Making Reform Work is a practical narrative of ideas that begins by describing who is saying what about American higher educationùwho's angry, who's disappointed, and why. Most of the pleas for changing American colleges and universities that originate outside the academy are lamentations on a small number of too often repeated themes. The critique from within the academy focuses on issues principally involving money and the power of the market to change colleges and universities. Sandwiched between these perspectives is a public that still has faith in an enterprise that it really doesn't understand. Robert Zemsky, one of a select group of scholars who participated in Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's 2005 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, signed off on the commission's report with reluctance. In Making Reform Work he presents the ideas he believes should have come from that group to forge a practical agenda for change. Zemsky argues that improving higher education will require enlisting faculty leadership, on the one hand, and, on the other, a strategy for changing the higher education system writ large. Directing his attention from what can't be done to what can be done, Zemsky provides numerous suggestions. These include a renewed effort to help students' performance in high schools and a stronger focus on the science of active learning, not just teaching methods. He concludes by suggesting a series of dislodging eventsùfor example, making a three-year baccalaureate the standard undergraduate degree, congressional rethinking of student aid in the wake of the loan scandal, and a change in the rules governing endowmentsùthat could break the gridlock that today holds higher education reform captive. Making Reform Work offers three rules for successful college and university transformation: don't vilify, don't play games, and come to the table with a well-thought-out strategy rather than a sharply worded lamentation.

During the past fifty years, the Congresses and presidents of the United States have made many efforts to improve the performance of the federal government. In this book, a leading expert in public management examines the most important reform statutes passed and concludes that the problem is not too little reform but too much. Paul Light explains that Congress and the presidency have never decided whether they trust government and its employees to do their jobs well, and so they have moved back and forth over the decades between four reform philosophies: scientific management, war on waste, watchful eye, and liberation management. These four philosophies, argues Light, operate with different goals, implementation strategies, and impacts. Yet reform initiatives draw on one or another of them almost at random, often canceling out the potential benefits of a particular statute by passing a contradictory statute soon afterward. Light shows that as the public has become increasingly distrustful of government, the reform agenda has favored the war on waste and watchful eye. He analyzes the consequences of these changes for the overall performance of government and offers policy recommendations for future reform approaches.

Is it time to give up on rehabilitating criminals? Record numbers of Americans are going to prison, and most of them will eventually return to society with a high chance of becoming repeat offenders. But a decision to abandon rehabilitation programs now would be premature warns Ann Chih Lin, who finds that little attention has been given to how these programs are actually implemented and why they tend to fail. In Reform in the Making, she not only supplies much-needed information on the process of program implementation but she also considers its social context, the daily realities faced by prison staff and inmates. By offering an in-depth look at common rehabilitation programs currently in operation--education, job training, and drug treatment--and examining how they are used or misused, Lin offers a practical approach to understanding their high failure rate and how the situation could be improved. Based on extensive observation and over 350 interviews with staff and prisoners in five medium-security male prisons, the book contrasts successfully implemented programs with subverted, abandoned, or neglected programs (those which staff reject or which do not teach prisoners anything useful). Lin explains that staff and prisoners have little patience with programs aimed at long-range goals when they must face the ongoing, immediate challenge of surviving prison life. Finding incentives to make both sides participate fully in rehabilitation is among the book's many contributions to improving prison policy.

Based on the Liverpool Desistance Study, this book compares and contrasts the stories of ex-convicts who are actively involved in criminal behavior with those who are desisting from crime and drug use. Extensive excerpts from the study reveal two types of personal narratives: a "condemnation" script favored by active offenders and a "generative" script favored by desisters. The way that these scripts are constructed and the manner in which they are used is then examined in light of contemporary criminological and psychological thought. The results suggests that success in reform depends on providing rehabilitative opportunities that reinforce the generative script. This study reveals a constructive new direction for offender rehabilitation efforts and will appeal to a wide range of readers from psychologists and criminologists to legislators, administrators, substance abuse counselors, and offenders themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)

The nonprofit sector has never been under greater pressure to prove itself. With missions expanding and funding never more competitive, the sector suffers from a general impression that it is less efficient and more wasteful than its government and private competitors. Its funders, be they governments, charitable foundations, or individual givers, have never seemed so insistent about economy and results, while its clients, be they communities or individuals, have never been more demanding about efficiency and responsiveness. How the nonprofit sector does its work is becoming almost as important to funders and clients as what the sector actually delivers by way of goods and services.The problem is that there is virtually no agreement on just how nonprofits can improve. Unlike the federal government, the nonprofit sector is still at the beginning of its reform journey and its networks of consultants, management associations, and scholars are only beginning to develop the research base to know what reforms might work under what conditions. In Making Nonprofits Work, Paul C. Light charts the current trends of management reform in the nonprofit sector and assesses the climate for reform at the local and national levels. Light examines the four popular philosophies, or "tides," being advocated— scientific management, liberation management, war on waste, and watchful eye—offering examples and caveats from a portfolio of recent experience. Drawing on confidential interviews with leaders in nonprofit management reform, a detailed search of Internet sources, and a survey of state associations of nonprofit organizations, Light's findings suggest that the nonprofit sector has a remarkable opportunity to prevent the excesses and fadism that have dominated reform efforts in government and the private sector. He cautions leaders in the nonprofit sector to recognize the limits of various reform models, to set priorities carefully, and to limit investments of reform energy to a handful of priorities. Finally, he urges reformers to boost the sector's ability to implement new systems and reforms by focusing more closely on capacity building.

Mark V. Pauly offers a detailed look at the individual insurance market in the United States. He explains how it works, suggests approaches to improvement that build on what currently works well, and provides a realistic assessment of how much improvement we can demand and expect. He concludes that, although there are some serious deficiencies in today's individual insurance market, there are also some important advantages in this market that should be preserved.

This collection of essays analyses the reform experiences of the 30 OECD countries in nine major policy domains in order to identify lessons, pitfalls and strategies that may help foster policy reform in the future.