Publications

Employment programs situated within public housing developments are facing multiple challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With routine operations disrupted by shelter-in-place orders, programs like Jobs Plus can find creative ways to keep their doors open and their clients engaged.

Monisha Gibson, director and CEO of the Maritime Odyssey Preschool in Norwalk, Connecticut, discusses the program’s work with a vulnerable student and family population during the coronavirus pandemic. She describes how Odyssey adapted to continue its holistic approach: prenatal support, food distribution, connections to mental health services, and quality preschool.

A recent (virtual) discussion with representatives of 13 schools, districts, and programs that provide work-based learning found each of them seizing unexpected opportunities amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The pivot from hands-on experiential learning to virtual instruction is varied and evolving at these organizations, which offer internships, apprenticeships, job shadowing, and other work-related programs.

A Better Life is an economic mobility program operating in four housing authorities in Massachusetts. This brief discusses how the program has shifted to meet residents’ dramatically different needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper summarizes ASAP’s long-term effects and the educational investment in students associated with its services. The program helped students graduate faster, boosted graduation rates by 30 percent, and increased the financial aid students received.

The COVID-19 pandemic means community colleges cannot administer in-person tests to determine whether students must take developmental (remedial) courses. But some colleges were already using multiple pieces of information for course placement, rather than a single test score. This brief offers three relevant insights from research on these placement systems.

The intensive program for middle school students was successfully replicated in three new cities, significantly improving grades after two years. The findings suggest that Higher Achievement could be a model nationwide to help close the learning gap between children born into poverty and their middle-class peers.

MDRC has studied a number of strategies for helping students stay in college and succeed there. Lessons from some of these models may be readily adapted to support students and close equity gaps now and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This Issue Focus offers three lessons taken from MDRC’s evaluations.

Implementation researchers can be good partners to program operators at this difficult time — by being sensitive to the new constraints that programs face, by assessing how learning agendas and evaluation plans need to change, and by helping programs learn from the adaptations they are making in response to the pandemic.

This Issue Focus offers guidance to social service programs seeking to help participants progress toward their goals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Techniques are described for alleviating social isolation, communicating remotely, setting and achieving goals, getting medication, assessing workplace safety, applying for public benefits, working from home, and managing grief.

Higher Achievement, which serves fifth- through eighth-graders, is an effective after-school and summer program that improved middle school students’ math and reading test scores and the academic quality of many students’ high schools. These short-term gains did not translate into impacts on the types of colleges that students attended.

Here are MDRC’s Top Five Tips for social service and educational programs adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic. They focus on ensuring staff members’ and participants’ personal safety so that agencies can continue providing high-quality services and support while working remotely. They also include guidance on protecting participant confidentiality.

Semistructured interviews involve an interviewer asking some prespecified, open-ended questions, with follow-up questions based on what the interviewee has to say. This Reflections on Methodology post describes a semistructured interview protocol recently used to explore how children who experience poverty perceive their situations, their economic status, and public benefit programs.

The paper summarizes past and ongoing research, identifies gaps in knowledge, and presents four categories of potential questions to help define future research in employment and training programs serving low-income people.

The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) project integrates procedural justice principles (the idea of fairness in processes) into enforcement at six child support agencies. This brief describes the parents in the PJAC study sample and what led them to the point of being in contempt of court for nonpayment.

Jenny Taylor, vice president of career services for Goodwill of North Georgia, describes her successful subsidized jobs program targeting noncustodial parents (mostly fathers), how it has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it could be expanded to serve more people.

The MyGoals for Employment Success demonstration uses executive skills coaching to help participants with emotional control, stress tolerance, time management, organization, flexibility, and persistence, which are vital to success in the workplace. Research showing that poverty causes stress and impedes these skills informs the approach of this pilot program.

Bridge-to-college programs aim to help people complete high school and enroll in postsecondary education. This evaluation of one such program at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College in Green Bay, WI finds that it helped more students earn their GEDs and enroll in college courses.

Pretrial release and detention decisions for defendants are increasingly guided by risk assessments guided by data, which are intended to counteract biases but have the potential to introduce new biases and perpetuate racial disparities. This research brief describes the approach taken by MDRC to understand, assess, and address these biases.

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the nation’s awareness of the critical role that low-wage workers — cashiers, nursing assistants, delivery people — play in our lives. MDRC’s Cynthia Miller summarizes research about how expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit can effectively supplement their earnings and lead to other positive benefits for them and their families.