This Urban Institute needs assessment is an initial review of Oklahoma’s early childhood care and education (ECCE) delivery system. The review focuses on programs that directly support ECCE to include universal pre-K, Head Start and Early Head Start, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) Head Start and Early Head Start, Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships, and state-funded child care and tribal child care programs. The assessment identifies future goals and action areas to include alignment of systems of care for seamless service delivery, affordability of ECCE options, increases in the number of choices for families for culturally responsive care and services while assisting parents’ ability to work, and resources to meet the urgent health and mental health needs of rural young children.

This video covers highlights from the “Thriving Communities for a Better Southern Nevada” meeting that was held in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 10, 2020. This event, hosted by the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) and Las Vegas-Clark County, Nevada, brought together a local planning team, community leaders, and practitioners who discussed constructive measures to help individuals overcome barriers to employment and improve their families’ economic well-being and mobility.

2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the federally-funded Vocational Rehabilitation Program. To celebrate this milestone, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) has created a webpage for anniversary content. Key features of this webpage include a podcast with keynote remarks from the RSA Commissioner and graphics to promote the 100 years of Vocational Rehabilitation. Additional information and materials will be added throughout the calendar year.

This Urban Institute blogpost profiles Kentucky’s Justice to Journeyman program, a prison apprenticeship program. The blogpost notes a key feature of the model: starting classroom occupational instruction (for jobs not available at correctional facilities) at the beginning of the apprenticeship and on-the-job training (OJT) upon the apprentice’s release. This classroom instruction and OJT leads to placement for jobs as welders, electricians, and telecommunications workers. Research cited in the blogpost notes that conventional prison-based apprenticeship programs offer occupational training in jobs typically found in correctional facilities, such as groundskeeping, cleaning, and cooking, which effectively limits economic prospects for returning citizens.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report examines San Francisco’s STEP Forward program, which targeted diverse low-income job seekers including CalWORKs (California’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program) or CalFresh (California’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients, or individuals who have exhausted unemployment insurance benefits. This paper describes a random assignment evaluation of 837 adults – those with access to STEP Forward services and a control group without access to STEP Forward services but to other services. First-year costs of the program for job readiness services and subsidies were evaluated.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) brief offers a summary and updated review of the Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness (HomVEE) initiative. OPRE reviewed 21 program models identified as fitting the evidence-based early childhood home visiting service delivery model.

This MDRC series includes six podcasts that reflect evidence-based programming for education and social programs, at both the design and evaluation stages. Podcast speakers include MDRC researchers and field practitioners and cover: Using Data-Driven Strategies for Program Improvement, Replicating CUNY’s ASAP Model in Ohio, Can Aligned Instruction Prevent Pre-K Fadeout, A Practitioner-Researcher Partnership for the Grameen America Program, Steps to Upward Mobility: Lessons from Three Youth Employment Programs, and How to Improve College Placement Using Multiple Measures.