Fascinating claim reported by David Brooks. The study (by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie) doesn’t seem to be available anywhere as of this writing. Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in…
The GiveWell Blog
Year: 2009
Small, unproven charities
Imagine that someone came to you with an idea for a startup business and offered you a chance to invest in it. Which of the following would you require before taking the plunge? Familiarity with (or at least a lot of information about) the people behind the project Very strong knowledge of the project’s “space”…
Road safety
From the abstract of a new study from the Center for Global Development: In the experiment, messages designed to lower the costs of speaking up were placed in a random sample of over 1,000 minibuses in Kenya. Analysis of comprehensive insurance data covering a two year period that spanned the intervention shows that insurance claims…
Qualitative evidence vs. stories
Our reviews have a tendency to discount stories of individuals, in favor of quantitative evidence about measurable outcomes. There is a reason for this, and it’s not that we only value quantitative evidence – it’s that (in our experience) qualitative evidence is almost never provided in a systematic and transparent way. If a charity selected…
Philanthropy Action points to more evidence on education interventions
Board member Tim Ogden writes, Mathematica Policy Research has conducted a multi-year randomized controlled trial of sixteen educational software programs (covering both reading and math) aimed at elementary and middle school students. The products selected were generally those that had at least some evidence of positive impact … the educational software didn’t make much difference….
Alliance for Social Investing
Last November, we discussed the Alliance for Social Investing. I am now a member of the Alliance; an update on its second meeting (and the first one I attended), which took place at the beginning of April, is available via Tactical Philanthropy here.