Publications

Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) is an initiative to help young people who have been involved in the foster care or juvenile justice systems, or who are homeless. This brief provides details on the models in LEAP and the young people participating, and offers some early implementation findings.

Early findings show that using multiple measures to assess college readiness reduces the number of students placed in remedial classes and increases the number who enroll in and complete college-level math and English.

Studying implementation is a multidisciplinary exercise requiring careful planning and coordination. This post, the first of several from the Implementation Research Incubator describing the processes and procedures of MDRC’s work, shows how a wide array of staff members contribute to the effort.

Paycheck Plus raises the top tax credit for low-income workers without dependent children from $500 to $2,000. In a three-year test, the program increased after-credit earnings, reducing severe poverty; modestly improved employment among women and more disadvantaged men; and led to more noncustodial parents paying child support.

This report describes the ways in which eight TANF programs primarily serving American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) families use subsidized employment. It found that their use of subsidized employment has the potential to provide work opportunities for AIAN individuals with limited work experience and barriers to employment.

A group of 17 donors are collaborating to provide multiyear funding to help community organizations build data capacity and integrate services — an uncommon opportunity. This report reviews the progress made among the first round of grantees and considers lessons involving donor expectations, technical assistance, and stakeholder involvement.

This paper reviews the available evidence supporting various types of career and technical education programs, touching on both the amount of evidence available in each area and its level of rigor.

The fourth in a series from the Chicago Community Networks study, this web feature explores how partnerships within local collaborations can both sustain themselves and adapt in the face of external events, using one Chicago neighborhood as a case study.

This report presents 30-month impacts from a random assignment evaluation of a program that subsidized employers to offer temporary paid jobs to young people who were disconnected from school and work in New York City. After 30 months, program enrollees and nonenrollees fared similarly, with the former slightly more likely to report employment.

An essential step in the child support process is delivering legal documents to the person named as a parent. This infographic summarizes results from a Georgia intervention that aimed to get parents to come in and accept documents voluntarily instead of using a sheriff or process server to deliver them.

This report from the Community College Research Center and MDRC describes how three institutions — University of North Carolina, Charlotte; California State University, Fresno; and Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania — are implementing comprehensive, technology-based advising reforms, including detailed examples of new advising practices, outreach methods, and messages to students.

In the second of two posts on the research opportunities presented by school choice systems, Reflections on Methodology discusses a few issues common to lottery-based analyses — constrained statistical power, imperfect compliance, and restricted generalizability.

To help City University of New York (CUNY) students referred to developmental (remedial) education, CUNY Start delays their enrollment in a degree program for one semester of intensive instruction. This report describes students’ progress through developmental education after one semester, and college enrollment in the semester thereafter.

One in five U.S. children live in poverty. This review examines how children and parents think and feel about poverty and public benefits, as well as how families discuss their economic circumstances. Children report awareness of both material deprivation and stigma.

The Center for Applied Behavioral Science (CABS) combines MDRC’s decades of experience tackling social policy issues with insights from behavioral science. This graphic explains the CABS’s approach to solving problems.

This community college reform directs remedial math students into accelerated course sequences focused on statistics or quantitative reasoning, depending on their programs of study. In a random assignment evaluation, students in the pathways group are enrolling in and passing college-level math at a higher rate than students in traditional courses.

Fathers in Responsible Fatherhood programs can face numerous barriers to remaining involved with their children. This brief describes how MDRC collaborated with fathers to develop DadTime, one of the first smartphone applications designed specifically to help fathers improve their engagement with and attendance at parenting programs.

A key to interpreting study findings is considering not just the features of a program being tested, but how it differs from business as usual — which may change over the course of the evaluation. The Implementation Research Incubator discusses guidelines for measuring this contrast.

Community college students who enroll in summer courses are more likely to graduate, but most do not attend during the summer. The Encouraging Additional Summer Enrollment (EASE) project uses insights from behavioral science to encourage more students to enroll in summer. This brief presents EASE’s Phase I findings.

To address underplacement, in which students who could succeed in college-level courses are directed into developmental education, community colleges have begun supplementing the typical placement test with measures like high school GPA and noncognitive assessments. This guide walks colleges through the process and pitfalls of undertaking this kind of reform.