Evidence-Based Policy: The Movement, the Goals, the Issues, the Promise

• Published date: 01 July 2018
• Author: Ron Haskins
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716218770642
• Date: 01 July 2018
• Subject Matter: Introduction

8 ANNALS, AAPSS, 678, July 2018

DOI: 10.1177/0002716218770642

Evidence-Based

Policy: The

Movement, the

Goals, the

Issues, the

Promise

By

RON HASKINS

770642ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYEVIDENCE-BASED POLICY: MOVEMENT, GOALS, ISSUES, PROMISE

research-article2018

Keywords: evidence-building; evidence-based policy-

making; social programs; social science

Evidence is facts or other information that

help us to determine whether something is

true or false. When applied to programs designed

to increase human well-being, evidence allows

us to decide whether the program produces its

intended impacts. For the past decade or two,

both federal and state governments— and even

several big cities—have been experiencing

what might be called an evidence-based upris-

ing that is helping them to select or develop

effective social and educational programs and

then improve them. This volume of The

ANNALS is designed to provide a survey of the

field of evidence-based practices and policy-

making in articles written by some of its most

notable practitioners. All the authors and the

editor are fans of evidence-based policy, but

most of us are well aware that we have miles to

go before we can argue that the field has been

proven to consistently improve the nation’s

policies and show clear progress in reducing

the nation’s social problems, most of which are

complex and resistant to amelioration.

Correspondence: RHASKINS@brookings.edu

Ron Haskins is a senior fellow and holds the Cabot

Family Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings

Institution, where he codirects the Center on Children

and Families. Haskins previously cochaired the

Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission, appointed

by Speaker Paul Ryan. He is the coauthor of Show Me

the Evidence: Obama’s Fight for Rigor and Evidence

in Social Policy (Brookings Institution Press 2015) and

the author of Work over Welfare: The Inside Story of

the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (Brookings Institution

Press 2006). Together with Isabel Sawhill, Haskins was

awarded the Moynihan Prize from the AAPSS in 2016

for being a champion of the public good and advocate

for public policy based on social science research.

EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY: MOVEMENT, GOALS, ISSUES, PROMISE 9

The Rise of Evidence-Based Policy: Why Now?

A number of factors have contributed to the rise of the evidence-based move-

ment; I want to emphasize only three. The first is that the social sciences have

advanced sufficiently to be able to provide evidence that is useful for policy for-

mulation. The field (economic and behavioral scientists who plan and study social

interventions) has learned how to conduct experiments under real-world circum-

stances and to accurately determine whether programs designed to reduce social

problems such as gaps in school achievement, juvenile delinquency, or teen

pregnancy actually do so. This issue is discussed at several points in this volume

(especially the Orr contribution), but the message to emphasize is that we have a

set of scientific methods, the most important and useful of which is the random

assignment experiment, which allow the field to determine in a reliable way

whether our social programs are effective. Without this capacity, it would be

nearly impossible to fix social problems—and to know when we are doing so.

These methodological and scientific advances are noteworthy, but they are

also conditional: as the Knox, Hill, and Berlin article in this volume shows, once

a social program has been found to produce positive impacts, replicating the

program in new settings is usually difficult. One response to this challenge is that

some scientists and organizations require that a social program be successful in

at least two settings before declaring it an evidence-based program. If the

multiple- settings criteria were more broadly employed, we would have many

fewer programs that have been determined to be evidence-based. The Knox,

Hill, and Berlin article, as explained, presents a creative and comprehensive

method for attacking the problem of replication. Meanwhile, it should be granted

that the failure to replicate is a serious threat to developing successful programs.

The failure to replicate is the Achilles heel of the evidence-based movement.

The second of the three factors contributing to the rise of the evidence-based

movement is that state and local governments have now accumulated a critical

mass of evidence-based programs. A good source to find examples of these pro-

grams is the website of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, active between

2008 and 2015 when it was halted because its president, Jon Baron (an author in

this volume), left to become a vice president of the Laura and John Arnold

Foundation. However, the coalition’s website is still being maintained.1 Baron

identified the evidence-based programs by assembling an advisory board of

experts who reviewed mostly random assignment evaluations of social programs

across eleven domains of programs, such as education, employment and training,

and health care. The experts evaluated the quality of the research design and the

significance of the findings of a few hundred social programs over these years and

determined whether the programs could be considered evidence-based. Over

the nearly eight years of the project, only twenty-two programs in eleven areas of

policy were determined to be evidence-based. The J-Pal program at MIT, which

is featured in this volume (Chupein and Glennerster), adds many more examples

of programs that are shown by rigorous experiments to have significant impacts.

There are also numerous clearinghouses that focus on specific domains of social

policy that review evidence on social programs in that domain. The Institute of