Publications

In 2020, MDRC published 100 reports, briefs, practitioner guides, blog posts, and infographics — offering evaluation results, profiles of innovative programs, and evidence-backed advice for policymakers and practitioners confronting both the crisis of the pandemic and longstanding inequities in society. Here are the 15 most popular.

Working with the City University of New York, MDRC’s Center for Applied Behavioral Science mapped factors that impede students transferring from community colleges. This blueprint shows the stages of the transfer process, with information about challenges at each stage and interventions informed by behavioral science that could help overcome them.

In this commentary originally published in Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, MDRC President Virginia Knox explains that public and philanthropic investments have built a foundation of evidence that can inform decision makers as they work to build economic mobility and reduce inequality.

This Issue Focus highlights MDRC’s efforts to incorporate principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion into the content of our work and how we conduct it, providing examples of current and ongoing initiatives to advance those goals.

This report from the Building Evidence on Employment Strategies for Low-Income Families project examines programs that integrate employment services with treatment and recovery services for people with substance use disorders. It explores the role employment plays in recovery and reviews limited but promising evidence on the effectiveness of these integrated programs.

The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) project integrates procedural justice (the idea of fairness in processes) into enforcement at six child support agencies. This brief describes the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on PJAC project agencies and parents during the spring and summer of 2020, and examines agencies’ responses.

MDRC’s work appeared in a variety of mainstream and trade publications in 2020 — on such topics as criminal justice reform, responses to the pandemic, community college programs, career and technical education, and high school reform. Here are 10 of our favorites.

MDRC’s Evidence First podcast features experts — program administrators, policymakers, and researchers — talking about the best evidence available on education and social programs. Here are the five most popular episodes from 2020.

Low-wage workers have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, experiencing greater levels of unemployment than their higher-wage-earning peers. Training programs that focus on moving workers into skilled jobs in industries with strong local demand could reposition them for 21st-century success.

Men of color complete college at lower rates than their fellow students. To help overcome this gap, many colleges have programs offering academic and social support to male students of color. This report summarizes MDRC’s evaluation of one such program at the Community College of Baltimore County.

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, early care and education providers faced challenges attracting and retaining qualified, well-trained, and diverse early educators — and staff turnover can affect children’s early progress. Three approaches may help improve these workers’ access to professional education, their overall economic well-being, and their sometimes difficult working conditions.

Colleges support students with academic and other types of advising, counseling, or coaching. Some schools enhance those services by reducing adviser caseloads and providing more comprehensive, frequent guidance, which can improve students’ semester-to-semester retention and average credits earned. This brief describes important lessons on designing and implementing those services.

A college degree remains critical to unlocking opportunity and to accessing America’s middle class, yet millions of students who pursue higher education never earn degrees. This memo, produced with Results for America, draws lessons and policy implications from two decades of rigorous research in postsecondary institutions focused on addressing this problem.

This paper describes the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model, a framework for providing employment services to those facing barriers to work. MDRC, in partnership with MEF Associates and Abt Associates, is studying IPS as part of the Building Evidence on Employment Strategies for Low-Income Families (BEES) project.

Can hands-on internships be successfully converted into all-virtual programs in the age of COVID-19? Here are some lessons that MDRC learned when it decided to transform its summer internship into a virtual learning opportunity, plus tips for organizations considering such an approach.

In this commentary originally published in Government Executive, MDRC Senior Vice President Dan Bloom argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that it’s important for decisionmakers to make bold policy reforms and to build evidence for future action at the same time.

A random assignment evaluation at seven State University of New York campuses finds that using multiple measures assessments to determine placement in remedial education led to more students being placed in college-level courses, where they did better than their peers who were placed in remedial classes.

More children spend time in preschool now than a decade ago, but not all of them get educational programs of the same quality. This brief explores how to put new classroom curricula in place across multiple schools to bolster classroom quality, instructional practices, and children’s skills.

In this commentary, originally published in Community College Daily, President Marcia Ballinger of Lorain County Community College describes how Lorain’s comprehensive student success program, SAIL, has persevered during the pandemic — and offered lessons for school’s overall response to COVID-19.

Colleges, researchers, and advocates believe innovation and change are needed in developmental (remedial) education, because developmental courses have low success rates and because many of their students ultimately drop out. This brief summarizes research on developmental education and provides summaries of findings and implications for state and college practices.