Most citizens care about the performance of their public institutions.
Parents worry about the quality of their children's schools.
City dwellers anxiously scan the latest crime statistics. Drivers pray for better roads, transit riders for dependable buses and subways, air travelers for effective air traffic control. But most elected officials pay little attention to performance. But for the rest of the year, campaigns and debates center on policy issues and public images, not on how well public institutions perform. This disparity between what the public wants and what politicians deliver is fueling an explosion of efforts to compare the performance of different governments, schools and regions.