Jordan Weissmann is
Slate ’s senior business and economics
correspondent.
Creating an Opportunity
Society: 1027_opportunity_society_presentation.pdf
http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2009/creatinganopportunitysociety
IFS-ForRicherForPoorer-Final_Web.pdf
Executive Summary
T he standard portrayals of
economic life for ordinary Americans
and their families paint a picture of stagnancy, even decline,
amidst rising income inequality or joblessness. But rarely does the public
conversation about the changing economic fortunes of Americans and their
families look at questions of family structure. This is an important oversight
because, as this report shows, changes in family formation and stability are
central to the changing economic landscape of American families, to the
declining economic status of men, and to worries about the health of the
American dream.
This study documents five key findings about the relationships
between family patterns and
economic well-being in America.
1– The retreat from marriage—a retreat that has
been concentrated among lower-income
Americans—plays a key role in the changing economic fortunes of
American family life. We
estimate that the growth in median income of families with children
would be 44 percent
higher if the United States enjoyed 1980 levels of married
parenthood today. Further, at least
32 percent of the growth in family-income inequality since 1979
among families with children
and 37 percent of the decline in men’s employment rates during
that time can be linked to the
decreasing number of Americans who form and maintain stable,
married families.
2– Growing up with both parents (in an intact
family) is strongly associated with more
education, work, and income among today’s young men and women. Young men and women
from intact families enjoy an annual “intact-family premium”
that amounts to $6,500 and
$4,700, respectively, over the incomes of their peers from
single-parent families.
3– Men obtain a substantial “marriage
premium” and women bear no marriage penalty
in their individual incomes, and both men and women enjoy
substantially higher family
incomes, compared to peers with otherwise similar characteristics.
For instance, men
enjoy a marriage premium of at least $15,900 per year in their
individual income
compared to their single peers.
4– These two trends reinforce each other. Growing
up with both parents increases your
odds of becoming highly educated, which in turn leads to higher
odds of being married as
an adult. Both the added education and marriage result in higher
income levels. Indeed,
men and women who were raised with both parents present and then go
on to marry
enjoy an especially high income as adults. Men and women who are
currently married
and were raised in an intact family enjoy an annual “family
premium” in their household
income that exceeds that of their unmarried peers who were raised
in nonintact families
by at least $42,000.
Growing up with both parents (in an intact family) is strongly
associated with more education, work, and income among today’s young men and women.
5– The advantages of growing up in an intact
family and being married extend across
the population. They apply about as much to blacks and Hispanics as
they do to whites.
For instance, black men enjoy a marriage premium of at least
$12,500 in their individual
income compared to their single peers. The advantages also apply,
for the most part, to
men and women who are less educated. For instance, men with a
high-school degree or
less enjoy a marriage premium of at least $17,000 compared to their
single peers.
Given the economic importance of strong and stable families, policy
makers, business
executives and owners, and civic leaders should experiment with a
range of public and private
policies to strengthen and stabilize marriage and family life in
the United States. Such efforts
should focus on poor and working-class Americans, who have been
most affected by the
nation’s retreat from marriage. Specifically:
1– Public policy should “do no harm” when it
comes to marriage. Accordingly,
policymakers should eliminate or reduce marriage penalties embedded
in many of
the nation’s tax and transfer policies designed to serve
lower-income Americans and
their families.
2– Federal and state policy should strengthen the
economic foundations of middle- and
lower-income family life in three ways: (a) increase the child
credit to $3,000 and extend
it to both income and payroll taxes; (b) expand the maximum earned
income tax credit
for single, childless adults to $1,000, increasing their
marriageability; and (c) expand
and improve vocational education and apprenticeship programs that
would strengthen
the job prospects of less-educated young adults.
3– Civic institutions—joined by a range of
private and public partners, from
businesses to state governments to public schools—should launch a
national
campaign around a “success sequence” that would encourage young
adults to
sequence schooling, work, marriage, and then parenthood. This
campaign would
stress the ways children are more likely to flourish when they are
born to married
parents with a secure economic foundation.
This report is part of the Home Economics Project, a research
effort of the American Enterprise
Institute and the Institute for Family Studies that explores
whether and how strong and stable
families advance the economic welfare of children, adults, and the
nation as a whole. The project
also examines the role, if any, that marriage and family play in
increasing individual opportunity
and strengthening free enterprise at home and abroad, as well as
their implications for public policy.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2015/06/02-space-place-race-reeves
Richard V. Reeves and Allegra
Pocinki
|
June
2, 2015 4:49pm
Space, place, race: Six policies to improve
social mobility
Place matters: that’s the main message of Professor Raj
Chetty’s latest research . This supports the findings of a rich
body of evidence from social scientists , but Chetty is able to use a
large dataset to provide an even stronger empirical foundation.
Specifically, he finds that children who move from one place to another have
very different outcomes, depending on whether they move to a low-opportunity
city or a high-opportunity one.
The local factors bearing on upward mobility chances include segregation,
housing, transportation, family formation, schools, jobs, and institutional
racism, to name but a few. So what can be done? At our
recent event featuring Professor Chetty and an expert panel, a
number of concrete policy solutions were put on the table (click on the link
to jump to that part of our discussion):
VIDEO
Target housing vouchers more effectively. Currently,
families with small children are often put on a waiting list for housing
vouchers. Chetty suggested that vouchers
should target families with younger children , who would get the most
benefit from moving, since each year of ‘childhood exposure’ counts.
In addition, Chetty pointed out that the Moving
to Opportunity project was most effective when it required
families to move to low-poverty areas; this aspect of the program should
be replicated.Build public housing in low-poverty areas, instead of
high-poverty ones. In fact, as
Chetty argued , mixed-income neighborhoods are not only beneficial to
low-income families, but can produce better outcomes
for the rich.Reform exclusionary zoning laws . The current housing
market is much more exclusionary than buyers realize. According to our
Brookings colleague Jonathan Rothwell , a free market would be better
than the
current situation (although not ideal).Better enforcement of fair housing rules by HUD. Margery
Turner of the Urban Institute pointed to a new
HUD proposed rule , Affirmatively
Furthering Fair Housing , which would require states and localities
receiving HUD funding to more effectively enforce fair housing laws.Invest in infrastructure. The Washington
Post’s Emily
Badger argued for policies that would increase transportation options
and invest
in infrastructure for the integration of neighborhoods. Moving
low-income families to better neighborhoods can improve their life
chances, but only if they have easy, affordable access to jobs.Promote school choice. Children should not be
forced to attend failing schools if their families do not have the
opportunity to move to a better area, argued Rothwell. He proposed increasing
opportunities for school choice —providing vouchers, building
charter schools, or bussing students to schools to which they would not
otherwise have access.
No single policy can do it all
Diane Bell-McKoy highlighted the scale of the challenge: what breaks
people is ‘broken systems’ in high-poverty areas like much of Baltimore.
Clearly it will take much more than a handful of policies to turn the tide
in such places. And many will only succeed if we make progress in reducing
institutional and structural racism. We can hope, along with Professor
Chetty, that simply learning about the reality of opportunity gaps in so
many U.S. cities will mean more cities
adopt such policies , and take up the challenge of promoting opportunity
across America.
Why are black Americans at greater risk
of being poor ? This is a complex and contested question, one that has
exercised scholars and politicians for decades. One of the most sensitive
issues is the relative importance of individual effort and responsibility,
compared to the impact of historic and ongoing racial discrimination. (One of
the best contributions to this field in recent years is Patrick Sharkey’s Stuck
in Place
In a
review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me , Rich
Lowry, the editor of the National Review , fires another volley in
this long-running battle. He suggests that Coates puts too much weight on
systemic racism in explaining the struggles of black Americans. What’s
needed, Lowry argues, is more focus on individual responsibility, and to stop
denying “the moral agency of blacks, who are often depicted as the products
of forces beyond their control.”
Lowry suggests that black Americans would be better served if Coates made
his readers aware of a “little secret” set out in previous
research by our colleagues, Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, which assesses
the likelihood of economic success conditional on achieving three middle class
“norms,” which they call the “success sequence.” Lowry correctly
reports that about three-quarters of Americans reach the middle class provided
that they:
Graduate from high school;
Maintain a full-time job or have a partner who does; and
Have children while married and after age 21, should they choose to
become parents.
Unlike Lowry, we are able to further breakdown the number of people who
reach the middle class or follow the norms by race using the dataset from in
the original paper by Sawhill and Haskins, updated for 2013. The bottom line
is that even when black Americans do follow all three norms, their economic
prospects are worse than whites.
Three norms: the black-white divide White Americans are significantly more likely to demonstrate all three
norms than black Americans: about 65 percent compared to 45 percent. Rates of
high school completion are similar, but whites are significantly more likely
to have a full-time job and to delay childbearing than blacks:
There are big questions here about the large race gaps in labor market
activity and family formation, which are being addressed by scholars and
policy-makers. A range of inter-related factors are at play here, involving
the education
system , the political
system , and the workings of the job
market . To take just a couple of examples, black
children attend worse schools , in part because local tax and property laws
prevent
their parents from moving to neighborhoods with better schools. There are
also stark gaps in the perceived treatment of blacks
and whites in the criminal justice system , with significant knock-on
effects for employment and family life.
Success sequence equals more success for
whites than blacks
What happens to those who do follow the norms? If Lowry is right, and black
Americans simply need to take responsibility and follow middle class norms, it
should be the case that blacks and whites who follow all the norms reach the
middle class at similar rates. The data suggest otherwise.
Among those who follow all three norms, blacks are significantly less
likely to reach the middle class than whites who do the same. About 73 percent
of whites who follow all three norms find themselves with income above 300
percent of the federal poverty line for their family size, while only 59
percent of blacks who adhere to all three norms fare equally well:
Of course, there may also be differences by race above the 300% federal
poverty line, so we delve a little deeper here. We find that blacks and whites
who follow the three norms have about the same likelihood of ending up near
the middle, with incomes three to five times the federal poverty line (about
$60,000 to $100,000 for a family of three). But white norm-followers have
better odds than their black equivalents of ending up in a more affluent
household—whites are 10 percentage points more likely, for example, to have
an income at least seven times the poverty line:
Which norms matter most? A related question is whether some of the norms matter more than others, in
terms of understanding these inequalities by race. It is hard to empirically
isolate the impact of each of the norms. But we can look at the cost of
missing any particular one. If income is mostly equal between groups of blacks
and whites who uphold two of the norms but break a third, it is suggestive
that the norm in question is less central to the inequality between groups. We
find that whites who break only one rule enjoy success at higher rates, on
average, and that breaking norms related to work and childbearing are
associated with greater inequality than not getting a high school diploma:
What about
Baltimore? The data presented so far are national; but of course there could be
significant variation between different areas, especially cities. In
Baltimore, blacks who follow the norms are much less likely to get ahead than
whites. That pattern holds up across very different cities, like Denver, New
York, and Minneapolis:
In fact, the differences hold up across many different cities. In almost
every city we examined, the proportion of blacks who follow all the norms that
reach the middle class is well below the proportion of white norm-adherents
who do so, often by 10 percentage points or more.
Promoting success for all
The debate over individual responsibility and substantive opportunity is
too simplistic. Nobody can sensibly deny the need for both. But for
policymakers committed to improving opportunity and mobility, the urgent
question is: “What are we going to do?” Most Americans of all races aspire
to the norms captured in the success sequence. But the hurdles are clearly
higher for some groups—especially black Americans—than others. And the
pay-offs from following the success sequence clearly differ by race. There
are solutions to some of these deep-rooted, systemic problems.
Implementing tried-and-tested policies does not require us to wait for an
answer to the questions Lowry poses.
New norms
A final point: the norms identified by our colleagues were based on an
analysis of what mattered in the past for middle class status in the present.
It is almost certain that these will change over time. So what might new norms
look like? First, a high school education is probably no longer sufficient;
some postsecondary education is increasingly important for attaining a
middle-class income. Not
everyone needs to go to college , but fewer and fewer middle class jobs
will be in the reach of those without some postsecondary education.
Second, there is a growing marriage gap in America than may alter the role
of marriage. Some commentators bemoan this turn of events, but in light of its
decline, maybe a better norm is that any children are intentional: as Sawhill
puts it, by design rather than by default. Whether married or not, it is clear
that children
who are intended fare better .
Last, for most people a full-time job remains an important precondition for
middle class status. But as collective recent experience demonstrates,
economic currents don’t always cooperate. Millions of people can find
themselves out of work involuntarily, rather than as a personal choice (though
for some it will be). For that reason, we need robust work
support and training programs , to ensure that those who are forced out of
work by a weak labor market will be able to sustain themselves and their
families and to avoid skill atrophy while they are unemployed.
Even if the success sequence norms need occasional recalibration to fit
changing times, racial disparities are likely to remain, and will not dissolve
simply as a result of greater individual responsibility. There are other,
deeper, factors at work.
Black Americans who meet traditional markers on the pathway to the American
Dream are still less likely to get there than white Americans. Until we break
the structural barriers that keep black Americans from reaping the benefits of
their individual responsibility, arguments about why some don’t follow norms
risk being beside the point.
Taken from Step One:
Gospel to the Ghetto
It is essential to keep things simple. The average church member
doesn’t have time to attend additional meetings or become a part of a new
committee. Efforts should be made through the existing organizations of the
church – women’s groups, Sunday school classes, youth groups. Helping the
poor should be on the agenda of most church organizations anyway.
Although excessive committees are to be avoided, careful structure is
needed. Organization of the congregation can be accomplished by establishing
task forces with clear objectives. An active chairman can supervise their
functions. Task forces don’t need to meet often. Most of their duties can be
performed informally – phone conversations, written directives, brief meetings
before or after other meetings.
A Chairman
The chairman’s task in each church is to coordinate five task forces.
The suggested task forces are as follows:
Friendship Task Forces
Research Task Force (Church Think Tank)
Skills Task Force
Ministry Task Force
Process Task Force
A Joint Effort - Additional Support Churches
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Friendship Task Forces
These task forces have the responsibility first, for relating to the
institutional leaders of the community and second, to all public servants who
want their assistance. Essentially, they are influence committees composed of
people of the congregation who have been successful in their professional
endeavors and are willing to share themselves and their abilities.
This task force should:
1)
Establish relationships with institutional leaders in the
community such as the high school principal, the police precinct captain, the
head of a welfare office, and the urban pastor. The task force should meet with
them on a monthly basis to lend support and to listen to their needs and
problems. Other friendship members would meet with individual public
servants-teachers, welfare workers, etc.
2)
Communicate these needs and problems to the research task force
(Think Tanks).
3)
Act as a constant communication link throughout the problem
solving and resource procurement process.
+++++++++++++++
Research Task Force (Church Think Tank)
This task force
represents the creative cutting edge of the congregation in such areas as
education, health, management, law enforcement, recreation, etc. It attempts to
solve the problems and needs expressed by the institutional leaders through the
activities of the friendship committees.
The Research
task force should:
1.
Develop work plans in various content areas of the think tank such
as education, jobs, etc., that can be implemented by the skills task forces of
the congregations.
2.
Respond to the requests of the institutional leaders conveyed
through the friendship task force.
3.
Tap the creative resources of the congregation to explore new
solutions to urban problems. For example:
·
·
·
+++++++++++++++++++
Skills Task
Force
This task force represents the divers work skills of the congregation
(what they do all week long). Skills members are laypersons with the practical
proficiency to implement the work plans produced by the think tank. They may be
involved in rebuilding houses, locating and creating jobs, tutoring youths,
promoting public relations, running day care centers, accounting, and performing
preventive medical assistance.
The skills task force should:
1)
Inventory the work skills of the
congregation.
2)
Implement the work plans of the
research task force or church think tanks. For example:
·
An accountant could help upgrade
the financial records of several community businesses.
·
An electrician could help with some
new wiring.
·
A lawyer could defend a youth in
court.
+++++++++++++++++++
Ministry Task Force
These individuals are responsible for ministering to the spiritual needs
of the poor, working
wherever possible through
families.
The Ministry task force should:
1)
Develop ministry teams to befriend families and to assist them in
implementing prescriptions of personal inventory teams. Ministry teams would
consist of two couples for each targeted family.
2)
Develop personal inventory teams of an educator, jobs person,
financial specialist, social worker, and spiritual person to ascertain the
comprehensive needs of a family or individual and write prescriptions based upon
work plans and think tank.
+++++++++++++++++++
Process Task Force
This task force has two major responsibilities:
1)
Quality control and evaluation of the program.
2)
Advertising and promoting the program.
Some examples
·
·
·
·
++++++++++++++++++++
A Joint Effort
No church will have sufficient resources to change an urban neighborhood
single-handedly. Nor will any one church have the diversity of gifts to
implement such a comprehensive project. Groups of congregations must work
together. This is not a legal agreement. It is simply four to seven churches
agreeing to cooperate to help the poor in a geographical neighborhood. If
someone wants to drop out or be added – so be it.
Additional Support Churches
Once four to seven churches are highly organized with task forces, other
churches can join the effort in supportive ways. These additional churches could
help by expanding the friendship teams, think tanks, work plans, spiritual
ministries and process task forces that have been created.
The purpose of this organizing effort is to give every participant a
specific task to do. Unless such a management strategy is followed, specific
skills of the layperson will never be applied to the specific needs of the urban
poor. When people live miles apart and public institutions dominate human
service delivery systems either you intensively organize assistance or you
frustrate volunteer effort. Our urban productivity will directly correspond to
our organization.
Preliminary results from the SGM show that success at any individual stage of life greatly enhances the chance of success at the next stage. For example, a child who is ready for school at age five is nearly twice as likely as one who is not to complete middle school with strong academic and social skills.4 Similar arguments from Nobel laureate James Heckman and others suggest that because of the cumulative nature of skill development, intervening earlier in the life cycle rather than later is likely to be the most effective strategy for promoting opportunity among the disadvantaged.5
docs/two_storm_panel_final_report.pdf
How to conduct a Task Force
The 3-D 's of good leadership; D ecide,
D elegate, then D isappear!
"vision without action is a dream"
Vision without action is just a dream.
A leader is someone you choose to follow to a place you would not go by
yourself.
“What one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace.”
“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you
can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you
can. As long as ever you can.”
“We should be rigorous in judging ourselves and gracious in judging
others.”
“Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing
but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone
will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on Earth.”
“Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound
of knowledge.”
John
Wesley
We need to be; holistic, comprehensive and inclusive in our roles and approaches.
All ___________ residents are safe,
healthy and productive.
Problems, roadblocks, obstacles in the way preventing the Outcome statement
from being true.
We have to serve the immediate and short-term needs, but what are we focusing
on prevention and solving the problem. Devote more personal contact,
"one-to-one" (interaction provides the best assessments)
Immediate needs
Sustainability
Prevention
Relapse/recidivism
Advocacy to change "The System"
Measurement - Results based accountability (RBA)
Break the stereotype that those working within the social services feild
don't want to solve the problems because f the job-secutrity it provides
Are we looking at the BIG PICTURE?
Inventory all of the resources in a community, (Community is the area to be
determined to affect. Could be neighborhood, municipality, region)
Assist where needed, determine who is best to provide the needed service.
(What is best? Scalability needs to be determined. You wouldn't use a
bulldozer to place dirt in a paper cup, you wouldn't use a spoon to dig a
foundation for a building)
Are we overlapping? Are we redundant, are we redundant? Department of
Redundancy Department.
Is this really a zero=sum game as many say?
being the safety net when necessary
becoming the trampoline when people are ready
looking at the Big picture by focusing on the smallest
details.
http://www.otlcampaign.org/resources/all-resources
Optimum Scalability - Working at the
right level (area of influence) to most effectively and efficiently.
The correct level of organization has to be
utilized. many local issues need to be resolved with higher level policy
changes.
The size and scope of the issue needs to be
clear.
We have municipal jurisdictions, but also,
county, regional (Greater Hartford, East of the River, catchment areas are
different for different system. State Representatives, State Senator,
Congressional Districts, etc.
Efforts with individuals, families,
neighborhoods, schools, parts of town, towns, counties, state, regional, federal
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is
for good people to stand by and do nothing.
No snowflake ever take blame for the avalanche,
no water drop ever takes blame for the flood. (we're all partly responsible)
The importance of Home Visits. More
emphasis (resources, efforts, energy) needs to be focused on meeting people
where they are. Home visits accomplish much since you get see the family where
they live, are comfortable and can be more open. If resources are then
readily available, solutions can be offered more quickly. Less planning
meetings are necessary if more "face-time" is spent with those who
need help.
A Model Code on Education and
Dignity: Presenting a Human Rights Framework for Schools Wed,
2012-08-01 The Dignity in Schools Campaign
OTL
Personal Opportunity Plan.pdf
In
the first in a series of policy proposals, the National Opportunity to Learn
Campaign advocates the creation of Personal Opportunity Plans for every student
who is one grade level or more behind in reading or math, giving them access to
the academic, social and heathcare supports they need to get back on track.
http://ct-institute.org/background.html
CIFC Background
Connecticut Institute For Communities, Inc. is a
locally based community development corporation, serving low and moderate-income
families throughout Western Connecticut. Since commencing operations in 2003,
CIFC fulfills two unique roles; A) as a "safety-net provider" of
social services and B) as an especially qualified "community
developer" of programs and projects.
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/
Policymakers and practitioners who believe that research
evidence should inform policy and practice
face several challenges. These include debates about the
standards of evidence for allocating
resources to programs, weak information on how to produce change
at scale, and concerns that
a few, well-evaluated programs will drive out others that
deserve support. Such
challenges threaten to undermine 30 years of progress in
learning which social
programs improve child, youth, and family outcomes. The purpose
of this article is to describe a strategy that can inform these and other issues
facing evidence-based
policymaking.
Take, for example, programs and policies aimed at improving the
well-being of
young people. The standard evidence-based position assumes
widespread improvement
for children and youth will occur through “scaling-up”
brand-name programs,
models, and organizations that have produced effects in prior
evaluations. Do more
of what works and less of what does not; the idea seems prudent
and has political
appeal. There is currently great interest in this approach in
the public sector,
fueled in part by the availability of federal stimulus funds
geared toward scaling up
evidence-based programs. Examples include the White House’s
Social Innovation
Fund (SIF), the Department of Education’s Investing in
Innovation Fund (i3), and
funding from the Department of Health and Human Services to
replicate evidence-based
home visitation and teenage pregnancy prevention programs. These
initiatives
are bold in scope and in their commitment to doing what works.
Prior history shows that programs that are effective at small
scale have trouble
maintaining that effectiveness when replicated more broadly.
Recognizing this, the
new initiatives include funding to support building the capacity
of existing organizations
to implement the evidence-based programs and, for larger
projects, strong
evaluation designs to test the effectiveness of the program
at scale. This is fortunate because it creates a foundation for
providing guidance on questions for which we currently have
no conclusive answers:
(1) What policies and other conditions
improve the likelihood that programs will have positive effects?
(2) What organizations or other program-level policies and
practices
lead to positive effects?
Much research and development work is focused on clarifying
the effects
created by schools, youth organizations, and programmatic
interventions. My argument is that too
little of this
work examines the
conditions, policies, and practices that produce
such effects.
In
today’s vernacular, we need more research
attention paid to why
and under
what conditions things
work as the missing ingredients in the “what works” agenda.
The good news is that the launch of the various federal
initiatives creates an exceptional opportunity to improve our answers to these why
and when
questions.
Understanding the answers
to these questions would improve our ability to expand effective
programs in a way that maintains their effectiveness. Using the new initiatives to pursue these questions has the added
advantage of leveraging them to more effectively justify their cost in the current fiscal environment. We will learn about the
effectiveness of this work, while also gaining enough knowledge to do even better work the next time. It is an opportunity we should
not waste. Before describing how policymakers might pursue the learning agenda, I will explain why I am concerned.
Scale-Up in Practice
For the past seven years, I have been president of the William
T.
Grant Foundation. Part of running a mid-sized foundation
strategically
is operating in a way that is flexible and complements
the work of larger public and private funders. Given our focus
on vulnerable youth, those funders include research agencies
such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the
Institute
of Education Sciences (IES), as well as private funders such as
the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the Spencer Foundation,
and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Historically, we, along with our colleagues, have pursued
scale-up strategies as we tried to improve outcomes for
vulnerable
children, youth, and families. One version of scale-up
assumes that researchers will develop and incubate new
strategies
or programs, test those programs under limited circumstances,
and then work with policymakers and practitioners to
implement and test them at scale. This approach is rooted in the
tradition of phased clinical trials in medicine, and NIH and IES
favor it. The development of David Olds’s Nurse-Family
Partnership
is a good example, and congressional staff referenced that
program heavily when the decision was made to scale-up home
visitation as part of health care reform.
A closely related strategy, perhaps best exemplified currently
by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, is to search for
promising
organizations, encourage strong evaluations of organizational
impact, and then expand the organizations that have
promising evaluation results. This approach is similar to the
strategy businesses use to expand their services and market
share.
Not surprisingly, it is advocated by many of the management
consulting firms that are currently working with philanthropic
organizations. While NIH has funded many good evaluations of
researcher-created programs, there are fewer strong studies of
practitioner-developed programs, in part because many
organizational
leaders have avoided strong tests of their organizational
impact. Yet, there are examples—the BELL Accelerated Learning
Summer Program (BELL Summer) and the Carerra Adolescent
Pregnancy Prevention Program are two.
The two scale-up approaches share a commitment to strong
research and evaluation as the basis for assessing promise. This
work has led to the identification of model programs and
organizations
that are effective at small scale, many of which are cataloged
on websites created and maintained by public agencies
and some nonprofit organizations. The most ambitious example
of such a site, and perhaps the best, is the What Works
Clearinghouse (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/) sponsored by the federal
Department of Education. Other prominent examples include
the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy’s Social Programs That
Work (http://evidencebasedprograms.org/wordpress/), Johns
Hopkins University’s Best Evidence Encyclopedia (http://www. bestevidence.org/), and the University of Colorado’s
Blueprints
for Violence Prevention (http://www.colorado.edu/cspv/blueprints/).
Concerns about the Scale-Up Model
Despite the research community’s ability to identify promising
programs, there is almost no evidence that it is possible to
take
such programs to scale in a way that maintains their
effectiveness.
A recent report from the National Academies underscores
this concern.
The 2009 report Preventing
Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders Among Young People: Progress and Possibilities concludes
that substantial progress had been made in identifying
efficacious interventions during the past 15 years, but that “thus far, however, preventive interventions have not been widely
implemented in schools and communities and have done little to reduce behavioral health problems in American communities”
(p. 297). While calling for more research on how to “implement
and disseminate” interventions, the report also quotes a paper by Dean Fixsen and colleagues that synthesized what is known
about the problems of implementation and replication of model programs. Fixsen and colleagues argue that “successful
implementation is synonymous with coordinated change of system, organization, program, and practice levels,” and note that
such coordination rarely exists.
Most current scale-up initiatives, including those the Obama
administration is launching, are consistent with the Fixsen analysis: Better support, incentives, and infrastructure will
lead to wider diffusion of model programs and organizations. Such improvements may lead to better results. However, the mixed
success of prior efforts sends a strong message that changes via replication of evidence-based programs may
never be enough to produce widespread improvements for vulnerable youth without additional adjustments
to the strategy.
Programs as One
Influence on Youth
No one is satisfied with the current
outlook for youth in the United States.
Too many young people lack the skills
necessary for achieving success in
school, work, and life. As we try to
improve outcomes by increasing the
availability and number of effective
programs, it might be useful to consider
how such programs fit into the larger array of forces that
affect young people. Figure 1 depicts how youth development is
influenced by what happens in the daily environments where
youth spend their time: classrooms, households, neighborhoods,
community-based programs, and in informal activities
with peers and others. What happens in any one of these daily
settings is influenced by what happens in the others (e.g.,
events
at home influence what goes on in school and vice versa).
Powerful secular trends and unpredictable historical events
shape these daily settings, as do public policies. For example,
shifts in immigration patterns alter who is in our classrooms,
an oil spill affects household incomes, and the evolving labor
market influences how much the skills developed in a youth
employment program are rewarded in the job market. Similarly,
policies shape the nature of programs in intended and unintended
ways (e.g., changes in accountability policies are meant
to improve what goes on in schools but may also encourage
more test preparation in lieu of other teaching).
Figure 1 is a useful reminder that we ought to be modest in
our expectations of any scale-up effort that does not transform
daily life, and programs are unlikely to be as transformative
as the policies, secular trends, and historical events that
shape
youth and their daily settings. This makes it all the more
impressive
when evidence-based programs do beat the odds and make
a difference for young people. (The criteria used in the social
sciences to confer “evidence-based” on a program requires
that
it produce improvements in youth outcomes greater than those
that would have happened without the program.)
Documenting this difference is not as difficult as it may seem.
The best evaluation designs for measuring program effects
(known as field experiments) use a lottery to allocate access to
a program when it has excess demand. The lottery creates two
equivalent groups, one who can attend the program under study
and another who can attend similar programs in the community.
The two groups are followed, and when the outcomes for
the two groups differ at a level not likely to be due to chance,
the
difference is logically attributed to the difference in
experiences
created by one group having access to the program of interest.
Learn When and Why Programs Are Effective
In the past 30 years, we have become much better at
understanding
how to conduct such lottery-based studies in “real-world”
settings to produce accurate estimates of program effects. Such
studies have made it possible to have a coherent discussion of
what it means to be “evidence-based.” However, no single
study
tells us much about the conditions under which a program is
effective, the policies that help it produce results, the
capacities
that affect an organization’s ability to implement an
innovation,
or the staff practices that directly improve youth outcomes.
If a program produces uniformly positive effects across multiple
locations, these questions are less critical. However, that is
rarely the case. Summaries of such program evaluations indicate
that, although programs show outstanding results in some
cases, most often they produce no net gain over the status quo,
and occasionally, innovative programs are less effective than
existing alternatives in the community.
Learning more about why and under what conditions programs
are effective is possible once you have reliable estimates
of those effects. In addition, you need good measures of the
conditions, policies, and practices within and outside the
program
that might
influence
effects, along with a large number
of lottery-based studies in which such measures can be used.
With the data gathered from such measures, it is possible to
look across the individual studies and find the conditions,
policies, and practices that predict effects.
Researchers have productively applied this strategy in a
number of prior efforts. For example, in 2003, MDRC’s Howard Bloom and colleagues pooled the information from three
large multi-site studies of the effects of welfare-to-work
strategies on participant earnings. In these studies, different local
welfare offices all used lotteries to decide if welfare
recipients
should receive innovative (but untested) services or services as
usual, creating 59 small-scale experimental studies (i.e., one
per
office). Bloom and his colleagues then examined whether or not
the condition of the local labor market predicted the impact of
the innovative services on earnings (it did).
Prior to the Bloom analysis, some argued that innovative
services
for welfare recipients would be more effective when the
unemployment rate was low, implying available jobs for
participants
if the services improved their motivation and preparation
for those jobs. Others thought that the welfare-to-work
programs would have less effect in such an environment, given
that it would be relatively easy for clients to get jobs without
help. It was also possible that people receiving welfare when
unemployment was low would be particularly hard to employ
and therefore difficult to help.
Bloom and colleagues found support for the first theory—
welfare-to-work programs did better in labor markets in which
unemployment was low. In their analysis, they found that the
average program increased participant earnings by $879 during
a two-year follow-up, but that a 1 percentage point increase in
the local labor market’s unemployment rate reduced that impact
on earnings by $94, with all other factors equal. While the
study
could not tell us why the local labor market mattered, such a
finding is useful for situating such innovative programs and
predicting their effects across communities.
Bloom and his colleagues also examined whether certain welfare-
to-work practices were more effective than others—at least
in the short term. Some were. The programs that emphasized
quick job entry increased the average effect on participant
earnings
($879, as noted above) by another $720, while those that
emphasized basic education as preparation for work reduced the
average earnings by $16. All estimates were larger than those
expected to occur by chance.
Joseph Durlak and Roger Weissberg recently produced similar
work in their review of the effects of after-school programs.
They synthesized the results of 66 evaluations of after-school
programs, looking at the effects on nine different measures of
youth performance including social, behavioral, and academic
performance. On average, they found positive effects on a number
of important youth outcomes assessed in the different
evaluations.
However, a subset of programs created large effects,
and many programs created no net effects beyond those of a
comparison group of youth. In trying to explain these results,
Durlak and Weissberg identified four characteristics common
to the subset of effective programs—each had a sequenced
approach, got youth actively involved in learning, was focused
on a few goals, and had activities explicitly tied to those
goals.
The group of programs that had the SAFE characteristics (i.e.,
sequenced, active, focused, and explicit) created statistically
significant
impacts in all nine outcome categories assessed, while
the cluster of programs that did not have all four
characteristics
had no positive effects.
As promising as this work is, it is not common, in part
because investigators are limited to analyzing data originally
collected in earlier studies. For example, Durlak and Weissberg
were able to reliably code for the presence or absence of the
SAFE characteristics, but it seems clear that such
characteristics
do not affect youth directly. Rather, they are in some way
related to the daily experiences that young people have in
programs.
It is possible that the positive effects are caused by the
staff practices created in SAFE programs, and thus improving
certain staff practices is the best path to achieving better
youth
outcomes. At this point, we do not know, because almost none
of the prior after-school studies generated data on staff
practices
at the point-of-service. Those that did collect such information
did not gather comparable data in the “control” condition,
so it
is impossible to know how the experiences of the two groups of
youth differed over time.
A Learning Agenda for the Scale-Up Movement
Currently, it appears that federal agencies will use their
various
scale-up initiatives to produce reliable information on whether
or not individual programs produce positive effects for young
people when they are extended to new participants,
organizations,
and communities. However, these agencies are positioned
perfectly to learn more. For example, in the Department of
Education’s
$650 million i3 fund, a large number of innovative programs—
with promising but limited track records—will receive
$30 million each to try to replicate their positive effects at
scale
in multiple locations. Given the priorities stated for i3, many
of these efforts will focus on ways to improve teacher
effectiveness
or help failing schools. After a few years, it is likely that
the
evaluations will produce the usual results—each innovation
succeeded
in some instances, but not in others. It is possible to take
a page from analysts such as Bloom et al. and Durlak and
Weissberg
and increase our knowledge about why
that happened. I
will outline one possible process for gaining that knowledge.
After funding decisions are made for each of the new
initiatives, it is likely that federal and state funders will require a subset of grantees—probably those with larger grants—to
conduct strong impact evaluations of their expansions. The funders should then foster a consensus on common data to be collected
across the impact evaluations. Progress could be made with
relatively little information.
The following questions are at the heart of current debates.
For each question, I’ve added a suggested way to collect good
information to form the answer. Because we are trying to predict the patterns of effects across studies (and across sites within
a sample study), this information should be collected prior to the beginning of the scale-up efforts (i.e., at “baseline”).
1. How does the rigor and extent of the prior research evidence
of effectiveness predict effectiveness at scale? (Capture
the rigor and extent of prior evidence in the review process.)
32 Pathways
Winter 2011
2. Are programs more effective with certain youth and
families than others? (Gather
common measures of participants across evaluations at baseline.)
3. Are certain scale-up strategies more likely than others
to produce effects at scale? (Categorize
the planned scale-up strategies along practical dimensions, such as how expensive and how prescriptive they are.)
4. Are scaled-up programs more likely to make a difference
in some environments than others? (Capture
relevant baseline information on environmental factors that might influence effects, such as the mobility of youth or
the extent to which services analogous to the innovation are available in the community.)
5. Are certain program approaches more likely than
others to produce effects at scale? (Categorize
program strategies along practical dimensions, such as the degree to which they are highly structured, their cost, or their
presumed intensity and duration of services.)
6. Are there organizational policies, capacities, or practices
that predict effectiveness when an organization
replicates an evidence-based program? (Capture
baseline information on proxies for organizational capacity, such as the stability of funding, leadership, and line
staff.)
Not all of these data will be easy to acquire. Therefore, I
would encourage a disciplined process in which a few items related to these questions are measured well. While some of
this will require document review or a brief survey (e.g.,
information on financial stability, the baseline information on
participants), much of it will be accessible from the applicants’ proposals (e.g., the program approach, the scale-up plan).
I understand that there is often a large difference in what is
planned and what occurs and that organizations and innovations change over time in ways that may influence the effectiveness
of the innovative program. That variation will be captured by local evaluators and can be used to explain results. However,
such information, gathered after the fact, is not available to funders or program operators when they are making their
plans and deciding on how to allocate finite resources. My
suggestion is to gather additional information earlier to be used after the study is complete, in order to better understand the
variation in implementation and impacts that is likely to occur within and across the various scaled innovations. How much
evidence should funders require before supporting a program expansion? And what approaches to expansion produce the
best results? We can learn the answers to these questions with a little effort and foresight.
My suggestions do require some cross-study planning and
agreement, though not much. The Bloom et al. experience shows that it is possible for one firm (in this example,
MDRC) to collect such information across multiple states and many local programs, and the Durlak and Weissberg review proves
that it is possible to extract common information from disparate evaluations done by different teams. The new initiatives
could provide consistent data across a large number of
individual studies in many locations. This is exactly the scenario needed to permit the analyses I am suggesting.
Such coordination may produce additional benefits. Program
developers frequently talk about the features that they believe distinguish their particular innovation and rarely
acknowledge that there may be a set of strategies and practices common to all effective youth programs whether or not they
have been rigorously evaluated. For example, in a recent
compendium of observational measures of youth program quality, Nicole Yohalem and Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom (of The Forum
for Youth Investment) examined the content of nine measures that are widely used to assess effective staff practices in
youth programs. Although the measures varied slightly (e.g., some measured program management practices while others
did not), all of them measured six common features of staff’s work with youth:
(1) the supportiveness of relationships;
(2) the program environment’s safety;
(3) the predictability of
the program’s structure and routines; and practices that produced
(4) positive engagement,
(5) positive social norms, and
(6) the opportunity to build new skills. The recognition of these
commonalities is shaping subsequent work in the after-school field, as we try to identify the practices that produce good
results. It is the sort of information we need in all youth
fields to move beyond an endless stream of model-specific impact evaluations.
Answering the Big Why
I have argued that the results from scaling-up evidence-based
programs have not been encouraging, in part because we do
not know the conditions that lead to positive effects or what
distinguishes the practices of programs that produce such
effects from those that do not. My suggestions will not provide
definitive answers to these questions. At the end, we will
still have correlates of impact results, and we will not know
if these correlates are causal agents. However, the ability to
examine how well factors such as program context, content,
and practices predict youth-level effects would put us far ahead
of our current level of understanding. It is difficult to create
a
change in a young person’s experiences that has an impact on
their long-term well-being. Thanks to rigorous evaluations of
the effects of social programs, under some circumstances, we
have found such effects. We need to use the scale-up initiatives
to help us learn why.
Robert C. Granger is President of the William T. Grant
Foundation.
Scaling Up
What do we know for sure?
socially.
What makes a successful student, successful
parent, successful family,
"The most important decision a child
can make to guarantee their success, is to carefully choose the right family to
be born into."
A wise man once told me, "Bryan I can tell
you're seeking answers. What you really need to do is to ask the right
questions, because no one is."
I didn't realize it at the time, that this
really was wisdom.
I thought back to the O. J. Simpson
trial. I along with many people were glued to the TV watching the trial
day in and day out. It became an obsession and I'm not really sure why. I know
for me it was the first time I had ever observed a trial in progress, especially
such a heinous and brutal crime. When the verdict was announced, it was an
incredibly interesting moment based on people's reactions. Not only did it push
to the forefront the racial divide that we wanted to believe didn't still exist
in America, but it made many people really begin to wonder
Who has been offering solutions?, what are they
what will be achieved
What is the true cost of doing nothing, or
doing more of the same or doing something new that we know probably won't work?
Topic Issues Options Reality Obstacles Solutions
Children are
coming to school unprepared
Each level of education from
kindergarten to community College
Social
progression versus merit
Those closest to
making the correct policy are in the most difficult positions,
Education -remediation, more funding, universal
pre-school, full-day kindergarten
Family Breakdown
HELPFUL HARMFUL
INTERNAL STRENGTHS Experience
WEAKNESSES
Resistance
to change
EXTERNAL OPPORTUNITIES
Collaborations
with existing resources
THREATS
Not
being able to "turn the faucet off"
Transiency
The
"culture" - What are we learning from the media?
Page 18 of the Vernon Community Plan
C. WHAT CAN WE DO?
The Vernon Community Network and Vernon School Readiness Council
agree that a coordinated approach
involving local, regional and state partnerships is most
effective in addressing issues of abuse and neglect.
The following proposed strategies implemented locally, will make
a difference for children Birth to 8 who are
suffering and/or at risk of abuse and neglect.
1. Develop a coordinated system of response for identified
families.
a) Establish a Child
Advocacy Team (CAT), to create a collaborative approach to aid and assist
families with
complex service needs.
• Assess opportunity to redeploy existing resources
• Seek new funding
b) Capture historical (situational) responses of Vernon
Community Network to date to map future
responses.
c) Reduce barriers to participation in existing parent education
programs.
d) Implement mentoring programs, based on the Parent-Aide
model, a system
for long-term commitment to families who exhibit the risk factors connected with child
abuse and neglect.
e) Expand Nurturing Families Network screening and services in
order to identify all
families who
present
with risk factors for abuse and neglect and connect them with
services.
2. Increase the capacity of the Vernon Community Network and its
members to better meet
the needs of children and families.
a) Conduct Asset Mapping of Vernon Community Network –
individual, group and community
members
• Host a Vernon Community Network Agency Fair – increasing
awareness of existing services and
resources
• Make targeted linkages by connecting community needs to the
appropriate VCN provider or
organization.
b) Create a coordinated calendar of training and technical
assistance opportunities throughout the
community.
• Program Performance and Accountability
D. HOW WILL WE KNOW WE MADE A DIFFERENCE?
• How
much did we do?
# of community volunteers who register for mentor training.
# of VCN members who attend capacity-building sessions.
• How
well did we do it?
% of volunteers who attend all mentor training sessions.
% of VCN members who attend capacity-building sessions.
% of VCN members who participate in the development of a
coordinated system.
• Is
anyone better off?
% of trained volunteers that have increased ability to mentor
others.
% of VCN members who report using acquired capacity-building
skills in their work environment.
% of VCN members who adopt a common screening tool.
From page 56
CHILD ABUSE
& NEGLECT
Base
Investment
FY 2012-13
FY 2013-14
FY 2014-15
Additional
Detail
STRATEGY
1: Develop a coordinated system of response
for identified families.
Establish a
Child Advocacy Team (CAT), to create a collaborative
approach to aid and assist families with complex service needs.
-0-
$13,918
Coordinator/case
management position : 10hrs/week x $25/hr x 50wks+ FICA + Admin
• Assess
opportunity to redeploy existing resources
-0-
$58,100
$58,100
$58,100
Implementation
Coordinator is responsible to convene meetings
• Seek new
funding
Capture
historical (situational) responses of Vernon Community Network to date to
map future responses.
Reduce
barriers to participation in existing parent education programs.
$58,100
$58,100
$58,100
Implementation
Coordinator is responsible to convene meetings,
organize data collection and create outreach plan
Implement
mentoring programs, based on the Parent-Aide model, a system for long-term
commitment to families who exhibit the risk factors connected with child
abuse and neglect.
$58,100
$58,100
$58,100
Implementation
Coordinator coordinates with faith community & KIDSAFE CT to develop
mentor training
Expand
Nurturing Families Network screening and services in order to identify all
families who present with risk factors for abuse and neglect and connect
them with services.
$84,000
$134,000
$134,000
$134,000
ECHN current
grant funded program provides this service for fi rst-time parents deemed
at-risk
From page 70
Policy Change is difficult, often there is a villain.
If we look at the individuals, the corporations or the industry as the enemy and
treat them as such, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead we need to look at them as allies to
the solutions, we need to be reasonable and understanding . Only if we
don't get cooperation, then we have to go to the next level and publicly demand
it. If we then don't get it, do we publicly and in an organized manner
swing public opinion.
Accountability
Who is accountable or responsible in each
case? can we legislate morality?
The reason we can't reason, there are too many
agendas at play, often "hidden" agendas.
Ray
Kroc's quote, I don't know what we'll be selling in 20500, but we'll be selling
the most of them!
http://www.darientimes.com/4809/powell-what-were-those-jobs-linda-and-one-big-reform/
Having resolved for state government to take
control of as many as 25 of Connecticut’s worst-performing local schools —
that is, schools crippled by the poverty of their students — Gov. Malloy has
acknowledged in principle the real urban
issue .
It’s not economic development, which his
administration has turned into an ever-growing swamp of patronage, or mass
transportation, which his administration mocks with its Hartford-to-New Britain
“busway” project even as the Metro-North commuter railroad says that
Connecticut’s biggest mass-transit system needs “billions” of dollars in
renovations.
No, the real urban issue is child
neglect and abandonment, primarily the fatherlessness induced by the
welfare system that subsidizes it. This fatherlessness leads not only to the
school failure for which the governor heroically is taking responsibility but
also to the violence of young men who grow up as predators, violence such as
what occurred in Hartford a couple of weekends ago — nine shooting incidents
leaving two people dead and 10 injured. Some of the victims refused to cooperate
with the police, indicating that they either were involved in a criminal
undertaking themselves or that the police really can’t protect them or anyone
else in Hartford.
The intense therapy the state Education
Department plans for those failing schools will be a slow process, involving
just a few schools at a time and presumably requiring decades to reach all
Connecticut’s poverty-stricken schools. By contrast, welfare reform whose main
objective was to reduce poverty by discouraging childbearing outside marriage
would be comprehensive, applying throughout the state all at once and to both
the crime and education problems.
__
Ending the week, the governor signed
legislation to conceal failure in education. Two years ago the state Higher
Education Department reported that two
thirds of the freshmen in the state university and community college
systems need remedial math or English or
both . But rather than act against the lack of high school graduation and
college admission standards, the General Assembly misconstrued the problem as
the extra time and cost being imposed on socially promoted students seeking
college degrees.
So the new law prohibits separate remedial
courses in the colleges and requires courses to have “embedded” remediation.
That is, classes will be slowed and dumbed down for conscientious students so
Connecticut may keep guaranteeing a pretend college education to kids who failed
high school but were graduated anyway. And as there won’t be any more separate
remedial classes, there won’t be any more shocking reports quantifying social
promotion.
The new law directs high schools and colleges
to coordinate their courses by 2016. But lack of coordination isn’t the
problem, as a third of college freshmen still can handle high school
math and English. The problem is that educators and elected officials lack the
courage to do their jobs. It’s much easier for them if Connecticut keeps
paying for 16 years of education without getting even 12.
__ Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
http://www.ncadvertiser.com/11833/powell-rx-for-states-decline-a-lot-more-of-the-same/#ixzz2Do144DkM
