Increasing the reach of promising dropout prevention programs: Examining the tradeoffs between scale and effectiveness (original) (raw)

2018, AEA Randomized Controlled Trials

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. II. RESEARCH QUESTIONS The University of Chicago Education Lab and Crime Lab New York research teams are carrying out a randomized controlled trial during the 2016-17 and 2017-18 academic years to build on previous collaborations with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the New York City Department of Education, and SAGA Innovations that have found that SAGA's intensive, individualized, during-the-school-day tutoring can generate very large gains in academic outcomes in a short period of time, even among students who are many years behind grade level. This research suggests the promise of this approach for improving the academic skills and educational attainment of disadvantaged youth, even once they have reached adolescence. However, to truly affect outcomes at the local and national level, SAGA would have to be rolled out on a much greater scale than researchers have been able to study in Chicago. Yet little is known about how to take promising interventions to scale. This study seeks to build the science of scale-up, by examining the extent to which this individualized tutoring program can be implemented at an even greater scale and by explicitly exploring the trade-offs between effectiveness and scale. The SAGA Innovations program expands on the nationally recognized innovation of highdosage, in-school-day tutoring developed in Match Education's charter school in Boston. The tutoring program meets as a scheduled course, Math Lab, once a day during the normal school day, and is provided in addition to a student's regular math class. Students work two-on-one (two students with one tutor) with the same full-time, professional tutor for the entirety of the school year. The content of the tutoring sessions is aligned with what students are learning in their regular math courses, but is also targeted to address individual gaps in math knowledge. Also