedures. New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein once admitted that special-education programs treat teachers better if they fill out the forms but fail to teach than if they teach well but mishandle the paperwork.

This basic difference between the public and private sectors means that a business CEO who makes his or her shareholders money will be rewarded with generous contracts, public veneration, and six-figure book deals. In contrast, a government manager who improves an agency may get promoted, but is equally likely to get the ax for upsetting powerful interests or making others look bad.

Examples abound. New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton presided over the start of an unprecedented decline in crime during his brief tenure, from 1994 to 1996, as he documented in Turnaround. Unfortunately, though, police chiefs are not fired or promoted based on crime rates.

That's partly because sociology and criminal-justice professors have long argued that police can't cut crime - a view in which mediocre police chiefs take comfort. Because cops supposedly can't fight crime, police commissioners are judged not by crime rates, but by whether they avoid scandals and make the mayor look good.

As onetime Bratton colleague and former Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney wrote in his book, Beat Cop to Top Cop, this sort of thinking led New York police brass to micromanage patrol officers and squash initiative in the name of controlling corruption. And New York had a record 2,245 homicides in 1990.

Bratton was able to change the department's culture of compliance into a culture of crime-fighting. But once he grew more popular than his patron, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, he became a political threat and was forced to resign. So the most effective police commissioner in the nation was fired for successfully fighting crime.

It's much the same today in Washington. Police Chief Cathy Lanier cut the murder rate only to face becoming part of the unemployment rate. (Her future under a new mayor remains unclear.) And the numbers show that Bratton and Lanier are not alone.

Our graduate student Michael McShane analyzed homicide rates per capita and police chief tenures for America's 10 largest cities from 1990 to 2009, and he found no statistical relationship between the two. The data suggest that mayors, city council members, the media, and ultimately the voters, show no desire to reward successful crime-fighters with job security, or to push time-serving satraps into early retirement.

Lanier's sister in public service, schools Chancellor Rhee, had even more success in an even tougher job. The Council of the Great City Schools' "Beating the Odds" report ranks Washington first among the nation's 60 largest school systems in gains on standardized test scores, which occurred during Rhee's tenure.

Unfortunately, Rhee's reforms ran afoul of politically powerful groups, most notably the Washington Teachers' Union. Rhee had the guts to identify and fire ineffective teachers, which the union could not abide. Just days after Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his reelection bid to a union-backed candidate, Rhee was sent packing.

No doubt Rhee's successor will take the lesson to heart: Teaching the children matters less than pleasing the union.

When we look at how politicians and the public treat outstanding public servants, it's not hard to see why many feel the private sector works better. William Bratton, Cathy Lanier, and Michelle Rhee are poster children for privatization. Is that what supporters of public service want?