Publications

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.

This practitioner brief describes three new approaches in the B3 evaluation of enhancements to Responsible Fatherhood programs: a cognitive behavioral workshop that builds skills for employment stability; Just Beginning, an interactive approach to high-quality parenting; and DadTime, a mobile app to encourage active participation by fathers with their children.

Many students in high-poverty schools face serious challenges such as housing instability and hunger, and the stress in their daily lives can affect their school attendance and performance. CIS aims to address these challenges. This brief describes how the organization has used evaluation findings to enhance and modify its services.

Communities In Schools (CIS) works to integrate a variety of support services for students to keep them on a path to graduation. This quasi-experimental evaluation examined the effects of the CIS whole-school model in high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools.

More and more schools are using multi-tiered systems of support to deliver students the right amount of help when they need it. MDRC has evaluated several such systems — eight, in fact. This brief summarizes some lessons about tiered systems of support drawn from those evaluations.

How do community groups collaborate to improve schools, address violence, and rebuild homes and businesses? What strategies do groups take to connect with each other to improve their communities? Are some forms of collaboration more effective than others?

Funding requirements, new government policies, or budget realities may force organizations to alter components of a program model, complicating the assessment of its implementation. How can researchers anticipate such adaptations, and what can they learn from them? The Implementation Research Incubator offers some ideas.

MDRC launches the first of a five-part web series from the Chicago Community Networks study — a mixed-methods initiative that combines formal social network analysis with in-depth field surveys of community practitioners. It measures how community organizations collaborate on local improvement projects and how they come together to shape public policy.

Even in good economic times, workers with limited education may need help getting or regaining a foothold in the job market. Effective career training programs exist. Approaches that target in-demand industries and closely involve employers can get results, benefiting high school students, adults without diplomas, and long-term unemployed workers.

Pay for Success promises to generate funding to solve complex social problems while at the same time using ideas from the private sector to hold governments accountable. For the concept to work, though, parties in a Pay-for-Success deal must have some specific skills.

This brief, which draws on data from a large survey of secondary school teachers and principals, discusses how existing evaluation and support systems could be better used to realize the vision of teacher improvement now included in federal law under the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Born out of research showing that girls and boys have different risk factors and pathways into the justice system, gender-responsive programs focus on girls’ unique needs and strengths. This brief summarizes the developing research on their effectiveness and describes how one program enacts the principles in its service delivery.

MDRC launches the first of a five-part web series from the Chicago Community Networks study — a mixed-methods initiative that combines formal social network analysis with in-depth field surveys of community practitioners. It measures how community organizations collaborate on local improvement projects and how they come together to shape public policy.

Democrats and Republicans agree it is necessary to build evidence concerning the nation’s social programs. But more should be done to improve the nation’s research capabilities, to embed evidence building in government programs, and to put evidence at the heart of making policy.

Can children’s math skills be strengthened in pre-K and kindergarten, and can such improvements have longer-term effects? This preliminary analysis examines the cumulative effects of two early math programs and demonstrates that this enhanced experience can have modest, positive impacts on children’s math and executive function skills in kindergarten.

Researchers and funders often want to know not just whether a social program works, but how and why — the terrain of implementation research. This new series of monthly posts shares ideas from past program evaluations and insights from ongoing studies that can improve research approaches.

Subsidized employment programs use public funds to create jobs for the unemployed. This two-page memo describes how they can provide short-term income support to individuals with serious barriers to employment or to broader groups during poor economic times — while having positive effects on reducing recidivism, increasing child support payments, or reducing reliance on welfare.

In 2016, MDRC has published more than 50 reports and briefs on programs affecting low-income Americans in all realms of education and social policy: education from preschool to postsecondary, workforce development, behavioral science, youth development, home visiting, and more.

For school districts striving to meet both ESSA requirements and specific educational needs, this infographic shows how evidence can guide decisions. The evaluation of Reading Partners, a one-on-one volunteer tutoring program, serves as an example.