ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly outlines the origins and prescriptions of Reinventing Government. It also describes two sets of criteria for judging public administration outputs: the politics-based governance model of Karen Hult and Charles Walcott and the economics-based model of E. S. Savas. The chapter focuses on these criteria to judge school reform in general and Arizona charter schools in particular. As James Davison Hunter writes, schools are ground zero of the culture wars: Education is strategic in the culture war because this is the central institution of modern life through which the larger social order is reproduced. Curriculum wars rage about the presentation and non-presentation of the nation's founders, religion, sex education, multiculturalism, capitalism, and homosexuality. The chapter also outlines two sets of criteria: the fit between policy and organizational design and the divisibility of costs and benefits. Different organizational governance structures are suited to different policy settings.
