MDRC
Project Title
For core support of the Center for Effective Career and Technical Education
Date
Sep. 11, 2025
Duration
36 months
Description
Across the country, a suite of approaches to career-connected learning, also known as Career and Technical Education (CTE), has e merged and gained bipartisan support as an effective strategy to support student success and economic mobility. Founded in 1974, MDRC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan social policy research organization with extensive experience evaluating programs and policies that support economic mobility. With Corporation support in 2018, MDRC established the Center for Effective CTE (the Center) to ensure that CTE program expansion is guided by robust evidence. The Center serves as a hub for evidence building, innovation, technical assistance, and research synthesis related to CTE. Since its inception, the Center has released multiple publications, made hundreds of social media posts, and attended a variety of conferences and convenings about CTE with policy makers at federal, state, and district levels to share learnings. Continued core support would enable the Center to continue to grow as a hub of reliable, useful, and cutting-edge information and partner directly with three to four state agencies, school districts, community colleges or local nonprofits to put CTE evidence to work through student programming. The Center would also disseminate its findings broadly through various challenges to communicate directly with policymakers and practitioners about the growing evidence base on CTE.
Website
Project Title
For core support of the Center for Effective Career and Technical Education
Date
Sep. 14, 2023
Duration
24 months
Description
New models of career and technical education (CTE) can prepare students for long-term success by helping them navigate and adapt to an increasingly complex labor market. As demand for CTE grows, it is critical to build evidence about high-quality, equitable programming and policies. MDRC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan social policy research organization with significant experience evaluating effective programs and policies to support educational attainment and economic mobility. With Corporation support in 2018, MDRC established the Center for Effective Career and Technical Education (the Center) to ensure that the expansion of CTE programs is informed by a robust evidence base. The Center serves as a hub for evidence building, innovation, technical assistance, and research synthesis related to CTE. With core support from the Corporation, the Center will expand partnerships with CTE organizations to ensure their programming is evidence-based and add to the sector’s knowledge about what works, identify gaps in the research focused on work-based learning and develop a learning agenda to inform future research, and expand CTE policy outreach and dissemination.
Website
Project Title
For the Center for Effective Career and Technical Education
Date
Sep. 02, 2021
Duration
24 months
Description
New models of career and technical education (CTE) can prepare students for twenty-first century success by helping them navigate an increasingly complex labor market. However, renewed interest in CTE has come largely without the benefit of a strong evidence base about the efficacy of next generation CTE models. MDRC, a social policy research organization with a two-decade history of developing and evaluating CTE programs, is filling that gap. With Corporation support in 2018, MDRC launched its Center for Effective Career and Technical Education, a hub for building evidence on CTE effectiveness, synthesizing research and lessons learned, and providing technical assistance and resources related to CTE programs, policy, and evidence. Since then, ongoing Corporation support has enabled MDRC to grow the Center and take on specific research projects, includingexploratory studiesthat grew intolarger, federallyfunded projects. Renewedsupport will enable the ongoing development of the Center as well as research activities to inform policy and practice.
Website
Project Title
For the Center for Effective Career and Technical Education
Date
Sep. 12, 2019
Duration
24 months
Description
New models of career and technical education (CTE) can prepare students for twenty-first century success by helping them navigate an increasingly complex labor market. However, the renewed interest in CTE has come largely without the benefit of a strong evidence base about the efficacy of next generation CTE models. MDRC, a social policy research organization with a two-decade history of developing and evaluating CTE programs, is beginning to fill that gap. With Corporation support in 2018, MDRC launched its Center for Effective Career and Technical Education, a hub for building evidence on CTE effectiveness, synthesizing research and lessons learned, and providing technical assistance and resources related to CTE programs, policy, and evidence. Renewed support will enable the ongoing growth and development of the Center as well as research activities to inform policy and practice among CTE stakeholders.
Website
Project Title
For support of the Center for Effective Career and Technical Education
Date
Jun. 14, 2018
Duration
18 months
Description
New models of career and technical education (CTE) can prepare students for twenty-first century success by helping them navigate and continually adapt to an increasingly complex labor market. However, the renewed interest in CTE has come largely without the benefit of a strong evidence base about the efficacy of next generation CTE models. MDRC, a social policy research organization with a two-decade history of developing and evaluating CTE programs, is partnering with over a dozen CTE programs to build evidence and inform CTE policy and practice. With Corporation support, MDRC will launch the Center for Effective Career and Technical Education, a hub for building and synthesizing evidence on CTE effectiveness, incubating new ideas, synthesizing findings and lessons learned, disseminating these to policymakers and practitioners, and advancing the field overall so that expansion and scale-up is informed by a growing evidence base.
Website
Project Title
For preliminary work to prepare for a large-scale, rigorous evaluation of the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) 9-14 model
Date
Sep. 08, 2016
Duration
12 months
Description
The Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) 9-14 model is designed to better prepare high school students for college and career through early exposure to college coursework, career opportunities, and college- and career-aligned curriculum, giving high school students the opportunity to earn an Associate’s degree and participate in internship and job opportunities both during and after high school. Founded in 2011, this model has rapidly scaled to now consist of over 30 schools in New York State, with plans to open more schools across the country. This rapid scale-up has occurred despite lack of rigorous research evidence supporting the efficacy of the P-TECH model in addressing educational outcomes for students. MDRC, a social policy research organization with over forty years of experience conducting rigorous studies for a wide audience, proposes to conduct a large-scale, rigorous evaluation of the P-TECH 9-14 model. With Corporation support, MDRC will continue to collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data in preparation to competitively bid on a large-scale evaluation of the P-TECH 9-14 model.
Website
Project Title
For the design and development of a multi-campus study of promising programs in college-level developmental English and mathematics
Date
Jun. 03, 2010
Duration
18 months
Website
Project Title
For dissemination of education research
Date
Dec. 06, 2007
Duration
42 months