On the Evidence

Contact tracing is an important public health tool for containing the spread of disease, including COVID-19. But contact tracers are effective only if they can persuade people to answer questions about recent whereabouts and who else might have been exposed. Contact tracers are more likely to be successful in their outreach if they and the people they are contacting have similar backgrounds. Currently, no one collects and reports information on the composition of the COVID-19 workforce in communities across the country, making it difficult to know whether the workforce could be more effective with focused recruitment strategies. However, a partnership between Mathematica and the Public Health Foundation sheds some light on who is engaged in contact tracing during the pandemic and how their backgrounds compare with the backgrounds of people in their local communities. On this episode of On the Evidence, guests Ilya Plotkin and Jia Pu discuss an interactive dashboard that uses a large and unique national data set to visualize demographic data of COVID-19 contact tracing trainees and the communities they serve. • Plotkin is the director of the TRAIN Learning Network, a service of the Public Health Foundation that provides a clearinghouse of learning opportunities, including free training on contact tracing, for health professionals. Although it is not the only source of training on contact tracing, it is one of the largest. As of early April 2021, more than 40,000 people participated in its training on COVID-19 contact tracing. • Pu is a health researcher at Mathematica who led the development of the dashboard based on data from the TRAIN Learning Network and other sources. During the podcast, Plotkin and Pu share how their personal backgrounds as part of Russian and Chinese immigrant communities in the U.S. motivated them to develop a resource for culturally sensitive, equitable, and effective contact tracing during the pandemic. They discuss potential applications of the dashboard and important limitations of the data. They also explain why contact tracing, as a tool for controlling and preventing disease spread, will only grow in importance as more people are vaccinated, infections decline, and more parts of the economy, such as schools and offices, reopen. Find a transcript of the conversation here: https://bit.ly/3w1LGKP Read a blog post by Ilya and Jia that provides further context about the COVID-19 contact tracing workforce dashboard: https://bit.ly/2Q3IEpY Explore the COVID-19 contact tracing workforce dashboard: https://bit.ly/3tB2DtK Email CTINFO@mathematica-mpr.com if you would like your information about the contact tracing workforce to be included in the dashboard. Help us improve the show. Please take our listener survey at tinyurl.com/ontheevidence. Upon completion of the survey, you will be given the option to provide an email address that will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a $50 e-gift card.

In partnership with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mathematica has been gathering information on what works in engaging fathers across a wide range of human services programs, with the goal of helping fathers and families thrive. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many of the typical ways organizations support fathers and their families, but it has also provided motivation to be creative, to adapt, and to experiment with digital services that have certain advantages in helping fathers meet their goals over traditional in-person services. On this episode of On the Evidence, guests John Ward, Sean Wilson, Richard Barr, Kirk Berry, and Rebekah Selekman discuss COVID-19’s implications for delivering fatherhood engagement services during and after the pandemic. • Ward is a father who shares experience working with a local nonprofit, Father to Father, in Charleston, SC. • Wilson is an intervention specialist at Father to Father who worked with Ward. • Barr is the vice president of strategic and organizational development at the South Carolina Center for Fathers and Families, a statewide nonprofit that operates six local fatherhood organizations, including Father to Father. • Berry is an expert on responsible fatherhood programs at Public Strategies, a public policy research and consulting firm. • Selekman is a researcher at Mathematica leading the KEEP Fathers Engaged project with ASPE. Find a full transcript of the episode here: https://bit.ly/3aNxOvp Learn more about the partnership between ASPE and Mathematica to identify strategies used to engage fathers across human service programming: https://aspe.hhs.gov/father-engagement Some of the clips from this episode come from a webinar hosted by the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA). We thank APHSA for allowing us to use clips from its Third Thursday Virtual Mini-Series, which is available here: https://www.aphsathirdthursday.com/ Help us improve the show. Please take our listener survey at tinyurl.com/ontheevidence Upon completion of the survey, you will be given the option to provide an email address that will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a $50 e-gift card.

On this episode of On the Evidence, guests Patricia A. King, LaVerne H. Council, and Akira Bell discuss diversity in evidence-based public policy and how it relates to issues of inclusion and justice. They are all members of Mathematica's Board of Directors who recently helped develop the company's aspirational vision that by 2035, "Mathematica is shaping an equitable and just world in which evidence drives decisions for global impact." They bring unique perspectives as Black women who are leaders in the fields of law, medicine, and technology. Patricia is a professor emerita at Georgetown Law. LaVerne is a founder and the chief executive officer of Emerald One, which works with mission-driven leaders and organizations to create and execute business and technology strategies that enact positive change. Akira is a senior vice president and the chief information officer at Mathematica. Find a full transcript of the episode here: https://bit.ly/3dXAZmc Find LaVerne's podcast, Brilliant in 20 here: https://bit.ly/3tvrfFe Find Akira's blog on ensuring that data security, privacy, and ethics are at the heart of the digital transformation occurring at Mathematica and other evidence-building organizations: https://bit.ly/3e81hB5 Read an interview with Pat about the 25th anniversary of the Belmont Report here: https://bit.ly/3uOgTAC Read an interview with Pat about her career as a civil rights leader here: https://bit.ly/3tp5Hu0 Help us improve the show. Please take our listener survey at tinyurl.com/ontheevidence Upon completion of the survey, participants can choose to enter a drawing for a chance to win a $50 e-gift card.

In late March, the Biden administration announced that it was investing $10 billion to ramp up COVID-19 screening testing to help schools reopen. The expansion of screening tests in schools follows a February report from Mathematica that drew lessons from the experiences of six pilot sites that implemented COVID-19 testing in schools. These pilot programs—in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Los Angeles, California; Tulsa, Oklahoma; New Orleans, Louisiana; Louisville, Kentucky; and Washington, DC—were conducted with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, and Johns Hopkins University. The report provided insights about the acceptability, feasibility, and effectiveness of adding a testing program to schools’ existing COVID-19 related plans. For this episode of On the Evidence, guests Jennifer Harper, Sarah Hanck, and Divya Vohra discuss findings from the Mathematica report, impacts of the report so far, more recent lessons based on Tulsa’s experience implementing testing, and what leaders in schools and communities across the country need to know about using antigen testing as a screening tool. Harper is the project manager for COVID antigen testing in schools in Tulsa. Hanck is a senior advisor at the Rockefeller Foundation for strategy and impact who has provided guidance and support to Mathematica as it gathered evidence about antigen testing in the six pilot sites. Vohra is a senior researcher at Mathematica who coauthored the report on the pilots. Read Mathematica's report on the partnership between six pilot sites and the Rockefeller Foundation to implement COVID-19 rapid antigen tests in schools: mathematica.org/news/research-supported-by-the-rockefeller-foundation-strengthens-the-evidence-base-for-reopening-k-12 Help us improve the show. Please take our listener survey at tinyurl.com/ontheevidence Upon completion of the survey, you will be given the option to provide an email address that will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a $50 e-gift card.

March 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization officially declaring the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. The disease we’ve come to know as COVID-19 has now infected more than 28 million Americans and led to at least half a million deaths in the United States. COVID-19 has also incurred serious damage to the nation’s economy. In February, the number of unemployed persons was 10 million, up from 5.7 million a year earlier. On this episode of On the Evidence, guests George Putnam, Dana Rotz, and Naihobe Gonzalez discuss the current distressed economy and evidence-based ideas about how to help workers who have been negatively affected by the pandemic. • Putnam, the labor market information director at the Illinois Department of Employment Security, helps the Midwest Collaborative, a consortium of nine states that share current administrative data across sectors and state lines to develop insights to support reemployment and economic recovery efforts. • Rotz is a senior researcher at Mathematica who leads a team at Mathematica that is producing short summaries of research related to pressing employment issues during the pandemic. • Gonzalez is also a senior researcher at Mathematica who coauthored a recent report for the U.S. Department of Education on findings from two experiments that allowed the use of Pell Grants to help displaced workers earn credentials that might quickly improve a person’s job prospects. To find a written transcript of the episode and to learn more about the data and research discussed on this episode, visit mathematica.org/commentary/using-evidence-to-guide-employment-assistance-strategies-during-and-after-the-pandemic. Help us improve the show. Please take our listener survey at tinyurl.com/ontheevidence Upon completion of the survey, you will be given the option to provide an email address that will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a $50 e-gift card.

Nearly a year after COVID-19 took root in the United States, Americans are still dealing with the pandemic’s economic fallout. In January 2021, more than 10 million Americans were unemployed, up from roughly 5.8 million a year earlier. On this episode of On the Evidence, four guests discuss an increasingly popular approach for helping people find jobs and achieve other, related goals that provide economic security, such as getting a GED, buying a car, and improving a credit score. The approach combines two related services called coaching and navigation. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with Mathematica to better understand what coaching and navigation look like in practice, how the approaches are helping people through remote services during the pandemic, how they can be used to address racial and social inequities, and what evidence currently exists about their efficacy. In addition to hosting a virtual convening and producing a series of issue briefs on the topic, Mathematica invited the following experts involved with coaching and navigation to share their experiences on this episode of On the Evidence: - Ty Wright, a community engagement coordinator at AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School, who has benefited from coaching and navigation - Lucy Smart, the program coordinator of parent engagement for LIFT-DC, who also provides coaching services - Brian Marroquin, a senior program director for LIFT, a national nonprofit that provides coaching and navigation services in four cities - Sheena McConnell, a senior fellow at Mathematica who studies employment programs that help vulnerable families Read about current knowledge on the effectiveness of coaching and navigation in facilitating economic mobility: https://bit.ly/37IZgc9 Help us improve the show. Please take our listener survey. Find it at the link below: tinyurl.com/ontheevidence Upon completion of the survey, you will be given the option to provide an email address that will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a $50 e-gift card.

On this episode of On the Evidence, guests Ravi Goyal and Natasha Martin share lessons from using an agent-based model to predict the spread of COVID-19 in a university setting. Goyal is a senior statistician at Mathematica who has an expertise in epidemic modeling. Martin is an infectious disease economic modeler and an associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego. They recently collaborated on a project that estimated the potential impact of masking, social distancing, and regular testing on the spread of COVID-19 at UC San Diego. Learn more about the COVID-19 agent-based modeling partnership between UC San Diego and Mathematica here: https://bit.ly/3sLL4bp Explore the web tool Goyal and Martin discuss on the podcast here: https://bit.ly/39UMXtz Read more about the agent-based model and results in a recent article published in the journal, Clinical Infectious Diseases here: https://bit.ly/3r9TqYX Learn more about Mathematica's partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Education, which used agent-based modeling to inform K-12 school leaders about the relative risks of different operating and closure strategies here: https://bit.ly/3pct8EF Learn more about Mathematica's work on using wastewater testing to detect early trends in COVID-19 infections here: https://bit.ly/3iM5zAa For an up-to-date overview on Mathematica's involvement in the COVID-19 response, visit our landing page on COVID-19: https://bit.ly/3pmp8By

Between a pandemic, an economic recession, and heightened awareness about social injustice, 2020 presented no shortage of urgent health and social challenges that required immediate responses based on emerging data and research. In this episode of On the Evidence, Mathematica’s Adam Coyne, Jill Constantine, and Chris Trenholm reflect on how Mathematica and its partners rose to meet those challenges. Coyne, Constantine, and Trenholm are the general managers of Mathematica’s international, human services, and health business units, respectively. The episode features short interviews with each of them as they share some of Mathematica’s most memorable work from the past year. Each interview includes a preview of projects, initiatives, and likely themes in 2021. We have a full list of resources mentioned on the episode on the Mathematica blog: https://bit.ly/3oIJxQV

In early spring, states were scrambling to learn from one another how to scale up contact tracing for COVID-19. Staff at Mathematica and the National Academy of State Health Policy (NASHP) recognized that states needed a single place to find accurate, up-to-date publicly available information about the decisions that other states were making in response to the pandemic. To help states as they develop and refine their approaches to contact tracing, NASHP and Mathematica partnered to create and maintain a central repository that reflects publicly available information about how states approach this work. NASHP hosts an interactive map and table with detailed information about states’ approaches to COVID-19 contact tracing. It is the single most comprehensive resource for documenting the variation in states’ approaches to contact tracing for COVID-19 and updated on a regular basis. Mathematica hosts a supplementary web tool that provides contextual information about each state’s population based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which can inform contact tracing strategies. For this episode of On the Evidence, Mathematica's Holly Matulewicz and Sule Gerovich as well as NASHP's Jill Rosenthal and Elinor Higgins discuss the origin story of the data visualizations, what they're learning from the tools, and how the tools might be updated or improved going forward. Watch the original video chat, where the guests demonstrate how to use the web tools, here: https://bit.ly/37PzhPv See the interactive map and table hosted by NASHP here: https://bit.ly/2JS7czh See the companion page with an interactive map and charts showing data from the U.S. Census Bureau hosted by Mathematica here: https://bit.ly/3m60Uc9

For more than two decades, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supported evidence-based programs in India that promote reproductive health and rights. As the foundation phased out its grantmaking related to population and reproductive health, it partnered with Mathematica to conduct a cumulative review of its efforts to improve maternal health in India. The foundation’s maternal health quality of care strategy in India sought to improve the trajectory of health for women, children, and their families. Although the country had already made considerable progress in expanding access to maternal health services and, in the process, driving down the national maternal mortality ratio, the foundation and its grantees sought to improve the quality of these services, which is seen as a contributing factor in the pregnancy-related deaths that still occur today. Because the Mathematica report was published in late February, it summarizes the state of maternal health in India up to, but not including, the COVID-19 pandemic. On this episode of On the Evidence, six guests discuss insights from the report and provide perspectives on how the pandemic has changed the supply and demand for maternal health services. The following guests appear in the episode: - Dipa Nag Chowdhury, who served as the deputy director of the MacArthur Foundation’s India office - So O’Neil, a Mathematica senior researcher and the lead author of the cumulative review of the MacArthur Foundation’s efforts to improve the quality of maternal health care in India - Sharad Iyengar, a pediatrician and the chief executive of Action Research & Training for Health - Renu Khanna, a co-founder of the SAHAJ-Society for Health Alternatives - Vinoj Manning, chief executive officer at the Ipas Development Foundation - Aparajita Gogoi, executive director of the Centre for Catalyzing Change Find the report discussed in this episode here: https://bit.ly/3nUoolT Find bonus interviews below: Vinoj Manning: https://bit.ly/3l6GDmg Renu Khanna: https://bit.ly/39ffJ9z Sharad Iyengar: https://bit.ly/2UZfnvF Aparajita Gogoi: https://bit.ly/2V2kbAw

In his research, Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, has explored the causal relationship between school spending and student outcomes. His work has also shed light on the role that teachers and schools play in helping students acquire skills and succeed in the long run. Jackson is the 20th winner of the David N. Kershaw Award and Prize, established to recognize young professionals under the age of 40 who have made distinguished contributions to the field of public policy. David Kershaw, for whom the award is named, was a founder and the first president of Mathematica. In the spring of 1979, he helped guide the establishment of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) and Mathematica’s principal role within it, before his death from cancer later that year at the age of 37. The award in his memory was created in 1983 and has since been jointly administered by Mathematica and APPAM. The award is presented every other year at the APPAM Fall Research Conference in November. In this episode of On the Evidence, Jackson discusses his research on education spending and on measuring the effects of teachers and schools on students’ long-term success.

For about a decade, the national supply of teachers has steadily declined, a trend that is expected to continue even as the demand for new teachers is projected to increase. Not only do schools and school districts need enough teachers, but they want to recruit and retain effective teachers. Because evidence suggests that students of color benefit academically from having a teacher who shares their racial or ethnic identity, increasing the number of effective teachers likely means, among other things, that schools will need to increase the number Black, Latinx, and other teachers of color. For this episode of On the Evidence, guests Sharif El-Mekki and Jill Constantine talk about the current challenges with recruiting and retaining teachers, especially Black male teachers, and what evidence-based practices may help. El-Mekki is a former teacher and principal in Philadelphia and currently the chief executive officer of the Center for Black Educator Development, a nonprofit focused on increasing the number of Black educators in preK–12 education. He also writes an education blog called Philly's 7th Ward (https://phillys7thward.org/) and is a co-host of The 8 Black Hands Podcast (https://apple.co/37LK3YM). Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/selmekki. Constantine is a senior vice president at Mathematica and an expert on teacher training and quality. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jconjazz. Interested in digging into some of the latest research on retaining a diverse and effective teacher workforce? The Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic released a new study in October 2020 focused on the School District of Philadelphia: https://bit.ly/2HFGDMC

In mid-September, researchers from Mathematica partnered with the Pennsylvania Department of Education to run 400,000 simulations intended to inform school operating and closure strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The simulations predict the level of spread of COVID-19 infection in schools, taking into account a range of factors. These factors include school type and size, the community infection rate, school mask policies and other precautions, in-person opening strategies, and potential school responses to detected infections. For this episode of On the Evidence, guests Adam Schott and Brian Gill discuss the results and implications of these simulations. Schott is the special assistant to the secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Gill is a senior fellow at Mathematica and one of the researchers who coauthored the report about the simulations. Find a short summary of the top-line findings here: https://bit.ly/318rVEh Read the full report discussed in this episode here: https://bit.ly/351QMuy Check out a blog post explaining how school and community leaders could use the report to estimate the potential risks in their specific situation, based on the community infection rate; school type; school size; and the school’s operating, quarantining, and closure strategies: https://bit.ly/2SWBykV

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected people in long-term care settings, who only make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population but represented more than 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States in September. In Connecticut, that disproportionate impact was even more severe: as of July 30, about 72 percent of the state’s COVID-19-related deaths were among long-term care residents. On this episode of On the Evidence, guests Patricia Rowan and Debra Lipson of Mathematica discuss their independent assessment of COVID-19’s impacts on nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Connecticut. Their final report, which published on Sept. 30, includes findings on why the pandemic was so devastating in the state’s long-term care facilities earlier in the year. It also recommends steps that the state and the long-term care industry can take to prepare for a potential second wave of COVID-19 infections and for future infectious disease outbreaks. Although Mathematica conducted the assessment for the state of Connecticut, the report’s recommendations are intended to provide evidence-based guidance to policymakers in every state. Find the final report and a short summary of the report's main findings here: https://bit.ly/3iEuiov

Although performance measurement and program evaluation are both ostensibly about assessing the effectiveness of government, they have historically meant different things in terms of what gets assessed and who does the assessing. Performance measurement is more commonly associated with ongoing monitoring and reporting of program accomplishments and is typically conducted by program or agency staff. Program evaluation, on the other hand, is more commonly associated with periodic or ad hoc studies conducted by experts outside of an agency or program. But are those distinctions still relevant today? That’s one of the questions journalists Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene discuss in their new book, The Promises and Pitfalls of Performance-Informed Management. In this episode of On the Evidence, Barrett and Greene talk about how state and local governments use performance measurement and program evaluation to inform management decisions, providing contemporary case studies along with historical context about how the field has evolved over the past three decades. The episode covers the following topics: - The integration of different but related disciplines of performance auditing, performance measurement, and program evaluation (19:42–22:23) - The increasing availability of data and its effect on performance-informed management (22:26–26:40) - Changes over time in how states value, understand, and use data in decision making (28:40–30:15) - What the book might have covered about the two major stories of 2020—the COVID-19 pandemic and concern over persistent racism in the United States—if it had been published a few months later (30:14–37:05) Other resources that we discuss on the episode are available here: https://bit.ly/35UYGbx Barrett and Greene's full Q&A with Mathematica's Chief Executive Officer Paul Decker is available here: https://bit.ly/3kliU1S