Publications
What Works Clearinghouse
 The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), which is administered by Mathematica for the Institute of Education Sciences, announced the release of a new type of evidence report. The WWC Quick Review provides an objective assessment of the quality of the research evidence from a research paper or report whose public release is reported in a major national news source. The WWC Quick Review assesses whether the research described in the paper or report is consistent with WWC evidence standards.
New WWC Quick Reviews include:
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Medicare Advantage
 "Medicare Advantage in 2008." Marsha Gold, June 2008. Medicare Advantage (MA), a voluntary program that provides beneficiaries with an alternative way to access traditional Medicare benefits, replaced the Medicare+Choice program in 2004 and became fully operational in 2006. This issue brief reviews recent trends in the program and includes information trends in firm participation and market share, changes in beneficiary choice, and growth in MA plans available to employer groups. The brief notes that the number of Medicare beneficiaries in MA plans continues to grow, to 8.2 million at the end of 2007, up from 5.4 million in March 2005. In the first four months of 2008, enrollment increased by more than 800,000. Private fee-for-service plans account for more than half of this new growth. About one in five Medicare beneficiaries (19 percent) is enrolled in an MA plan. In addition, four main players—UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Kaiser, and Blue Cross Blue Shield—accounted for more than half of enrollment at the end of 2007.
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Health Insurance Reform
 "Health Insurance Exchange Study." Deborah Chollet, Su Liu, Kate Stewart, Alison Wellington, Allison Barrett, Mila Kofman, and Amy M. Lischko, March 2008. In 2007, the state of Minnesota considered establishing a Health Insurance Exchange to serve small groups and individuals, facilitating access to coverage, choice among insurance products, portability of coverage, and affordability. Mathematica studied the coverage, cost, and fiscal impacts of a series of health reforms that might occur coincident with the implementation of the exchange—guaranteed issue and community rating of both small group and individual products, a mandate requiring all residents to obtain coverage, and a requirement that all employers with 11 or more employees offer a Section 125 or “cafeteria” plan. This report estimates the impacts of the reforms alone and in combination. In addition, it explores the range of implementation and legal issues that policymakers in Minnesota would need to address in order to develop an exchange.
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School Meal Programs
 "Tightening Income Documentation in a Means-Tested Program: Who Stays Away?" Philip Gleason, John Burghardt, Paul Strasberg, and Lara Hulsey, Evaluation Review (subscription required), June 2008. Programs using means tests to identify low-income households face a trade-off between promoting access and ensuring program integrity. In the case of the National School Lunch Program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently implemented a pilot program to improve the accuracy of the process of certifying students for free or reduced-price meals. This pilot program required households to provide income documentation with their applications for these benefits. This paper uses a comparison district design to estimate the effects of the up-front income documentation requirement on free/reduced-price certification among ineligible families as well as on access to the program among eligible low-income families. The key finding was that requiring income documentation did not reduce the proportion of ineligible households getting free or reduced-price meals, but it did reduce access to the program among eligible households.
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Child SSI Recipients
 "Changing Circumstances: Experiences of Child SSI Recipients Before and After Their Age-18 Redetermination for Adult Benefits." Jeffrey Hemmeter, Jacqueline Kauff, and David Wittenburg, February 2008. This paper provides an analysis of the dynamics of the transition of child Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients into adulthood, using linked 2001-2002 National Survey of Children and Families survey and Social Security Administration administrative data. The authors examine the interaction of impairment status, reported health needs, and other self-reported indicators of human capital on SSI program and employment outcomes after age 18. They find that after controlling for measures of disability severity, duration, and human capital, youth with other mental and behavioral disorders are much less likely to receive SSI at age 19. Their findings also suggest that non-health-related factors, particularly education, employment, and social indicators, play an important role in the probability of a child SSI recipient being on adult SSI after age 18.
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Teacher Quality
 "Evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in the Chicago Public Schools: Study Design Report." Steven Glazerman, Allison McKie, Nancy Carey, and Dominic Harris, November 2007. Recent evidence has confirmed that teacher quality is a critical component in student achievement. The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) is a whole-school approach to evaluating and compensating teachers and providing professional development opportunities to both improve teaching and help schools attract and retain good teachers. This report describes Mathematica’s five-year evaluation, which began in 2007, in high-need Chicago public schools.
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