Measuring our Projected Gains

Every year, Congress works through the federal budget, and every year child advocates fight to protect funding for programs that work.  For many of us, it feels like a Sisyphean task to protect funding, let alone increase it or enact new federal policies aimed at helping children.

Why is it so difficult? The problem isn't that policymakers and the public don't care.  In fact, the opposite is true: at a June briefing on protecting children’s programs in tight times, Bruce Lesley, president of the progressive advocacy organization First Focus, presented poll results showing that when asked about budget cuts, there is strong public support for protecting and investing in children. Republican and Democratic voters alike were more likely to protect children's programs "than any other programs on the chopping block," according to the poll.

But some years, cuts have to be made—and that's certainly the case this year. To make these tough choices, policymakers rely on data to tell them which investments are the most effective and which are not working and thus can be cut. The usual data challenge applies: what really counts as “success”?

The First Focus panel shed light on another challenge: when does it count as a success? One of the problems with a lot of the available data, Dr. James S. Marks, Senior Vice President and Director of the Health Group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation explained, lies not in what the results are—but when the results occur.

Projected Data and the Problems of a 10-Year Limit

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) collects and distributes statistical data on federal programs, including children's programs, to help legislators make informed decisions based on solid, consitent evidence.   A large part of what the CBO releases is projected data—that is, it relies on trends in the past and present to predict how well a certain program or policy is likely to succeed in its goals.

In projected data, the CBO looks ahead a maximum of ten years.  In other words, when measuring the impact of, for example, public assistance (welfare) programs, the CBO will only look at projected results in the next ten years to determine whether the program is a success. 

So what's the problem? Isn't ten years plenty of time to measure results? Not always. Programs like universal preschool and welfare have an impact designed to extend (and in some cases to appear) beyond ten years.  In fact, true measurable results often don’t become statistically significant until 20 years out, said Marks. 

An example: some welfare programs for new mothers include regular home visits by nurses in the first two years of a newborn's life.  Statistics showed that children who recieved that extra boost of care in infancy did significantly better in their first few years of school, and were less likely to be involved with the juvenile justice system as teengers than children who did not recieve that care. So here, one of the strongest results in the well-being of children in that program showed up in their teenage years.

In cases like this, long-term data will eventually show improvements in quality of life and a strong economic return as a result of a program or policy, but most of these numbers never make it into the budget-cut debate because the CBO data does not look that far ahead.

It's not easy to be patient, and patience is not in our nature. Making decisions today based on results that won't be felt for two decades or more doesn't come easy to most of us, it seems. But opting for cuts that bring immediate (and arguably small) savings may cost us more in the long run. As Bruce Lesley noted, either "we can pay now or we pay later."

Yet all is not lost. It is possible to better understand the true impact of children's programs and make good decisions. Advocates and researchers can help policymakers do so—and we can do it within the confines of the existing data if we (1) understand the data and what they can and can't tell us and (2) get savvy about voicing our message correctly.

You can find photos, presentations, and more from the briefing online on the First Focus site.

Part 2: Messaging to Make it Happen

How do we get the ball rolling?  Lesley gave some tips on messaging and how we can learn from the U.K., who implemented a successful anti-poverty target for children that halved the poverty rate of Great Britain's children. That's in Part 2.

Alison Beth Waldman is Editorial & Policy intern with SparkAction.