Mayor Greg Fischer (@louisvillemayor) of Louisville, Kentucky joins us to talk about creating a city government culture that is data driven and results focused. He is a former businessman and entrepreneur who was first elected mayor in 2010 and was re-elected in 2014. He was named a “Public Official of the Year” by Governing Magazine in 2013, with the magazine noting, “At the heart of his performance efforts is a focus on data.” Under his leadership, Louisville has launched a PerformanceStat initiative called LouieStat, launched a 311 mobile app, implemented a new open-data policy and launched innovation delivery teams.

In the interview, Mayor Fischer also discusses his work to make Louisville a more compassionate city, including allowing city employees to take two hours of paid time each week to be a mentor.

How can school district leaders, or other state and local education leaders, strengthen student outcomes through innovative low-cost interventions, such as through text messages?

To gain insights, we’re joined by Benjamin Castleman (@BenCastleman), a professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on how behavioral economics and social psychology can improve college access and other measures of success for low-income students.

Web extras: Benjamin Castleman discusses the many decisions that students and parents have to make, from early childhood through college and why those decision points can become bottlenecks — ones that low-cost interventions can help ameliorate. [click here] He also discusses this research on “summer melt” (the fact that a significant fraction of graduating low-income high school students who are planning to attend college that fall end up not going to college) and about low-cost interventions to reduce it. [click here]

What are the key themes of the Obama Administration’s evidence-based policy agenda around grant making and what can state and local leaders learn from those efforts to strengthen the use of evidence in their own jurisdictions?

We get perspective on those questions from Ron Haskins, the author (with Greg Margolis) of Show Me the Evidence: Obama’s Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy. The book describes the development and implementation of six evidence-based social policy initiatives undertaken by the Obama administration, spanning areas such as education, teen pregnancy, employment and training, and health. He also published a related opinion piece in the New York Times.

He is a former White House and congressional advisor on social policy issues. Today he is a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution where he co-directs the Center on Children and Families as well as the Budgeting for National Priorities Project.

Web extras: Ron Haskins discusses the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, one of the six evidence-based social policy initiatives he discusses in his book. [click here]

The U.S. Department of Education has made important advances in recent years in encouraging evidence-based grant making, including focusing a larger share of discretionary (a.k.a. competitive) grant dollars on approaches backed by rigorous evidence of effectiveness and facilitating more evidence building among grantees. What lessons does the Department provide other public agencies at the federal, state and local levels in terms of strengthening evidence-based grant-making?

We explore that question with Jim Shelton (@JIMSEDU), the Deputy Secretary of Education, who has been a strong advocate for the greater use of evidence to learn and do what works. Previously he led the Office of Innovation and Improvement at the Department, managing a portfolio that included most of the Department’s competitive programs, including the Investing in Innovation Fund (i3). Prior to that, he was the program director for education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Web extras: Jim Shelton discusses the type of incentives that can be used to encourage (or require) grant applicants to use or build evidence, including on the front end (at the application stage) and on the back end (program evaluation requirements). [click here]

Update: In May 2016, two years after leaving the Obama Administration in 2014, it was announced that Jim Shelton would lead the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan.

Evidence-based policy and public sector innovation are sometimes seen as oppositional, but new efforts in the U.S. federal government have helped to bridge that divide, encouraging the use of both evidence and innovation. This brief video draws on that experience to provide five insights for federal, state and local policymakers.

Those insights include:

• Ensure everyone (especially innovators) understands the value of rigorous program evaluation
• Frame evidence-building as a tool for learning, not just an “up or down” verdict
• Use a behavioral insights team to strengthen a culture of experimentation, even in parts of government that are not used to trying out new ways of operating.
• Replace traditional grant programs with tiered-evidence grants, also known as innovation funds
• Bridge “silos” within agencies by connecting experts to address key challenges

While there’s a lot of buzz about “big data” these days, today’s interview looks beyond the buzz to examine concrete examples of how leading cities are using data and analytics to produce tangible improvements to outcomes and save money. These cities are linking data across agencies while protecting privacy, analyzing patterns and using predictive analytics, using data to target services or enforcement to get better results, and maintaining a strong focus on outcomes and not just activities.

To learn more, we’re joined by one of the nation’s experts on public management and leadership. Stephen Goldsmith (@GoldsmithOnGov) has served as the Mayor of Indianapolis and as Deputy Mayor of New York City. He is currently a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he directs Data-Smart City Solutions initiative. His new book, co-authored by Susan Crawford, is The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance (also see the website).

How do you run effective meetings? Form a productive and trusted relationship with your boss, the Secretary of an agency? Deal productively with the media? Or help lead an agency or division through a time of external political upheaval? You might not see these topics on a syllabus in graduate school, yet they are critical to bring a successful agency leader.

To gain insights into these topics, we’re joined by a seasoned public manager who has served in senior leadership roles as both a political appointee and a career civil servant. JoAnna Richard is the former Deputy Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce, under then-Governor Jim Doyle and Secretary Roberta Gassman. In that role, from 2003 to 2010, she was responsible for the internal day-to-day operations of a department of 1,600 employees and budget of nearly $2 billion. Today she is in a career (non-political) role, as the Deputy Division Administrator at the Department’s Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.

Web extras: Joanna Richard discusses how, as Deputy Secretary, she oversaw the operations of five divisions through weekly check-in meetings [click here] and she shares her reflections of how to work effectively with a governor’s office [click here]

How can partnerships between the public sector and academic researchers help programs and policies to achieve significantly better results? To explore that question, we’re joined by someone who has successfully built bridges between academia and government through a range of federal, state and local projects. Carolyn Heinrich is a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of their Center for Health and Social Policy.

In the interview, we discuss lessons from a research-to-practice collaboration funded by the Institute of Education Sciences at the Department of Education. It involved six large urban school districts (Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin and Dallas) and focused on improving the performance of supplementary educational services.

In recent years, New Mexico has become a leader in using cost-benefit analysis to inform policy and budget decisions. The state is part of the Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative that has helped New Mexico build capacity to do this work. In particular, the legislature is able to produce analyses for legislators — think “consumer reports,” but for public policy — showing which policy options or existing programs have the most bang for the buck.

How can the public sector, including school districts, make the most of opportunities to learn what works — in other words, to fill knowledge gaps about effective policies and practices? In this interview, we discuss on an important tool for doing that: opportunistic experiments. These experiments, i.e., randomized controlled trials (RCTs), are “opportunistic” because they focus on policy or program changes that are already being planned (not changes done specifically for a study) and typically use administrative data that are already being collected. As a result, they can be lower disruption and lower cost than traditional experiments. In short, they’re a way for public leaders to do more experimentation and learning.

To get an overview of opportunistic experiments, we’re joined by Peter Schochet of Mathematica Policy Research, who is a nationally known expert on rigorous program evaluations. Earlier this year, Mathematica authored a how-to guide to using opportunistic experiments in education, as well as a guide specifically for school district leaders and principals, both funded and published by the U.S. Department of Education.