From Data to Action: Lessons from the Child Poverty Action Lab

EDU H228 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Children's outcomes aren't shaped by any single system. They are shaped by how multiple systems — housing, schools, health care, job supports, neighborhood safety, benefits access — interact around place. Yet we have designed our public systems to treat each of these as a separate problem, missing how they stack up as either overlapping advantages or overlapping burdens in the neighborhoods where children actually grow up. The work of ending intergenerational poverty, then, is less a matter of inventing new programs than of re-wiring how existing systems see, reach, and respond to children and families.
 

This seminar introduces students to a practitioner's approach to that re-wiring, grounded in the work of the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL). Since 2018, CPAL has operated as an unofficial R&D department for Dallas — rethinking how data can be integrated into public systems, community programs, and neighborhood life to break cycles of intergenerational poverty. CPAL focuses on issues that meet two conditions: (1) they shape childhood experiences in ways that evidence links to adult economic outcomes, and (2) they can be meaningfully addressed with resources and rule-making authority that already exist locally — enabling communities to act without waiting for state or federal policy change.

CPAL’s approach is grounded in a rapidly growing evidence base — drawn from economics, developmental science, sociology, public health, urban planning, and neuroscience — that connects the conditions and characteristics of place to child development and long-run economic mobility. A decade of neighborhood-level research has shown, at previously unimaginable resolution, that the block and the neighborhood a child grows up in shape adult earnings, college-going, incarceration, and even life expectancy. Work on the social determinants of health has documented how neighborhoods shape birthweight, chronic stress, and toxic exposures. Developmental science has mapped how early adversity becomes biologically embedded, and how social capital, relationships, and networks of opportunity mediate those effects. Together, these bodies of evidence make the same point from different angles: the conditions of place — housing stability, school quality, safety, access to benefits and services, social connectedness — accumulate into the life chances of the children growing up there.

Much of the dominant response to this evidence has focused on policy change at the federal and state levels as the primary lever for scale. CPAL was built on a different premise. Rather than waiting for policy to save the day, CPAL asks: if we assume a world in which federal and state policy is not going to save the day, where can we leverage data to better help us take action with the resources and rule-making authority we already have locally — whether we're a resident, a community-based organization, an interested stakeholder, a government employee, or an elected leader? Answering that question requires borrowing data and innovation techniques from disciplines that have typically lived outside the cradle-to-career field. We will examine how CPAL has drawn on business strategy, design thinking, behavioral science, data science, implementation research, and policy analysis, and how those tools have been translated into case studies across housing, early childhood, maternal health, benefits access, gun violence, and economic connectedness.

The seminar is designed to be generative as well as analytical. Students will be asked to take what they learn and apply it to an issue they care about, in a community they hope to work in.