William Elliott III

Promise Indiana Rewards Card Study

February 2018 - April 2019

The Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion (AEDI) proposes to conduct a rapid-cycle randomized control trial to test the impact of providing rewards cards (vs. no rewards cards) to families of students with Children’s Savings Accounts (CSAs). Reward cards provide a rebate up to 5% on all grocery store and pharmacy purchases. At the time of purchase the rebate is ear marked to be deposited into a child’s CSA. By transforming spending into saving, rewards card programs have the potential to allow even the poorest CSA participants to begin building assets to help pay for college, even when purchasing goods with food stamps.

General Support of AEDI

September 2018 - August 2019

The Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion (AEDI), is wholly focused on harnessing the power of assets to create meaningful, equitable opportunities for economic mobility for all American children. AEDI’s mission is to create and study innovations related to assets and economic well-being, with a focus on the relationship between children’s savings and the educational outcomes of low-income and minority children as a way to achieve the American Dream. We bring our analytical expertise, theoretical foundation, collaborative relationships, and strategic insights to this formidable challenge. A core focus for AEDI is advancing Children’s Savings Accounts (CSAs) as critical interventions with considerable potential to realize this vision of broadly-shared prosperity.

Kickstart to Career Newaygo County Program Evaluation

April 2019 - December 2022

Kickstart to Career is designed as a 10-year cohort program scheduled to enroll students through 2027. The program will conclude upon the graduation of the last cohort, class of 2041. The 2018-2019 initial cohort includes kindergarteners from eight schools (approximately 700 students). Approximately 7,000 students will receive accounts and financial literacy lessons within that timeframe.

Wabash County Foundation - Promise Scholars

We seek to study through research the effectiveness of our program at advancing educational attainment in Wabash County. The Community Foundation Early Award Scholarship Program (EAS), extends the efforts of the Wabash County Promise, (WCP) which has as its aim to enroll grade K-3 students in Indiana’s CollegeChoice 529 plan and to engage students and families in aspiring to and saving for post-secondary education. Both WCP and EASP employ measures based on identity-based motivation theory. The Community Foundation hypothesizes that the early award scholarship program, which employs multiple incentives to build college savings accounts, influences student identity, aspirations, school outcomes, and post-secondary preparedness. Through research we seek to understand under what conditions and for whom the program is effective, as well as examine the program mechanics and relationship of assets (529 accounts) incentives, identity and school outcomes. The proposed research topics are provided in order of priority.

Removing Barriers to Recovery: Community Partnering for Innovative Solutions to the Opioid Crisis

November 2018 - May 2021

Removing Barriers to Recovery: Community Partnering for Innovative Solutions to the Opioid Crisis

Kickstart to Career Newaygo County

Kickstart to Career is designed as a 10-year cohort program scheduled to enroll students through 2027. The program will conclude upon the graduation of the last cohort, class of 2041. The 2018-2019 initial cohort includes kindergarteners from eight schools (approximately 700 students). Approximately 7,000 students will receive accounts and financial literacy lessons within that timeframe.

General Support Grant No. 219.0833 from Annie E. Casey Foundation

May 2019 - April 2023

The grant is to support a conference being held by the Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion (AEDI) on Children’s Savings Accounts (CSAs). CSA programs are interventions that seek to build assets for children to use as long-term investments. They have the potential to act as the plumbing for an asset building agenda that helps low-income children thrive, linking poor children with accounts and creating the space for receipt of both private and public wealth-building transfers. The conference will bring together policy makers, practitioners, and researchers from across the country.

AEDI Children’s Savings Accounts

September 2019 - August 2021

The Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion (AEDI) is wholly focused on harnessing the power of assets to create meaningful, equitable opportunities for economic mobility for all American children. AEDI’s mission is to create and study innovations related to assets and economic well-being, with a focus on the relationship between children’s savings and the educational outcomes of low-income and minority children as a way to achieve the American Dream. We bring our analytical expertise, theoretical foundation, collaborative relationships, and strategic insights to this formidable challenge. A core focus for AEDI is advancing Children’s Savings Accounts (CSAs) as critical interventions with considerable potential to realize this vision of broadly-shared prosperity.

CollegeBound Saint Paul

Children's Savings Account (CSA) programs are long-term investments often starting at a child's birth or upon entry into kindergarten but not coming fully to fruition until a child reaches college age. Given this, many outcomes programs are most interested in, such as college enrollment, cannot be measured for many years after the program is started. Therefore, identifying interim outcomes that can provide some indication if the program is on course to reach its long-term goals is imperative (Elliott & Harrington, 2016). Parental and children’s educational expectations have been identified as an important interim measure for evaluating the success of CSA programs (Elliott & Harrington, 2016). In line with the importance of educational expectations, the growth in CSAs over the last five years has in a significant way been driven by previous research that shows a strong correlation between CSAs and children’s educational expectations (Elliott, 2009; Elliott, 2013; Elliott & Beverly, 2011a; Elliott & Beverly, 2012b; Elliott, Chowa, & Loke, 2011; Elliott, Song, & Nam, 2013) and a causal relationship between CSAs and parental expectations (Kim, Sherraden, Huang, & Clancy, 2015). It appears that the logic model, in some measure, is informed by this research. Educational expectations are a proxy for college bound identity (Elliott, 2013). We see establishing the logic model on this framework as a strength of the model. Here we further specify this model. The college bound identity framework sprung out of research on Identity Based Motivation (IBM) theory. This body of research suggests that IBM acts as mediator between CSAs and children’s academic outcomes (Elliott, Choi, Destin, & Kim, 2011). Therefore, a fundamental mechanism explaining CSA effects on children’s academic outcomes is that school is experienced as identity-congruent (e.g., “people like me can succeed”) and relevant to future goals (Elliott, Destin, & Friedline, 2011; Oyserman, 2013). Cementing a financial pathway and investment for college early via a CSA sets clear expectations for college enrollment early in kindergarten, including strategies for attaining education goals for both students (initiative and persistence in the face of difficulty) and parents (involvement education and progress in school). These key components of IBM improve important self-regulatory outcomes for students (e.g., social-emotional development and college savings deposits) and parents (college savings outcomes, parental academic support, parental expectations, parental conversations about high school and beyond, and planning for college) which in turn improve academic achievement and college success. Indeed, the impact of IBM on self-regulatory behaviors and academic outcomes has been rigorously tested (Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006).

Support for Children's Savings Account Strategies

We propose capitalizing on the scaffolding of existing CSA programs across the country (e.g., PA, CA, CO, NM, NB, and St. Paul, MN) to tape into state and city policies funded but not being fully spent by adapting Senator Corey Booker’s Baby Bonds proposal to include additional targeted deposits for poor and minority children. In doing so, we propose to adapt small dollar CSA accounts into tools that can combat wealth and educational equality in America. This moment in our history, a moment of global pandemic and racial unrest, calls for solutions that rise to the moment. Research done by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy illustrates the potential transformative nature of this proposal. They find that a universal, progressive children's asset-building intervention with an initial deposit of $7,500 for low-wealth households and incremental declines to $1,250 for the highest-wealth households could close the Black/White wealth gap by 23% and the Latino/White wealth gap by 28%. Converting small dollar CSAs into large dollar CSAs through existing funding streams might be a powerful way to tackle wealth and educational inequality in America. We plan to build the evidence to achieve such change.

Wabash County Foundation - Promise Scholars Supplement

We are writing an additional paper on the association between welfare receipt and participating on Promise Scholars. In addition, we are helping Summit Labs with data management and writing of reports on a student-level randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Pathways to Success that they have conducted for the Wabash Community Foundation. Pathways is a brief, whole classroom 12-session universal social-psychological intervention, implemented twice per week during the first six weeks of the school year.