Publications

Jobs Plus promotes employment among public housing residents through employment services, rent rule changes that provide incentives to work, and community support for work. Within the first 18 months, all nine public housing agencies in this evaluation had begun structuring their programs, building partnerships, and implementing the model’s core components.

FSS provides case management services and a long-term escrow-savings account to housing-assisted families; an enhanced version also offered short-term cash work incentives. Six-year results of the random assignment evaluation show few significant effects overall for either program. However, the enhanced program increased employment and earnings for participants not working at enrollment.

This grant program funds semester-long paid internships for college juniors and seniors with financial needs. These part-time opportunities, typically with hourly wages of $10-$14, are intended to provide meaningful experiences connected to students’ career interests. Despite some difficulties, many students had highly positive impressions of the program overall.

Paycheck Plus offers workers without dependent children an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) worth up to $2,000 per year for three years (four times the current EITC for singles). Results after two years from a random assignment evaluation show that it has increased income and work rates.

WorkAdvance offers training and placement services to help prepare individuals for quality jobs in sectors that have strong local demand and advancement opportunities. In this update on employment and earnings only, the most experienced provider continued to produce substantial impacts on both; one other provider increased earnings for late enrollees.

MDRC’s Chicago Community Networks Study explores ways to consider power in networks of neighborhood organizations, how power is configured differently in different Chicago neighborhoods, and how these patterns can help communities respond to local challenges.

Success Academy is a rapidly expanding charter school network in New York City. In this paper, MDRC uses lotteries for the seven Success Academy schools operating during the 2010-2011 school year to estimate the difference in students’ academic achievement caused by Success Academy.

In the complex high school choice process, families may face an additional layer of decisions if they are considering career and technical education programs, which vary widely in their structure, content, and quality. This issue focus emphasizes the importance of providing families with clear information about how to compare them.

The NYC Change Capital Fund, a donor collaborative, invests in community organizations to help build their data capacity. This brief outlines the challenges and benefits of creating a data infrastructure and the need to help staff members go beyond standard funder reporting practices and begin using data to improve programs.

For 18 years, Howard Bloom, MDRC’s chief social scientist, has led the organization’s development of experimental and quasi-experimental methods for estimating program impacts. In this essay, he reviews some of the lessons he has learned in four decades of research both inside and outside academia.

Welfare rolls declined after Temporary Assistance for Needy Families became law in 1996, and there was widespread consensus that its reforms were a bipartisan success story. But the onslaught of the Great Recession exposed serious flaws in the law. This memo describes a two-part solution based on experience and evidence.

The ExCEL Network, a collaboration of researchers, preschool providers, and local officials, is exploring how benefits of early childhood interventions persist. The ExCEL P-3 project examines whether one preschool program, reinforced by a system-wide alignment of instruction into elementary school, has impacts on a range of skills through third grade.

Researchers recognize the importance of program culture, but how can it be measured? The Implementation Research Incubator provides an example of a mixed-methods approach that evaluated the experiences of both participants and staff members at a youth program’s multiple sites.

The Detroit Promise allows the city’s high school graduates to attend local colleges tuition-free. To that existing scholarship the Detroit Promise Path adds campus coaches, monthly financial support, enhanced summer engagement, and messages informed by behavioral science. Early findings from the first year are positive.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) promotes work and raises over six million Americans out of poverty each year. Early results from an ongoing demonstration suggest that expanding the EITC for singles, an idea with bipartisan support, is feasible and can increase employment and income while reducing poverty.

As school choice systems expand, district enrollment offices are striving to make the choice process accessible and clear for families. This practitioner brief offers lessons for supporting families through the sequence of decisions involved as they engage in the process, search for information, and compare and select schools.

Hearing directly from those who administer and take part in social programs can greatly enrich an implementation study. The Implementation Research Incubator offers some important considerations for choosing a method and discusses the preparation involved.

Although most college students receive financial aid, many are left with unmet financial needs and may take on loans or drop out as a result. But promising innovations in financial aid could help students pay for college and accelerate their studies.

PowerTeaching emphasizes cooperative learning to instruct middle school math and has shown strong evidence of effectiveness. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education funded an effort to scale up the program, and in 2012 MDRC began a multiyear evaluation of it. This report describes the evaluation and presents its findings.

Forty percent of all entering college students and over half of entering community college students must take at least one remedial course. Fewer than half make it through developmental education. This two-page Looking Forward memo provides an overview of research evidence in four areas of developmental education reform.