Publications

Career and technical education programs are trying to address challenges faced by disadvantaged students, particularly Black students and other students of color. Access is only part of the path to equity as these programs focus on inclusive workplace environments, meaningful mentorships, and language that emphasizes strengths rather than real or presumed deficits.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hurt many students, but many have also grown tremendously from the events they experienced in 2020. This brief discusses service learning as a practice that draws on the skills and community awareness students have developed through the past year, and that also can help them rebound.

Millions of community college students, particularly students of color and women, don’t complete the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses critical to succeeding in the modern economy. This brief examines one program that combines increased academic support, out-of-classroom activities, accelerated coursework, and other components to help improve student outcomes.

This is the first in a series of briefs highlighting strategies to increase educational equity by addressing students’ social and emotional needs. It describes how environmental and structural factors cause disparities in social and emotional well-being that affect learning, then lays out three levels of change to address this inequity.

This brief summarizes recent findings about the rollout of the federal emergency aid program for higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. It offers recommendations and resources for policymakers and practitioners interested in developing or implementing future programs in a time of national crisis as well as in more stable times.

Roca Baltimore works with young men who have been involved in the justice system and who are at high risk of violence. MDRC is partnering with Roca to evaluate its implementation and participant outcomes. This brief describes the program model, the young men it serves, and its local context.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, programs that combined substance use disorder treatment and recovery with employment services faced new service-delivery challenges, including an unprecedented shift to virtual services. This brief discusses the operational experiences of seven such programs in the initial months of COVID-19.

Financial aid reduces dropout rates, yet college students are unaware of many financial resources available to them. The 2021 American Rescue Plan Act requires colleges to tell students they can apply for more aid. These evidence-based strategies can help schools create effective messages about aid to get positive responses.

In this commentary originally published in Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, two MDRC researchers and their colleagues describe how Head Start programs can invest federal relief funds to help parents of children in Head Start advance toward their economic goals.

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 PJAC’s approach to forgiving parents’ child support debt as an incentive for positive behavior—for example, making consistent payments.

MDRC’s Equity Collaborative has developed a set of guiding questions to help researchers incorporate culturally responsive practices and an equity-based perspective in all stages of an evaluation or technical assistance project.

In this commentary, which originally appeared in Early Learning Nation, MDRC’s Shira Mattera and Ximena Portilla suggest three important investments that states, districts, and programs can make to support high-quality teaching in early education settings.

Unemployed or underemployed parents have trouble paying child support. In the Families Forward Demonstration, child support agencies sought to help parents get better jobs and increase their earnings by teaching job skills needed by local employers. The questions arising from the project may help other agencies evaluate prospective job training partners.

In this commentary originally published by New America, Meghan McCormick and Shira Mattera describe how investing greater resources in community-based programs will be critical for building an equitable universal pre-K system that provides high-quality experiences to all children.

MDRC’s Equity Collaborative has compiled examples of metrics, data displays, and analytic approaches to help fellow researchers more fully measure equity both as a condition and as an outcome in studies focused on education.

Minnesota’s two-year project to improve student success and degree attainment focused on improved course placement methods, communications about satisfactory academic progress and policies, and comprehensive student support programs. A major lesson in this brief: Programs that show significant results must be implemented widely to change student outcomes meaningfully.

The Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) study used text messages to administer short surveys, collecting information rapidly and directly from participants in the study about their experiences with fatherhood programs. This infographic offers lessons the B3 team learned about text messaging and offers tips for other programs.

In 2020, MDRC launched the world’s first comprehensive cloud platform for social policy research: SPROUT (Social Policy Research and Operations Unified Technology). MDRC is making SPROUT available at near cost to social and educational policy researchers, agencies, and nonprofit organizations, regardless of their affiliation with MDRC.

In this commentary, originally published in Community College Daily, MDRC’s Alyssa Ratledge draws on years of research to make the case for the importance of adding robust support services to free tuition programs at community colleges.

Home visiting provides information, resources, and support to expectant parents with low incomes and families with young children and low incomes. This report presents the proposed design for long-term follow-ups with families in a recent large study of home visiting, continuing through the time their children are in high school.