The great evaluator.

• Author: Kaminsky, Jonathan
• Position: STAFF PROFILE: STEVE AOS

Steve Aos helps lawmakers in Washington be shrewd stewards of taxpayers' money. His methods may be coming to a statehouse near you.

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On a May morning shortly after the Washington Legislature has concluded its regular session, a trim, soft-spoken man in his early 60s welcomes a visitor to his office a few blocks from the Capitol.

One wall is taken up by dozens of oversized three-ring binders with titles like "Drugs & Labor Market" and "Mental Health Model Parameters." The other is filled with tomes ranging in topic from criminology to econometrics. Reading material aside, the simple desk, austere swivel chair and second-story view of Olympia's unglamorous downtown do not suggest the workplace of one of the most celebrated minds in evidence-based policymaking.

But Steve Aos, director of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy--an entity with the responsibility of answering specific policy questions posed by the Legislature--has led to a transformation in the way state lawmakers think about funding a broad array of government programs.

In so doing, Aos (sounds like dose) has attracted the attention of the MacArthur Foundation and the Pew Center on the States, which have embarked on an ambitious, seven-figure effort to replicate his method in 14 other states, and counting.

Asked about the high level of interest his work--especially in criminal justice has generated beyond Olympia, Aos smiles graciously. (He has lectured on his research methods 243 times, to audiences as far afield as the United Kingdom and Australia.) It is "nice and gratifying," he says.

"It's more exciting to me that it's being used to the degree it is in Washington state," he says. "You have an interest in getting better outcomes and using taxpayer dollars more efficiently, making public policy work better, in your own place."

A Translator

Aos' primary role is to bridge the disparate worlds of academic researchers and political decision makers by distilling and interpreting the findings of the former for use by the latter.

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It's hard to find anyone willing to speak ill of how he does it. Senator Bruce Dammeier (R), vice chair of the Early Learning and K-12 Education Committee, is effusive in his praise of Aos. The institute's research "has been really important" in guiding lawmakers' thinking on a range of education issues, he says, including informing his position that teachers' advanced degrees subsidized by the state must be specific in nature to stand the best chance of boosting student outcomes.

Senator Jim Hargrove, a notoriously prickly six-term Democrat and former chairman of the Senate Human Services and Corrections Committee, agrees. The institute, he says, "has been crucial in not only gathering the results of the programs that we've been doing, but also in looking at national research and bringing us models for programs that are...