CHOICE
connect
A division of the American Library Association
Editorial Offices: 575 Main Street, Suite 300, Middletown, CT 06457-3445
Phone: (860) 347-6933
Fax: (860) 704-0465
FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY
Please do not link to this page.
Johns Hopkins University Press
The following review appeared in the November 2015 issue of CHOICE. The review is for your internal use only. Please review our Permission and Reprints Guidelines or email permissions@ala-choice.org.
Social & Behavioral Sciences
Education
In many states, the amount of money provided to public universities and community colleges is determined, in part, by how well universities perform on certain output measures. In this book, Dougherty and Natow (both, Teachers College, Columbia Univ.) examine the origin, transformation, and possible discontinuance of several states’ performance funding policies using a conceptual model composed of concepts from policy theory, institutional theory, and broad-based social theories such as neoliberalism. The authors employ case method techniques, including extensive document review and personal interviews with the various actors for each state that they examine. They find that there were two distinct waves of performance funding legislation. While the authors’ conceptual model seems to fit well with the descriptions provided by the actors involved in the process, the jury is still out on whether performance funding—especially wave-two schemes that involve large fractions of base-level funding—work. To date, there is little empirical work that measures the impact of performance funding on various outcomes, either those that are explicitly included in the funding formulas (e.g., number of students completing a degree) or those that are not included in the formula but may be indirectly impacted by performance funding (e.g., student learning).
--B. P. McCall, University of Michigan