While many federal agencies have been building and increasing their use of research-based evidence in funding and other policy decisions, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is considered one of the leaders. Programs within ACF’s purview are wide-ranging, including Head Start, child care, child support, child welfare, adolescent pregnancy prevention, and many others.
How is evidence being built and used for these programs? Where are these programs headed? We asked Naomi Goldstein, Director of ACF’s Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE).
SIRC: Let’s start with the big picture. Very early on, the Obama administration made a point of emphasizing evidence in federal programs, including both building the existing evidence base and using that evidence where it is available. Earlier this year, your office published an updated evaluation policy in the Federal Register that reflected that same dual focus. Can you tell us more about ACF’s strategy for building and using evidence in its programs?
Naomi Goldstein: Actually ACF has a long history of building and using evidence under many administrations, with the longest track record in the areas of welfare and early childhood programs. A recent book called Fighting for Reliable Evidence describes “forty-five years of uninterrupted, large-scale random-assignment studies that assessed the effectiveness of [welfare] reform initiatives.” Full disclosure, the authors are Howard Rolston, my predecessor as director of ACF’s Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, and Judy Gueron, the former president of MDRC, a firm that has done many evaluations under contract to OPRE.
This history is worth mentioning for a few reasons. First, building knowledge to improve social programs is a long-term enterprise. While some questions can be answered quickly, in other cases evaluations may take years to plan and carry out. Just as important, really robust, useful knowledge requires ongoing portfolios of work, not just one-off investigations of isolated questions. Third, it takes time to develop both the capacity for rigorous, relevant evaluation, and a broad culture that values evidence. ACF has been recognized by the Government Accountability Office as an agency with a “mature evaluation capacity” and an “evaluation culture.”
It’s because of that history, capacity, and culture that ACF and OPRE have been able to respond to the administration’s emphasis on evidence. In the last several years we have taken on new activities related to teen pregnancy prevention, home visiting, health professions training pathways for low-income people, and other areas. Ron Haskins and Greg Margolis of the Brookings Institution pointed this out in their recent book, Show Me the Evidence, when they noted that “OPRE was well suited for the evaluation role [in home visiting] because of its long history of rigorous evaluation.”
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