Applying Promising Evidence to New Settings: An Experimental Evaluation of Summer Jobs in Philadelphia

This proposal aims to provide some of that evidence by conducting a randomized controlled trial of Philadelphia’s summer jobs program, WorkReady, in summer 2017. The project aims to assess how generalizable the Chicago and New York City findings are by testing program impacts on crime, violence, and incarceration in a different setting. These kinds of replication and expansion studies are crucially important to providing policymakers with the rigorous evidence they need to inform crime prevention policy and ensure that program expenditures are well targeted. In the absence of this evidence, policymakers may risk taking the initial evaluation as a sign of an “evidenced-based program,” but without enough information to know whether small changes in the program model, program population, or settings will undermine program effectiveness. ca/ncf