This report summarizes the final impact results for the national Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project. This project tested, using a random assignment design, the effectiveness of numerous programs intended to promote steady work and career advancement. All the programs targeted current and former welfare recipients and other low-wage…

Research completed since the 1980s has yielded substantial knowledge about how to help welfare recipients and other low-income individuals prepare for and find jobs. Many participants in these successful job preparation and placement programs, however, ended up in unstable, low-paying jobs, and little was known about how to effectively help them…

Although most of the substantial increase in states' child care spending between 1997 and 1999 is expended through child care subsidy programs or by contracts with child care resource and referral agencies, little research has focused on how the child care subsidy program operates, who is served, and what services are offered. This report is one…

A program to test the feasibility of vouchering vocational training for clients of the Work Incentive Program (WIN) was conducted in Portland, Oregon. (Vouchering places the buying power for institutional training into the hands of the clients, thus allowing them greater autonomy in deciding their own occupational destiny.) One hundred and…

Student-level data were collected in 5 states California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, and Oregon and analyzed to build understanding and improve the role of community colleges in adult education and literacy. The states illustrate the degree of diversity in governance systems and local provider systems and allow for comparative analyses by provider…