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The Abstract
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> By Stephanie DiCapua Getman, Arnold Ventures
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Here’s a bright spot of 2020: This year Arnold Ventures is celebrating 10 years of giving. While the philanthropic endeavors of our Co-Founders Laura and John Arnold began sooner, the organization they lead today has since 2010 funded more than 1,000 projects and invested more than $1 billion in evidence-based solutions to pressing problems in criminal justice, health care, education, public finance, and more. You can explore all of our grantmaking here. To celebrate, we joined together (bittersweetly, over Zoom) for our 10th annual team meeting: two days of inspiration and reflection that served as an emotional reminder of why we do what we do — to improve lives. For the history and why behind the Arnolds’ philanthropy, listen to this discussion between John Arnold and Peter Attia on "The Drive" podcast, and this conversation with Laura Arnold and Milken Institute Chairman Michael Milken.
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The Right Way
to Cancel Student Debt
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By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager
Student debt cancellation is on the agenda in Washington. President-elect Joe Biden voiced support for legislation to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt to all borrowers as part of a COVID-19 relief bill. Others are advocating for universal debt cancellation for all student borrowers, totaling $1.7 billion. But advocates for higher education reform say universal student debt relief is the wrong move.
Why It Matters: Universal debt relief would help mostly upper-income Americans, who hold a disproportionate amount of the country’s student loan debt and are in a drastically different financial situation than hard-pressed low-income borrowers. Instead of blanket relief, these advocates favor more carefully targeted policies that would relieve debt for those struggling the most — often lower-income borrowers and borrowers of color. “Universal loan forgiveness is just incredibly regressive,” said Tamara Hiler, Director of Education at the policy think tank Third Way. “It’s not where the federal government should put that kind of money.”
Bottom Line: The federal priority should be to cancel debt for students who have been defrauded by predatory for-profit schools and found themselves with an incomplete or worthless degree. Other recommendations include policies that would discharge loans for permanently disabled borrowers, reinvigorate enforcement against predatory colleges, and hold college owners and executives personally liable for their schools’ conduct. And a “pay down, upskill” policy would be more inclusive, offering a $5,000 credit for post-secondary education to all eligible adults that could go toward either paying down existing debt or enrolling in high-quality training to gain skills for the future job market.
Read the story>
Related: The Hechinger Report with a warning from economists that a policy of broad student debt cancellation might not help those who need it the most.
Related: The Washington Post editorial board writes that the plan to forgive up to $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower will only worsen inequality.
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Who's Maximizing Opportunity
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By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager
A roller derby team with eight paid employees is not the type of business that has financial firms banging down the door to help manage retirement savings. That’s where an auto-IRA program like OregonSaves comes in. For smaller companies like Rose City Rollers — led by Kim Stegeman, whose nom de derby is “Rocket Mean” — this innovative approach to saving is a way to help employees with little effort and a big payout. (Stegeman says it took her accountant all of 15 minutes to set it up.)
What’s Happening: While large companies offer workers retirement plans, small ones often don’t. OregonSaves and other programs of its kind are designed to fill the gap. While Oregon was the first state to create an auto-IRA program back in 2017, similar programs are now up and running in California and Illinois, with legislation already enacted to create plans in three additional states. These programs will go a long way toward offering retirement savings vehicles to workers at fast food outlets or small shops who often lack access to employer-sponsored plans.
Bottom Line: The auto-IRA might not be enough to retire on completely, but it has helped workers get used to the idea of putting money away gradually over time. And putting savings on auto-pilot is a plus. “The harder it is for people to save for retirement, the less likely they are to do it,” Stegeman says.
Read the story > |
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Who's Minimizing Injustice
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By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager
Nearly three out of four people in Texas jails haven’t been convicted of a crime — they’re just awaiting trial. Most of them are stuck behind bars simply because they cannot afford to pay cash bail. It’s a system that incarcerates the poor because they cannot afford to buy their freedom and forces people into guilty pleas to obtain release. Researchers with the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School and the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University are trying to change that.
What’s Happening: A newly published Texas Bail Manual is designed to give defense attorneys the information and skills necessary to more effectively advocate for pretrial release for their clients. The release of the Texas Bail Manual comes at a time when three of the state’s largest counties have been fighting lawsuits about the constitutionality of wealth-based pretrial detention.
Why It Matters: Research shows that those jailed before trial are four times more likely to be sentenced to jail and receive a longer sentence than those who are released. Meanwhile, researchers emphasize that there’s no connection between pretrial detention and public safety. In fact, spending a few days behind bars can increase the risk of being arrested for a new criminal activity. Smart advocacy from defense attorneys early in the process can keep people out of jail before trial, safely returning them to their homes, jobs, and families.
Read the story >
Related: For a primer on the human rights crisis that is America’s bail system, watch “Trapped: Cash Bail in America” on YouTube.
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Why Drug Pricing Rules Fall Short
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Drug pricing reform has been a central talking point for the Trump administration, but a pair of recently unveiled rules aimed at lowering drug prices were underwhelming, at best, and failed to address one of the key culprits behind high costs: manufacturer prices.
What's Happening: In a new analysis, AV's drug pricing experts dig into the rules and explain what they actually do and whether they would effectively result in lower prices (spoiler alert: probably not). One rule would actually have the opposite of its intended effect, shifting costs onto the backs of Medicare beneficiaries rather than saving money (for context, this is a rule that has been promoted by the pharmaceutical industry), while the other rule needs to be redesigned to effectively lower prices.
Bottom Line: Americans want — and deserve — drug pricing reform, but in their current iteration, these rules fall short. Congress and the administration should be leveraging the government's significant purchasing power to create a better-functioning market, our team writes, and any effective policy must address launch prices and price increases not just for public payers, but private payers, too.
Read the story >
Related: USA Today does a fact check on a Facebook post touting decreasing drug prices under President Trump. While the overall number of drugs increasing in price has slowed over the last few years, brand-name drugs entering the market are coming in at exorbitant launch prices. |
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The Marshall Project with a bombshell piece on how Mississippi allowed its private prison contractor to understaff its prisons, creating a dangerous and inhumane situation for both guards and incarcerated people. “State officials failed to enforce contractual penalties that punish short staffing. Instead, they continued to pay MTC the salaries of absent employees, aka ghost workers.”
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Sweeping reforms to the Los Angeles criminal justice system introduced by District Attorney George Gascón, including an end to cash bail, the death penalty, and three strikes sentencing. As The New York Times reports, the changes are part of a growing movement to rethink criminal justice across the country.
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This Texas Tribune piece on a rural women's health clinic that is struggling amid the pandemic to meet health care demands and faces major barriers to offering telehealth services.
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This Reason Foundation analysis of Arizona’s public pension system, which has more than $15.6 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and is falling deeper into debt each year.
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The Baltimore Sun reporting on Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s goal of releasing some of the state’s oldest incarcerated individuals, an effort to reduce the number of men and women behind bars amid the pandemic.
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How the Biden administration can help local criminal justice systems shift away from traditional, punitive responses to crime and toward a fairer model that provides community-based services and supervision, via Adam Mansky, formerly of the Center for Court Innovation, writing in The Hill. “It would address the distrust of our local criminal justice systems felt by those who, for far too long, have paid the biggest price for the inequity and racism embedded in these systems.”
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Disappointing news that a broad, bipartisan effort to pass legislation protecting Americans from surprise medical billing has been stymied, via The Hill.
Related: Watch this short clip on how one woman’s ER visit resulted in a $10,000 surprise medical bill — and a five-month odyssey to fight it. It’s part of the No Surprises campaign from Families USA.
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- Jan. 14: At 11 a.m. ET, researchers and policymakers will convene to discuss research on dual-eligible individuals, with a focus on home and community-based services. Register here for “Building the Research Pipeline: Home and Community-Based Services and the Dual-Eligible Population,” hosted by the Administration for Community Living, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Arnold Ventures.
- Jan. 21: At 2 p.m. ET, Arnold Ventures’ Evidence-Based Policy initiative will host a 60-minute webinar on practical advice for preparing a successful grant proposal to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a U.S. social program through our RCT Opportunity request for proposals (RFP). Register here.
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“Between the World and Me,” an HBO Max film that brings to life the intimate and devastating prose of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 book to his son on what it means to be Black in America — a country where “it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage” — and his thesis on this nation’s structural support of white supremacy. Powerful monologues that vacillate between haunting and energizing, love and terror are cut with archival footage, recent news clips, and artful animation that tell the story of Coates’ upbringing in inner-city Baltimore, his initiation into Howard University and “The Mecca,” and the loss of friend and classmate Prince Carmen Jones Jr., who was shot and killed by a police officer in 2000. An ensemble cast dramatizes these readings with edge-of-your-seat performances. A partial list includes Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Jharrell Jerome, Janet Mock, Phylicia Rashad, and Susan Kelechi Watson. The film also includes chilling audio from Breonna Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, recounting her frantic search for answers on the night of her daughter’s death. She waited and worried from night into the next day before finally learning that her child was gone. For further reading, Coates discusses this adaptation in the context of 2020 America in this NPR interview.
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- I just love this wholesome story: A Chicago news anchor’s 10-year-old was afraid of getting teased for wearing glasses during remote schooling, so mom wore hers on live TV for a week to make this to point: “Whatever people say or think about you is none of your business. Just be yourself, authentically and unapologetically. The rest will work itself out.” And viewers responded. (As kids, my sister and I had matching pink glasses. She “accidentally” left hers behind at a restaurant on a multi-state drive. And I still haven’t accepted the fact that today I pick up my first pair of progressives. I blame too much COVID screen time.)
- I know I’ve already done photos of the year, but this entry from The New York Times really puts 2020 in context.
- The power of journalism: I was horrified by this column from Nicholas Kristof on the rampant exploitation and abuses built into Pornhub — but buoyed by the fact that days later in response, the company announced changes to its platform.
- Taylor Swift is the 2020 gift that keeps on giving. She has released yet another album this year, “Evermore,” which dropped last night.
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Funding Opportunity: As part of efforts to to better understand how to improve the systems that deliver care to a population of more than 12 million people who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, we are seeking to fund researchers who are guided by the following principles: policy relevance, rigor and independence, and alignment with our strategy. Learn more here.
The Criminal Justice and Evidence-Based Policy teams at Arnold Ventures are teaming up to learn more about what works in criminal justice reform in an ongoing request for proposals for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that will test programs and practices. There is no deadline for submissions.
The Evidence-Based Policy team invites grant applications to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of social programs in any area of U.S. policy. Details are here.
View all RFPs here.
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Have an evidence-based week,
– Stephanie
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Stephanie DiCapua Getman develops and executes Arnold Ventures' digital communications strategy with a focus on multimedia storytelling and audience engagement and oversees daily editorial operations and design.
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