Evidence First

Many schools are expanding tutoring services and personalized instruction to address learning loss caused by the pandemic. This episode features Reading Partners, a successful national nonprofit that mobilizes community volunteers to provide one-on-one tutoring to students who struggle with reading in under-resourced elementary schools. MDRC has been working with Reading Partners for nearly 15 years to help document and improve the program’s effectiveness. MDRC’s rigorous evaluation of Reading Partners found that its program boosted three different measures of reading proficiency, including reading comprehension, for second- to fifth-graders.   In the first episode of a series celebrating MDRC’s 50th anniversary and our longtime collaborators, join Leigh Parise as she talks with Dean Elson, Chief Knowledge Officer at Reading Partners, and Robin Jacob, a Research Professor at Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and Co-Director of the Youth Policy Lab. Jacob helped lead MDRC’s evaluat