Featured Reports
Grantees regularly submit findings and publish journals articles, working papers, reports, and other publications related to the work we've funded, and the most recent and noteworthy of those follow. In addition, this page also features recent publications or reports by staff members, related to our Current Research Interests.
From Soft Skills to Hard Data: Measuring Youth Program Outcomes
This guide, published by the Forum for Youth Investment using a grant from the Foundation, identifies four types of "soft skills" that matter for success in school, work, and life—communication, relationships and collaboration, critical thinking and decision-making, and initiative and self-direction. The authors then review eight instruments that measure some or all of these areas. The measures are designed for use in schools and youth programs serving upper elementary through high school aged children.
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Project READS (Reading Enhances Achievement During Summer)
This featured finding by James Kim and Jonathan Guryan is focused on Project READS, a voluntary summer reading program designed to improve reading comprehension and help address summer reading loss. The investigators conducted a multi-district planned variation experiment to (1) test the effects of READS in a larger sample of diverse school districts, and (2) test enhancements to READS involving a family literacy enhancement, an incentives-to-read program, and a longitudinal implementation of the READS program over two years. In each site, the team also conducted book fairs, which provided children opportunities to self-select books to read during the summer. The goal of this variation was to enhance children's motivation to read during the summer. The findings indicate that the incentives caused children to read more of their READS books, especially those children who selected well-matched books at the book fair.
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Barriers in the Pathway to Adulthood: The Role of Discrimination in the Lives of Young Disadvantaged Men
William T. Grant Scholar Devah Pager conducted a two-part study on the direct and indirect influences of discrimination on the economic outcomes of black youth. The findings suggest that black men receive callbacks and job offers at half the rate of equally qualified white men. These findings imply that black applicants must search twice as long—and apply to twice as many jobs—as equally qualified whites. Perhaps most disturbingly, the research also suggested that black men who have never been incarcerated fare no better in the job market than white men just out of prison. A second part of this research considers how black job seekers respond to the reality of labor market discrimination. Economists have assumed that blacks avoid job openings where they would encounter discrimination. By contrast, the investigator noticed that black job seekers, in fact, cast a wider net in their job search than similar whites. This adaptation improved their chances of employment, but was associated with important costs in terms of wages and career coherence.
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