Faculty Quotes
John Billings
"We're trying to understand why it is that there are huge disparities in health outcomes – between low-income populations, say – so that policymakers can find solutions. For example, we looked closely at Medicaid claims date to track how well primary care providers managed their patients. Did one provider have more emergency room visits that another? More primary care visits? What we found was that hospital clinics were much worse at managing patients than private doctors and free-standing, community clinics were. We're trying to sort out why this is. Wagner's Center for Health and Public Service Research (CHPSR) serves as a vehicle for connecting academic research with policymaking and program development in order to address key issues concerning the delivery of health care and social services."
Jan Blustein
"The challenge is to make the connection between medical care and health and to understand how factors other than medical care can influence health among older people. In doing research that will benefit older people, it is vital to have an appreciation of the importance of housing, maintaining social connections and maintaining functional abilities, in addition to the benefits of high-technology medicine."
Jo Boufford
"Leadership development in the area of health in Africa is crucial. There is a clear connection between health and public administration, as health is a public service in most countries other than the U.S. and in virtually all African countries. The constraints of civil service reform, economic restructuring and governmental decentralization are fundamental in problems of health systems development in Africa. Helping to build leadership capacity in this area will have a fundamental impact on global health issues."
Charles Brecher
"Much of my research is done in connection with the Citizens Budget Commission. It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan civic organization that seeks to improve financial management and service delivery by the City of New York and the State of New York. Recent reports have dealt with methods to assess the affordability of debt at the state and local level, ways to use the internet and e-gov techniques to make procurement by City agencies more cost-effective and the implications of converting the civilian municipal workforce from a 35 to a 40 hour work-week. Research is now underway on cost containment strategies for New York State’s Medicaid program and options for financing major transportation infrastructure improvements. I enjoy the applied nature of the work, with opportunities to interact with state and local officials."
Sewin Chan
"My research is focused primarily on the well-being of individuals and how this is shaped by the interaction of individual decision-making, market institutions and government policies. I’m particularly interested in the economics of aging and retirement, especially the risks facing older households. Recently, I’ve collaborated with Professor Jan Blustein to examine health outcomes and the labor market behavior of grandparents raising their grandchildren. This work will help in developing better policies and programs to support this growing yet vulnerable group that is performing an important social role."
Ingrid Ellen
"My book explores the stability of racial integration in neighborhoods. The conventional view, to borrow Saul Alinsky’s famous line, is that racial integration is merely the time between when the first black moves in and the last white moves out. Counter to this view, I found that many neighborhoods in the United States are racially integrated and stay that way for years. Integration has become both more prevalent and more stable over the last several decades. Still, metropolitan areas in the United States remain highly segregated and many integrated neighborhoods do “tip” top become majority black. Thus, in the second half of the book, I explore why this happens and why certain neighborhoods can remain successfully integrated over time."
Erica Foldy
"I am now involved in a study of how social change organizations use various identities – racial, ethnic, class, geographic – as a resource in their work. In a related arena, I am also interest in team learning and, in particular, how multi-cultural teams can learn from and across difference. I am just embarking on a project studying teams and what enables team learning in a large state social services agency. I am very interested in the mutual influence between social identities, like race, gender and class, and organizational life. How do social identities affect organizations? And how do organizations affect their members’ experience of their social identities? My last study found that, in fact, work organizations do influence their employees’ racial and gender identities, even though those identities are usually understood as largely stable and immune to organizational effects."
Anthony Kovner
"Leadership training is extremely important for non-profit boards. The key distinctive characteristic of nonprofits is their mission. The boards of for-profit organizations are accountable to the shareholders, and those of public organizations are accountable to the voters. Part of the problem of accountability of nonprofit boards of trustees is that they often don’t get the information they need to carry out the function they’re supposed to perform."
Roger Kropf
"Technology will never replace caring people. We all want the human touch when we’re sick or just getting a check-up. Yet technology is talked about all the time because it can help prevent errors and support the people providing care by providing quick access to information. My work has focused on how to use technology to help professionals collaborate and share knowledge, regardless of whether they are in the same building or separated by hundreds of miles."
Paul Light
"I’m currently finishing a book on what the RAND Corporation knows about managing high-performing organizations. It’s a three-year study looking at RAND research on everything from army logistics to the quality of health care, and draws a number of conclusions about the characteristics of high-performing organizations and how, through careful and appropriate change, they can improve. I’m also conducting a study for the Carnegie Corporation about the value of the national infrastructure on associations, schools, college, universities, publications and networks that help individual nonprofits improve their performance. The basic question is – What works, what doesn’t, and what is the value of having a nonprofit infrastructure in the first place?"