Providing opportunities so that all people can realize their full potential is first and foremost a moral imperative.
It’s also an economic one. The collective knowledge, skills, and experience of a population are the key determinants of regional competitiveness and innovation. Growing, attracting, and retaining talent requires well-designed education, workforce, and human service systems.
During our first 25 years, ECOnorthwest’s consulting was concentrated in natural resource economics and place-based policymaking. We were on the frontlines of the Pacific Northwest’s Timber Wars and growth management debates. ECO occasionally evaluated social service and workforce training programs in those early years, but it was not a specialty.
That changed with federal welfare reform in the late 1990s. President Clinton’s signature legislation converted a New Deal-era cash assistance program into a block grant and transferred much of the responsibility for running it to the states. With that responsibility came increased local attention to the safety net.
In the post-reform era, Oregon’s human service officials wanted to ensure that families in need knew what aid was available to them. With better access in mind, Multnomah County hired ECO to model the rules of 12 common social services so that applicants could assess their eligibility for multiple programs at once. The pioneering web-based prescreening tool, Oregon Helps, won national and international awards for innovation in government technology. Arizona, New Jersey, Los Angeles County, Metro Kansas City, and the MDRC evaluation firm would eventually operate ECO-designed prescreeners.
Oregon Helps’s success led to an invitation to explain the complex rules of U.S. disability benefits policy. Together with the World Institute on Disability and Eightfoldway Consulting, ECO built Disability Benefits 101 (DB101) to help people navigate a return to work and alert them to possible changes in their eligibility status—especially for Medicare and Medicaid. DB101 operates in 13 states—covering 40% of the US population—and has informed hundreds of thousands of disability benefit plans.
Our deep knowledge of safety net rules translated naturally into policy consulting. ECO supported the Oregon Business Council’s Poverty Reduction Agenda, which led to an expansion of the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit for parents of preschool-aged children and a redesign of cash welfare rules to ease transitions to work.
Education reform expands the practice
In 2002, the bi-partisan No Child Left Behind Act ushered in a 15-year era of K-12 education reform focused on accountability. The federal framework expected schools to improve student performance on standardized tests or risk losing autonomy, students, or both. The search for evidence-based education practices was on.
Philanthropy was a key player in the reform movement. The Gates Foundation made an early, high-profile investment in small high schools. Oregon’s Chalkboard Project, a collaboration of the state’s largest foundations, focused on improving teacher quality and pay. These efforts and others turned to ECO for evaluations of their initiatives. Our work was enabled by a unique partnership with the Oregon Department of Education, which—under strict data privacy agreements—provided ECO access to hundreds of thousands of de-identified student records linked across school years. The highly detailed data—including demography, free lunch eligibility status, attendance, test scores—were inputs to rigorous school-to-school comparisons that illuminated where progress was being made—and where it wasn’t.
Over time, the practice, and the data, expanded into higher education. By 2010, the relationship between a state’s economic performance and its population’s college degree attainment had become indisputable, and nearly every governor set an aggressive education attainment goal. Today, ECO tracks progress on all of these state goals through our analytic support for the Lumina Foundation’s A Stronger Nation report.
Demography, technology, and the future of work
A current emphasis, workforce, could have been predicted at the practice’s founding. Demography is destiny, and the U.S. has long known that a surge in baby boomer retirements would strain the labor force leading into the 2020s. Less anticipated, at least by us, has been the astonishing acceleration of automation and destruction of routine work.
The rapidly changing landscape drives a steady stream of questions from employers, educators, and policymakers. How do we train humans to build skills that can’t be easily automated away? How do we redesign training and credential programs to better serve working adults? What level of wages and working conditions are required to attract and retain caregivers of children and elders? How do we re-design education programs to best serve a global center of semiconductor research and development?
As the practice continues its journey into an increasingly complex future of work, it requires that we draw heavily on ECO’s curiosity value: ask questions from many perspectives, listen carefully, and get comfortable with the unknown unknowns.