Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has hurt many students, but many have also grown tremendously from the events they experienced in 2020. This brief discusses service learning as a practice that draws on the skills and community awareness students have developed through the past year, and that also can help them rebound.

Unemployed or underemployed parents have trouble paying child support. In the Families Forward Demonstration, child support agencies sought to help parents get better jobs and increase their earnings by teaching job skills needed by local employers. The questions arising from the project may help other agencies evaluate prospective job training partners.

In this commentary originally published by New America, Meghan McCormick and Shira Mattera describe how investing greater resources in community-based programs will be critical for building an equitable universal pre-K system that provides high-quality experiences to all children.

MDRC’s Equity Collaborative has compiled examples of metrics, data displays, and analytic approaches to help fellow researchers more fully measure equity both as a condition and as an outcome in studies focused on education.

Minnesota’s two-year project to improve student success and degree attainment focused on improved course placement methods, communications about satisfactory academic progress and policies, and comprehensive student support programs. A major lesson in this brief: Programs that show significant results must be implemented widely to change student outcomes meaningfully.

In this commentary originally published in Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, two MDRC researchers and their colleagues describe how Head Start programs can invest federal relief funds to help parents of children in Head Start advance toward their economic goals.

The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) project integrates procedural justice (the idea of fairness in processes) into enforcement at six child support agencies. This brief describes PJAC’s approach to forgiving parents’ child support debt as an incentive for positive behavior—for example, making consistent payments.

MDRC’s Equity Collaborative has developed a set of guiding questions to help researchers incorporate culturally responsive practices and an equity-based perspective in all stages of an evaluation or technical assistance project.

In this commentary, which originally appeared in Early Learning Nation, MDRC’s Shira Mattera and Ximena Portilla suggest three important investments that states, districts, and programs can make to support high-quality teaching in early education settings.

More than 5 million American children under the age of 18, a disproportionate number of whom are Black or Latino, have had a parent incarcerated. This report reviews studies about promising programs that seek to maintain and build healthy relationships between parents who are incarcerated and their children.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced leaders of the Male Student Success Initiative at the Community College of Baltimore County to create an entirely online environment for a formerly hands-on program. Here are some measures the program took to deepen its commitment to supporting and mentoring its students.

A research-practice partnership between MDRC and the New York City Department of Education focused on mutual learning using insights from behavioral science and human-centered design to achieve five learning goals related to the kindergarten application process. This report discusses study results and lessons learned for each of the five goals.

The pandemic has been especially hard on recent high school graduates. MDRC is partnering with several cities to connect 2020 and 2021 graduates to high-quality programs and coaching and counseling resources that can guide them to educational and workforce opportunities that match their interests.

The Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) study used text messages to administer short surveys, collecting information rapidly and directly from participants in the study about their experiences with fatherhood programs. This infographic offers lessons the B3 team learned about text messaging and offers tips for other programs.

In 2020, MDRC launched the world’s first comprehensive cloud platform for social policy research: SPROUT (Social Policy Research and Operations Unified Technology). MDRC is making SPROUT available at near cost to social and educational policy researchers, agencies, and nonprofit organizations, regardless of their affiliation with MDRC.

In this commentary, originally published in Community College Daily, MDRC’s Alyssa Ratledge draws on years of research to make the case for the importance of adding robust support services to free tuition programs at community colleges.

Home visiting provides information, resources, and support to expectant parents with low incomes and families with young children and low incomes. This report presents the proposed design for long-term follow-ups with families in a recent large study of home visiting, continuing through the time their children are in high school.

The InPractice blog is MDRC’s place for sharing resources and tips developed by practitioners, for practitioners. This review of the past year’s posts shows how our program partners adjusted to difficult, uncertain conditions and continued to deliver services during the worst of the pandemic.

In this commentary originally published by New America, Meghan McCormick and Amena Sengal argue that states and districts should allocate some pandemic relief dollars to strengthening summer learning for pre-k and kindergarten students.

The Families Forward Demonstration examined strategies to help parents with low and middle incomes make reliable child support payments by increasing employment and earnings. The model, which emphasized free occupational training activities, shows promise for helping parents qualify for jobs in their chosen fields and for improving child support compliance.