Angela Hawken
NYU Urban Seminar hosted by the Marron Institute, CUSP & Furman Center
Most of our public policies—how we educate our children, rehabilitate convicted offenders, or house the homeless—have one thing in common: they have never been rigorously tested. Conducting rigorous evaluations has traditionally involved professional researchers, extramural funders, and yards of red tape. As a result, many commonplace policies intended to make us smarter, safer, or healthier are based more on intuition than on data. The movement toward “evidence-based practices” was a step in the right direction, except that these practices often lack actual evidence. Another problem is that an evidence-based practice (even one based on good evidence) that works well in Place A might not in Place B. BetaGov removes the barriers to conducting rigorous evaluations of policies and practices and seeks to make these assessments the norm rather than the exception—homegrown, practitioner-led trials. The most rigorous test of an intervention—random assignment—is also the simplest to interpret; with the support provided at no cost by BetaGov, practitioners can carry out randomized controlled trials (RCTs) at minimal cost and contribute to a registry of evidence with greater scope, rigor, and practical value than anything produced by traditional academia. The private sector has long relied on simple, targeted RCTs to improve efficiency and performance. BetaGov promotes these same techniques to guide policy solutions for our most challenging social problems. Angela Hawken, founder of BetaGov, will discuss how it came about and some promising new directions, with a focus on criminal justice.
Speakers
Program Director / Litmus
Professor of Public Policy / NYU Marron Institute
Angela Hawken, Ph.D., is a Professor of Public Policy and Director of the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. She is the founding director of NYU’s BetaGov, which supports innovation-and-testing for social good. Her team of research and practice scholars, along with a growing cadre of NYU graduate students, works closely with state and local agencies, schools, and nonprofits across 32 states and six countries in developing and testing practices, policies, and new technologies. She is dedicated to partnering with “pracademics” on rapid-cycle innovation and experimentation, empowering practitioners and the people they serve with a central role so that research is performed with them. She directs a community-supervision resource center for the US Department of Justice and the NYU Opioid Collaborative, which works with justice agencies in six states on designing, implementing, and testing responses to the opioid crisis. Most recently, her team is helping prosecutors to harness their own data for equitable decisionmaking, through analysis and decision-support tools. And it works with corrections, parole, and social-service agencies to help returning citizens succeed by supporting a graduated reintegration, which entails an early release from prison into stable housing and supportive services in the community. Prior to joining NYU, she was a Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, a Research Economist at UCLA, and an Associate Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation. For the US Department of State, she trained mid-career civil servants in Georgia on policy analysis, and for UNDP, she developed cross-country measurement instruments on corruption and gender inequality for Human Development Reports. In Afghanistan, she had a central role in developing a corruption-monitoring system, also for UNDP. She has a B.S. and an Honours degree in Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Ph.D. in Policy Analysis from the RAND Graduate School.
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