Gathering evidence is important if you’re trying to decide how to improve government, but you’d better build stories atop the data if you want anything to actually happen.
That was the message given by two former federal officials and the Portsmouth city manager in a session designed to encourage governments to adopt a so-called “moneyball” approach when deciding which policies to pursue.
“Politics is shaped by the stories that people tell. . . . Getting moving stories that are associated with the evidence is as important as the evidence itself,” said Jim Shelton, the former deputy secretary of education under President Obama.
Shelton joined Ron Haskins, a senior advisor on welfare policy to former president George W. Bush, and John Bohenko, city manager of Portsmouth, for the free session at the Warren Rudman Center for Justice at UNH Law School. It drew some 50 people, including at least a half-dozen legislators, who heard about the need to objectively evaluate the results of government actions.
“We spend money on junky programs that have no evidence of success,” Haskins said.
Further, he noted, even when evidence exists, it can be hard to change policies. He pointed to DARE, a long-running program in which police officers go to schools and talk about the dangers of drug use.
“It sounds great,” Haskins said. “Then we started getting great studies about DARE, and it just doesn’t work. . . . It doesn’t accomplish what it tries to accomplish.”
Despite that, he said, funding for DARE continues because people like the idea of police officers interacting with students.
Haskins went on to argue that his experience with the Bush administration shows that government can accomplish good things even against difficult problems like teen pregnancy, which has fallen throughout the country for years, as long as it evaluates programs and is willing to make change when evidence supports it. That is where good stories come in, to help persuade the public and policy-makers.
The session, co-sponsored by the Carsey School of Public Policy at UNH, was prompted by the book Moneyball for Government, which features essays from a number of people, including U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte.
The name “moneyball” comes from a book and subsequent movie about a data-driven approach used by the Oakland Athletics baseball team in 2002, when success with a relatively low-paid team surprised opponents. Moneyball for Government was released by Results for America, a nonpartisan group that wants government to take a similar approach.
David Medina, co-founder of Results for America and moderator of the discussion, acknowledged the difficulty, starting with spending money on test results.
The tough choice that legislators face, he said is this: “Are you going to fund an evaluation, or are you going to help more kids, help more homeless?”
Shelton agreed. “The hardest dollars to raise are the dollars to evaluate. . . . Policy makers get credit for not spending on evaluation.”
The panel also agreed that evaluating government policies can be harder than evaluating something straightforward, such as which of two web ads draws more clicks.
Bohenko of Portsmouth mentioned an ongoing battle between many communities around Great Bay and federal environmental officials over which nutrients should be measured, and how they should be judged, when deciding about future wastewater treatment requirements.
And all agreed that while many government officials and groups seeking government funding have learned to adopt moneyball-type jargon, their actions may not follow suit.
“Beware of people who come before you and say their project is evidence-based, because everybody is saying that,” Haskins said. The speakers agreed that a lack of standards about how evaluations should take place can complicate the situation.