Inside the Belly of the Beast: How Bad Systems Trump Good Programs

Excerpt

Reading the many excellent articles in this compilation highlights the pressing need for widespread system reform if Evidence Based Programs are to ever reach scale. The articles’ contents offer a crash course on the promising paths opening before us, while the lengthy inventories of challenges is sobering in their collective assessment of the odds that any kind of “best practice”—much less evidence-based practice—will become common practice in public child welfare, mental health and juvenile justice systems. Noting the difficulty in moving from science to practice in disciplines more closely linked to the hard sciences—such as medicine—several authors list a daunting array of obstacles to the much more difficult challenge of bringing evidence-based interventions to scale in the human services generally, and in publicly financed human services in particular. …