How Policymakers Define ‘Evidence’: The Politics of Research Use in New Orleans

Abstract

Nearly ten years after Katrina and the implementation of a host of new and radical education reforms in New Orleans, there remains little evidence about whether the changes have improved school performance. Despite this lack of evidence, the New Orleans model is held up as a reform success, and is being adopted by other cities. In this article the authors ask how policymakers in New Orleans and at the state level define, access and interpret research or evidence on the reforms, and how, if at all, such evidence informs their decision-making. They interviewed key district and state policymakers, as well as representatives from dozens of intermediary organizations in the area, who, they argue, are also shapers of policy. On the demand side, they found that policymakers primarily used personal anecdotes to justify their position and explain the success of reforms, and they relied on blogs or non-peer-reviewed sources for background information. Peer-reviewed research was seldom used, typically passed to policymakers via an echo chamber of intermediary organizations, personal contacts or key partners. Connecting supply to demand, the authors find that intermediary organizations broker research and evidence to advance their policy agendas, and that they serve as de facto policymakers in New Orleans.

Strategies for effective dissemination of research to United States policymakers: a systematic review

“…Two studies (about 7%) did not specific the geographic region or state in which the study took place [43,44]. Of the remaining studies, four examined policymaking in the Northeastern United States [45][46][47][48], four in the Western US [49][50][51][52], and one in the South [53]. The geographic regional groups used similar channels to disseminate evidence to policymakers including publications and presentations.…”

“…We also analyzed whether dissemination at different levels of government (i.e., local, state, and federal) used unique channels. Six of included studies (about 22%) examined multiple levels of government and did not separate results based on specific levels of government [27][28][29][30][31]53]. One study did not specifically identify the level of government used [46].…”

“…Roughly half of studies were atheoretical (n = 13). Four studies used the Weiss Typology [29,36,54,55], two studies used the operationalization framework [45,53], and two studies used the advocacy coalition framework [53,56].…”

“…The sources of knowledge varied across studies with some studies including multiple sources of social policy information. The most common sources of knowledge included research, as in peer-reviewed literature (n = 7) [30,33,38,42,43,49,54], researchers (n = 5) [27,31,32,34,56], and research broadly defined (n = 5) [36,39,47,48,55], the government (n = 11) [29, 36, 41-44, 47, 50, 54, 56, 57], and organizations (n = 7) [33,36,46,[52][53][54]56].…”

This is the Big Leagues” Charter-Led Turnaround in a Non-Charter World

“…Orleans' Recovery School District (RSD), where charter organizations run the vast majority of city schools under the umbrella of state management, and where academic gains have been widely hailed if not incontrovertible (Sims & Rossmeier, 2015;Jabbar et al, 2014). There are some critical differences between these two districts, to be sure, such as their relative scale and the fact that choice is citywide in the RSD but not the ASD.…”