The public administration literature has consistently questioned the validity of satisfaction surveys as a measure of government performance, particularly in comparison with more objective official measures. The authors examine this objective-subjective debate using unique data from a large survey distributed to nearly 1 million parents of children in the New York City public schools along with officially reported measures of school performance for about 900 schools. Their results suggest that the official measures of school performance are significant and important predictors of aggregate parental satisfaction, even after controlling for school and student characteristics. They conclude that public school parents form their satisfaction judgment in ways that correspond fairly closely with officially measured school performance. The results can also be interpreted as suggesting that the official performance measures reflect, at least in part, aspects of public schooling that matter to parents.

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As public sector work environments continue to embrace the digital governance revolution, questions of work surveillance practices and its relationship to performance management continue to evolve, but even more dramatically in the contemporary period of many public servants being forced to shift to remote work from home in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article presents the results of three surveys, two of them population‐based survey experiments, all conducted during the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic in Canada that compare public servant (n = 346) and citizen (n = 1,008 phone; n = 2,001 web) attitudes to various cutting‐edge—though no doubt controversial among some—digital surveillance tools that can be used in the public sector to monitor employee work patterns, often targeted toward remote working conditions. The findings represent data that can help governments and public service associations navigate difficult questions of reasonable privacy intrusions in an increasing digitally connected workforce. Evidence for Practice New work surveillance technologies are available to use within the public sector and will present acceptability challenges to public managers as they contemplate the introduction of these technologies. Multimodal survey data from Canada reveals that public servants and citizens find these emerging work surveillance technologies to be quite intrusive and unreasonable but show relatively more tolerance for digital surveillance over physical surveillance practices. Understanding surveillance anxieties among targeted employees will be key to finding a balance between employee privacy rights and employer desires to manage employees in a remote or digital environment.

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