2015

To quote social policy expert Isabel Sawhill, “If we want to reduce poverty [in the U.S.], one of the simplest, fastest and cheapest things we could do would be to make sure that as few people as possible become parents before they actually want to.”

An important state initiative to do that is Colorado’s Family Planning Initiative. Launched in 2009, it has provided 36,000 long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) to low-income women through family planning health centers, while also increasing health care provider education and training. Since it’s launch, Colorado’s teen birth rate has been cut nearly in half: Both the birth rate and abortion rate for women ages 15-19 fell 48 percent from 2009 through 2014. Moreover, for every dollar invested in the LARC program, an estimated $5.85 was avoided within a three-year period by the Colorado Medicaid program.

To learn more, we’re joined by Dr. Larry Wolk, the Executive Director and Chief Medical Officer of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

Can food banks be used to address diet-sensitive disease in low-income communities? A new study of a pilot intervention suggests they can.

Between 2012 and 2014, researchers enrolled almost 700 food pantry clients with diabetes in a six-month pilot intervention in three states. The intervention provided participants with diabetes-appropriate food, blood sugar monitoring, primary care referral, and self-management support. The results, published in Health Affairs, show small but important improvements on a range of health indicators — with larger effects for those with the most series cases of diabetes. While the findings will need to be confirmed by an impact evaluation (already underway), the intervention creates a model for food banks to use to address diet-sensitive disease in low-income communities. The study also shows the value of running pilot programs to test the feasibility of innovative social programs and to “work out the kinks” before more rigorous evaluation.

To learn more, we’re joined by Dr. Hilary Seligman, the lead author of the study. She is a professor of medicine, epidemiology an biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, a practicing physician, and Senior Medical Advisor and Lead Scientist at Feeding America.

Colorado is a leader among U.S. states in involving state employees in efforts to make state government agencies and programs more efficient and effective through a so-called lean approach. Lean techniques were developed in manufacturing settings, most famously at Toyota, and have since been applied to service settings, including government agencies. Under Governor John Hickenlooper, Colorado launched its lean initiative in 2011 and it has lead to about 200 projects within state agencies and has trained about 2,500 state employees in lean techniques.

To learn more, we are joined by Henry Sobanet, the Director of the Office of State Planning and Budgeting in Colorado, who has spearheaded the state’s lean efforts for Governor Hickenlooper.

Web extra: Henry Sobanet discusses Colorado’s involvement in the Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative which is working with 19 states and several counties to implement an innovative cost-benefit analysis approach that helps jurisdictions invest in policies and programs that are backed by strong evidence that they work. [click here]

How can the nation catalyze progress on key social policy challenges? A bold proposal, called the Ten Year Challenge, calls for selecting ten important social challenges and then having the federal government fund ten communities or states to address each challenge (so 100 experiments in total), while rigorously evaluating the results. The goal would be to generate a few breakthrough approaches that could be scaled up.

To learn more, we’re joined by the proposal’s author, Jeffrey Liebman, who presented the proposal in a paper published by Results for America and the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Liebman is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and Director of the Government Performance Lab at the Kennedy School. He previously served on the leadership team of the White House Office of Management and Budget and, prior to that, served as an economic advisor to candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign.

On which challenges could the initiative focus? In the paper, Liebman provides examples, including “reducing recidivism among ex-offenders, raising third-grade reading and math skills among low-income children living in high-poverty neighborhoods, preventing youth from dropping out of high school, helping chronically unemployed individuals obtain and keep jobs, raising community college completion rates, reducing obesity-triggered diabetes, eliminating chronic and/or family homelessness, and helping developmentally-disabled youth make successful transitions into the adult workforce, among many others.”

There is growing awareness in the U.S. of the problem of bullying in middle and high school. Between a third and a fourth of all students say they have been bullied by other students, whether verbal, physical, and emotional. The potential consequences of bullying and harassment, including violence in schools, has highlighted the need for effective strategies to reduce bullying.

To highlight one evidence-based strategy, we’re joined by Betsy Levy Paluck (@betsylevyp). She is a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and an expert in the psychology of social norms, social influence, and behavior change. Along with her co-author Hana Shepherd, she ran a unique field experiment that shows that targeting the most influential students in a school can be a key factor in reducing bullying.

How can public leaders, whether you’re running a large department or a small program, apply the insights of behavioral economics and other behavioral sciences to improve results? A simplified framework for the application of behavioral insights was developed by the U.K. Behavioral Insights Team (@B_I_Tweets) provides a useful way to start. The framework is called “EAST,” which stands for Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. As the team notes: “Though we do not claim that EAST is a comprehensive summary of all there is to know about behavioral science, we do think that for busy policymakers, the EAST framework is an accessible, simple way to make more effective and efficient policy.”

To learn more, we’re joined by Simon Ruda who is a director at the Behavioral Insights Team.  

This podcast usually focuses on results-focused government, but our topic today is running a results-focused state think tank — with insights about making change that can be relevant more broadly.

If you’re not from New Mexico, you may not have heard of the nonpartisan nonprofit called Think New Mexico (@ThinkNewMexico). Its record of accomplishment, however, is worth paying attention no matter where you live. With only a four full time staff, plus interns, it has helped bring about a dozen landmark laws over the past 16 years.

To get insights into Think New Mexico’s unique approach, we’re joined by Fred Nathan. He founded Think New Mexico in 1999 and has served as its Executive Director ever since.

Web extra: Fred Nathan discusses Think New Mexico’s current initiative, infrastructure spending reform. [click here]

How can we help disadvantaged youth avoid negative outcomes such as delinquency and dropout? A recent NBER working paper presents findings from three randomized control trials that help low-income young people slow down and consider whether their quick, automatic responses are useful for a given situation. The paper is co-authored by Sara Heller, Anuj Shah, Jonathan Guryan, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan and Harold Pollack.

All three studies show sizable positive effects. The first, which tests a program carried out within the Chicago Public Schools called Becoming a Man (BAM), shows that participation reduced violent-crime arrests by 44% and improved schooling outcomes. The second, also of BAM, reduced overall arrests by 31%. And the third, carried out in the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, saw reductions in return rates to the center by 22%.

To learn more, we’re joined by Jens Ludwig (@profjensludwig). He is a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and the Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Web extra: Jens Ludwig describes the mission of the University of Chicago Crime Lab as well as the University of Chicago Urban Labs of which it is a part. [click here]

On September 15th, 2015, President Obama issued an Executive Order encouraging federal agencies to apply behavioral insights in their programs, policies, and operations. On the same day, the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) released its first annual report that details the results of 15 different collaborative projects with agencies to apply insights from behavioral economics and other behavioral sciences to improve program outcomes and help tackle agency challenges.

To highlight some lessons from this work for public leaders at the federal, state and local levels, we’re joined by Maya Shankar. She is the Senior Advisor for the Social and Behavioral Sciences at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and leads the SBST.

How can public leaders and program managers track the performance of different sites within a program in a way that reflects impact — i.e., the value added of each site? The most rigorous approach is to run a rigorous program evaluation, such as a randomized controlled trial, by site, but that type of evaluation is not always feasible. Another approach (the most common one) is to use performance measures, since they are low-cost and easy to implement, but there’s a downside: They aren’t necessarily good indicators of impact. That’s because the performance of sites are effected by local conditions and demographics, not just program quality.

Our interview focuses on public leaders can design performance measures to better reflect impact, including through the use of regression-adjusted performance measures — that is, measures that statistically control for factors that aren’t related to program quality. We get insights from Peter Schochet. He’s a Senior Fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, a leading authority on evaluation methodology, and the co-author of an article in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management on this topic.

In the interview, he describes how regression-adjusted performance measures can be useful, especially if there is good baseline data, measures are not overly complex and align well with the most relevant outcomes of interest, and (when relevant) if there is longer-term follow-up data.