Latest News

Each year, the Annual Conference of the Early Childhood Social Impact Performance Advisors hosts one of the nation’s most dynamic conversations about the feasibility, research, and policy implications of Pay for Success programs. The conference is organized by the Institute for Child Success, Ready Nation, and Sorenson Impact Center at the University of Utah, with whom I partner as a Senior Research Fellow.
read more…

Last week I had the opportunity to present on the opportunities and challenges presented by Pay For Success programs in early childhood.  Two early childhood PFS are already in progress in the U.S. – in Chicago and Utah — and another has just been launched in South Carolina. PFS programs have great potential to inject capital into effective social programs who sorely need it. However, they must be structured in such a way as to ensure program effectiveness and quality implementation; to minimize risk for investors; and to enable scaling and sustainability.

The PowerPoint presentation can be downloaded here.

As I think about the conversations I heard about early childhood in the past year, I find people are usually speaking the same language.  At conferences, in journals, and in legislative chambers, those of us who live within the early childhood realm generally agree that early childhood is a great public investment.  We also agree that, in general, attention and resources ought to be focused on children who are traditionally underserved.

Amidst all of this agreement, there remains an central unanswered question:  What is quality? This is a question that the field has not fully answered.  In part that’s because there is not one “right” answer to the question.  In many ways, the field is asking us to define our terms.   read more…

Is your organization suffering from Evaluation As Usual (EAU)?  Symptoms of EAU include overly enthusiastic language about successes, wish-washy discussion of potentially negative results, and a general lack of objective and critical data analysis and discussion.

Evaluation can be expensive, and billions of dollars are disbursed every year based on its results.  With this kind of money at stake, it’s essential that funders are getting the most mileage possible out of their evaluation dollars.  Unfortunately, however, much of this money is being directed to EAU.  This is, perhaps, unsurprising:  the central irony of program evaluation is that is usually funded by the very organizations who sponsored the program under inspection, posing a natural conflict of interest.   With reputations and funding dollars at stake, challenging EAU is sometimes difficult. read more…

The final report from the Early Childhood State Advisory Councils, released in May, documents the $92 million awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to 45 states to help build higher-quality early childhood systems.  The funding touched the lives of millions of children across the country and helped inform President Obama’s 2013 early learning plan.

Among the grant’s legislative requirements were to conduct periodic statewide needs analyses, to identify strategies for better collaboration, and to increase participation among underrepresented groups.  In order to advance these goals, two states, Colorado and New York, built interactive early childhood cost-benefit models to measure the current scope of the state’s early childhood system and to estimate the costs and benefits of program improvement.  I was excited to have the opportunity to help develop both of these models in partnership with APA Consulting and each state’s early childhood advisory council. read more…

Apart from the words “free ice cream”, there’s nothing more exciting in my mailbox than an e-mail that says “new web-based cost-effectiveness tool.”   Given the approximately 550$ billion we spend on K-12 education alone in this country, understanding the impact of our investment is more important than ever – so the easier it is to create accurate and complete cost-effectiveness analyses, the better.

The Center for Benefit-Cost Studies (CBCS) at Columbia University has just released Cost Out, a web-based tool to facilitate the estimation of costs and benefits of public programs.  The tool is based on the “ingredients” method, developed by CBCSE Director Henry Levin and Patrick McEwan, and described in detail in their 2001 book Cost-effectiveness Analysis: Methods and Applications.

The ingredients method involves tallying the individual components of a program’s cost.  In the education context, these could include teacher salaries, classroom materials, or administrative costs.  The ingredients method is often preferable to other cost-effectiveness approaches because it uses actual cost inputs rather than budget figures, and thus more accurately reflects actual expenditures for a program.