This report explores the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Deep-End Initiative, which is helping juvenile justice jurisdictions safely and significantly reduce youth confinement -- especially for young people of color. In America today, youth of color are consistently over-represented in courtrooms and detention centers, youth prisons and other…

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…

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…

This article explores the statistical methodologies used in demonstration and effectiveness studies when the treatments are applied across multiple settings. The importance of evaluating and how to evaluate these types of studies are discussed. As an alternative to standard methodology, the authors of this article offer an empirical binomial…

To the data analyst, outliers can present both a problem and an opportunity. Stray or outlying observations can severly distort estimates of a distribution's central tendency (like the mean) and estimates of one variable's relationship to another (like the regression coefficient). These problems are frequent and serious, and as a result,…

This interim report, part of a series of documents examining the feasibility of the longitudinal evaluation of Project Developmental Continuity (PDC), presents the results of an analysis of PDC impact at the Head Start level, using Spring 1977 data. PDC is a Head Start Demonstration Program aimed at providing educational and developmental…

This paper reviews ten years of evaluation efforts by the sponsors of Follow Through programs, maintaining that sponsors' evaluations provide a different, equally valuable perspective to the one provided by the national evaluations of Follow Through. Sponsors were persons or groups that developed educational models for Follow Through and enacted…

This interim report re-examines data on instrument suitability, comparability of groups, and adequacy of sample size in Year III of the process evaluation of Project Developmental Continuity (PDC) and offers preliminary recommendations concerning the feasibility of continuing the impact study. PDC is a Head Start demonstration program aimed at…

The Pontiac Adult-Student Learning (PALS) Program's three years of operation are described in this report. (The primary goal of the project was to broaden the career horizons and aspirations of students in Pontiac's (Michigan) two high schools through an instructional program which would include student work experience through cooperative efforts…

Seven Wisconsin school districts formed a consortium to improve district level implementation of career education, K-12. Each district developed assessment and/or evaluation instruments to meet their specific needs, and circulated these instruments among all seven districts for review and feedback. After revision and field testing, these…

This report delineates the data and the analytical procedures necessary for comparing educational demonstration programs. Used as a means of encouraging the introduction of new practices into the educational process, demonstration programs and their effectiveness depend, in part, on the quality of the data about the program and its availability to…

This report contains an analysis of data collected during Phase 1 (spring 1979) of a project to develop and validate standards for industrial arts education programs. These data detail responses to four instruments devised by the project to survey fifty-four state and territorial supervisors of industrial arts and 2,235 public school principals,…

The Mt. Hood Community College National Tech Prep Demonstration Center program is described in this performance report. The report details the following activities through which the center contributed significantly to educational reform: (1) information dissemination (including distributing information packets to more than 2,770 sites, hosting 63…

Five research objectives were identified by the Wisconsin State Board for Vocational, Technical and Adult Education in a project designed to evaluate the impact of vocational education research and exemplary projects on educational practices in Wisconsin: (1) An assessment of the impact of State funded research and exemplary activities to a…

Project Information Packages (PIPs), kits containing directions for the replication of exemplary remedial programs, were field tested in a number of school districts. Based on curriculum analysis and site visits PIPs were found to induce projects which were adequate copies of what was packaged; however, what was packaged was not sufficient to…