New article on evidence-based practice in funding decisions

The ever-wonderful Youth Today has a fascinating article about the Obama Administration's move toward cutting programs that have not demonstrated their effectiveness in rigorous evaluations.

Prove It or Lose It: White House move to fund ‘effective’ programs sets off battles

This has a big impact on mentoring efforts, as "just last month, the director of the president’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) indicated that for the 2012 budget, the targets will be duplicative youth-serving programs spread across numerous departments, including mentoring, programs that strengthen and interest students in math, engineering and the sciences, and employment and training."

The article notes several issues with using evaluation data to make these types of policy and funding decisions. The biggest issue for youth mentoring programs is simply a lack of evidence. It's not that mentoring can't be shown to work, it's just that there has been very little money devoted to the types of expensive random control trial studies that most often count as "evidence" in the eyes of policymakers. Even when those studies have been done, such as with the evaluation of the Department of Education's Student Mentoring Program, there are major disagreements about how to define "success" or evidence of positive outcomes. In fact, in that study, there were plenty of positive outcomes for youth, but the evaluators set a threshold for what constituted "significant" outcomes that resulted in most of those positive effects being disregarded. The program was cut days later.

I addressed some of these issues in a Fact Sheet on evidence-based practice a few years ago: Research and Practice: The Role of Evidence-Based Program Practices in the Youth Mentoring Field. I encourage anyone who is interested in the future of mentoring to read these articles and start following these developments. And, start thinking long and hard about how your program can boost its evaluation efforts and show clear and significant positive outcomes for youth.