Publications

Beyond measuring average program impacts, it is important to understand how impacts vary. This paper gives a broad overview of the conceptual and statistical issues involved in using multisite randomized trials to learn about and from variation in program effects across individuals, across subgroups of individuals, and across program sites.

One-on-one tutoring by volunteers improves the reading proficiency of struggling second- to fifth-graders, according to MDRC’s random assignment study. As a program staffed mostly by volunteers, Reading Partners is substantially less costly than other supplemental reading services typically offered to struggling readers.

This report examines the implementation and effects of an academic summer program for middle school students offered by Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL). The findings suggest that BELL students did not outperform non-BELL students in reading, but that the program may have had a positive effect on students’ math achievement.

Using data from the Head Start Impact Study, this paper examines variation in Head Start effects across individual children, policy-relevant subgroups of children, and Head Start centers. It finds that past estimates of the average effect of Head Start programs mask a wide range of relative program effectiveness.

MDRC's evaluation of CUNY's ASAP, which showed that the program is doubling the graduation rate of students who start with developmental needs, has gained a lot of attention. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions we've received about ASAP and the study — as well as their answers.

The City University of New York’s comprehensive ASAP program nearly doubles the three-year graduation rate for developmental education students in community college – at a lower cost per degree than regular services. ASAP also increases rates of transfer to four-year colleges.

Nonprofit organizations, which deliver many of the social services Americans receive, often face financial management challenges that affect the quality of their services. This report examines how 25 Chicago-based organizations responded over a four-year period to an initiative designed to improve their ability to address those financial challenges.

YouthBuild is a federally and privately funded program providing construction and other training, educational services, counseling, and leadership development opportunities to low-income, out-of-school young adults ages 16 to 24. This first report from a Department of Labor-supported evaluation focuses on the implementation of YouthBuild in 75 sites across the nation.

The Great Recession took a toll on the already dim economic prospects of low-income 16- to 24-year-olds who face structural barriers to employment. Evidence indicates that involvement of employers in devising education, training, and work experiences that meet labor market demands should be a key component of any policy response.

Improving the employment outlook of disadvantaged young people on a large scale will require a stronger focus on engaging private employers on potential solutions. On June 4, 2014, MDRC and The Rockefeller Foundation convened a group of experts to discuss such demand-driven approaches.

MDRC conducted a study of the Young Adult Literacy program, created in New York City to prepare young adults for a high school equivalency certificate. Findings indicate that the program fills an important gap in services for disadvantaged and disconnected youth who lack critical academic and employment skills.

Policymakers have increasingly encouraged greater use of administrative data to produce timely, rigorous, and lower-cost evaluations of health and social programs. This report details MIHOPE-Strong Start’s process of acquiring administrative vital records and Medicaid data from 20 states and more than 40 state agencies to measure health, health care use, and cost outcomes.

In the Innovative Professional Development (iPD) Challenge, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is helping school districts redesign their teacher professional development systems to better support teachers in increasing student success. This Issue Focus, the second in a series, offers some early reflections from MDRC’s study of it.

This report presents the first findings from MIHOPE, the legislatively mandated national evaluation of the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program. It includes an analysis of the states’ needs assessments, as well as baseline characteristics of families, staff, local programs, and models participating in the study.

In the Innovative Professional Development (iPD) Challenge, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is helping school districts redesign their teacher professional development systems to better support teachers in increasing student success. This Issue Focus introduces the iPD Challenge and presents some early findings from MDRC’s study of it.

This report suggests that evidence-based approaches can improve 3-year-olds’ social-emotional competence in mixed-age preschool classrooms. While the findings are promising, further research is needed to confirm the results and to better understand how these benefits are generated.

Each year, MDRC releases dozens of publications on programs affecting low-income Americans in all realms of education and social policy. Here’s a list of our top 10 most popular reports and briefs in 2014. (Bonus: see our most-downloaded video and infographic, too.)

The Youth Transition Demonstration identified and tested service strategies, combined with waivers of certain Social Security Administration program rules to enhance work incentives, to help youth with disabilities maximize their economic self-sufficiency as they transition to adulthood.

This paper makes valuable contributions to the literature on multiple-rating regression discontinuity designs (MRRDDs). It makes concrete recommendations for choosing among existing MRRDD estimation methods, for implementing any chosen method using local linear regression, and for providing accurate statistical inferences.

The city’s small, academically nonselective high schools have substantially improved graduation rates for disadvantaged students. This report demonstrates that, because more of their students graduate and do so within four years, the schools have lower costs per graduate than the schools their study counterparts attended.