THE MISSING REAR VIEW MIRROR

As readers of this website know, we’re always on the lookout for exciting new programs and policies in state and local government. There are plenty of them out there. Not only do they provide fodder for this space, but we’re always pleased to share them with our friends, many of whom have come to believe that nothing good is happening in government today.

But here’s our problem. After some time passes and we want to refer again to our original discovery, it’s often the case that we can’t find out what’s happened to it. Was it a success? A failure? Someplace in between?

Consider new technological innovations. There’s often lots of excitement in a city, county or state that has invested lots of money in a high-tech solution designed to save time and effort. But when we check back months or even years later, we don’t find much reporting on the performance gains (or losses) that have followed the investment. While there are often articles that focus on the time and budget hurdles confronted during development and implementation, there's not so much about the results.

From an elected official’s point of view, this is somewhat understandable – even if it’s not good for the public.  After all, big announcements about a new economic development approach or a promising efficiency initiative can draw lots of attention from voters and perhaps even help garner votes when election time rolls around. But evaluating these efforts down the line runs the risk that they won’t have panned out.

Tracking down the end of the story is a powerful tool for the government in charge, and a laudable approach to improving the use of taxpayer dollars. But this information is also a weapon for opponents to use in a fight to demonstrate the incompetence of the current administration. There’s an old maxim that “honesty is the best policy,” but it has its cost.    

Beyond that, even when there are follow up evaluations, there’s rarely any commentary about the big “but for” question. It’s easy to claim that a new program has made real progress, but it’s understandably difficult to answer the question of what would have happened if the investment hadn’t been made.

This is hardly a new issue. In fact, the Pew Charitable Trusts set forth this example in a 2018 issue brief: “Consider a state that implements a summer program to help students who are reading below grade level. Performance data shows that participants scored significantly higher on English language arts exams than students who were similarly struggling to read at grade level but did not participate in the program.

“Is the summer reading program the reason the test scores went up? More important for state policy makers, is this a program the state should expand to improve students learning?”

Another issue is that it’s rarely the case that one government’s effort is entirely responsible for good things happening or not. Consider the declining crime rates in many big cities. There’s lots of credit to go around to new policing techniques, including the use of data to help focus police departments’ resources on approaches that will do the most good.

But even if those efforts hadn’t come to pass, it’s likely that crime rates would still be dropping – if less so. That’s because violent crime is disproportionately the work of young males. But birth rates have been lagging and median ages of cities have gone up and so there are simply fewer people inclined to commit violent crimes.

We know we’re not the only ones out there who would like to have more information about the actual results of policies and programs. But even in good times, there’s a lack of dedicated budgets for the kinds of updates we think are important.

What’s more, deducing causality is a complicated affair, and many state and local governments lack in-house staff who have been trained in the methodologies that should be used to come up with accurate conclusions. Even if an entity has data analysts on hand, they’ve got lots of other things to do than create outcome studies.

Lest we seem to be going overboard here, it’s important to note that though there isn’t enough follow-up going on, there are certainly some places that have positions that do exactly that. Not long ago, for example, we wrote a kind of a valentine card to the performance auditors who do careful analyses about the issues that interfere with programs working. There are also full-time evaluators like those in New Mexico’s Legislative Finance Committee.

We spend lots of time following the work of groups like these. But wouldn’t it be nice if more agencies took on these tasks, and shared the results, themselves.

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