Harry Hatry Obituary

Harry Hatry was a distinguished fellow in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where he had been a leader in developing performance management/measurement and evaluation procedures for public agencies since the 1970s. He worked with a wide range of local, state, and federal agencies internationally and nationally develop outcome measurement procedures for such services as public safety, health, transportation, education, parks and recreation, social services, environmental protection, and economic development.

Hatry was a fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration, was a member of the US Office of Management and Budget’s 2002-03 Performance Measurement Advisory Council, and served for several years on the US Department of Education’s external Evaluation Review (Advisory) Panel. He received the American Society for Public Administration’s “Outstanding Contributor to the Literature of Management Science and Policy Science” award in 1984; the Elmer B. Staats award for excellence in program evaluation in 1985; a National Public Service Award in 1993; and the “Evaluator of the Year” award from the Washington (D.C.) Evaluators Association in 1996.

In 1999, the Center for Accountability and Performance of the American Society of Public Administration established the Harry Hatry Award for Distinguished Practice in Performance Measurement. In 2014, his coauthored article, “The Case for Performance Monitoring,” was named one of the 75 most influential articles to have appeared in Public Administration Review since 1940.

Hatry had a BS in engineering from Yale University and an MS in business from Columbia University.