The high level objectives of public authorities are to create value at minimal cost, and achieve ongoing support and commitment from its funding authority. Similar to the private sector, today’s government agencies face a rapidly changing operating environment and many challenges. Where public organizations differ is that they need to manage this environment while answering to demands for incre...

We examined the practices, policies, and procedures used in all 50 states for evaluating school and school district effectiveness. Our primary interest was the study of methodological and measurement issues in the collection, analysis, and reporting of information for accountability purposes. Accountability occupies a central role in current educational reform efforts nationally. 1999), " ...ac...

introduction: the main purpose of accounting and financial reporting systems in the public sector is to provide sophisticated information to help managers play an effective role regarding accountability, and help them make sensible political, economical and social decisions. hence, this research investigates managers’ attitudes toward the quality of financial reports. methods: the current paper...

People often use indirect speech, for example, when trying to bribe a police officer by asking whether there might be "a way to take care of things without all the paperwork." Recent game theoretic accounts suggest that a speaker uses indirect speech to reduce public accountability for socially risky behaviors. The present studies examine a secondary function of indirect speech use: increasing ...

This paper reports on findings from a large sample survey in the states of India that account for two thirds of the children out of school. It then examines the feasibility of the central government’s goals to ensure all children complete 5 years of school by 2007, and 8 years by 2010. These goals—more ambitious than the global EFA goals—are unlikely to be achieved without significant reforms b...

Voice interventions of various kinds have been widely used to create accountability in managers of public programs. We reviewed the evaluation literature to understand the findings with regard to the impact of voice interventions on quality and responsiveness of public services. The literature on ‘voice’ interventions is broad, but very few studies focus on quantitative outcomes that bear on im...

With the explosion in new technologies that heralded the end of the 20th century, enabling the rapid gathering and analysis of genetic information from humans and the multitude of other organisms with which they interact on this planet, we are now in a position not only to understand the details of everyone’s genetically determined features, but to manipulate them to our own design. The implica...

An urgent need to broaden diversity and support the preparation of students and faculty members along proactive pathways to research and success can be facilitated by targeted faculty development and formalization of policies built on institutional commitment, engagement, and accountability. Involvement of the faculty in building institutional diversity will recognize equity-building initiative...

This paper surveys recent contributions to the study of fiscal decentralization which adopt a political economy approach. It is argued that this approach can capture, in a variety of formal models, the plausible and influential ideas (increasingly, supported by empirical evidence) that fiscal decentralization can lead to improved preference-matching and accountability of government. In particul...

Higher education in general (Bogue, 1998) and study abroad programming in particular (Gillespie, Braskamp & Braskamp, 1999) are hardly strangers to stringent demands for accountability. What is new to higher education and to study abroad is the demand for accountability in terms of measurable student learning outcomes. This article is a first report from a system-wide initiative to document lea...