Challenge for public policy is to match resources with goals

Recently, the Los Angeles Times polled how Americans felt about poverty generally, and programmatic approaches to reducing poverty specifically. When asked why current efforts to reduce poverty fail, most felt flawed programmatic design was the problem, while a much smaller minority cited lack of adequate funding as the culprit.

This result isn't surprising. Most folks naturally assume if something isn't working, it must be broken, especially when it comes to public policy failures. Why? Well, if the real problem is a lack of funding rather than programmatic flaws, then the solution means more financial resources are needed. Which of course means more tax revenue must be raised, something the public would rather not hear, and politicians would rather avoid.

And therein lies one of the core obstacles to getting public policy right. See, this is no "which came first, the chicken or the egg" dilemma. Indeed, irrespective of how well a program may be designed, one simple truth supersedes all: inadequate resources on the front end means inadequate outcomes on the back end. Period. But honestly identifying programmatic costs necessitates an equally honest evaluation of the tax capacity required to cover those costs - which is politically toxic. Hence, it's far easier for taxpayers and politicians to blame policy failures on broken systems, rather than determining whether the program in question actually had the capacity to generate desired outcomes.

This is highly counterproductive, of course, since public policy can't be reformed to generate desired outcomes, if the whole focus of the reform effort is off-point. To see how this manifests in the real world, look no further than our nation's effort to reform public education over the last decade, driven in part by the desire to improve the achievement of American students on the Programme for International Student Assessment or "PISA" exams, where U.S. performance consistently ranked below average in both math and science.

This low achievement on PISA led many to castigate America's public education system as fundamentally broken. After all, math and science are most indicative of how well an education system is performing, since those subject areas are least influenced by support children receive at home. As teachers and administrators increasingly came under attack for being unproductive and unmotivated, decision makers responded by passing reforms like the federal "No child Left Behind Act" and the "Race to the Top" initiative, which were designed to promote competition for resources. The belief was resource competition would improve educational practices and thereby enhance student outcomes.

Unfortunately, this reform effort was launched without ever considering how resource capacity was impacting student achievement - a flaw that could have been eliminated if closer attention were paid to the data. Indeed those U.S. students attending schools where the low-income population was less than 10 percent, had the highest PISA scores in the world, while U.S. students in schools with low-income concentrations between 10 and 25 percent, scored fourth highest in the world overall, but best when compared to students from other countries (like Canada) with similar low-income counts. Achievement of American students on PISA only fell off the map when low-income levels exceeded 25 percent.

Not surprisingly, those U.S. schools that attained high student performance on PISA, actually had the resource capacity to do so. Moreover, on a per-pupil basis, they significantly out-spent American schools which served greater concentrations of low-income students. By failing to account for capacity, the national education reform movement intended to enhance student performance by making schools and teachers compete for resources, actually made matters worse, by forcing schools that didn't have adequate capacity in the first place, to complete for resources with schools that did.

Designing sound public policy to address fundamental societal needs is difficult. The only way to get it right is to ensure that programs both incorporate evidence-based, best practices by design - and have adequate capacity to generate the outcomes that are desired.

• Ralph Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a bipartisan fiscal policy think tank. rmartire@ctbaonline.org