The following are recent articles by Lisbeth Schorr drawing on lessons learned over the last several decades from research, theory, and practice about multiple efforts to solve social problems, new opportunities to act on what we now know, and new approaches to assessing “what works”.
Click on each title for access to that article's full text.
“Innovative Reforms Require Innovative Scorekeeping,” Education Week, August 26, 2009.
“To Judge What Will Best Help Society's Neediest, Let's Use a Broad Array of Evaluation Techniques,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, August 20, 2009.Serious social reformers today agree that rigorous efforts to determine “what works” are essential. But if these efforts are not to sabotage or marginalize the most innovative attempts to solve intractable social problems, funders must develop more inclusive ways of establishing effectiveness and accountability.
If government agencies and private grant makers support only those interventions that are shown effective by experimental methods, we will be robbed of (1) good programs that do not lend themselves to experimental evaluations, (2) reforms that are deeper and wider than individual programs, and (3) innovations of all kinds.“Realizing President Obama's Promise to Scale Up What Works to Fight Urban Poverty,” Center for the Study of Social Policy,” June 2009.
What it will take to spread the Harlem Children’s Zone, with its intricately woven tapestry of services and supports, to twenty “Promise Neighborhoods.”
Mismatch between Complex Interventions and "Gold Standard" Evaluations, Chart, 2009.
Comparison of the attributes of effective complex interventions and the attributes associated with "gold standard” evaluations.
Co-authored with Katya Fels Smyth, “A Lot to Lose: A Call to Rethink What Constitutes ‘Evidence’ in Finding Social Interventions that Work,” January 2009, Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy,
The authors describe the characteristics of What It Takes organizations, which their work suggests support lasting change in the lives of highly marginalized and vulnerable people. They identify the risks inherent in the continued privileging of experimental designs over all others, and suggest that the risks are heightened in periods of great economic stress, when the pressure for accountability is increased.
As a society we know a great deal more about what works than we’re acting on. And the outcomes we’re achieving are far more modest than they would be if we applied the vast knowledge we now have.
“The O'Connor Project: Intervening Early to Eliminate the Need for Racial Preferences in Higher Education,”Judicature, September 2004
, Volume 88, Number 2 September-October 2004.“The O'Connor Project, Can We End Racial Discrimination Without Affirmative Action? Here's What it Will Take
,” The American Prospect, January 2004.
In her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor declared her expectation that racial preferences in higher education will no longer be necessary 25 years from now. These articles lay out what we can and must do with present knowledge to reduce or eliminate racial disparities early in life and thereby eliminate the need for racial preferences at the university level.
“From Knowledge Management to
By taking a bold, generous, and inclusive approach to knowledge building, foundations can equip community organizations, service providers, and policymakers at every level with actionable information that will enable them to more effectively achieve their objectives.
Co-authored with Patricia Auspos, “Usable Information About What Works: Building A Broader and Deeper Knowledge Base,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Fall 2003 , Vol. 22, No. 4.
The authors contend that to foster and support effective strategies that will actually improve lives, the way we think about and process knowledge in the social policy world must change:
• Prevailing conventions about what counts as credible knowledge must be reexamined and modified.
• Our focus must change from making yes-or-no judgments about individual interventions to discerning patterns from an accumulation of research and experiences.
• Our knowledge-building activities must cross systems and disciplinary boundaries, even if service delivery and funding continue to operate predominantly within self-contained silos.
Lisbeth Schorr argues that rigorous research on impacts is needed but is not sufficient. Too many programs are multidimensional, cannot or should not be standardized, evolve or adapt through time, require participants’ active involvement, or are dependent for success on good implementation, not just good design. Schorr argues for more flexible forms of evaluation that require experts and practitioners to hypothesize the linkages between actions and outcomes, identify interim indicators of success, and pay more attention to the attributes of programs and the institutional contexts that are essential to success. While recognizing the inevitable trade-off between knowing a few things very well and more things with less certainty, Schorr argues for greater efforts to understand broad patterns that connect activities to results, even if this means compromising the search for absolute truths.