Background/Context: The reckoning with racial injustice and growing inequality that have become hallmarks of the early 2020s in the United States has implications for impact analysis and the evidence it produced for public policy decision-making. Various researchers have highlighted the shortcomings that impact analyses have when estimating the…

In this paper, the authors examine the complex relationship between education research and policymaking, analyzing key barriers and potential solutions for increasing research impact on policy. Four main challenges are identified: differing cultures and incentives between researchers and policymakers, communication barriers, competing values in…

A randomized experiment that measures the impact of a social policy in a sample of the population reveals whether the policy will work on average with universal application. An experiment that includes only the subset of the population that volunteers for the intervention generates narrower "proof-of-concept" evidence of whether the…

Different from more traditional policy-making avenues, the courts provide an antipolitical arena that does not require broad agreement from various constituents for policy enactment. Seeking to guide court decisions on these policy issues, individuals and organizations have filed "amicus" briefs that increasingly include social science…