On the Evidence

In the United States, education and training programs are available to help adults with low incomes secure better jobs and earn higher wages. But, of an estimated 21 million parents with low incomes nationwide, only about 1 in 10 participated in such programs. One reason the participation rate isn’t higher? Inadequate supply of affordable and convenient child care options. The lack of child is a m...

Although researchers play an important role in making progress on equitable research, they are one part of a broader ecosystem of people and organizations who make research possible and use research findings to change policies, programs, and practices to improve people’s lives. On this episode of On the Evidence, we focus on the role of funders, particularly those in the philanthropic sector, as e...

On this episode of On the Evidence, we focus on a national initiative aimed at addressing social needs like housing or food insecurity that affect a person's health. Specifically, we discuss a screening tool for health-related social needs. The screening tool stems from the Accountable Health Communities Model, a nationwide initiative funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) In...

On this episode of On the Evidence, we focus on a creative initiative designed to build a more diverse pipeline of researchers who use methods and tools from data science and social science. Earlier this year, Howard University and Mathematica sponsored a free, two-week training for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and beginning faculty in the fields of data science and social science....

On this episode of On the Evidence, we focus on a demonstration in Vermont evaluated by Mathematica intended to help high school students with disabilities transition to college and the workforce. In 2016, the Rehabilitation Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Education, awarded grants to state vocational rehabilitation agencies to build on the body of knowledge about what work...

Our guest for this episode of On the Evidence is Anita Summers, a former member of Mathematica's Board of Directors and a pioneer in the fields of economics and public policy research. Summer's career includes research posts with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Standard Oil, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. During her time at the Federal Reserve, she developed expertise in u...

Almost seven years ago, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched an initiative to test a possible solution to improper use of ambulance rides, long cited as a major source of waste and abuse in the Medicare program. The idea was pretty simple: Require companies that provide patients with repetitive, scheduled, non-emergent ambulance transport (RSNAT) for certain types of health...

Five years ago, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in partnership with the Kresge Foundation, launched Hope Starts Here, a community-focused, citywide initiative aimed at ensuring that all children in Detroit are prepared for kindergarten by increasing access to high quality early care and education. As part of the citywide initiative, Mathematica, with financial support from the Kellogg Foundation, wor...

All over the country, federally funded Head Start programs promote the school readiness of young children ages birth through five from families with low incomes. These programs provide early education and a range of comprehensive services at no cost to the family. Although Head Start programs have historically empowered parents to be involved in their children’s learning and development, it’s been...

Contact tracing is an important public health tool for containing the spread of disease, including COVID-19. But contact tracers are effective only if they can persuade people to answer questions about recent whereabouts and who else might have been exposed. Contact tracers are more likely to be successful in their outreach if they and the people they are contacting have similar backgrounds. Curre...

In partnership with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mathematica has been gathering information on what works in engaging fathers across a wide range of human services programs, with the goal of helping fathers and families thrive. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many of the typical ways organizations...

On this episode of On the Evidence, guests Patricia A. King, LaVerne H. Council, and Akira Bell discuss diversity in evidence-based public policy and how it relates to issues of inclusion and justice. They are all members of Mathematica's Board of Directors who recently helped develop the company's aspirational vision that by 2035, "Mathematica is shaping an equitable and just world in which evide...

In late March, the Biden administration announced that it was investing $10 billion to ramp up COVID-19 screening testing to help schools reopen. The expansion of screening tests in schools follows a February report from Mathematica that drew lessons from the experiences of six pilot sites that implemented COVID-19 testing in schools. These pilot programs—in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Los Angele...

March 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization officially declaring the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. The disease we’ve come to know as COVID-19 has now infected more than 28 million Americans and led to at least half a million deaths in the United States. COVID-19 has also incurred serious damage to the nation’s economy. In February, the number of unemployed persons...

Nearly a year after COVID-19 took root in the United States, Americans are still dealing with the pandemic’s economic fallout. In January 2021, more than 10 million Americans were unemployed, up from roughly 5.8 million a year earlier. On this episode of On the Evidence, four guests discuss an increasingly popular approach for helping people find jobs and achieve other, related goals that provide...

On this episode of On the Evidence, guests Ravi Goyal and Natasha Martin share lessons from using an agent-based model to predict the spread of COVID-19 in a university setting. Goyal is a senior statistician at Mathematica who has an expertise in epidemic modeling. Martin is an infectious disease economic modeler and an associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public...

Between a pandemic, an economic recession, and heightened awareness about social injustice, 2020 presented no shortage of urgent health and social challenges that required immediate responses based on emerging data and research. In this episode of On the Evidence, Mathematica’s Adam Coyne, Jill Constantine, and Chris Trenholm reflect on how Mathematica and its partners rose to meet those challenge...

In early spring, states were scrambling to learn from one another how to scale up contact tracing for COVID-19. Staff at Mathematica and the National Academy of State Health Policy (NASHP) recognized that states needed a single place to find accurate, up-to-date publicly available information about the decisions that other states were making in response to the pandemic. To help states as they deve...

For more than two decades, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supported evidence-based programs in India that promote reproductive health and rights. As the foundation phased out its grantmaking related to population and reproductive health, it partnered with Mathematica to conduct a cumulative review of its efforts to improve maternal health in India. The foundation’s maternal heal...

In his research, Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, has explored the causal relationship between school spending and student outcomes. His work has also shed light on the role that teachers and schools play in helping students acquire skills and succeed in the long run. Jackson is the 20th winner of the David N. Kershaw Award and Prize, established to recognize young professi...

For about a decade, the national supply of teachers has steadily declined, a trend that is expected to continue even as the demand for new teachers is projected to increase. Not only do schools and school districts need enough teachers, but they want to recruit and retain effective teachers. Because evidence suggests that students of color benefit academically from having a teacher who shares thei...

In mid-September, researchers from Mathematica partnered with the Pennsylvania Department of Education to run 400,000 simulations intended to inform school operating and closure strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The simulations predict the level of spread of COVID-19 infection in schools, taking into account a range of factors. These factors include school type and size, the community infec...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected people in long-term care settings, who only make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population but represented more than 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States in September. In Connecticut, that disproportionate impact was even more severe: as of July 30, about 72 percent of the state’s COVID-19-related deaths were among long-term c...

Although performance measurement and program evaluation are both ostensibly about assessing the effectiveness of government, they have historically meant different things in terms of what gets assessed and who does the assessing. Performance measurement is more commonly associated with ongoing monitoring and reporting of program accomplishments and is typically conducted by program or agency staff...

As states and counties grapple with containing the spread of COVID-19, they have learned that the virus places novel demands on contact tracing efforts. Early experiences from states with contact tracing programs suggest that a successful contact tracing program needs to account for the economic circumstances of people infected, as well as their families; it needs to account for the emotional and...