In Arizona, the expansion and elaboration of neoliberal educational policies over the past three decades in Arizona have placed public schools and the teaching profession in precarious positions. These challenges have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Within this turbulent context, a school district in partnership with a college of…

This report summarizes the two-year findings of a rigorous random assignment evaluation of the WorkAdvance model, a sectoral training and advancement initiative. Launched in 2011, WorkAdvance goes beyond the previous generation of employment programs by introducing demand-driven skills training and a focus on jobs that have career pathways. The…

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…

Although a growing number of individuals are enrolling in college in response to the increasing payoff to higher education, more than a third of them never finish. College completion rates are especially disappointing for low-income students, in many cases because they tend to enter college underprepared academically but also because they have…

Purpose: Better Jobs Better Care (BJBC) was a long-term care workforce demonstration that sought to improve recruitment and retention of direct care workers by changing public policy and management practice. The purpose of this article is to document and assess BJBC's implementation, analyze factors affecting implementation, and draw lessons from…

This report presents the final results for the evaluation of the New Americans Centers (NACs) demonstration project in Arkansas and Iowa. It focuses on program operations and plans for program sustainability, while highlighting services provided through the demonstration projects in Arkansas and Iowa. It also documents outcomes for New Iowan…

An increasing number of jobs in today's workforce require postsecondary education, yet large numbers of workers lack the essential skills and credentials to fill these jobs. The result is that many workers remain underemployed, reaching a ceiling early in their working careers. In 2007, the Joyce Foundation launched the Shifting Gears initiative…

For more than two decades the U.S. Department of Education has supported campus- and community-based prevention programs through a number of programs and activities. For example, in 1987 the Department convened the first annual National Meeting for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention in Higher Education as a forum to disseminate…

Recent efforts to improve K-12 educational outcomes have had mixed success. One possible reason is that many students entering kindergarten lack the basic skills to succeed in school. In 2007, with support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Hawai'i launched its P-3 (preschool through third-grade) initiative, the early childhood component of the…

The Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project is the most comprehensive effort thus far to ascertain which approaches help welfare recipients and other low-income people stay steadily employed and advance in their jobs. Launched in 1999 and slated to end in 2009, the ERA project encompasses more than a dozen demonstration programs and…

The second of two volumes, this document continues the final evaluation report of Project Developmental Continuity (PDC), a Head Start demonstration project initiated in 1974 to develop program models which enhance children's social competence by fostering developmental continuity from preschool through the early elementary grades. In particular,…

A procedure was developed for on-site evaluation of replications of exemplary programs that emphasized the replication of the functions accomplished rather than the processes performed. Program functions are defined as operational purposes. A functional analysis begins with identifying program components; describing them fully; and then listing…

This article discusses the challenges faced when a popular model program, the Strengthening Families Program, which in the past has been implemented on a smaller scale in single organizations, moves to a larger, multiorganization endeavor. On the basis of 42 interviews conducted with program staff, the results highlight two main themes that…

This report identifies factors that have an influence on the successful institutionalization and transfer of innovative uses of telecommunications. It examines which factors promote or deter the institutionalization of demonstration projects in the public service field, as well as alternative strategies for institutionalization and innovation…

This report evaluates the implementation of a demonstration model of a father-involvement component of Head Start programs in Washington (District of Columbia). Since well over 90 percent of the children in area Head Start programs are Black, the target group for this project was Black fathers. The following recommendations for program improvement…