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

描述（由申请人提供）：美国不同种族、民族和社会阶层的健康结果差异很大，这在很大程度上是由于人力资本的巨大差异。不幸的是，我们对弱势儿童辍学的原因和可能的补救措施知之甚少，也许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，这个过程始于生命历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指导、监测和案例管理是否可以改善贫困儿童的学业成果，并阐明导致学业失败的儿童和家庭层面的潜在原因。我们请求资金与芝加哥公立学校（CPS）合作，随机分配120所学校进行治疗和控制条件，并在学校内随机分配约4000名三年级至九年级学生接受现状服务或基于检查和连接（C&C）模式的指导、监测和病例管理。C&C是本文献中为数不多的干预措施之一，它从先前的有效性试验中获得了对学校持久性的影响的任何支持，尽管这些先前的试验显示对考试成绩或毕业没有显著影响（可能是因为样本量小），没有检查非学校的结果，提供有限的中介机制信息，并且没有提供关于这种干预策略是否有效的信息。我们提出的研究将测试这种干预措施和一个更关注与父母合作的密切变体（部分是为了了解更多关于学校脱离和失败的潜在决定因素），并将在全国第三大城市进行大规模研究。我们将使用面对面的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亚组对候选中介和结果的干预效果来检验关于学业失败决定因素的不同理论。我们还建议对这一干预措施进行全面的效益-成本分析。通过对几乎所有美国主要城市的逃学和辍学率的调查，这项研究的重要性不言而喻。干预是手动的，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利用行政数据以低成本跟踪长期结果，并提供开展后续研究的选择，通过在未来的提案中申请资金，重新随机分配样本，并为从治疗组和对照组中随机选择的儿童提供后续教育支持，来测试晚干预和早干预的互补性。

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.