Increasing the Reach of Promising Dropout Prevention Programs: Examining the Trade-offs Between Scale and Effectiveness

Summary

The inability to consistently deliver at large scale promising education interventions is an important contributing cause to inequality in the U.S. The research team applies insights from price theory and field-based randomized controlled trials to examine the effect of implementing a promising academic skills development program at large scale before implementing at scale. The project is designed to provide evidence of direct scientific and policy value for attempts to scale up a specific intervention, but also stimulate a much more thorough investigation of social policy scale-up challenges by refining these methods and demonstrating their feasibility and value.

The research team examines the challenge of program scale up for a promising intervention studied in Chicago at medium scale in the past - SAGA tutoring. Past work has demonstrated that SAGA's intensive, individualized, during-the-school-day math tutoring can generate very large gains in academic outcomes in a short period, even among students who are many years behind grade level. This study will explicitly explore the extent to which there is a trade-off between effectiveness and scale for this intervention. By taking advantage of the power of random sampling, this study will also allow for observation of the program's effectiveness as if it were running at three-and-a-half times the proposed scale in a subset of the study population.

Conditions

• Educational Achievement

Interventions

OTHER

SAGA Innovations

An intensive math tutoring program

OTHER

Scale-up tutors

Tutors who have been selected for hire via the one in three-and-a-half randomization process

OTHER

Standard Tutors

Tutors who have been selected for hire via SAGA's standard hiring process, which does not entail randomization

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Northwestern University

  collaborator OTHER

• SAGA Innovations

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Chicago Public Schools

  collaborator OTHER

• Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

  collaborator OTHER

• William T. Grant Foundation

  collaborator OTHER

• Chicago Beyond

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• New York City Department of Education

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• University of Chicago

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Jonathan Guryan, PhD · Northwestern University

• Kelly Hallberg, PhD · University of Chicago

• Jens Ludwig, PhD · University of Chicago

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2016-09-30

Primary Completion

2018-06-30

Completion

2021-01-31