Publications

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.

This study examines whether an alternative approach to distributing financial aid — in biweekly payments instead of one or two lump sums — can improve outcomes for low-income community college students. After one semester, the policy reduced students’ debt and use of federal loans but showed little consistent evidence of academic effects.

Students learn or progress at their own paces. How can schools make sure that they get the help they need — and only the help they need? Many are turning to multi-tiered systems of support. This brief provides some practical considerations for schools contemplating tiered approaches.

A promising new community college intervention involves a revised developmental math course that emphasizes statistical and quantitative reasoning skills to align with students’ fields of study. In a random assignment evaluation at four schools in Texas, students report a qualitatively different experience with math instruction.

Schools or programs often face challenges in delivering services — such as limited time -- that may change what aspects of a service they implement and how. The Implementation Research Incubator discusses designing a measurement approach that can reveal important variations.

The BIAS project tested behavioral interventions in child support, child care, and work support programs with nearly 100,000 low-income clients in eight human services agencies. Each site saw at least one significant, low-cost impact. The findings suggest that small environmental changes can enhance client-agency interactions and expanded behavioral strategies might help strengthen programs and policies.

To serve at-risk girls, PACE provides academic and social services in a gender-responsive environment, focusing on safety, relationships, and girls’ individual strengths while accounting for the effects of trauma. The program offers low staff-to-student ratios, counseling and case management, and a life skills curriculum targeted to girls.

This issue focus describes how MDRC is helping administrators in criminal justice and child support enforcement test innovative reforms to improve the way their systems interact with low-income people, particularly men of color. 

School choice systems can be complex and confusing for low-income families. In the search for solutions, researchers and policymakers may have overlooked lessons from other policy arenas. This issue focus suggests strategies from MDRC’s experience designing and evaluating interventions to support low-income people’s decision making in arenas outside P-12 choice systems.

Many low-income young people are not reaching important milestones, but the social-service organizations and schools that serve them often struggle to identify who is at more or less risk. Predictive analytics use schools’ and programs’ existing data to help them identify risk earlier and more accurately.