Lisbeth B. Schorr, “The Time to Reinvent our Social Institutions is Now,” Medium, June 30, 2020 Lisbeth B. Schorr, “Experimentation and Its Discontents,” Review of The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World, by Max H. Bazerman and Michael Luca, Stanford SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW, Summer, 2020 Lisbeth...
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Piecing together the real woman behind Reagan’s ‘welfare queen’
by Lisbeth B. Schorr The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth By Josh Levin Little, Brown. 418 pp. $29 Lisbeth B. Schorr, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, is the author of “Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage” and...
Solving Social Problems “One Coin Toss at a Time”
This review of Andrew Leigh’s Randomistas, posted by the Stanford Social Innovations Review Sept. 18, 2018, raises the question of whether a narrow obsession with randomized trials has discouraged us from using the full toolkit of evidence that would support social policies and action to achieve more substantial results....
To Base US Policy on Evidence, We Need to be Able to Say the Word
The Trump administration wants to ban terms like “evidence-based” from government reporting. But if policymakers can’t make budget and policy decisions based on evidence, what, exactly, is supposed to guide them? A grenade just landed in the midst of lively discussions about what it means to make policy decisions...
Reconsidering Evidence: What It Means and How We Use It
The tide that has swept experimental program evaluation to the forefront of knowledge building about social policy is suddenly ebbing. The latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Princeton’s Angus Deaton, was described by Justin Wolfers in the New York Times as “an influential counterweight against a popular...
Getting Better at Getting Better
Responding to President Obama’s State of the Union proposal for tuition-free community college – Lisbeth B. Schorr, senior fellow, and Frank Farrow, Director,Center for the Study of Social Policy Education leaders are calling President Obama’s State of the Union proposal for tuition-free community college a game changer. It has the potential of...
The benefit that Robert Ball wouldn’t administer
It was early 1965 when I sat in on a meeting that was one of a series deliberating the final touches of the legislation that would soon be enacted as Medicare. Those gathered that day were the Undersecretary of HEW, Wilbur Cohen, the Commissioner of Social Security, Robert Ball,...
Fitting the evidence to the question ….
On the front page of the Science Times of September 2, 2013, Gina Kolata celebrates the U.S. Education Department’s efforts that are “starting to get some real data” about what works in science and math education. The key to replacing guesses and hype, writes Kolata, is a “method that...
Reflecting On The Alienation Of Immigrants from the Perspective Of My Immigrant Experience
Reading about the alienation of the Tsarnaev brothers from their American surroundings made me reflect on my experience as a 9-year old refugee, arriving in the United States in 1940. My family arrived from Germany, via England, where we had waited for a year until our quota number came...
Risks Worth Taking
When philanthropists fund programmatic interventions, they should resist the seduction of certainty.