Founded in 1974, MDRC is committed to improving the lives of people with low incomes. We design promising new interventions, evaluate existing programs, and provide technical assistance to build better programs.
MDRC develops evidence about solutions to some of the nation’s most difficult problems. Explore our projects and variety of products, including publications, videos, podcast episodes, and resources for researchers and practitioners.
Lessons from Employers and Schools in NYC's Original P-TECH Grades 9-14 Schools
New York City P-TECH Grades 9-14 schools partner directly with employers to provide work-based learning experiences for students, including internships, mentoring, and job shadowing, that align with the career and technical education curricula the schools offer. This brief describes four important strategies for forming and maintaining productive partnerships.
Head Start, a federal early childhood program, uses data-driven insights to enhance the quality and responsiveness of its services. The National Head Start Association’s Victoria L. Jones and MDRC’s Samuel Maves spoke with Mary Lockhart-Findling, a Head Start program director, to discuss the ins and outs of pre-K assessments.
Postsecondary institutions across the country are adopting corequisite remediation—which enrolls students directly into college-level courses and provides them with aligned and concurrent support—as an alternative to stand-alone developmental (remedial) courses. This brief summarizes insights from the latest research.
Customer Journey Mapping as a Tool to Identify Barriers to Program Participation
To identify ways to bolster participation in fatherhood programs, the Strengthening the Implementation of Responsible Fatherhood Programs project used “customer journey mapping,” a process that focuses on the needs and goals of participants. This document describes and illustrates each of five steps in the mapping process.
The TANF Data Innovation (TDI) project was created to expand the use of administrative data by state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) agencies to improve program performance. This brief describes a TDI test of an approach to building staff capabilities through applied data analytics, intensive training, and technical assistance.
Although policymakers and institutions have increasingly disaggregated college completion data by race and gender to create targeted forms of support, the complex and intersecting challenges that Black women face in college often remain overlooked. This brief highlights opportunities to address the challenges Black women face in postsecondary education.
When high school students can enroll in college courses, they are more likely to enroll in and persist in college; however, access to such opportunities is distributed inequitably. This brief offers recommendations for increasing access to and equity in such courses for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds.
Families’ Stories from the Early Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic
This report describes how the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic affected the economic circumstances and emotional well-being of a small sample of families with younger children and low incomes. It adds meaningful context to the nationally reported aggregate statistics about the pandemic and its effects on families and children.
In this blog post originally published by New America, seven pre-K leaders—including center directors and principals—share their perspectives about how to make early education assessments more useful, equitable, and effective.
A Brief Synthesis of 20 Years of MDRC’s Randomized Controlled Trials
What works to help community college students progress academically? This brief synthesizes 20 years of rigorous research by MDRC, presenting new evidence about key attributes of community college interventions that are positively related to larger impacts on students’ academic progress.
Practices, Justifications, Outcomes, and Limitations
Many colleges are exploring alternative assessment models, such as informed self-placement (ISP), to increase student enrollment and success in entry-level college courses and to identify students who would benefit from developmental (remedial) instruction. This literature review provides a discussion of the methods used to implement ISP and justifications for its use.
Multiple testing procedures reduce the likelihood of false positive findings, but can also reduce the probability of detecting true effects. This post introduces two open-source software tools from the Power Under Multiplicity Project that can help researchers plan analyses for randomized controlled trials using multiple testing procedures.
Per Scholas, a sector-based training and career advancement program, has had success expanding access and increasing enrollment by leveraging the expertise of outside research firms. This brief focuses on the organization’s participation in MDRC’s “Expanding the Impact” study, which was designed to help Per Scholas further deepen its impact.
Results from the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation
Home visiting programs aim to support the healthy development of infants and toddlers in families with low incomes. This report presents the findings from a study that estimated the cost of providing home visiting services.
In this commentary originally published in Route Fifty, JoAnn Hsueh, Cynthia Miller, and Michelle Maier discuss how states are supplementing the wages of childcare workers to retain them during widespread staffing shortages. Ensuring eligible workers enroll to receive the benefit can be challenging, but research suggests three strategies to help.
Leaning on a robust body of evidence, this brief offers suggestions to policymakers, college administrators, and researchers for forecasting the financial impact of new interventions in postsecondary education, based on the interventions’ costs and their ability to keep more students enrolled, generate tuition revenue and state funding, and improve outcomes.
State higher education funding is strongly linked with college completion. However, states often distribute funding inequitably, providing fewer resources to institutions that predominantly serve students of color and those with low incomes. This brief explores “state finance equity audits,” which states can use to assess and correct inequities in funding.
College students who enroll full time directly after high school are often considered “traditional.” But their experience is not the norm—a large proportion of undergraduate students are older than 24, work full time, or have children. This brief shares recommendations for helping these “posttraditional” learners succeed.
Children’s and Adolescents’ Perceptions and Experiences of Poverty and Inequality
Poverty in childhood can affect health, social and behavioral functioning, and cognitive, academic, and educational outcomes. Yet little is known about how children view their experiences of poverty. This brief summarizes findings from interviews with children and adolescents about their perceptions of wealth, economic inequality, and their own poverty experiences.
Homeboy Industries Managed Its Organization-Wide Transition to a New Data System by Following Five Key Principles
Homeboy Industries’ (HBI) experience implementing a new data system was described in an earlier InPractice post. This post examines the complexities and challenges that must be addressed before successful implementation can take place, and how HBI managed that change process.