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This chapter examines the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) regime in English local government, a scheme introduced in the early 2000s to improve performance across local authorities. A paradox lies in the fact that even though the CPA was a classical performance management system, overall it was a success, whereas most other performance measurement systems have failed or have been replaced quickly by systems of performance review. The scheme worked by improving the information environment for stakeholders, incentivizing poor performers to improve and make a substantive difference to local authority performance overall. This result is surprising, particularly given some contradictory elements of the incentivization under the CPA, such as a context where deprivation beyond local authority control influences public service outcomes and an asymmetric electoral response to performance — electoral punishment for low performance, but no corresponding reward for high performance. Yet the system actually worked, in spite of a volume of commentary and research on public management reform that says otherwise.

This chapter examines some of the main conceptual issues and methodological challenges that underlie our understanding of, and approaches to, a measurement of the performance of health sectors. It discusses the reasons behind performance measurement and its objectives, reviews selected conceptual frameworks that have been proposed to evaluate health sector performance, and examines some of the key challenges related to performance assessment in the context of existing frameworks. It then briefly explores a complementary approach to performance assessment that, drawing on the ‘tracer’ approach, makes it possible to identify weaknesses in elements of the health sector and so obtain more direct insight into its performance. It concludes with a brief overview of whether and how performance measurement actually makes a difference.

This chapter discusses the development of the performance assessment system for social care. It covers the period from the introduction of the Performance Assessment Framework in 1998 to the organisational changes of 2004, including discussion of the yearly star ratings for each council with social services responsibilities introduced in 2002. It considers the extent to which users have participated in setting the agenda for performance assessment. It notes that there are still no directly user-defined indicators. It explains that the effectiveness of user involvement in improving quality of service is also an area that needs to be better evaluated.

There are several strategies for advancing the transition to safer chemicals: prohibition strategies, aversion strategies, and safer chemical strategies. The safer chemical strategy relies on assessing the alternatives available for substituting or replacing chemicals of concern and adopting those that meet acceptable performance and cost criteria and are safer. Chemical action planning and alternatives assessment are new tools that can be employed to help guide safer alternative selection and implementation. Alternatives assessment can include hazard assessment, performance assessment, cost assessment, exposure assessment, material management assessment, life cycle assessment and social impact assessment.

Begins with an examination of the principles underlying the construction of social indicators to be used for the express purpose of assessing performance in achieving the social agenda of the EU. The end product in this context is a portfolio of common indicators applied across the EU, and the principles involved in its construction may concern either the single indicators or the portfolio as a whole. Indicators can take different forms, and the second part of Ch. 2 considers indicator properties; since any portfolio of indicators involves selecting from a range of competing alternatives, it is essential to understand the full set of possibilities. Choice of indicators involves compromise over objectives, but will also be constrained by data limitations and by institutional differences across countries; these are the subjects of the third part of Ch. 2.

This chapter, which deals with the performance evaluation, assessment, and causal significance of environmental and nonenvironmental institutions, shares the focus of the previous one: Institutions as the main independent variable of interest. It also discusses important dimensions, methodology, scales, and metrics in evaluating the performance of institutions, along with definitions and terminology. The author argues that behavior change should be considered as the litmus test for the performance of institutions rather than the next-best alternative to environment quality. The chapter also addresses issues such as how to evaluate institutional performance as well as important characteristics to consider for assessment. The goal is to classify how much an institution committed to whatever improvement was made toward a specified objective that influenced global environmental change.

Incurring of a larger budgetary outlay year-on-year has been a hallmark of governmental financial performance for long in India. There has been a growing concern about the results of the financial investments made by the governments and its effectiveness. There have been a number of failed attempts to put in place frameworks to assess the programme performance. The shift in emphasis from outlays to outcomes has been effectively operationalized using well-designed results frameworks by a number of countries even while India continues to experiment with new approaches time and again. The international best practices for programme performance assessment and their broad features are discussed in this chapter.

Assessment is an essential aspect of teaching and learning. Not only is assessment necessary to determine whether students have learned what teachers think they have taught, but it also informs the design of instruction and is used to adjust the specific teaching and learning strategies that are used over time. Numerous technological tools are available that enable teachers to be more efficient and effective with this process. This chapter is primarily concerned with the assessment of musical achievement in creative, psychomotor, and cognitive domains. It outlines essential assessment principles, discusses the technology-assisted development of assessments, explores technologies helpful to the process of assessing specific music learning outcomes, and describes new assessment approaches enabled by technology. The management of assessment data and processes via technology is also examined.

This chapter addresses assessment of students as musical learners, rather than merely as performers. Ensemble music teachers often conceive of each class as a rehearsal, the focus of which is to improve the group’s performance of concert repertoire. The assumption is that individual skills will inherently improve in this paradigm, but too often the resulting individual skills are uneven or lacking. Individual instruction and assessment of musical foundations is a path to better ensembles. Students can build musical independence through deepening their knowledge base and assisting with interpretation. Improving their ability to critique musical performances facilitates other self and peer assessment activities. Assessment of knowledge, reasoning, creative products, and dispositions facilitates transfer and students’ ability to understand what they are performing and why they are performing it.

This chapter provides assessment strategies for performance preparation assessment. Even though performing is a central and necessary aspect of ensemble music classes, concerts are not themselves assessment of individual students’ musical learning. The chapter includes a variety of ways to implement assessment in the rehearsal. Both informal assessment during the course of a traditional rehearsal and formal assessment settings off the podium can improve performance results. Self and peer assessment build metacognitive musicians and provide pathways to individualized feedback that teachers may have missed. Infusing assessment into the ensemble rehearsal is an investment of class time that pays noticeable dividends.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed overview of approaches to assessing music teaching and learning in a higher education setting. The chapter begins with a discussion of music aptitude versus music achievement and clarifies the differences between these constructs as well as between assessment and grading. Types of measures such as multiple choice, essay tests, and performance assessments are provided with discussion of advantages and disadvantages of each. A focus on reliability and validity if assessments is included and sample student-generated rubrics for various music courses are provided. Performance rubrics are provided as well. The chapter concludes with discussion of departmental level assessment.

This chapter includes strategies for assessing music students’ foundational performance abilities. Skills including tone, technique, posture, hand position, stage presence, and music literacy are considered. Numerous examples are provided for all performance areas; orchestra, choir, and band each have their own dedicated section of this chapter.

Even with the movement of the states toward standards-based reform, there was no reason to think a similar movement would, or even could, take place at the federal level. The defining characteristic of American education was its decentralization: the Republican Party habitually called for the elimination of the Department of Education, and the Democratic Party confined the federal role to providing aid to disadvantaged students. But over the course of fewer than 20 years, all of this was transformed, culminating in the most far-reaching federal education law in the nation’s history, passed under a Republican president no less. What explains this transformation? Three sets of changes need to be explained: how political actors were realigned, how policies were chosen, and how institutions changed. To begin with the political: How did the Republican Party, which had long been philosophically opposed to a federal role in education and had called for the abolition of the Department of Education as recently as 1996 come to support the biggest nationalization of education in the nation’s history? Why did Congressional Democrats, who in 1991 had strongly opposed a proposal by George H. W. Bush for national standards and testing as unfair to minority students, shift by 2001 to embrace a similar proposal offered by another Republican President, George W. Bush? In short, how did an overwhelming bipartisan political consensus form in favor of policies that had been opposed by large majorities in both parties only 10 years earlier? A second set of questions relates to policy choices. Of all the available policy tools, what explains the choice of standards-based reform as the primary federal response to this perceived crisis? The bipartisan embrace of tough accountability in No Child Left Behind seems particularly hard to account for by conventional interest group explanations, given that teachers unions are consistently rated the strongest players in educational politics and have historically been opposed to greater demands for school or teacher accountability. Why were standards and accountability the chosen policy vehicle, and why did they triumph over interest group opposition?

The objective of a report is to monitor performance and risk metrics and check the efficiency of an investment strategy. This chapter aims to present various and easy-to-understand examples of reports and case studies with useful comments. This chapter will teach you how to build an ALM framework report which shows, at a glance, the variation of the eleven building blocks of an investment strategy over given periods. The variation of the performance and risks of each building block vs their benchmarks and objectives are assessed in detail through useful and comprehensive charts and tables (efficiency of the growth portfolio of assets, performance and risk attribution of each asset class, liability driven investment strategies, management of the liquidity, risk budget, liquidity collateral, diversification, contributions, sponsor covenants monitoring, etc.) These various and important reports will help you quickly analyse results and variations and draw the right conclusions.

Chapter 4 explores the ramifications of the evolving demographic conditions and fiscal reforms for the careers of local political leaders. The focal issue is the moral hazard embodied in these leaders’ opportunistic use of public enterprises for career advancement and revenue control and manipulation during the 1980s and early 1990s. Their dominant strategy was to promote sales growth without a close link to profitability among the public enterprises under their purview. This strategy helped grow output, revenue, and employment, thereby contributing to the political and economic interests of local officials. Yet it also undermined the financial and organizational health of public enterprises and pushed them down the road to destruction.

This chapter revisits the debate about New Labour’s overall strategy for reform in the public and health services introduced in Chapter 2 in the light of the empirical case study data. It argues that network-based reforms were one important strand of reforming. Performance Assessment Framework is used to conclude that the performance of our networks was decidedly mixed, although there was a subgroup of higher performers. Many of them displayed ‘wicked problem’ conditions. A qualified defence of managed networks is offered and it is argued that ‘wicked problems’ may increase in importance still further in the future: these conditions are pervasive in practice and should be persuasive in policy design. Co-existence of NPM and network governance elements with little sign of more radical organizational changes is found and an ‘ideal type’ of a positive managed network form to guide future health policy making is outlined.

This chapter explores the evolution of the UN climate regime and its implications for patterns of legal argumentation. The 2015 Paris Agreement introduced three interrelated shifts. First, it brings a shift from a model in which the treaty serves as centralized forum for inter-state standard setting and accountability practices, epitomized by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, to a more decentralized model in which the treaty helps orchestrate a range of state and non-state practices, epitomized by the Paris Agreement. Second, it marks a turn toward non-binding substantive terms, supported by binding procedural terms. Finally, the Paris Agreement shifts from legal accountability practices toward non-legal performance assessment. A practice-based, interactional, account of international law suggests that only the third shift stands to reduce the scope for legal argumentation in the regime. The Paris Agreement’s decentralized approach and its increased reliance on non-binding or procedural terms are unlikely to diminish the salience of legal argumentation.