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Session Title: A Portfolio of Federal Evaluation Policy Case Studies
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Panel Session 103 to be held in Centennial Section C on Wednesday, Nov 5, 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM
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Sponsored by the Presidential Strand
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| Chair(s): |
| Stephanie Shipman,
United States Government Accountability Office,
shipmans@gao.gov
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| Abstract:
Despite extensive discussion within AEA of a few highly visible federal evaluation policies, there is no overarching policy that defines what evaluation is or how it should be done in the federal government. Instead, federal program evaluation grew over the past decade in a highly decentralized manner until it was recently spotlighted by OMB's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). As program evaluation expanded to agencies and subject areas beyond the social services, agencies developed their own methods and policies to meet government-wide accountability demands as well as their programs' individual needs and circumstances. In this panel, three federal agency officials will describe key aspects of their agencies' evaluation policies, the purposes those policies serve, and how they came about. A fourth panelist will describe the challenges encountered as OMB attempted to create government-wide evaluation policy through the PART.
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Evaluating Welfare Reform Demonstrations: Federal, State and Evaluator Partnerships
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| Mark Fucello,
United States Department of Health and Human Services,
mfucello@acf.hhs.gov
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Investing in evaluation to produce credible information about well-conceived welfare reform and self-sufficiency interventions for families living in and near poverty requires complex, collaborative planning among levels of government and the professional evaluation community. The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the Department of Health and Human Services has a history of creating partnerships with human services agencies and research firms to foster rigorous evaluations of policy and program alternatives. Evaluation collaborations begun in the 1980s that led to the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program in 1996 through current initiatives following the reauthorization of TANF in 2005 contribute to a body of rigorous research on a range of family self-sufficiency questions affecting public assistance policies and program strategies. The goal of ACF's welfare reform evaluation agenda has been to increase knowledge about the effectiveness of programs aimed at helping low-income families achieve self-sufficiency.
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Planning Evaluation to Improve the Effectiveness of Department of Labor Programs
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| Richard French,
United States Department of Labor,
french.richard@dol.gov
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As Director of the Program Planning and Results Center, Mr. French is responsible for providing Departmental leadership, direction, policy advice, and technical assistance on all aspects of strategic and performance planning, including managing the Department's compliance with the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993. In this role, he also oversees and manages a multi-million dollar budget that is dedicated to conducting annual evaluations of selected Department of Labor (DOL) programs. Mr. French will discuss the history of these evaluations; the process DOL utilizes in selecting programs for evaluations; and the impact that evaluations have made on improving the effectiveness of DOL programs.
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Reflections on Efforts to Meet Executive and Congressional Requirements and Implications for Future Federal Evaluation Policy
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| Cheryl J Oros,
United States Department of Veterans Affairs,
cheryl.oros@va.gov
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The presentation will provide an overview of evaluation experiences for a federal research agency and its current and planned evaluation policies. Included in the overview will be the history of evaluation practices and policies, targets of evaluation policies, and the purposes they serve for both internal decision making and for external accountability, including the PART and GPRA. Trends and differences in favored evaluation approaches and coordination with other federal science agencies will be noted and discussed. More in depth analysis of these experiences will be provided based on interviews with heads of evaluation units and PART coordinators. Efforts to encourage the development of new evaluation tools and methodologies, especially in collaboration with other federal entities will be discussed. A set of recommended options will be presented for evaluating federal research programs with a specific focus on how programs could benefit from regular evaluations.
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OMB's PART as an Effort to Create Government-wide Evaluation Policy
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| Stephanie Shipman,
United States Government Accountability Office,
shipmans@gao.gov
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OMB created the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to fulfill the goal of GPRA: that program performance should better inform program management and policy making. PART not only represents an effort to bring sustained attention to federal management reforms but also a dramatic increase in expectations for federal evaluation activity: that all programs should have comprehensive effectiveness evaluations. However, several features of federal programs and agencies have stymied OMB efforts to use PART as a standardized approach to conducting a thorough assessment of all federal programs. The diversity and complexity of the federal environment has also stymied efforts to create a government-wide policy for federal agency evaluation. This presentation will discuss issues identified in GAO reviews of the first couple of years' experience with the PART, as well as issues raised in continuing discussions among the federal evaluator community.
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