Families of youth with disabilities often access services to promote youth's transitions to adulthood. Such services can be oriented toward the youth or family. Using descriptive statistics and regression modeling of survey and administrative data, we explored patterns of service use and the association between outcomes for 9,013 U.S. youth with…

Promoting the Readiness of Minors in Supplemental Security Income (PROMISE), a study of 13,444 randomly assigned youth and their families, includes six model demonstration projects and a technical assistance center funded through the U.S. Department of Education and a national evaluation of the model demonstration projects funded through the…

The U.S. Department of Education's Policy to Performance project was funded in 2009 to build the capacity of state adult basic education (ABE) staff to develop and implement policies and practices that would support an ABE transition system. Policy to Performance states were selected though a competitive process. State adult education directors…

The Prevention Initiative Demonstration Project, funded by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), is a community-specific strategy delivered through eight regional networks designed to address the full spectrum of community-based prevention. This article summarizes a strong and meaningful pattern of improvements…

One of the original purposes of student financial aid was to ensure fairer access to post-secondary education to those least able to afford it and to those traditionally underrepresented. Various federal and state programs were put in place to achieve this goal, including the federal Pell Grant and state aid programs. Yet policymakers and…

"Free To Grow"--a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF)--supported efforts by Head Start agencies and their community partners to strengthen the families and neighborhood environments of high-risk preschool children living in low-income communities. The goal was to reduce the children's vulnerability to substance…

The "Policy to Performance Toolkit" is designed to provide state adult education staff and key stakeholders with guidance and tools to use in developing, implementing, and monitoring state policies and their associated practices that support an effective state adult basic education (ABE) to postsecondary education and training transition…

The Learning Communities Demonstration is a national research project that is testing the effectiveness of learning communities in six community colleges across the United States: Merced College in California; The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Baltimore, Maryland; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida; Houston…

Performance-based scholarships have two main goals: (1) to give students more money for college; and (2) to provide incentives for academic progress. MDRC launched the Performance-Based Scholarship (PBS) Demonstration in 2008 to evaluate the effectiveness of these scholarships in a diverse set of states, institutions, and low-income student…

Health care providers could help achieve the necessary shift to healthful eating and active living; however, lack of coverage or reimbursement, lack of time, and limited information about appropriate interventions are some of the documented barriers. This report highlights the potential for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education…

Community college stakeholders are searching with increasing urgency for approaches with the potential to improve the success rates for community college students, particularly those in need of developmental education. "Learning communities," which place cohorts of students together in two or more courses for one semester, are a popular…

The expense of attending college is one factor that may explain why low-income students often drop out of school. In California, despite generous state aid and relatively low fees at community colleges, many low-income students still have substantial college-related costs that they cannot cover. To compound matters, federal support for students…

The Learning Communities Demonstration is a national research project that is testing the effectiveness of learning communities in six community colleges across the United States: Merced College in California; The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Baltimore, Maryland; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida; Houston…

This report focuses on the seven original Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) projects selected for funding in 2003. Three of the original seven projects were selected for a national random assignment evaluation in 2005; however, this report only focuses on program operations prior to joining the random assignment evaluation for the three…

The Jobs-Plus Community Revitalization Initiative for Public Housing Families was developed in the late 1990s in response to the growing concentration of joblessness, underemployment, welfare receipt, and poverty in some of the nation's most economically deprived communities: public housing developments and their surrounding neighborhoods. In many…