The Joyce Foundation's Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration: Testing Strategies to Help Former Prisoners Find and Keep Jobs and Stay Out of Prison

Each year, almost 700,000 people are released from state prisons, and many struggle to find jobs and integrate successfully into society. This policy brief describes an innovative demonstration of transitional jobs programs for former prisoners in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and St. Paul being conducted by MDRC

Building Better Programs for Disconnected Youth

Nationally, more than one in four high school freshmen does not graduate in four years; in the 50 largest U.S. cities, the dropout rate is closer to 50 percent. Although many of these young people eventually seek to continue their education, a sizable number of dropouts (and many high school graduates) become seriously disconnected from both school and work. The long-term prospects for these young people are extremely poor. The population of disconnected youth is diverse, meaning that a range of different approaches is needed to reengage this group of young people. The research evidence on the effectiveness of such programs is relatively thin and the results are mixed, but there are some promising findings -- and a resurgence in political interest -- on which to build

Pattern avoidance for set partitions \`a la Klazar

In 2000 Klazar introduced a new notion of pattern avoidance in the context of set partitions of $[n]=\{1,\ldots, n\}$. The purpose of the present paper is to undertake a study of the concept of Wilf-equivalence based on Klazar's notion. We determine all Wilf-equivalences for partitions with exactly two blocks, one of which is a singleton block, and we conjecture that, for $n\geq 4$, these are all the Wilf-equivalences except for those arising from complementation. If $\tau$ is a partition of $[k]$ and $\Pi_n(\tau)$ denotes the set of all partitions of $[n]$ that avoid $\tau$, we establish inequalities between $|\Pi_n(\tau_1)|$ and $|\Pi_n(\tau_2)|$ for several choices of $\tau_1$ and $\tau_2$, and we prove that if $\tau_2$ is the partition of $[k]$ with only one block, then $|\Pi_n(\tau_1)| k$ and all partitions $\tau_1$ of $[k]$ with exactly two blocks. We conjecture that this result holds for all partitions $\tau_1$ of $[k]$. Finally, we enumerate $\Pi_n(\tau)$ for all partitions $\tau$ of $[4]$.Comment: 21 page

Boosting the Life Chances of Young Men of Color: Evidence From Promising Programs

In light of the momentum building to improve the fortunes of young men of color, this review examines what is known about this population -- particularly related to their struggles in the labor market -- and highlights programs that are shown by randomized controlled trials to be making a difference

Employment Retention and Advancement Project: Results from the Personal Roads to Individual Development and Employment (PRIDE) Program in New York City

A random assignment study of a welfare-to-work program for recipients with work-limiting medical and mental health conditions shows that participants had increased employment and decreased welfare payments

Building a Learning Agenda Around Disconnected Youth

In December 2007, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave MDRC a grant to conduct reconnaissance on promising strategies to reengage disconnected young people and improve their long-term outcomes. The primary objective of the grant was to identify key leverage points for future investment by government and foundations. MDRC consulted with researchers and policy experts, reviewed the results of completed and ongoing evaluations of youth programs, visited a number of innovative youth programs and cities with strong youth strategies, and hosted a meeting of youth practitioners. The goal of the paper's recommendations is to develop a menu of approaches for the heterogeneous population of disconnected youth--analogous in some ways to the multiple pathways that are being developed for high school students. The recommendations fall into two broad categories: building knowledge about mature, existing programs (to better understand whether they work, for whom, and why) and investment in developing and/or scaling up new programs that address areas of unmet need, such as efforts to restructure General Educational Development (GED) preparation programs so that they are more tightly linked with postsecondary programs, both occupational and academic; new "leg-up" strategies for older youth with very low basic skill levels, for whom a GED may not be a realistic goal; and new strategies to engage young people who are more profoundly disconnected and unlikely to volunteer for youth programs

The Employment Retention and Advancement Project: Results from the Substance Abuse Case Management Program in New York City

Participants in an intensive care management program for public assistance recipients with substance abuse problems were slightly more likely to enroll in treatment than participants in less intensive services. However, the intensive program had no effects on employment or public benefit receipt among the full sample