Jon Baron was a candidate for the 2022 Democratic nomination for Maryland governor.
Today, more than one-quarter of Maryland eighth-graders can’t read at even a basic level, and more than one-third can’t do basic math — the same as 20 years ago, according to U.S. Education Department measures. Census Bureau data show that more than a half-million Marylanders live in poverty, and that we haven’t reduced our poverty rate in more than 30 years. Even today’s problem of inflation eroding income gains is not new for many Marylanders: Census data show that, after accounting for inflation, the bottom 40 percent of households have seen stagnant earnings since 1979 as income inequality has soared.
Why are we stuck? The answer lies in the fact that Maryland, like other states, keeps rolling out well-meaning but unproven programs. This long-standing approach to social spending hasn’t brought progress for a simple reason: Many programs, no matter how plausible-sounding or well-intentioned, simply don’t work — they don’t improve people’s lives — as we’ve seen too often when the results are measured. The same pattern occurs in other fields, such as medicine and business: When new treatments or approaches are rigorously tested, only 10 to 20 percent are typically found effective.
Yet we keep rolling out untested social programs, expecting this approach to suddenly succeed where it has failed in the past. Hence, Groundhog Day.
The remedy lies in adopting a key lesson from other fields: To make progress, we must deploy solutions that don’t just sound good but have actually been tested in the real world and shown to improve people’s lives. That has been the standard procedure in medicine for more than 50 years, ever since the Food and Drug Administration started requiring pharmaceutical drugs be shown effective in rigorous randomized trials before allowing them to be marketed. The result has been amazing improvements in human health (think: vaccines for measles and the coronavirus, treatment for HIV/AIDS, and statins and antihypertensive drugs to prevent heart attacks and strokes — all proven effective in rigorous trials).
Could a similar approach work in social policy? Yes! In recent years, rigorous trials have identified a modest but growing number of exceptional social programs that produce big improvements in people’s lives, showing success is indeed possible. A leading example is Year Up, a job training program for disadvantaged young adults that focuses on fast-growing industries and provides paid internships with local employers. It increases average earnings by a remarkable $8,000 per year.
In education, KIPP — a network of college-prep public charter schools serving mainly low-income, minority students — increases reading and math achievement in kindergarten through eighth grade by five to 10 percentile points and college enrollment by seven percentage points. Another program, Bottom Line, which provides one-on-one advising to help low-income students get into and graduate from college, increases bachelor’s degree completion by eight percentage points.
Unfortunately, such programs have only a toehold in Maryland because government social spending in our state, as in other states, generally does not reward proven effectiveness. Instead, money is typically allocated through funding formulas or other processes that pay no heed to rigorous evidence, thereby supporting programs that sound plausible but are untested.
To make progress, we must rewrite Maryland’s laws governing social spending to incorporate two core principles. First, they should specify that programs meeting the highest standards for proven effectiveness receive top priority for funding to scale them statewide to benefit many thousands of people. Second, given the currently limited number of proven programs, the laws also should carve out funds to rigorously test innovative new programs — and promising existing ones — to grow the body of proven programs qualifying for scale-up.
If we continue on our current path, we will — like Murray’s TV weatherman — be here in 20 years, still mired in the same problems and listening to policymakers roll out the next new plan. Instead, let’s pioneer a new problem-solving approach in Maryland, using tested and proven solutions — just as in medicine — to finally ignite progress in education, economic opportunity and other areas affecting millions of lives.
