Publications

This brief reports findings from an analysis of patterns of data use by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) agencies. The findings highlight the importance of collaboration and communication, both internally and externally, and should be of interest to TANF administrators who want to make their agencies more data-driven.

A learning agenda is an outline of a state’s research priorities. This brief discusses how a state can use a learning agenda to direct investments toward proven interventions and foster equitable student success.

Disruptive behaviors in school can hinder students’ learning and long-term success. This study evaluated a “multi-tiered systems of support for behavior” program, which reinforces good behavior and provides supplemental support to students in need. Overall student outcomes did not improve but students who struggled the most saw some short-term benefits.

This blog post looks at how community colleges participating in MDRC’s Scaling Up College Completion Efforts for Student Success (SUCCESS) project use data-driven program management to keep tabs on key performance measures in real time and then act when those measures aren’t moving in the right direction.

Some 10.5 million children in this country live in poverty, yet little is known about how they and their families view their daily experiences of poverty. In this report, children, adolescents, and their parents who participate in social safety net programs discuss their perceptions of poverty, wealth, and economic inequality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.