Show Me the Evidence: Obama's Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy - Softcover

Haskins, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081572571X ISBN 13: 9780815725718

Verlag: Brookings Institution Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The first comprehensive history of the Obama administration's evidence-based initiatives. From its earliest days, the Obama administration planned and enacted several initiatives to fund social programs based on rigorous evidence of success. Ron Haskins and Greg Margolis tell the story of six—spanning preschool and K-12 education, teen pregnancy, employment and training, health, and community-based programs.
Readers will appreciate the fast-moving descriptions of the politics and policy debates that shaped these federal programs and the analysis of whether they will truly reshape federal social policy and greatly improve its impacts on the nation's social problems.
Based on interviews with 134 individuals (including advocates, officials at the Office of Management and Budget and the Domestic Policy Council, Congressional staff, and officials in the federal agencies administering the initiatives) as well as Congressional and administration documents and news accounts, the authors examine each of the six initiatives in separate chapters. The story of each initiative includes a review of the social problem the initiative addresses; the genesis and enactment of the legislation that authorized the initiative; and the development of the procedures used by the administration to set the evidence standard and evaluation requirements—including the requirements for grant applications and awarding of grants.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Ron Haskins is the codirector of the Center on Children and Families, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He served as a senior adviser for Welfare Policy to President George W. Bush and as a Republican staff welfare counsel on the Committeee on Ways and Means. He is the author of Work over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (Brookings, 2006) and coauthor, with Isabel Sawhill, of Creating an Opportunity Society (Brookings, 2009).

Greg Margolis is a senior research assistant who spent three years at the Brookings Institution studying evidence-based policymaking. He is currently obtaining his Juris Doctor degree.

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Show Me the Evidence

Obama's Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy

By Ron Haskins, Greg Margolis

Brookings Institution Press

Copyright © 2015 The Brookings Institution
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8157-2571-8

Contents

Foreword Jim Manzi, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xiii, 
1 Introduction: The Obama Strategy for Attacking Social Problems Ron Haskins, 1, 
2 The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Initiative, 31, 
3 The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative, 67, 
4 The Investing in Innovation Initiative, 102, 
5 The Social Innovation Fund Initiative, 132, 
6 The Workforce Innovation Fund Initiative, 168, 
7 The Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Initiative, 188, 
8 So Far, So Good, 213, 
Appendix A. Interviewees, 241, 
Appendix B. Questionnaire, 249, 
Appendix C. Share of Formula and Competitive Grant Funds in Six Evidence-Based Initiatives, 253, 
Appendix D. Abbreviations, 255, 
Notes, 259, 
Index, 297, 

CHAPTER 1

RON HASKINS

Introduction: The Obama Strategy for Attacking Social Problems

In the sixth century B.C., a young Jewish man named Daniel was captured by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, to serve as an adviser. While being held in captivity, Daniel and several of his companions refused to eat the food or drink the wine offered by the king, referring to the act of eating their captor's food as "defilement." But the official in charge of the king's slaves, who was responsible for their health and well-being, told Daniel that he was afraid that the king would kill him if Daniel began to show the effects of poor nutrition, in contrast to the young men of the court, who regularly ate from the royal table. Daniel then suggested the following experiment: "Please test [us] for ten days, and let us be given some vegetables to eat and water to drink" while the other men continue to eat from the king's table. The official followed Daniel's suggestion. At the end of ten days the appearance of Daniel and his fellow vegetable eaters seemed better and "they were fatter than all the youths who had been eating the king's choice food."

Daniel was intent on making a point about nutrition, but the way that he proved his point—nearly 3,000 years ago—opens whole vistas in human understanding. Two ideas implicit in Daniel's approach are crucial. First, the appeal to evidence, along with theory, is one of the two pillars of science. Why stand around arguing about abstractions when you can collect evidence to answer a question about what causes what? Second, Daniel instructs the chief chamberlain to gather a particular type of evidence: evidence from a planned experiment. If you want to understand whether A causes B, assign people to two groups, administer A to one group, and keep everything else that the groups experience as similar as possible. Then, after some period of time, measure B in both groups. If the two groups differ with respect to B, A must have caused the difference. While his experiment could be improved in many ways, especially by better measurement of outcomes and by assigning people to the two groups at random to ensure their initial comparability, Daniel was nonetheless onto something big.

Discovering the Obama Evidence-Based Initiatives

The Obama administration and the federal bureaucracy are full of Daniels. Sometime during the summer of 2010, around 18 months into the new administration, I became aware of a home visiting initiative that the administration was implementing, formally called the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting initiative. Home visiting is a health and educational intervention to help young, usually single, mothers make good decisions in their personal life and adopt parenting practices that help their babies flourish. In undertaking the home visiting initiative, the administration had decided to fund only home visiting programs that had strong evidence of success. In September 2010, Kathy Stack, a senior career official at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) who also was a friend of mine, called to say that she had heard that I was looking into the Obama initiative on home visiting. When I told her that I was writing a brief paper about the home visiting initiative, she asked if I wanted to have lunch to discuss not only the initiative but also other evidence-based initiatives that the administration was planning. I eagerly accepted. Over lunch, Kathy described the full scope of what the administration was doing and remarked that people should know more about the initiatives because they could be precedent setting. Well, I had an idea about how to let people know more about the Obama evidence-based initiatives—namely, by writing a book about them. I left our lunch determined to raise enough money to hire a research assistant and learn everything that I could about the initiatives. My initial idea was to describe how the initiatives had been conceived; how the administration got them through Congress; how "evidence-based" was defined; how the administration managed to communicate its evidence-based concept to potential program operators around the nation; how the administration ensured that money went to program operators who were using evidence-based programs; and how the administration would ensure that the programs were having the intended impacts. Eventually, the William T. Grant Foundation, which for many years had been focusing on how social science evidence informs public policy, agreed to finance my enterprise, and I was bound for the Promised Land—especially after I hired Greg Margolis, who became the legs—and, in large part, the brains—of my operation to tell the story of the administration's evidence-based ventures.

What does it mean for the Obama administration to create "evidence-based initiatives?" It means that the administration strives to be as certain as possible that federal dollars are spent on social intervention programs that have been proven by rigorous evidence to work. What does it mean to say that the programs "work"? It usually means that someone, following a scientifically rigorous version of Daniel's approach, randomly assigned people to two groups, one of which had the intervention program and one of which did not, and found that the outcome of the group that had the intervention was superior to that of the other group in one or more important ways. For example, poor and low-income mothers who participated in a home visiting intervention were found to have better outcomes in several areas than similar mothers who had not participated, depending on the particular study. Improvements included less smoking and drinking by the mothers during pregnancy, reduced rates of child abuse and harsh parenting, healthier children, lower levels of parent depression, and higher achievement test scores of children.

As we began to learn more about the Obama evidence-based initiatives, a second meaning of "evidence-based" became clear. Besides striving to fund primarily programs that already had been shown to work, the administration would also insist on rigorous ongoing evaluation of nearly every program that it funded. Running what eventually became six evidence-based initiatives, administration officials in the four executive agencies (Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the Corporation for National and Community Service) greatly increased the likelihood of good evaluations by requiring entities applying...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Brookings Institution Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 081572571X
• ISBN 13: 9780815725718
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 337
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland