Would It Work? The New Hope Evaluation

All of those who created New Hope agreed that their goal was to provide a model for national policy, not just to establish a local program. As Kerksick put it, “We haven’t spent all of these years of hard work just to deliver a program to 700 people. However proud we are of the program, we wanted to change policies for all low-income working families.”

The only way to test the efficacy of the model, they all agreed, was to design a model program and evaluate it with rigorous methods. The organizers commissioned an evaluation that used random assignment and a control-comparison group. This technique is the most stringent and demanding method to test a program.

The board hired MDRC, a nonprofit research firm, to conduct the evaluation. One-half of the individuals who applied for the program were randomly selected to have access to New Hope’s benefits for three years. The other half became a comparison group that was ineligible for New Hope.

The key evaluation question was, did people assigned to New Hope earn more, work more, improve their well-being and parenting, and did their children benefit more than people assigned to the comparison group?

To understand the effects of New Hope on children, the evaluators gathered extensive information about school performance, psychological well-being, and behavior problems from teachers, parents, and the children themselves. They also asked parents about their own levels of stress, depression, and hope for the future.

For a close-up view of how the program was affecting families, the evaluation team conducted in-depth interviews with a representative group of 44 parents and their children. Rarely has so much effort been expended to understand how a program like New Hope affected the lives of both adults and children.