America Achieves, through its Results for America initiative, develops recommendations and bipartisan support for investing public funds in evidence-based solutions that can be taken to large scale.Now more than ever, taxpayer dollars at all levels – local, state and federal –must be invested strategically with a rigorous focus on data and evidence to improve outcomes for young people and their families. Despite generous philanthropic and private sector efforts, American schools and programs designed to impact young peoples’ lives are overwhelmingly funded by public dollars, making it crucial to focus on how to more efficiently and wisely implement that investment.
New Directions
In an era of enormous social and economic shifts, budget constraints at all levels of government, an increasingly globally competitive workforce and growing demand for services from a larger, older, and more diverse population than ever before, young people and their families are especially vulnerable. While public debate focuses on whether to allocate more or less resources, it is critical to identify how to get better results from existing resources. To that end, federal government should identify and invest in “what works,” and be a catalyst for, and funder of, effective and innovative solutions that produce greater impact.
This approach has a strong history of bipartisan support. President George W. Bush’s Administration put a priority on improving the performance of federal programs and encouraged more rigorous evaluations to assess their effectiveness. The Obama Administration has built on this effort by supporting an increasing number of evidence and evaluation-based policies and programs. Mayors and governors from both parties across the country are also increasingly using data and evidence to steer public dollars to more effectively address needs in their communities and states.
Results for America’s Agenda
America Achieves aims to build on this foundation with its Results for America initiative. Results for America will help drive public resources toward innovative solutions that are evidence-based, performance-driven and competitively selected and away from programs that have consistently failed to achieve results.
Specifically, Results for America will:
- Develop new policy ideas to underscore government’s role as an investor in and catalyst for data-driven, evidence-based solutions to improve outcomes for young people and their families. This will focus on education, workforce development, and family well-being;
- Encourage federal, state and local governments to adopt tools to drive public resources toward what works; and
- Develop a bipartisan constituency and active champions for this approach among government leaders, and communicate powerful success stories across all levels of government.
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Source publication: americaachieves.org