MDRC

MDRC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization based in New York City and Oakland, CA. MDRC mounts large-scale demonstrations and uses randomized controlled trials to measure the effects of social and educational policy initiatives. MDRC is led by President Gordon Berlin and Senior Vice Presidents Jesús Amadeo and Robert Ivry.

In 1974 the Ford Foundation and six government agencies together created the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation. Its purpose was to implement and document the results of new programs intended to help the poor. In the 1980s and 1990s, it became well known for its evaluations of state welfare-to-work programs. It formally adopted "MDRC" as its registered corporate identity in 2003.

MDRC evaluates and pilot-tests programs in six main areas:

MDRC helped pioneer the use of random assignment to test social programs. Its evaluations of welfare work programs influenced the welfare reform of the 1990s. In the 1990s and 2000s, MDRC’s evaluation of the Career Academies high school reform model, which showed impacts on participants’ earnings eight years after graduation, influenced the expansion of the model around the nation. MDRC was the intermediary for the first social impact bond demonstration in the United States, a project to reduce recidivism among 16- to 18-year-olds incarcerated at Rikers Island. Most recently, MDRC's study of the City University of New York's Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) has demonstrated that the program has doubled the three-year graduation rate of students who begin college requiring remedial education.

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