Gov Innovator Blog

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Should states and localities expand the use of apprenticeship as a workforce development strategy? Robert Lerman argues yes. He is an Institution Fellow at the Urban Institute, a professor of economics at American University, and one of the nation’s leading experts on apprenticeship. In 2013, he founded the American Institute for Innovative Apprenticeship.

Today, countries such as Switzerland, Germany and increasingly in Australia and England — along with states such as South Carolina — are using apprenticeships to keep their workforces competitive and to train workers for higher-paying, growing fields. Under apprenticeship programs, as Robert Lerman explains, “individuals earn a salary while receiving training primarily through supervised, work‐based learning but also with related academic instruction. Employers, joint, union‐employer agreements, government agencies, and the military all sponsor apprenticeship programs. Apprentices are employees at the firms and organizations where they are training, and combine productive work along with learning experiences that lead to demonstrated proficiency in a significant array of tasks.”

Also of note, Mathematica Policy Research conducted an effectiveness assessment and cost benefit analysis of registered apprenticeship (RA) in ten states. The 2012 study found that RA participants had substantially higher earnings than did nonparticipants and that the benefits of the RA program appear to be much larger than the costs.

Credits: Music at the end of the interview is by Maya Lerman and her band Maya and the Ruins.

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For public leaders at the federal, state and local levels who want to strengthen their agencies’ abilities to learn what works and to continually improve performance, building program evaluation capacity within their agencies is essential. But what are the building blocks of that capacity? And why is the relationship between an evaluation office and a program office within an agency so important?

To explore these and other related issues, we speak with Naomi Goldstein, the Director of the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In her role, she advises the Assistant Secretary for Children and Families on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of ACF programs. She is one of the leading experts in program evaluation within the federal government and was awarded the Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive in 2012.

You may also be interested in reading ACF’s evaluation policy, launched in 2012, which is designed to confirm ACF’s “commitment to conducting evaluations and to using evidence from evaluations to inform policy and practice.”

Web extra: Naomi Goldstein discusses the similarities and differences between program evaluation and performance management. [click here] As a postscript, she commented after our interview about the value of combining typical performance management and evaluation approaches, including how experimental evaluations that use administrative data can produce relatively quick and inexpensive results.

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The Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) is a unit within the Mayor’s Office in New York City. It was launched in 2006 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to develop new and innovative anti-poverty initiatives and to rigorously test them to see what works. It provides about $100 million annually to primarily city agencies to fund pilot programs. The majority of funds come from the city, with additional support from state, federal and philanthropic sources. Since its launch, CEO has worked with 28 city agencies and over 200 community-based providers to pilot 50 programs. In recognition of its work, it won the 2012 Innovations in American Government Award.

The CEO provides insights into how public leaders can focus attention within government, and within their communities, on particular priority issues (in this case, reducing poverty); test new approaches; and rigorously evaluate the results in order to learn what works, scale up effective programs and stop doing what isn’t working. On the latter point, CEO has terminated about 20% of its programs for inadequate results, while at the same time scaling up several programs that have shown strong results.

To learn more, we are joined by Kristin Morse, CEO’s Executive Director.

Web extra: For brevity, the interview does not cover CEO’s Social Innovation Fund work, but more information is available here. This effort is supporting the replication of CEO’s most promising initiatives, including in eight urban areas in the U.S.

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With a population about the size of Virginia, Austria may be a relatively small nation, but it provides a prominent example of implementing performance budgeting. In particular, a series of budget reforms in recent years has significantly shifted the federal budget process in Austria from one focused on the question, “How much do we spend?” to one with a much stronger focus on the question, “What results are we producing?”

Specific reforms include multiyear budgeting, the ability of ministries (that is, federal agencies) to keep any savings from cost-cutting or efficiencies, and a performance measurement system including the requirement that each ministry set at least five key goals that are approved by parliament.

To tell us about performance budgeting in Austria, we are joined by Gerhard Steger who is the Budget Director for the Austrian Ministry of Finance.

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Jim Manzi is the founder and chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies, a business analytics firm. His 2012 book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics and Society argues for the usefulness of experimental methods—in other words, randomized controlled trials—for addressing important policy issues, from improving education outcomes to increasing economic growth to reducing crime.

In a review of Uncontrolled in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks writes, “Manzi wants to infuse government with a culture of experimentation.” Brooks also notes: “What you really need to achieve sustained learning, Manzi argues, is controlled experiments. Try something out. Compare the results against a control group. Build up an information feedback loop. This is how businesses learn. By 2000, the credit card company Capital One was running 60,000 randomized tests a year — trying out different innovations and strategies. Google ran about 12,000 randomized experiments in 2009 alone.”

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Steve Aos is the Director of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP). The Institute’s mission is to carry out practical, non-partisan research—at legislative direction—on issues of importance to Washington State. Areas of focus have included education, criminal justice, welfare, children and adult services, health and more. The outcome of WSIPP’s work includes cost-benefit analyses of various policy options so that legislatures can make more informed decisions about cost-effective policies.

Although not discussed in the interview, a related initiative to note that builds on WSIPP’s work in Washington State: The Pew Charitable Trusts and the MacArthur Foundation are currently working with 14 states (CT, FL, ID, IL, IA, KS, MA, MS, NM, NY, OR, RI, TX, and VT) to develop and strengthen their cost-benefit analysis capabilities, as part of the Results First initiative.

Web extra: Steve Aos explains how trust between WSIPP and the legislature, build over time, is an important aspect of the Institute’s ability to produce analysis that is valued and used. [click here]

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Mike Powell is the Chief Innovation Officer for the State of Maryland under Governor Martin O’Malley. In that role, he helps oversee the Governor’s Delivery Unit.

For public leaders in the United States, the Governor’s Delivery Unit is a useful example of setting specific, ambitious strategic goals, of being transparent with citizens about progress, and of creating a process internally — with close leadership involvement — to “own” those goals and drive progress towards them.

In particular, the Delivery Unit is designed to help achieve 15 strategic goals that are important to citizens and that cut across traditional agency silos. Its website tracks progress, including graphs, background information, and flags that show whether each goal has been delivered, is on track or progressing, or has had insufficient progress so far.

Mike previously worked for IBM as a consultant and was a CityStat analyst in Baltimore earlier in his career.

As background, it’s useful to note another O’Malley Administration initiative mentioned in the interview: StateStat. Every few weeks or months, depending on the agency, each agency leadership team comes to a StateStat meeting in the Governor’s Office to review the agency’s performance data and to discuss, with the Governor’s staff, ways to improve outcomes. The Governor’s Delivery Unit, in contrast, is closely related (and managed by StateStat staff) but is focused on cross-cutting goals that span agencies and that have been identified by the Governor as key benchmarks for state progress.

Web extra: Mike Powell discusses his role as Chief Innovator Officer for Maryland, answering a question that, as he has noted, he gets frequently: “What does a Chief Innovation Officer do?” [click here]