Recent policy discussions have proposed government-guaranteed jobs, including for youth. One key potential benefit of youth employment is a reduction in criminal justice contact. Prior work on summer youth employment programs has documented little-to-no effect of the program on crime during the program but has found decreases in violent and other serious crimes among at-risk youth in the year or two after the program. The authors add to this picture by studying randomized lotteries for access to the New York City Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), the largest such program in the United States. The authors link SYEP data to New York State criminal records data to investigate outcomes of 163,447 youth who participated in a SYEP lottery between 2005 and 2008. They find evidence that SYEP participation decreases arrests and convictions during the program summer, effects that are driven by the small fraction (3%) of SYEP youth who are at-risk, as defined by having been arrested before the start of the program. The authors conclude that an important benefit of SYEPs is the contemporaneous effect during the program summer and that the effect is concentrated among individuals with prior contact with the criminal justice system.

This brief sets forth guiding values and recommendations for grounding prison research in principles of racial equity. These values are intended to help researchers more accurately capture and measure racial biases, and design and conduct research that can elevate and disrupt systemic biases. This brief is part of a larger research agenda for the Prison Research and Innovation Initiative—a five-year effort to leverage research and evidence to shine a light on prison conditions and pilot strategies to promote the well-being of people who live and work behind bars. Key takeaways include that prison research grounded in principles of racial equity should be centered by the historical context of systemic racism and how it continues to disproportionately impact incarcerated Black people, include diverse representation on research teams and broadcast findings to diverse audiences, and share findings with the people who helped generate the data and enable them to interpret meanings and identify policy implications with stakeholders across all levels of decision-making.

Police in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, routinely transport patients with penetrating trauma to nearby trauma centers. Penetrating trauma occurs when a foreign object pierces the skin and enter the body creating a wound. During the past decade, the practice of police transport has gained increased acceptance, but outcomes resulting from the transport of these patients have not been recently evaluated. The purpose of this study was to assess mortality among patients with penetrating trauma who are transported to trauma centers by police vs by emergency medical services (EMS). This cohort study used the Pennsylvania Trauma Outcomes Study registry and included 3,313 adult patients with penetrating trauma from January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2018. Outcomes were compared between patients transported by police (n = 1,970) and patients transported by EMS (n = 1,343) to adult level I and II trauma centers in Philadelphia. For patients with penetrating trauma in an urban setting, 24-hour mortality was not different for those transported by police vs EMS to a trauma center. Timely transport to definitive trauma care should be emphasized over medical capability in the prehospital management of patients with penetrating trauma.

Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, educators and school administrators need to understand the available distance learning models and programs that may assist students who attend school from a remote location. To meet this need, this rapid evidence review sought to identify and report on what works in distance learning educational programming. After an extensive search and screening process, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) reviewed 36 studies spanning kindergarten through postsecondary education. Fifteen studies met the WWC Group Design Standards; of those, four met the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Tier 1 requirements. An analysis of where research has been conducted revealed that several distance learning programs for K–8 students met WWC Group Design Standards but only one study of distance learning program for high school students met WWC Group Design Standards. In addition, a meta-analysis of studies with similar design characteristics (nine in total) found that, on average, students in the distance learning programs improved in the English language arts (ELA) outcome domain but not in the mathematics domain. Although the results are promising, continued research using rigorous, randomized designs should be a priority.

A for-profit college can be converted into a nonprofit college if it is sold to a tax-exempt organization and the U.S. Department of Education approves the conversion. In this report, the authors identified converted for-profit colleges and reviewed their public Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings. They also examined IRS and department processes for overseeing conversions, interviewed agency officials, and reviewed federal laws, regulations and agency guidance. The authors identified 59 for-profit college conversions that occurred from January 2011 through August 2020, almost all of which involved the college's sale to a tax-exempt organization. In about one-third of the conversions, the authors found that former owners or other officials were insiders to the conversion—for example, by creating the tax-exempt organization that purchased the college or retaining the presidency of the college after its sale. While leadership continuity can benefit a college, insider involvement in a conversion poses a risk that insiders may improperly benefit—for example, by influencing the tax-exempt purchaser to pay more for the college than it is worth. The authors found that IRS staff did not always follow guidance to assess the risks of improper benefit. Also, the department doesn't assess ongoing risks in its reviews.

Monthly government transfer programs create cycles of consumption that track the timing of benefit receipt. In this paper, the authors exploit state-level variation in the staggered timing of nutritional assistance benefit issuance across households to analyze how this monthly cyclicality in food availability affects academic achievement. Using individual-level score data from a large national college admissions exam in the United States linked to national college enrollment data, the authors find that taking this high-stakes exam in the last two weeks of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit cycle reduces test scores and lowers the probability of attending a 4-year college for low-income high school students.

This report provides a more granular understanding of the digital divide for students amid distance learning and the pandemic, and offers a set of policy recommendations at the federal, state, and local levels to permanently close the digital divide. The digital divide is the gap that exists between individuals who have access to modern information and communication technology and those who lack access. Closing the student digital divide will require between $6 billion and $11 billion in the first year and between $4 billion and $8 billion annually thereafter, to address affordability and adoption gaps. In addition, closing the digital divide for teachers will cost approximately $1 billion in its first year. These costs cover installation, ongoing service fees, devices, repairs, and support for internet connectivity and e-learning devices. Moreover, additional funding is needed to ensure universal deployment of broadband infrastructure capable of 100/100 Mbps. While prior analyses estimated that it would cost $10 billion to $20 billion at the low end and $80 billion at the high end to expand broadband infrastructure, these assessments did not fully account for costs related to home access to adequate speeds and ongoing maintenance to ensure sustainable, universal broadband access. More specific research can further scope out and detail the investment required to sustainably connect all households to broadband service that meets their distance learning needs for today and going forward.

This outline defines key K-12 education funding terms and the various ways that states distribute financial support to K-12 school districts. K-12 education is funded through local, state, and federal contributions. With finite financial resources available, states must balance the specific needs of schools, students and staff. Often, state policy specifies how funding will be distributed to school districts. States use various distribution models to determine how much funding each district receives from the state. This resource captures funding distribution methods used by states in a 50-State Comparison and other policy products. In addition to providing definitions for key K-12 funding terms, this glossary includes a visual framework that displays the relationships among funding terms.

As of June 30, 2020, the Florida Growth Fund Program has made commitments to invest $827.2 million in 62 technology and growth companies and 43 private equity funds. Since our previous report, the two fund managers made new investments totaling $88.9 million in eight technology and growth companies and six private equity funds. Florida Growth Fund Program investments have been made in 14 Florida counties, with amounts ranging from $6.8 million in Manatee County to $208.8 million in Palm Beach County. From fund inception to June 30, 2020, the program had distributed $540.1 million to the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund. Since their inception, both Florida Growth Fund I and Florida Growth Fund II have exceeded benchmarks set for each of these funds. Net internal rates of returns since inception exceeded benchmarks by 1.4% to 25.8%, varying by tranche. The Florida Growth Fund Program’s investments resulted in reported economic benefits. Companies receiving program investments reported creating 19,794 Florida jobs as of June 30, 2020. Fund managers reported that current investments that created jobs paid median annual wages ranging from $17,000 to $121,098. The majority of these median wages exceed the state’s 2019 overall median wage of $35,838. Additionally, fund managers reported that companies and private equity funds receiving investments reported making $254.3 million in capital expenditures between July 1, 2019, and June 30, 2020, bringing total capital expenditures to $1.12 billion since fund inception.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many localities instituted non-essential business closure orders, keeping individuals categorized as essential workers at the frontlines while sending their non-essential counterparts home. The authors examine the extent to which being designated as an essential or non-essential worker impacts one’s risk of being COVID-positive following the non-essential business closure order in Pennsylvania. The authors also assess the intra-household transmission risk experienced by their cohabiting family members and roommates. Using a difference-in-differences framework, they estimate that workers designated as essential have a 55% higher likelihood of being positive for COVID-19 than those classified as non-essential; in other words, non-essential workers experience a protective effect. While members of the health care and social assistance subsector contribute significantly to this overall effect, it is not completely driven by them. The authors also find evidence of intra-household transmission that differs in intensity by essential status. Dependents cohabiting with an essential worker have a 17% higher likelihood of being COVID-positive compared to those cohabiting with a non-essential worker. Roommates cohabiting with an essential worker experience a 38% increase in likelihood of being COVID-positive. Analysis of households with a COVID-positive member suggests that intra-household transmission is an important mechanism.

Early in the pandemic, the number of people applying for unemployment insurance skyrocketed around the country – from 200,000 to over 6 million within the month of March 2020 alone. America’s fragmented public benefits systems already struggled with clarity and accessibility, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought these long simmering issues to full boil. When systems delivering public benefits became overwhelmed or unresponsive, people turned to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms in order to understand complex applications, share resource for obtaining benefits, and develop policy solutions. State, local, and federal policymakers can learn from this experience—frustrated users of public systems are creating roadmaps to help them improve government services. This report identifies five reoccurring trends of platform usage by people in relation to safety net programs and four techniques for capturing people’s experiences in order to reform the safety net. The five common ways safety net applications and beneficiaries use social media include 1) to find reliable information; 2) for self-advocacy; 3) to form a virtual community; 4) to gain insider perspectives; and 5) for organizing and advocacy. The four techniques for capturing people’s experiences include 1) building tools to monitor social media; 2) measuring user experiences; 3) using “secret shoppers”; and 4) developing a safety net complaint database.

Rural hospitals face many challenges in providing essential access to health care services to rural communities. From January 2013 through February 2020, 101 rural hospitals closed. The authors were asked to examine the effects of rural hospital closures on residents living in the areas of the hospitals that closed. This report examines, among other objectives, how closures affected the distance for residents to access health care services, as well as changes in the availability of health care providers in counties with and without closures. The authors analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program (NC RHRP) for rural hospitals (1) that closed and those that were open during the years 2013 through 2017, and (2) for which complete data generally were available at the time of review. They also interviewed HHS and NC RHRP officials and reviewed relevant literature. The authors found that when rural hospitals closed, people living in areas that received health care from them had to travel farther to get the same health care services—about 20 miles farther for common services like inpatient care. People had to travel even farther—about 40 miles—for less common services like alcohol or drug abuse treatment. Before rural hospitals closed, counties where these hospitals were located had fewer doctors than counties without any closures. The number of doctors further decreased when hospitals closed.

This report is one of a series of national, regional, and state reports that provide a snapshot of substance use and mental health in the United States. The report provides an annual update on a series of topics that focus on substance use and mental health (collectively referred to as behavioral health) in the United States. The authors selected specific topics and indicators in this report to represent a cross-section of the key behavioral health indicators that are assessed in periodic data collections. This report is intended to provide a concise, reader-friendly summary of key behavioral health measures for lay and professional audiences. Findings include that among youth aged 12–17 in the United States in 2019, 2.3% (or 572,000) used cigarettes in the past month. Among youth aged 12–17 in the United States in 2019, 7.4% (or 1.8 million) used marijuana in the past month. Among youth aged 12–17 in the United States between 2015 and 2019, past-month binge alcohol use decreased among youth overall and among non-Hispanic Black youth. In the United States between 2008 and 2019, past-year serious thoughts of suicide increased among both young adult males and young adult females aged 18–25 and among young adults aged 18–21 and 22–25.

Although clinicians have experimented with telehealth for years, it did not become mainstream until the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic curtailed in-person health care services. The growth of telehealth services—spurred by temporary changes that are intended to help prioritize and maintain both access to care and adherence to social distancing guidelines—has policymakers, payers, and advocates rethinking the role that they would like telehealth to play in a post-pandemic health care system. The authors of this report present considerations for how telehealth could benefit (or detract) from several policy goals. They also offer recommendations for how policymakers might use the tools at their disposal to achieve their post-pandemic goals. A common goal of telehealth policy in 2022 could be to increase access for only the most underserved, thereby also reducing disparities in utilization without significantly increasing costs overall. If this is the goal, payers could eliminate the geographic and originating-site requirements that make telehealth inconvenient for the underserved and also fail to acknowledge that underserved patients can live in any community; however, payers could choose to reimburse telehealth visits only for patients who have insurmountable barriers to accessing in-person services (e.g., no visits in the prior year, mobility challenges, no local provider within 50 miles). Furthermore, payers could continue to reimburse for audio-only visits because many underserved patients are not prepared for video visits, but only when there is a documented barrier to video visits (e.g., patient lives alone and does not have a device). These policies likely would keep telehealth utilization relatively low but target those most in need with precision. Alternatively, the goal could be to set financial incentives to ensure that every patient can access high-quality telehealth services not only from their regular providers, all of whom offer hybrid care models (a mix of telehealth and in-person services) but also from providers in distant communities and established telehealth companies. To work toward this goal, payers could (1) eliminate geographic and originating-site restrictions, (2) reimburse video telehealth at the same rate as in-person services to encourage universal adoption by clinicians, (3) eliminate reimbursement for audio-only telehealth because of quality concerns, (4) cover only select services shown to be equivalent in quality (e.g., behavioral health services, communication with patients with chronic illnesses), and (5) require an occasional in-person visit to offset some of the limitations of telehealth. Policymakers will need to make many key decisions with little supporting evidence, but this is not unique to telehealth policy.