| Principal Investigator: | Heath J. Prince, PhD |
| Sponsor(s): | Austin Regional Manufacturers Association |
| Project Duration: | April 2017 – September 2017 |
| Description: | The Ray Marshall Center (RMC) will partner with the Austin Regional Manufacturers Association (ARMA) to conduct a survey of manufacturing employers operating within the Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Statistical Area in order to learn more about their workforce needs. RMC will work with ARMA to develop a customized survey that would provide new insights on a range of manufacturing workforce issues, e.g.:
Our aim with this study is to provide ARMA with a clear understanding of the current and emerging skill needs of area manufacturers, as well as a more complete picture of the resources available locally to help manufacturers meet their skill needs. |
| Reports Available: |
TDHCA Tenant Survey
| Principal Investigator: | Greg Cumpton, PhD |
| Sponsor(s): | Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs |
| Project Duration: | April 2017 – August 2017 |
| Description: | The purpose of this research will be to obtain input from TDHCA tenants about aspects of their living situations as they pertain to statewide regulations set forth in the Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP) and Uniform Multifamily Rules. Specifically, this research will investigate tenants’ opinions about their neighborhoods, development features, and tenant services. Overall, this project will provide a representative portrait of tenants’ lived experiences and nuanced opinions about their homes, with the goal of identifying what tenants most value in their living situations. The research will be conducted in two phases – a series of four focus groups and one quantitative survey. |
| Reports Available: |
Pre-K 4 San Antonio Impact Study
| Principal Investigators: | Greg Cumpton, PhD and Michael Villarreal, MPP (Co-Principal Investigator) |
| Sponsor(s): | City of San Antonio |
| Project Duration: | March 2017 – December 2017 |
| Description: | Since the start of Texas’ public prekindergarten program, policymakers and education leaders have attempted to raise its quality. A recent survey of public prekindergarten programs found that 49 percent of local school districts offered students a full-day of prekindergarten; while 59 percent of districts adopted policies that limit class size, staff-to-student ratios, or both (Children at Risk, 2014). More recently, Governor Abbott has successfully advocated for funding to demonstrate and evaluate the effects of higher quality prekindergarten on student outcomes. At the local level, the City of San Antonio initiated an ambitious plan to demonstrate the value of high-quality prekindergarten by funding four demonstration centers, professional development for public school prekindergarten teachers, and grants to school districts to increase the quality of their programs.
Pre-K for SA (PK4SA) is the city agency leading the implementation of San Antonio’s prekindergarten investment. PK4SA has hired the Ray Marshall Center to be its research and evaluation partner to provide its first study of the effects of its high-quality prekindergarten on near and long-terms student outcomes. Moreover, PK4SA is engaging Ray Marshall Center to conduct its evaluation of PK4SA within a larger study of Texas’ public prekindergarten program with the goal of determining how the quality of public prekindergarten programs can be incrementally improved to have longer lasting positive effects on student outcomes. High-quality early childhood education has proven to be a cost-efficient strategy for increasing the cognitive and non-cognitive abilities of participating students. This study extends the current research on early education by investigating heterogeneous effects on long-term student outcomes. This study will explore if certain programmatic aspects of prekindergarten have a greater effect on student outcomes than others. It will also explore if all student subgroups benefit from public prekindergarten and if certain groups benefit more than others. This study uses data from the state’s student longitudinal data system, which includes student outcomes from prekindergarten through their postsecondary education and employment. This study also benefits from the cooperation of local school districts in Bexar County who have agreed to share district tests of prekindergarten and kindergarten students. This supplemental data will be used in a regression discontinuity analysis to check the robustness of statewide results that are produced from a regression analysis using propensity score matching and fixed effect techniques. |
| Reports Available: |
Strategic Planning for San Antonio Works
| Principal Investigator: | Greg Cumpton, PhD |
| Sponsor(s): | San Antonio Works and San Antonio Economic Development Foundation |
| Project Duration: | November 2016 – August 2017 |
| Description: | The Ray Marshall Center (RMC) along with consulting partner Jobs for the Future (JFF) will work with SA Works to develop an action plan for future work. The primary steps in developing the plan include:
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| Reports Available: |
Investigating the Intersection of Sector and Race Equity Strategies
| Principal Investigator: | Heath J. Prince, PhD |
| Sponsor(s): | The Annie E. Casey Foundation |
| Project Duration: | November 2016 – October 2017 |
| Description: | There is a growing base of evidence demonstrating that sector strategies can produce positive outcomes for lower-income workers in terms of employment, income, and career advancement outcomes. At the same time, despite gains in recent decades, significant racial gaps in median income and labor market participation persist, with African Americans and Latinos working and earning less, on average, that Non-Hispanic Whites. As such, sector initiatives would appear to have promise as an important tool for advancing racial equity. Yet, the majority of sector partnerships presently discuss their work as “population neutral,” leading some observers to ask whether the lack of a more explicit racial equity goal among more sector initiatives is a missed opportunity.
The Ray Marshall Center, along with Workforce Matters (a consulting firm that provides innovative strategies and workforce solutions), are proposing to launch a partnership to explore via a survey and series of interviews 1) If and how existing sector partnerships are addressing race equity issues; and 2) The most promising practices among those initiatives that are doing so. For more information, please see sectorsforequity.org. |
| Reports Available: |
Evaluation of English@Work Employer Benefits and Costs
| Principal Investigator: | Christopher T. King, Ph.D |
| Sponsor(s): | Literacy Coalition of Central Texas and Houston Center for Literacy |
| Project Duration: | July 2016 -July 2017 |
| Description: | The Ray Marshall Center (RMC), with support from the Literacy Coalition of Central Texas (LCCT), will conduct an evaluation of English@Work’s benefits and costs for participating employers, a required component of LCCT’s grant from the Houston Center for Literacy-English@Work which was launched as a small nonprofit in Austin in 2005 and was subsumed by the LCCT in January 2014, is a unique approach to teaching English-language skills by contextualizing, customizing, and providing them in the workplace. Early results indicated that this approach substantially outperformed more traditional approaches that rely heavily on classroom instruction, provide few hours of actual instruction per week, and/or fail to contextualize and tailor instruction in the setting and language of the workplace. Students made larger gains on various literacy measure more quickly than these more traditional approaches. And, students indicated that they felt more motivated to learn in a cohort of their peers that was situated within their workplace. After three years evolving and growing under the auspices of the LCCT, the Texas Workforce Commission’s (TWC) Site-based Workplace Literacy Project has provided grant funding to scale up English@Work in Austin and expand it to the Houston area over the period from May 2016 to June 2017. The grant from TWC will support literacy and career services for more than 700 participants and plans to provide credentials or certificates of completion for around 490 of these participants over the grant period.
The RMC evaluation will address two questions, as follows:
This evaluation strives to capture near-term outcomes and ROI for employers whose employees receive English@Work services within the resources available to the grant. Outcomes will largely be based on employer perceptions of the results within a relatively immediate timeframe. A more comprehensive evaluation is planned for the future if additional funding can be secured. |
| Reports Available: |
Multidimensional Poverty Assignment
| Principal Investigator: | Heath J. Prince, PhD |
| Sponsor(s): | Nuru International |
| Project Duration: | September 2016 – September 2017 |
| Description: | The Ray Marshall Center (RMC), with support from Nuru International (NI), will assist NI Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) with the methodology, tools, and data analysis of its integrated programming model in Ethiopia and Kenya. RMC will provide technical guidance on measurement and data collection for the Multidimensional Poverty Index along with quantitative data analysis of NI’s Multidimensional Poverty Survey (MPI). The key questions being asked this first year are:
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| Reports Available: |
An Evaluation of Austin Community College’s Title III SIP Proposal
| Principal Investigator: |
Greg Cumpton, PhD |
| Sponsor: | Austin Community College |
| Project Duration: | October 2015 to August 2020 |
| Description: | ACC proposes to establish an Office of Student Money Management (ACC-OSMM) – the office’s mission would be to give a stronger foundation to students’ academic and career goals and successes by helping them take charge of their financial futures.Two of the inaugural activities of ACC-OSMM will be:
ACC hopes to demonstrate that the activities of ACC-OSMM would be linked to improvements in measures of student success such as: graduation rate, time to completion, retention/persistence, and cohort loan default rate (CDR). ACC will partner with the Ray Marshall Center (RMC) to perform an evaluation, both formative and summative, on the effectiveness of these efforts on the student outcome measures of interest. Both types of evaluations provide actionable information about the success of the intervention while each successive cohort of recipients is in the process of receiving services, allowing for relatively rapid reflection and program modification as needed by ACC staff. Both evaluations are intended to measure the implementation, aggregate outcomes, and the impact of these efforts on Full Time First Time in College (FTFIC) loan or Pell grant receiving students’ graduation rates, 3-year Cohort Default Rates (CDR), retention rates, and fall to fall persistence for those who are Pell eligible. A host of intermediate steps related to these outcomes will also be measured. |
| Reports Available: |
Mid-South Community College-led Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) Grant
| Principal Investigator: Co-Principal Investigator: |
Heath J. Prince, PhD Ashweeta Patnaik, MPH |
| Sponsor: | Corporation for a Skilled Workforce and US Department of Labor |
| Project Duration: | June 2015 – September 2018 |
| Description: | The Ray Marshall Center (RMC), in collaboration with the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW), will be evaluating the efforts of the Mid-South Community College-led Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) grant for the Greater Memphis Alliance for a Competitive Workforce (GMACW). GMACW’s mission is to help solve Greater Memphis’ skills gap by: aligning training and education programs with employers’ skill requirements, and with each other; connecting employers to cost-effective training and hiring support, and; driving coordination and improved outcomes among providers that serve job candidates.
While CSW is conducting the implementation (formative) evaluation, RMC is carrying out a quasi-experimental comparison cohort (summative) evaluation to measure the impact of these strategies. The impact evaluation conducted by RMC will seek to gauge the “value-added” from these enhanced training pathways. |
| Reports Available: |
Linkage of Data at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) with Texas Administrative Records
| Principal Investigator: | Greg Cumpton, MPA |
| Sponsor(s): | Centers for Disease Control |
| Project Duration: | August 2014 – August 2016 |
| Description: | The purpose of this work is to link food assistance and other related data from Texas with National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data to assist in policy planning in the United States. Data to be linked includes Texas Administrative Data Files (TADFs), Texas Food Stamp Program (FSP) records, Texas Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) files, and Unemployment Insurance (UI) files.
This work will be completed in two stages: the first stage of the work, which links data from 2005-2010, will be completed in 2015. The second stage of the work, which links data from 2011-2012, will be completed by August 31, 2016. |
| Reports Available: |
