Maureen Berner

Building Conditions, Parental Involvement, and Student Achievement in the District of Columbia Public School System.

Little research has been done on the need to repair and refurbish school buildings because of the impact that the condition of buildings has on the students, rather than just the need to maintain local governments capital investment. This study uses Washington, DC, as a case study showing that the size of a public schools Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) budget is positively related to the school building s condition. The condition is, in turn, shown to be statistically related to the students academic achievement. An improvement in the schools condition by one category, say from poor to fair. is associated with a 5.5 point improvement in average academic achievement scores.

Learning through Action: How MPA Public Service Team Projects Help Students Learn Research and Management Skills

Abstract Experiential learning has become increasingly common in graduate public affairs programs. This article presents a student-led classroom/field model that integrates public service team projects into two first-year core MPA courses and has been effective in challenging full-time adult students to learn and use research and management skills. The authors describe the public service team projects and the role they play in student learning, and they present students’ accounts of how the projects contributed to their learning and clients’ accounts of the value of these projects to public service organizations.

The federal budget's core and periphery: patterns of budget outcomes

Cluster analysis on detailed federal outlay data from fiscal year (FY) 1962 to FY 1995 shows instead of being incremental or not, the budget is both. Spending is initially volatile but becomes incremental over time and with political entrenchment. The theory of incrementalism needs to be updated to reflect this complexity. Also, patterns show that most spending falls into three main groups, which do not correspond to traditional budgetary classifications, and none of the patterns show any major shifts in response to process upheaval. This suggests (1) rethinking how to analyze budget data, and (2) while processes and decision-makers have changed, the decisions have not.