In this time of economic and human crisis, both the low-income people MDRC seeks to assist and the government programs that serve them are vulnerable. Adding to this vulnerability, an equally daunting crisis lies just over the horizon: looming budget deficits that will put an extraordinary strain on government programs, the people they serve, taxpayers, and society as a whole. Simply put, policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels, in both the executive and legislative branch, face very difficult choices: Which investments will pay off in the long term? And which expenditures are no longer essential?

When limited government resources demand that the nation make the most of its investments in social and education programs, policymakers need credible information that identifies effective strategies for addressing serious national problems; for example, lack of quality in preschool programs, poor educational and employment outcomes for at-risk youth, low levels of college completion among community college students, and high recidivism rates among released prisoners. MDRC provides reliable evidence about what works, builds the capacity to do what works at scale and with high quality, and uses this evidence and capacity to leverage public and private support for the long term.

How does MDRC make a difference?

We focus on solutions. Most social policy organizations study the problem; understanding the problem and its underlying causes is an important place to start, but it doesn’t tell us whether any given solution will actually be effective. In fact, the first time around, most things don’t work or work only a little. Sticking with a problem by building a body of evidence and using that evidence to improve capacity over time is the only way to make real progress and avoid simply repeating past mistakes and relearning the same lessons over and over again.

We focus on rigor and reliability. At MDRC we want to answer four key questions: What difference did the program make above and beyond what would have happened anyway? How did it do so? Why or why not? Is the program cost-effective and does it have a high return on investment? We do this by using reliable random assignment research designs or near equivalents when feasible and ethical (it is, most of the time) and combining these methods with a range of qualitative research tools. In short, we want to hold education and social programs to the same high standards that have been instrumental in many of medicine’s stunning advances.

We are committed to capacity-building. We do more than evaluate programs; we design, develop, and improve them and the organizations that operate them. Our interest here is twofold: First, we want to know whether a particular program or model gets results, which requires that we evaluate well-implemented programs and avoid measuring ineffectual start-ups. Second, MDRC places a premium on helping programs apply what we learn. As evidence of this commitment, roughly a quarter of the staff in our five policy areas have program expertise gained from experience in schools, nonprofit service delivery organizations, and government agencies, both as managers and as line staff — skills that position them to strengthen programs and the systems they are part of.

We are committed to partnership and active communication. MDRC is only as strong as the individuals who make up the teams that carry out our work. We partner with leading university-based academics to maintain our position on the cutting edge of social science research methods, theory, and discipline; with practitioners who have "best practice" on-the-ground experience; and with government agencies and private foundations whose cross-cutting, bird’s-eye views position them to see across fields and disciplines. And we actively communicate to practitioners, policymakers, and other key stakeholders what we are learning that could help improve the lives of low-income people.

We think that this unique approach to evidence-building is making a difference, producing tangible proof that the nation can tackle some of its most intractable education and social problems. We expect the demand for MDRC’s work to grow ever more insistent as the choices policymakers face become more consequential. MDRC's recent Corporate Report highlights examples of work under way in each of our five policy areas — innovative clusters of projects, each building on the next, to advance knowledge in a given field. We hope that they will give you a sense of the wide range of areas in which we work and the disciplined approach to evidence- and capacity-building that guides us.

Gordon L. Berlin
President, MDRC