Even without an A/B comparison, if policies came with measures of success, that would go a long way to steering into better policies. Do school vouchers improve outcomes for students? It seems plausible, but we should be able to track graduation rates, and GPAs. Maybe we can even agree that that is an important goal. If after 5 years, those measures are not showing significant improvement, we can conclude that the voucher program didn’t meet its goals, and at the very least the policy needs to change, if not directly reversed.
It’s not perfect, as there can be confounding effects, but by tying the life of a policy to success metrics (that hopefully would be easier to agree on), we can at least we can show progress, and rule out the worst ideas.
Even without an A/B comparison, if policies came with measures of success, that would go a long way to steering into better policies. Do school vouchers improve outcomes for students? It seems plausible, but we should be able to track graduation rates, and GPAs. Maybe we can even agree that that is an important goal. If after 5 years, those measures are not showing significant improvement, we can conclude that the voucher program didn’t meet its goals, and at the very least the policy needs to change, if not directly reversed.
It’s not perfect, as there can be confounding effects, but by tying the life of a policy to success metrics (that hopefully would be easier to agree on), we can at least we can show progress, and rule out the worst ideas.