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Evidence Works: Cases Where Evidence Meaningfully Informed Policy

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Evidence Works: Cases Where Evidence Meaningfully Informed Policy EDITORS Nick Hart Fellow Bipartisan Policy Center Meron Yohannes Research Analyst Bipartisan Policy Center ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Bipartisan Policy Center would like to thank the William T. Grant Foundation for their generous support for this project. The editors thank Ashley Thieme for valuable research assistance as well as multiple reviewers of earlier drafts of chapters. BPC is especially grateful to the contributors of case studies and stories contained in this volume. DISCLAIMER This volume is a product of BPC staff. The case studies do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of BPC, its founders, its funders, or its board of directors. The case studies also do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of any organizations or agencies that employ the authors. The case studies also do not necessarily reflect the views of the individual authors of other chapters. RECOMMENDED CITATION Nick Hart and Meron Yohannes (eds.) Evidence Works: Cases Where Evidence Meaningfully Informed Policy. (Washington, D.C.: Bipartisan Policy Center, 2019). INTRODUCTION 6 Foreword 8 Why the Use of Evidence Matters USING EVIDENCE FOR FEDERAL POLICYMAKING 20 Earned Reputation: The Earned Income Tax Credit 28 Disability Policy: Saving Disability Insurance with the First Reforms in a Generation 40 Training Policy at the Onset of the Great Recession: Too Important to Let Evidence Intercede 48 Family First: Funding Practices that Keep Kids Safe 58 Llama, Llama, Child Support Under Obama 70 Alpha, Bravo, Charlie: Reforming the Department of Defense Child Care Program 82 Baby, It’s Cold Outside: Modernizing Energy Assistance Grants 90 What Will it Take to End Family Homelessness? The Family Options Study 98 Cutting Health Care Costs: Innovations from Pioneering Accountability in Care 106 Let’s Talk About LUST: EPA’s Underground Storage Tanks Program 114 Assessing Children’s Health in Public and Assisted Housing 124 Leveraging Research to Support the Nation’s Food Safety Net POLICYMAKING WITH EVIDENCE IN STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS 134 Making Street-Level Bureaucracy Work: Safer Food in Seattle and King County 142 Keeping Kids Safe and Healthy: Changing Colorado Policies to Prevent Child Neglect 150 Improving Literacy: Investing in Reading Coaching and Evaluation in Tennessee 158 Great Expectations, Re-calibrated: Evaluating DC's Police Body Worn Camera Program DESIGNING POLICYMAKING PROCESSES FOR EVIDENCE USE 168 Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs: A Tale of Persistence 178 There’s No Place Like Home: Improving Outcomes One Home Visit at a Time 186 Schoolhouse Rock: Enhancing Educational Opportunities for Students 192 Entering the Evidence Promised Land: Making the Evidence Act a Law CONCLUSION 206 Using Evidence in the Real World: What We Learned 4 | EVIDENCE WORKS INTRODUCTION Introduction | 5 FOREWORD Katharine G. Abraham, former chair of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. Ron Haskins, former co-chair of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. 6 | EVIDENCE WORKS In 2016 and 2017, we served as co-chairs of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Evidence- Based Policymaking. Along with our fellow commissioners, we spent over a year studying the challenges in using data to produce evidence to serve government decision-makers. Talking with and hearing from hundreds of people confirmed what many of us had believed for years—that all too often, there are steep barriers to producing the evidence needed to inform critical policy and program decisions. The good news is that there are solutions to the problems we heard about. Many of the recommendations our Commission made to improve the evidence-building process are now being implemented across government. Policymakers should increasingly have access to the information they need to make sound decisions. On its own, access to information isn’t enough. It’s also essential that our elected officials and government executives apply available information to their decisions in realistic and meaningful ways. While much of our work focused on the process of producing research and evidence, the desired outcome is ultimately to have this information used. This is not a partisan issue—Republicans and Democrats alike turn to the evidence that is available to inform their decisions and would welcome better evidence. The case studies in this volume illustrate this point well, providing illuminating examples in which good evidence has had a positive effect on policy debates and decisions. Evidence Works: Cases Where Evidence Meaningfully Informed Policy is a timely extension of the work of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. It is our hope that providing policymakers and evidence advocates with a resource for demonstrating the power of rigourous evidence will help with making the case that investments in research matter. The many examples discussed in this volume in which robust evidence was successfully applied to improve decision-making should do just that. Moving forward, as work to implement our Commission’s recommendations continues, we would like to reaffirm the vision articulated in the Commission’s final report for “a future in which rigorous evidence is created efficiently, as a routine part of government operations, and used to construct effective public policy.” Everything we see leads us to believe this vision can be realized. Foreword | 7 INTRODUCTION Why the Use of Evidence Matters Nick Hart is a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and chief executive officer of the Data Coalition. Previously, he served as the director of BPC’s Evidence Project. Meron Yohannes is a research analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center. 8 | EVIDENCE WORKS The use of information in daily life to make decisions is common. Information is perceived to be easy to understand and useful. To purchase or rent a new home, for example, people use web listings to compare different properties and seek out the expertise of realtors for advice; to buy a vehicle, people search the internet to learn about car safety features or to research prices before visiting a dealer. Decision-making about government policies is no different. It involves making decisions about how to allocate resources to meet goals. Those charged with effectively using taxpayers’ dollars for the benefit of society need solid information to make decisions. They need information to fulfill the goals of programs and policies, and to ensure that actions align with expected results. The concept of evidence-based policymaking has gained attention in the United States in recent years. In short, the idea is to use evidence to inform how policymakers go about reaching decisions. In this context, “evidence” is specifically defined as high-quality information constructed by systematically collecting data, analyzing data with rigorous research methods, then developing conclusions that are valid and reliable about groups of people, households, families, or organizations. This definition does not include hunches or haphazardly compiled information. The term “evidence” here also does not mean the same thing that it does in a courtroom. The data and methods for evidence-based policymaking are built on efforts to understand trends in performance, gain insights about how policies and programs operate, and acquire knowledge about impacts on outcomes and results. The evidence described here typically comes from statistical analysis, policy research, data science, or program evaluation. Most of the American public will probably respond to the concept by asking, “Don’t we already do this today?” or “If we don’t do that, what do we do today?” The reality is that policymakers use a vast array of information to make decisions—case studies, constituent priorities, electoral consequences, personal values, and evidence. These inputs are important in a democratic society. But today, unfortunately, evidence is not always the priority—or even present in some policy debates. One goal of the evidence-based policymaking movement is to encourage decision-makers to increasingly use rigorous evidence to guide their actions. Achieving this goal does not mean evidence will exclusively be how decisions are made. In fact, rarely can a portfolio of evidence itself dictate what decisions should be made. But evidence can reduce uncertainty about the effects of a decision, can help policymakers understand the range of benefits for different policy options, and can assure the American public that officials aren’t basing decisions on faulty beliefs or misguided theories. In short, evidence can ensure that decisions rely on facts, truth, and reality. A central tenet of evidence-based policymaking is that evidence should always have a seat at the table of inputs available for decision-makers. Proponents also conclude that it should have a prominent place at that table. It’s not that policymakers don’t want to make good decisions—they do. But policymakers may have different incentives for making decisions, Introduction | 9 may not have access to needed information, or may have to simply interpret what is available to them, recognizing gaps and limitations. Often, policymakers must find evidence, translate existing evidence, and judge the credibility, validity, and reliability of evidence—all under the real-world time constraints of policy decisions and public administration. In recent years, experts have focused a vast amount of attention on the supply of evidence, including how to reduce barriers to accessing data and strategies for enhancing the capacity to conduct policy research
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