A Randomized Study to Abate Truancy & Violence in Grades 3 to 9

描述(由申请者提供)：美国的健康结果因种族、民族和社会阶层的不同而有很大差异，这在很大程度上是由于人力资本的巨大差异。不幸的是，人们对弱势儿童脱离学校的原因和可能的补救措施知之甚少，可能是因为太多的注意力集中在辍学本身。然而，辍学是一个发展过程的终点，这个过程始于生命过程中较早的学校脱离--也就是逃学。我们建议开展我们认为将是第一个大规模随机有效性试验，旨在更多地了解结构化的指导、监测和案例管理是否可以改善贫困儿童的学业结果，并揭示儿童和家庭层面导致学业失败的根本原因。我们请求与芝加哥公立学校(CPS)合作，将120所学校随机分配到治疗和控制条件下，并在学校内，随机分配约4,000名3至9年级的学生接受现状服务或基于Check and Connect(C&C)模式的指导、监测和病例管理。C&C是这篇文献中为数不多的对先前有效性试验对学校持续性的影响有任何支持的干预措施之一，尽管这些先前的试验没有显示出对考试成绩或毕业的显著影响(可能是因为样本量较小)，也没有检查非学校结果，提供的关于调节机制的信息有限，并且没有关于这种干预策略是否在规模上有效的信息。我们提议的研究将测试这一干预措施和一个密切的变量，该变量将更多地关注与家长的合作(部分是为了更多地了解学校脱离和失败的潜在决定因素)，并将在美国第三大城市进行大规模研究。我们将使用面对面调查和行政数据来衡量各种不同的结果领域，如暴力、参与和健康以及学校教育。我们还将测量一系列候选中介过程，并通过比较不同研究小组对候选中介变量和结果的干预效果，来测试关于学业失败决定因素的不同理论。我们还建议对这种干预进行全面的效益-成本分析。从几乎所有美国大城市的逃学和辍学率来看，这项研究的重要性不言而喻。干预是机械化的，因此可以大规模实施。启动这项实验的资金还将使我们能够使用管理数据以低成本跟踪长期结果，并提供进行后续研究的选项，通过在未来的提案中请求资金重新随机抽样并向从治疗组和对照组中随机选择的儿童提供后续教育支持，来测试干预的互补性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Health outcomes in the U.S. vary dramatically across race, ethnic and social class lines, due in important part to massive disparities in human capital. Unfortunately far too little is known about the causes and potential remedies of school disengagement for disadvantaged children, perhaps because so much attention has focused on dropout itself. Yet dropping out is the endpoint of a developmental process, which begins with school disengagement earlier in the life course - that is, truancy. We propose to carry out what we believe would be the first large-scale randomized effectiveness trial designed to learn more about whether structured mentoring, monitoring, and case management can improve schooling outcomes for poor children, and to shed light on the underlying child- and family-level causes of school failure. We request funding to partner with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to randomly assign 120 schools to treatment and control conditions, and within schools, randomly assign around 4,000 students in 3rd to 9th grade to receive either status quo services or mentoring, monitoring and case management based on the Check and Connect (C&C) model. C&C is one of the few interventions in this literature that enjoys any support whatsoever for effects on school persistence from prior efficacy trials, although these previous trials show no significant effects on test scores or graduation (perhaps because of small sample sizes), do not examine non-school outcomes, provide limited information about mediating mechanisms, and are not informative about whether this intervention strategy can be effective at scale. Our proposed study would test this intervention and a close variant that focuses somewhat more attention on working with parents (in part to learn more about the underlying determinants of school disengagement and failure), and would carry out the study at large scale in the nation's 3rd largest city. We would use in-person surveys and administrative data to measure a wide range of different outcome domains such as violence involvement and health as well as schooling. We would also measure a range of candidate mediating processes and test different theories about the determinants of school failure by comparing intervention effects on candidate mediators and outcomes across different study sub- groups. We also propose to carry out a comprehensive benefit-cost analysis of this intervention as well. The importance of this study is self-evident from examining truancy and dropout rates in almost any major American city. The intervention is manualized, and so can be implemented at scale. Funding to launch this experiment would also enable us to track long-term outcomes at low cost using administrative data, and provides the option of carrying out follow-up studies that test the complementarities from intervening late as well as early by requesting funding in future proposals to re-randomize the sample and provide follow-up educational supports to randomly selected children from the treatment and control groups.