New Blog Posts

  • Worker Self-Directed Enterprises – A New Way of Thinking About the Workplace

    Ryan Thombs, MPP A democratic workplace in which the workers own and democratically decide how profit is distributed has long been the ideal of socialist thinkers. Marx referred to co-operatives, or democratically owned workplaces, as communism in The Civil War in France; and these ideas are echoed in  his other writings such as Das Kapital.…

  • Data-Driven Decision-Making, Results-Based Management, Big Data, Data Analytics – The New Normal?

    Dr. Kathryn E. Newcomer, Director, The Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration Jerry Wei provides great food for thought in his article on metrics. He is spot on in pointing that the search for measures to guide decision-making in the public and nonprofit sectors seems to be ubiquitous, overly ambitious, and conducive to “Metric…

  • Trachtenberg Professor Dylan Conger Studies How New AP Science Courses Advance Student Outcomes and Interest in STEM

    Kerry Belodoff, MPP, Staff Writer Brief Policy Perspectives Every year millions of American high school students take advanced placement (AP) courses to engage in more rigorous academic content and improve their chances of getting into a top college. Two and a half million students took at least one AP course in 2015, with participation in…

  • A Good Metric is Hard to Find

    Jerry Wei, MPP A proliferation of data has increasingly come to define the modern condition. We now use data to track fitness (Fitbit), hail cabs (Uber), and stalk love interests (Google). With technological advances, data are also being used as metrics to assess organizational and personnel performance. In theory, metrics—standardized, measurable, and objective—should work as…

  • Medical Cures Moves to the Senate, but Funding Questions Complicate Future

    Paul Melmeyer, MPP Earlier this summer the House passed the 21st Century Cures Act  by a 344-77 vote, and the bill was unanimously approved by the Energy and Commerce Committee, the committee of jurisdiction in the House of Representatives that oversees much of the U.S healthcare system. The bill includes policy reforms for the National…