MDRC

"Recently, the White House announced that it had exceeded its goal of recruiting 250,000 adults to become tutors, mentors and student success coaches in schools, allowing for a significant expansion of school-based tutoring programs," write MDRC's Barbara Condliffe and Shira Mattera in District Administration. "This is an impressive achievement. The question now is: Can tutoring for more students actually help reverse the pandemic-induced trends of lagging academic progress and widening equity gaps? "....Implementing any kind of major intervention in schools at a rapid pace is notoriously hard—a fact we know firsthand as former educators and education researchers at MDRC. "Based on our experience helping schools adopt new practices, we recommend that school leaders commit to the following four strategies to maximize their chances of helping new or expanded tutoring programs take root....."

"Some of the seeds of the current crisis were planted about two decades ago, when former Mayor Michael Bloomberg oversaw a sweeping effort to close struggling larger high schools and replace them with hundreds of smaller ones under the theory that smaller schools could deliver better results. "There’s evidence that smaller schools produced benefits, leading to higher graduation rates and college enrollment, though there is little research on how those schools are faring now. "'New York City’s small schools had a very large, consistent positive impact on students,' said Rebecca Unterman, of the research firm MDRC, who studied the effect of the small schools in the years after they opened." via Chalkbeat New York

Madelyn Austin, Employment Program Supervisor at Impact and Diego Colin, Implementation Researcher at MDRC co-presented at the NAMI Illinois Stronger Together: Building Unity, Driving Impact conference last week. Their session, titled "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Individual Placement and Support (IPS) within Substance Use Programs," delved into the importance of integrating employment services within substance use treatment programs. #MentalHealth #SubstanceUseRecovery #IPS #EmploymentSupport #NAMI2024 #ImpactfulResearch #StrongerTogether

Thrilled that our ASAP & ACE programs at The State University of New York are now serving more than 4200 students and are already driving gains in credit completion and persistence. Deeply grateful to Governor Hochul and our legislative champions for their investment in the SUNY Transformation Fund which made it possible for us to implement these evidence-based programs across 25 of our campuses. When I served as U.S. Secretary of Education for President Obama, I would talk about how impressed I was by the results of the randomized controlled trial (RCT) research on ASAP conducted by MDRC. Now, I feel privileged to be able to help take this proven model to scale at SUNY. https://lnkd.in/edSmzcqa

"The State University of New York Chancellor John King today announced that one year after stating plans to replicate the nation’s leading evidence-based retention and completion model, 4,270 students are now enrolled in ASAP|ACE across 25 SUNY campuses. All participating colleges met their enrollment targets and 12 had waiting lists going into the fall semester.... "'The ASAP/ACE model has an unparalleled record of success in study after study,' said Virginia Knox, President of MDRC. 'It is heartening to see this remarkable program being expanded to benefit so many students across the SUNY system.'"

This new brief from the MDRC Center for Criminal Justice Research synthesizes findings from three recent impact studies that assessed the effectiveness of varying intensities and modes of pretrial supervision, as well as electronic monitoring and sobriety monitoring, at ensuring court appearances and preventing new arrests. In sum, these analyses suggest that more restrictive levels and modes of pretrial supervision and special conditions do NOT improve the rates at which clients appear in court or avoid arrest. Jurisdictions should consider reducing their reliance on these release conditions and instead seek less restrictive requirements to support pretrial compliance among this population.

MDRCers are gearing up to take part in the upcoming #2024APPAM conference in National Harbor, MD, November 21-23! If you'll be there, please join us for a special reception celebrating MDRC's 50th anniversary on Thursday, Nov 21, 7:00-8:30 pm.

SREE, Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness is hosting a two-part webinar, “An Introduction to Bayesian Impact Analysis,” featuring Howard Bloom, former MDRC Chief Social Scientist, and Pei Zhu, MDRC Senior Research Associate, on October 24 and November 14. The webinars will introduce program evaluators to the basic ideas, intuition, logic, methods, applications, benefits, and limitations of Bayesian impact analysis, an emerging method for integrating a current impact estimate for a specific intervention with prior impact estimates for related interventions and study populations to obtain a more fully informed current impact estimate.

Jurisdictions across the United States are making changes to their pretrial systems to reduce the number of people who are held in pretrial detention. They are increasingly relying on strategies such as pretrial supervision, which requires released people to meet regularly with supervision staff members, and special conditions, such as electronic monitoring and sobriety monitoring. Three recent studies suggest that more restrictive levels and modes of pretrial supervision and special conditions do not improve the rates at which clients appear in court or avoid arrest. Jurisdictions should consider reducing their reliance on these release conditions and instead seek less restrictive requirements to support pretrial compliance among this population. 

To those working on behavioral health in Illinois: Will you be attending the NAMI Illinois state-wide conference tomorrow? Come learn from our Building Evidence on Employment Strategies (BEES) presentation on evaluating the effectiveness of supported employment, presented with Impact Behavioral Health Partners!