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Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
~Mark Twain
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John Tapogna
John Tapogna, is President of ECONorthwest (ECO), and oversees the firm's overall business strategy and operations. ECO is the Northwest's largest economic consulting firm and works for public, private, and not-for-profit clients throughout the U.S.
Since his arrival at ECO in 1997, Tapogna has built ECO's practices in education, healthcare, human service, and tax policy. In education, he has directed evaluations of dropout prevention programs, the impacts of small class sizes, and the efficacy of small schools for a variety of clients including Oregon's Chalkboard Project, Washington's League of Education Voters, and the Seattle Public Schools. He has recommended innovative ways to consolidate decision-making and budgeting across education sectors and co-authored a finance chapter in Minding the Gap: Why Integrating High School with College Makes Sense and How to Do It, published by Harvard Education Press.
Tapogna has overseen the development of award-winning software tools in Arizona, California, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, and Wisconsin that help low-income families, seniors, people with disabilities, and veterans understand their eligibility for safety-net programs offered in the public and nonprofit sectors. The first of these tools-Oregon Helps-won Government Executive's Government Technology Leadership Award and the 2003-04 Stockholm Challenge in the e-government category.
Tapogna routinely provides state fiscal and tax analyses to the Oregon Business Council and advised Governor Kulongoski's Revenue Restructuring Taskforce. He has presented his findings to a variety of governing bodies, including the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, the Oregon and Washington State Legislatures, and numerous local governments. Prior to joining ECO, Tapogna was an analyst at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, where he forecasted the nation's welfare spending and estimated the cost of key congressional legislation. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oregon and has a Masters Degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.