In 2010, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded the first round of five-year Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG 1.0) to 32 organizations in 23 states; five were tribal organizations. The purpose of the HPOG Program is to provide education and training to Temporary…

In 2015 Oregon became the second state in the country to implement a statewide promise program. Its program, Oregon Promise, seeks to promote students' postsecondary attainment by covering nearly all community college tuition. This study used student data from K-12 public schools, Oregon Promise applications, and postsecondary records to examine…

New Classrooms Innovation Partners was awarded an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the U.S. Department of Education to implement its "Teach to One: Math" (TtO) model in five schools in Elizabeth, New Jersey, for three academic years, beginning in September 2015 and continuing through June 2018. The Consortium for Policy Research…

A college degree is often viewed as a key step toward better employment and higher earnings. Many community college students, however, never graduate and cannot reap the financial benefits associated with a college degree. Although existing research suggests that financial aid interventions can modestly improve students' short-term academic…

Gaps in average college success among students of differing backgrounds have persisted in the United States for decades. One of the primary ways governments have attempted to ameliorate such gaps is by providing need-based grants, but little evidence exists on the impacts of such aid on longer-term outcomes such as college persistence and degree…

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) targeted substantial School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to the nation's "persistently lowest achieving" public schools (i.e., up to $2 million per school annually over 3 years) but required schools accepting these awards to implement a federally prescribed school-reform model.…

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term early intervention designed to help the lowest-achieving readers in first grade reach average levels of classroom performance in literacy. Students identified to receive Reading Recovery meet individually with a specially trained Reading Recovery (RR) teacher every school day for 30-minute lessons over a…

College graduation rates often lag behind college attendance rates. One theory as to why students do not complete college is that they lack key information about how to be successful or fail to act on the information that they have. We present evidence from a randomized experiment which tests the effectiveness of individualized student coaching.…

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. Prior studies (see Tuttle et al. 2013) have consistently found that attending a KIPP middle school positively affects student achievement, but few have addressed longer-term…

In recent years, community colleges have come into the spotlight nationally in terms of their potential to assist in the revitalization of the economy. This has resulted in an increased need for community colleges to understand more fully the factors that influence student persistence. The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to…

In 2009, the United States Department of Education conducted a competition for a second round of Striving Readers grants. Its dual purpose was to: (1) Raise middle and high school students' literacy levels in Title I-eligible schools with significant numbers of students reading below grade level; and (2) Build a strong, scientific research base…

The passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which extended need-based financial assistance to the general population for the first time, has improved college access for American students, but more work remains to be done to improve college success. According to government statistics, in 2006, about one in six students had earned a degree or…

This report presents early results from a rigorous evaluation of a performance-based scholarship program that was implemented at three community colleges in Ohio during the 2008-2009 academic year. The program in Ohio that is the subject of this report is part of MDRC's national Performance-Based Scholarship (PBS) Demonstration, which was launched…