ACF Evaluation Policy Revisions Strengthen our Commitment to Equity in Evaluation

November 12, 2021
| Naomi Goldstein
ACF Evaluation Policy graphic

This week, ACF announced revisions to our Evaluation Policy to strengthen language related to equity, diversity, and inclusion. ACF first established an evaluation policy in 2012 to govern our planning, conduct, and use of evaluation. The policy confirmed ACF’s commitment to conducting evaluations and to using evidence from evaluations to inform policy and practice. It included five principles: rigor, relevance, transparency, independence, and ethics.

The revised policy retains these five principles and adds language throughout to emphasize the importance of equity in all of our work. For example, the revised policy names equity as an overarching goal of our evaluation and learning activities. It also states a commitment to using inclusive and participatory practices in each phase of evaluation planning, execution, and dissemination.

These revisions to the evaluation policy reflect ACF’s commitment to equity and respond to recent directives such as the January 2021 Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities and Presidential Memorandum on Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking . Taken together, these documents show that equity requires learning, and learning requires equity. The Executive Order on equity makes clear that data and evaluation are key to advancing equity. After all, it’s hard to fix what you can’t measure, describe, and understand. The Order calls for studying methods to assess the effects of agency policies and actions on equity, and establishes an equitable data working group. Conversely, the Memorandum on Scientific Integrity makes clear that equity, diversity, and inclusion are critical to advancing learning. The Memorandum calls for agencies to use a broad set of methods to support evidence-based development and equitable delivery of policies and programs. It also emphasizes community engagement and inclusion in research.

Revising our agency evaluation policy is an important step toward institutionalizing our focus on equity. Meanwhile, our ongoing work continues to pursue both equity and learning. Examples include our work on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Human Services, our Center for Research on Hispanic Children and Families, our Tribal Early Childhood Research Center, and our newly launched African American Child and Family Research Center .

Beyond sponsoring individual projects, we aim to incorporate an equity lens into our learning activities broadly. One way to do this is by enhancing our own skills and knowledge, and those of the evaluation field at large. To this end, in October we held a conference on evaluation methods titled Enhancing Rigor, Relevance, and Equity through Community Engagement.  And we’ve launched a new project to advance methods for contextual analysis and participant engagement in evaluation.

ACF’s mission is to foster health and well-being by providing federal leadership, partnership, and resources for the compassionate and effective delivery of human services. Through evaluation, ACF and our partners can learn systematically so that we can make our services as effective, efficient, and equitable as possible.

Naomi Goldstein is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning, Research, and Evaluation. She serves as ACF’s Chief Evaluation Officer. Goldstein joined ACF as Director of the OPRE Division of Child and Family Development in 2001. She became Director of OPRE in 2004 and Deputy Assistant Secretary in 2015. Previously, she directed the United States Postal Service Commission on a Safe and Secure Workplace, an independent commission that examined workplace violence affecting the postal service and the nation. She served as project manager for the Urban Institute’s Assessing the New Federalism project and as Executive Officer in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS. Earlier in her career, she worked in the Massachusetts state government and developed infant mortality prevention programs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Goldstein received a B.A. in philosophy from Yale University, a Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University. She was awarded the Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive in 2012.

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