On May 14, 2012, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) provided a memorandum to all departments and agencies on the need to use evidence throughout the Fiscal Year 2014 budget submission. The memorandum provides four pages of issues and approaches for using evidence in the development, evaluation, and management of government programs. OMB also encourages agencies to strengthen program evaluation through a dedicated senior leader, such as a chief evaluation officer reporting directly to the secretary or deputy secretary.

Standardized tests are praised by some as a rational route to evaluating individual teachers or districts, while others vilify the technique as an outright attack on the entire educational profession. This debate, highly politicized, has emerged in many press articles as the beginning and the end of discussions about teacher evaluation.

Last week, we posted some thoughts from Dempsey Benton, the former head of North Carolina’s Office of Economic Recovery and Investment. First we shared his thoughts on what worked, then on what didn’t work.

One of the major “lessons learned” in the Recovery Act was that the capacity of state auditors and comptrollers to provide oversight was severely jeopardized by a lack of funds. As Earl Devaney, chair of the Recovery Board, told us: “The Act asked them to participate in the oversight activity and didn’t give them any money to do that. The money went to the federal Inspectors General, not the states.  That was unfair.”

Frank B. Strickland is a Senior Fellow Emeritus with the IBM Center for The Business of Government.

Performance measurement and evaluation have often received short shrift in reports about the Recovery Act. We were pleased to see that the May 2010 GAO Recovery Act report goes into more detail about these topics – even if they still only take up a small portion of the 344-pages. Here are some promising efforts that we've culled to share with you.

Factcheck.org, sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania,  is designed to reduce confusion and deception in U.S. politics. We've been following its commentary for some time, and have been generally impressed.

This week, the Council of Economic Advisers released its third quarterly report (for Q1 2010) on the impact of the federal stimulus with respect to jobs created or saved. The headline numbers: ARRA stimulated between 2.2 and 2.8 million jobs.

The debate over the economic benefits of last summer’s “Cash for Clunkers” program continues. Recently, the White House blog and Edmunds.com exchanged salvos in the argument.  But the economic benefits are only one part of the question.

Last week, we noted the excellent back-and-forth between Veronique de Rugy and Nate Silver regarding some of de Rugy's research into stimulus spending. The best part of the debate, at least for us, was that two smart people put aside differences to prod each other to better answers and sharper thinking.