American Idea Foundation

Measuring Results, Expanding Opportunity, Improving Lives.

Promoting Evidence-Based Public Policies

Reauthorizing MIECHV & Recognizing Evidence-Based Successes in Fighting Poverty

by

By: AIF Staff

The American Idea Foundation has long believed that Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program provides a useful example of how the government can move towards evidence-based programming and better allocate resources to more effectively fight poverty. As this home-visitation program is considered for reauthorization by Congress later this year, the American Idea Foundation will push lawmakers to reward MIECHV’s data-driven approach and understand the impact it is having in communities across the country.

MIECHV is a time-intensive, customized approach to helping parents from before their child’s birth through the first years of the child’s life. The First Five Years Fund summarized the program’s approach well, stating:

“Evidence-based home visiting programs, like those made possible by MIECHV, pair families with limited support and resources with trained home visitors such as nurses, social workers, and educators. Home visitors meet with families at home and work with families from pregnancy through their child’s kindergarten entry to help lay the foundation for the health, education, development, and economic self-sufficiency of the entire family. Visits by caring, experienced professionals can turn good intentions into good parenting, breaking generations-long cycles of poverty, addiction, abuse, and despair.”

MIECHV is administered by the federal government through grants to states, territories, and tribes allowing these entities to create voluntary programs, backed by data and evidence, to help families and parents build happy and healthy homes for children. It is results-based and has been subject to more rigorous evaluations than any other single poverty-fighting program.

At a recent hearing held by the House Ways and Means Committee, Congresswoman Jackie Walorski of Indiana highlighted the program’s success – and the reasons for it, saying in part:

“MIECHV is a program that gets results. This program builds upon decades of research that proves home visits by a nurse, social worker, or other trained professional during pregnancy and in the first years of a child’s life help prevent child abuse and neglect, support positive parenting, improve maternal and child health, and promote child development and school readiness….

“The program is now up for reauthorization again this year. What makes MIECHV unique is that funding is tied to evidence. Most federal programs operate in a black box. Less than $1 out of every $100 the government spends is backed by even the most basic evidence that the money is being spent wisely. Unlike most federal social welfare programs, we know what outcomes taxpayers can expect from our investments in MIECHV. This program serves as a model for how other programs for low-income families should be funded.

“For a home visiting model to earn taxpayer support, an evaluation must prove the program has demonstrated significant, positive outcomes such as preventing child abuse and neglect, improving maternal and child health, and improving economic independence…. As we turn to reauthorization, Republican priorities include providing a full 5-year reauthorization to give states and implementing organizations the certainty they need to conduct long-term planning.

“We aim to raise awareness of MIECHV’s high-quality outcomes to promote this time-tested program. And, we must apply lessons learned during the pandemic, specifically from the success of remote visits that grew efficiency while preserving the positive outcomes we expect from this evidence-based model.

“Few federal social programs have been evaluated to determine if they are working, and almost none have conditioned funding on evidence of effectiveness. When we spend limited taxpayer dollars to help those in need, we must ensure we’re investing in programs that deliver results.”

Without question, MIECHV is a bipartisan success story, supported by the administrations of Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden. Most recently, the Biden Administration announced millions in grants via the American Rescue Plan. There was a tremendous amount wrong with the American Rescue Plan, but funding MIECHV at more robust levels was right.

The evidence of MIECHV’s positive impact on children and families has been well-documented and the American Idea Foundation’s visit to a South Carolina Nurse Family Partnership program provided a visual testament to the difference its making in people’s lives.  

To learn more about the program’s impact, watch: Lessons from the Front Lines of South Carolina.

The American Idea Foundation believes that the condition of your birth should not determine the outcome of your life, and the MIECHV program provides a worthwhile example of how the federal government, working in tandem with researchers and organizations at the state and local level, can ensure that all children have the opportunity to succeed and lead productive lives. It is an approach that should be replicated as leaders work to meet other pressing policy challenges.   

On “Hardly Working” podcast, Ryan discusses why evidence-based policymaking is essential to fight poverty effectively

by

By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Earlier this week, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan was a featured guest on theHardly Working podcast. The podcast, hosted by Brent Orrell and produced by the American Enterprise Institute (where Ryan is a visiting fellow), focuses on the future of workforce development and on how policymakers can help individuals meet the diverse needs of the 21st century economy.

During the podcast interview, Speaker Ryan and Orrell discussed using evidence-based solutions to break through partisan gridlock, the amazing accomplishments of the Nurse-Family Partnership program, and other ways to successfully fight poverty.

Listen to the entire interview here or by clicking the icon below. Highlights of the conversation, edited slightly for clarity, follow.

The genesis & aims of the American Idea Foundation:

“After I retired as Speaker of the House, I wanted to focus on some of the things I really cared about which are poverty and strategies to improve our fight against poverty. I wanted to help go after poverty’s root causes and help break the cycle of poverty. There are different kinds of poverty, but I wanted to focus on intergenerational poverty and it’s just a perfect segue to what we are talking about which is the last law I wrote in Congress. It’s this thing called the Evidence Act.

“It’s a bill that I did with Senator Patty Murray. We founded this [Evidence-Based Policymaking] Commission and we got the idea from Jim Sullivan at Notre Dame, economists at their Laboratory for Economic Opportunities, and Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard…. We put Ron Haskins from the Brookings Institution in charge of it because I wanted to make sure this was not seen as some Republican thing, but rather just a good thing. The Commission gave us its results, we took them and put them in a bill and got it through Congress….

“Now, academic researchers can look at the data and see what works and what doesn’t and then get the government to actually measure the results of programs, the effectiveness of programs, and whether something works or not.  [It helps] get the muscle memory built in the minds not just of the bureaucracy, but of policymakers and of philanthropy to focus on evidence-based policymaking, so that we can bypass the ideological loggerheads….

“So, my foundation is basically focused on what I would call center-right ideas for fighting poverty and restoring civil society and reproducing upper mobility that we aspire to as Americans. It’s called the American Idea Foundation and I’d say the “American Idea,” or at least what we think of, is that the condition of your birth should not determine the outcome of your life.

“America is the only country founded on natural rights. It’s a beautiful thing. We are the only country that’s founded on an idea and it’s the job of Americans to pass this on to every generation.

“My foundation is trying to do that by making sure that we’re [using] evidence as a policy-making barometer and as a tool in government and out of government. Then [we’re trying to support] those things that connect the private sector, the public sector, and the philanthropic sector to get capital into poor communities, to get the private sector into poor communities.”

An evidence-based success story: The Nurse-Family Partnership program

“I’ve been to the Nurse-Family Partnership programs in Kenosha and Racine and I was just down in rural South Carolina last month touring [their program]…. The Nurse-Family Partnership is where a nurse partners with an expectant mom and they become very close. They become friends and the nurse effectively acts like a mother or a mentor – that’s probably a better word, a mentor to the expectant mother to help her figure out what you have to do to have a healthy pregnancy. The nurse says these are the vitamins, this the diet, these are the things you don’t do, these are the things you do, and here’s how you get prepared. No one else would tell [these mothers] this and then after they’ve had the baby, they help them for [two] years… with all those other things in infancy and it has huge impacts on a child’s development.

“The program has been subjected to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and we’ve been running evidence and analytics on this program for years. I first got involved with it in the George W. Bush Administration which grew the program. President Obama was enamored with it and they expanded it and then President Trump saw it and he reauthorized it. So, it grew under Bush, Obama, and Trump, three very different Presidents.

“It’s a program that just has really good evidence that proved [its concept]. It’s teaching women who are having babies…. how to be good moms and how to raise those kids and how to do so at a really critical stage of development from pre-birth to three years old.

“It’s extremely successful. Those nurses and those moms become extremely close, and they help these moms really ratchet themselves up the ladder of life, up the escalator of upward mobility, and get them on a really good path, putting their life together so the mother is better off. And if she’s going to be better off, we all know and it’s really clear that her child is going to be better off.

“This is an example of a government program and of civil society working to actually alter people’s trajectory and change society for the better…. For moms who’ve never had a baby and who didn’t know how to raise a baby, there is a good program that actually works. And if we prove that it works, then let’s fund it and let’s take the money from the programs that have been proven not to work and use that so we don’t actually net increase spending.”

Focusing on outcomes, not dollars spent, to better fight poverty:

“For lack of a better phrase, the War on Poverty got gripped by an ideology and because of that ideology, we started to measure success by throwing money at problems. We measured success by inputs like money or creating new programs.

“In many ways, they created this notion of “just let the government do it” if we’re trying to fight poverty and trying to get people out of poverty. [It was a notion of] don’t worry, pay your taxes, the government has got this figured out. [The government] will create programs to deal with this, as if that is a perfectly decent substitute for communities, for mediating institutions, for people helping fix problems person to person or community to community. They decided big is better. [They decided] the federal government is more efficient and they can just design programs and therefore materialistically [the government] can solve this problem.

“It blew up in our faces. It created a lot of dependency and it backfired. Materially taking people out of poverty, from a technical perspective by throwing money at the problem – sure, you can do that — but have we really created a society enriched with upward mobility, with people living the best versions of their lives and becoming the best versions of themselves? Did these policies do that? No.

“I think what is missing is the sense of community, the sense of solidarity, the mediating institutions that civil society provides. We displaced people participating in helping the lives of one another…. You can’t just substitute [government] for the private sector and for economic growth, wage growth, competition for labor, innovation, opportunity, social capital and all that comes with it.

“I think we went down this path in the War on Poverty of just getting rid of the secret sauce that makes all this stuff work and substituting all of it for more programs, more money, more dependency and [we’ve seen] predictable results.”

Strengthening civil society in an era of digitization and polarization:

“We are in real trouble right now because of digitization. I think we are living more artificial lives on our electronic devices and it is actually bringing atrophy to these mediating institutions — our churches, our civic organizations, the place and space where we live our lives, the space between our government and ourselves.

“And there’s also capital. Obviously, you have to have investment. You have to have organizations that promote civil society and all these things that help people realize their humanity and that work with one another to do that….

“The best thing I can come up with is we have to revitalize those institutions and revitalize civil society. We have to revitalize those non-government organizations and, since we’re becoming less religious as well, it is these non-government organizations that connect us and give us a sense of value and pride in helping other people. They give us this common good sense of community. If you’re raising kids — and I’ve got two that still have to get through high school, you’re really involved in this stuff but once you’re done with that, everybody leaves and that’s what’s sort of happening in society today.

“I wish I could say there’s a government program or a bill with the capacity to fix this but there really isn’t a way other than to have a good, healthy, growing economy so people have discretionary income, so they have more hours at home, working on these parts of their community.”

###

At “Show Us the Data” Conference, Ryan recognizes advancements in evidence-based policymaking by federal agencies

by

By: AIF Staff

Earlier this week, as part of the Coleridge Initiative’s Show Us the Data conference, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan delivered a keynote address on how the federal government can utilize data and evidence to maximum effect and, in the process, help Americans out of poverty.

The Coleridge Initiative’s conference highlighted the ongoing work of data science teams who are modernizing the federal government’s information systems and dataflow. The conference aimed to answer the questions: How can federal agencies best use data and make informed decisions about what data to invest in? And how can researchers, academic institutions, and publishers help build data and evidence to better inform policy? 

In his remarks, Speaker Ryan highlighted the various steps of the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act. The idea started with a bipartisan Commission, setup by Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray. Then, many of the Commission’s recommendations codified into law. Now, the law is guiding government agencies to develop modern data collection, security, and dissemination practices. These practices will ultimately help the federal government and policymakers utilize and evaluate data which should result in better outcomes, particularly when it comes to fighting poverty.

Ryan’s remarks, which recognized the contributions of those experts who are advancing the data practices of the federal government, are accessible here. A transcript, edited slightly for clarity, follows.

“I spent 20 years in Congress working on a lot of economic issues. I spent five years before that working in the field of economics as a staffer and at think tanks. During my entire career, I found myself always wanting more data and I found myself trying to quantify things

“It’s why I served as Chairman of the Budget Committee and the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and as I looked through my career, what I realized was that when working with agencies like Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), their data wasn’t reaching the furthest extent possible. It wasn’t going where it needed to go. One of the other issues that I felt where the federal government had an important responsibility – and where it was really falling short, was alleviating poverty.

“The federal government does so much in this space. It spends about $1 trillion dollars a year over almost 100 different programs and as we evaluated this spending and looked at all of the data, we realized that we weren’t following the evidence and that the federal government was more or less measuring its progress on this important issue based on inputs. It measured how many programs are we creating and how much money are we spending on these programs and it was not measuring based on results and outcomes. It was not following the best results, finding what works and finding what didn’t work, and moving those taxpayer dollars to things that did work. That wasn’t happening in government so I basically decided to take on the challenge, midway through my career, to try and find a way of de-politicizing fighting poverty and taking the ideology out of these fights.

“And that’s the one other point I would make, which is as I went into this space and tried reforming lots of programs, I found myself in an ideological, partisan battle almost every step of the way as we tried to make things different and better. And so, what I realized was that data is the one thing that is really unassailable. The one unassailable thing today is facts, evidence, scientific data.

“This is what led me down this path and after speaking with a number of economists and teaming up with my buddy Patty Murray (D-WA), who is totally on the other side of the aisle but a good friend of mine nonetheless, we tried to find a way of sorting this out. [We asked] could we get the federal government to really use its data so that partners in academia, partners in the private sector, partners in the vendor community, and government agencies themselves could use this data and evidence? And if so, where would that take us?  Would that make our government work better? Would we be able to achieve the results we want to achieve?

“We can move down the path of making things work better and better fulfilling our goals and our missions and our visions without these hardcore, ideological, partisan battles and that is why we chose the Evidence Act. It’s why Senator Murray and I did a commission and then passed the bill we have now. And I’m really excited about the “Version 2.0” of the Evidence Act, which is where do we go from here, how do we deploy this, how do we make it work so it is better effectuating policy.

“I saw a couple of glimpses of the promise of this approach. I was in Manning, South Carolina earlier this year, visiting for the fourth or fifth time a program that I’m really enamored with, the Nurse-Family Partnership program. The Nurse-Family Partnership is a program that’s been around for a while and is funded through the MIECHV program. It’s one of a few programs where the federal government has been using data and collecting evidence on where a nurse visits a new, first-time mother – usually an inexperienced mother, to help make sure that this mom is really prepared for motherhood by providing prenatal and postnatal care. The results are simply amazing.

“It has a $6 to $1 cost-benefit ratio and there is a $27,000 improvement per family to society in the form of reduced government benefits because of this Nurse-Family Partnership program. And what was this program, politically speaking? It started with President Bush. It got expanded with President Obama and renewed under the Trump Administration. These are three very different presidents, very different administrations. The one thing the program had is unassailable data and evidence that showed it works.

“I saw that particular program as a window into a very positive future where we use data and evidence, working with the private sector, with the academic sector, with colleges and universities, with philanthropies and foundations, and with for-profits and the government and where we can really effectuate policy….

“I think we can leapfrog the stalemate. We can bypass all the unproductive, ideological and partisan gridlock we have and make government work. We can move the needle on the missions that we all want in society: We want poverty to be alleviated. We want upper mobility. We want to solve problems that society has and nowhere is this better made clear than if we follow evidence and data, so much of which is already being collected, but we need the tools and the capabilities to not just understand what’s being collected but empower people to find unassailable, unbiased, objective truth and facts and science and data and evidence so that we can really move the needle and solve problems….

“And so, I just want to commend the Coleridge Initiative and the award winners and say thank you for doing what you’re doing because you’re showing the promise of these ideas that we’ve had all along. Thank you and have a great conference.”