A Lynchburg College professor and four of her students helped gather data for "Grading the States 2008: One-of-a-Kind Report on State Performance" by the Government Performance Project, due out Monday, March 3.
Dr. Sally Selden, associate professor of management at Lynchburg College, has served as the lead academic person for the "People" section of the Government Performance Project (GPP,) a non-partisan, independent research project of The Pew Center on the States, since its inception in 1998.
Two graduate students, Rob Wooters and Marni Fogelson both of Lynchburg, and two undergraduates, Joe Orenstein of Kernersville, N.C., and Colin J. Turcotte of Forest, Va., worked with Dr. Selden grading state governments' human resource management systems. The grades are being released nationally on Monday in Governing Magazine.
The GPP evaluates how well state governments perform the basic management of money, people, infrastructure and information - four areas critical to developing and implementing public policy - every three years. This is accomplished through the use of a web-based survey, analysis of publicly available documents and journalistic interviews.
The "People" section of the GPP investigates how well states manage their employees, including the implementation of hiring, retention, development, and performance management systems.
The report and 50 state summaries will be available March 3 at www.pewcenteronthestates.org/gpp.