The Man Who Got Tired of Guessing

An Interview with Jon Baron

For most of his career, Jon Baron has been preoccupied with a deceptively simple question: Do the things we spend public money on actually work?

It is a question that has shaped decades of his life in government, law, and nonprofit leadership. Baron is the president and founder of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to ensuring that social programs are tested rigorously and funded based on real results, not just good intentions.

He sat down for an interview for Tutors, Mentors, and The City, a conversation series run by Kevin “Dotcom” Brown through The City Tutors, to talk about how that question has driven his choices and his work.

“When we are trying to solve problems like poverty, failing schools, crime, or substance abuse, it is not enough to roll out one well intentioned idea after another and hope it works,” Baron says. “When programs are finally evaluated carefully, many of them do not work.”

That belief has quietly influenced how parts of the federal government approach education, job training, and social spending. But Baron’s own path into this work was not planned in advance.

From public schools to public policy

Baron grew up in a middle class family, first in Maryland and later in Texas after a childhood move. He attended public schools and remembers his early years in simple terms: playing wiffle ball and softball, then discovering speech and debate in high school, a space where ideas, logic, and performance all merged.

He went on to Rice University in Houston, then earned a master’s degree in public policy from Princeton and a law degree from Yale.

On paper, it looked like the beginning of a conventional legal career. In practice, it lasted about one summer.

“I tell people I practiced law for about five minutes,” Baron says with a laugh.

The appeal of courtroom advocacy never took hold. What drew him instead was public policy, how large systems operate, how laws are shaped, and why so many social programs struggle to deliver the outcomes they promise.

After graduate school, he worked for Congress and later joined the Clinton administration, serving inside the U.S. Department of Defense. With a top secret security clearance and a front row seat inside one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, he learned how decisions move through layers of authority and how difficult large scale change can be.

He focused on technology policy, working on innovation and emerging systems. The work was ambitious and future oriented, but his attention kept returning to a different set of problems, the ones rooted in long standing inequality and stagnant social outcomes.

Building a new standard

In his late 30s, with a young family and a mortgage, Baron founded the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy. The decision carried financial risk. His wife, a government employee, provided stability while he sought foundation funding and worked to convince policymakers that stronger evidence should guide funding decisions.

“We had kids. We were changing diapers. A lot was going on,” he says.

The coalition’s mission was straightforward in theory and challenging in practice: identify social programs with strong, credible evidence of effectiveness; encourage government to expand those programs; and be candid when popular or familiar ideas failed to demonstrate real impact.

Over time, that work helped shape federal initiatives that prioritized randomized controlled trials, long term outcome tracking, and measurable gains. Some programs showed significant improvements in earnings, educational attainment, and job readiness. Others, once tested seriously, revealed far weaker results than expected.

Baron does not speak about this process in triumphal terms. To him, success is less about credit and more about changing the default question in policy conversations, from Does this sound good? to Does this actually work?

A late career leap into electoral politics

Years later, Baron took a risk of a very different kind. He ran for governor of Maryland.

He entered a crowded field of ten candidates in an open race. The sitting governor was term limited, and many people saw an opportunity. Baron saw a chance to bring the principles he had spent decades advocating, testing, measurement, and scale based on results, directly into executive leadership.

The campaign taught him a different dimension of public life. Fundraising became a daily routine: hours on the phone calling friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, explaining his vision and asking for specific amounts, 250 dollars, 1,000 dollars, and for help hosting small events.

There was nothing abstract about it. The work was personal, repetitive, and demanding.

Once his television ads began running, strangers started recognizing him in grocery stores and barbershops. That visibility, he learned quickly, still defines statewide politics.

He did not win the race. He does not describe the experience as a disappointment.

“I did not want to go to the end of my life thinking woulda, coulda, shoulda,” he says. “I only live one life. I wanted to try.”

Risk, feedback, and asking for help

Across Baron’s story, a consistent pattern emerges. He takes professional risks that involve uncertainty and change, leaving traditional law, founding a nonprofit, running for office, while avoiding moves that would put his family in irreparable danger. He expects some experiments to fail. He treats those moments as information, not as verdicts.

Equally central to his approach is feedback. He makes a habit of asking people around him to critique his work directly. After major events or strategic decisions, he would turn to colleagues, staff, and campaign teams and ask plainly what landed and what did not.

“I take other people’s input seriously,” he says. “I have always tried to stay open to outside advice.”

That openness, he suggests, has mattered as much as any credential or title.

A different model of a life’s work

Baron’s career does not follow the traditional model of choosing one path and staying on it. Instead, it reflects a series of deliberate pivots: law to policy, government to nonprofit leadership, advocacy to electoral politics, and back again.

Public school student. Debate team. Rice, Princeton, Yale. Congressional staffer. Pentagon official. Technology policy leader. Founder of a nationally influential nonprofit. Candidate for governor.

What connects those chapters is not a single profession, but a way of thinking. He treats ideas as hypotheses to be tested, accepts uncertainty as part of progress, and places measurable outcomes over rhetorical certainty.

Baron sometimes jokes that he has poured out all the wisdom of his 61 years. The shape of his career suggests otherwise. It reflects a belief that both institutions and individuals should be allowed, and expected, to change course when the evidence points in a new direction.