The Bush administration’s focus on improving agency performance through the use of management score cards and a program rating tool has earned kudos from many public-sector management experts. But Beryl Radin, a professor of public administration at American University, is not one who lavishes praise. In her new book, “Challenging the Performance Movement,” Radin is especially critical of how the Office of Management and Budget has implemented performance management.

In her critique of the performance management movement in the public sector, she focuses on the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993 and OMB’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). “Neither of these federal performance management activities fits easily into the institutional structures, functions and political relationships found in the American political system,” Radin writes in the introduction to her book.

The No Child Left Behind Act, with its standardized tests to measure performance, is a poster child for the performance movement gone awry, Radin said. “Teachers are under so much pressure because their own performance evaluations are based on the test that they lie, or they give kids the test beforehand.”

In the 1990s, Radin worked for several years in the Department of Health and Human Services as special adviser to the assistant secretary for management and budget. Radin said she is sympathetic to the goals of the performance movement, but her book is about its limitations. She offers the following three tips for OMB officials, lawmakers and federal program managers who are implementing GPRA and PART.

1. Measure agency performance in ways that reflect diverse public values.

Radin said she believes that OMB, for example, should not act on its own in establishing performance management goals for federal agencies. Instead, it should consult with Congress and other constituents, including state and local government officials, who play a role in the success or failure of many federal programs.

“There is a body of examples where that has worked,” said Christopher Mihm, managing director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office. Gaining that agreement, he said, requires “getting people together who genuinely have disparate agendas and saying, ‘Let’s try to figure out a set of performance goals and performance measures that meet your needs, meet my needs, and let’s see if we can work toward those.’”