February 19, 2021
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The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has taken steps to
track reports of sexual harassment and sexual assault
involving its federal civilian employees, but its
visibility over both types of incidents is hindered by
guidance and information-sharing challenges. While
employees may not report all incidents for a variety of
reasons, DOD also lacks visibility over those incidents
that have been reported. For example, from Fiscal Years
2015 through 2019, DOD recorded 370 civilian employees as
victims of sexual assault and 199 civilian employees as
alleged offenders. However, these data do not include all
incidents of sexual assault reported over this time
period. Specifically, based on DOD guidance, examples of
incidents that could be excluded from these data include
those involving civilian employee victims (1) occurring
in the continental United States, (2) employed by DOD
components other than the military services, such as
defense agencies, and (3) who are also military
dependents. Without guidance that addresses these areas,
DOD does not know the extent to which its civilian
workforce has reported work-related sexual assault
worldwide. Additionally, the authors found that DOD
civilian employees' ability to make restricted reports of
sexual assault—confidential disclosures that do not
initiate official investigations, but allow the victim to
receive DOD-provided sexual assault support
services—varies across components. According to DOD
officials, they have not taken action to resolve this
variation due to conflicts with federal statute, among
other things. By reporting to and requesting any needed
actions from Congress to resolve any conflicts with
statute, the department can alleviate such
inconsistencies and minimize legal risks for DOD
components. The authors provide 19 recommendations
including that DOD issue guidance for comprehensive
tracking of civilian work-related sexual assaults,
enhance guidance on the structure of anti-harassment
programs for civilians, and report to and request any
needed actions from Congress on the ability of civilian
employees to make restricted reports of sexual assault.
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Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office
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This report series provides an overview of states
approaches prison-release discretion and the relationship
between rules for prison release and prison population
size, including an assessment of each state’s degree of
indeterminacy. States that have a low degree of
indeterminacy provide a short window from first release
eligibility to the maximum prison term, thus making the
total prison stay length more predictable. In contrast,
states with a high degree of indeterminacy have long
windows spanning years, or even decades depending on the
individual sentence. Overall, the authors place
Connecticut’s prison-sentencing system in the category of
low indeterminacy, but this is a judgment that splits the
difference between two very different prison-release
subsystems. For nonviolent offenders the system operates
with a moderate degree of indeterminacy. Judges and
back-end officials with prison-release discretion enjoy
roughly comparable amounts of control over time actually
served in individual cases. In contrast, for violent
offenders, the system is one of extremely low
indeterminacy (or, by the authors’ alternative
terminology, extremely high determinacy). Judicial
sentences in cases of violent crime are very strong
predictors of actual time served. For nonviolent
offenders, the parole board holds significantly more
back-end discretion over time served than the department
of corrections, although both have non-trivial powers.
For violent offenders, the parole board and department of
corrections hold nearly identical and overlapping
authorities, but the quantum of release discretion that
they share is small.
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Source: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal
Justice, University of Minnesota
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This study examines the effects of negative equity (owing
more on the mortgage than the value of the house) on
children’s academic performance, using data on children
attending Florida public schools and housing transactions
from the State of Florida. The authors’ empirical
strategy exploits variation over time in the timing of
family moves to Florida in order to account for household
sorting into neighborhoods and schools and selection into
initial mortgage terms. In contrast to the existing
literature on foreclosure and children’s outcomes, they
find that Florida students with the highest risk of
negative equity exhibit significantly higher test score
growth. These effects are largest among Black students
and students who qualify for free or reduced-priced
lunch. They find evidence supporting two underlying
mechanisms: (1) consumption patterns suggest that
families in negative equity may reduce the impact of
income losses on consumption by forgoing mortgage
payments, and (2) mobility patterns suggest that families
exposed to high levels of negative equity may move to
schools that are of higher quality on average. While
negative equity and foreclosure are undesirable, the
changing incentives in terms of mortgage delinquency may
have helped families manage the economic shocks caused by
the great recession, as well as temporarily reduced the
housing market barriers faced by low-income households
when attempting to access educational opportunities.
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Source: National Bureau of Economic Research
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Each year, colleges place millions of students into
developmental math and English courses upon enrollment.
Developmental courses are basic courses designed to give
students the skills they need to be successful in
college-level courses, but students do not earn college
credit for these courses. To do so, colleges most often
use a high-stakes placement test, which numerous research
studies have shown to be highly inaccurate in determining
how well students are prepared for college. As a result,
these tests underplace many students into developmental
education classes who would have been successful
immediately if they had taken college credit-bearing
courses instead. Developmental education courses are
designed to give students the skills they need for
success in college-level courses, but they also delay
students’ enrollment in credit-bearing coursework,
lengthen the time it takes them to earn a degree, and may
decrease the chances they will ever graduate. Colleges
could boost incoming students’ college-level course pass
rates by improving the assessment tools they use to place
those students, with the goal of minimizing
underplacement and increasing the number of students
taking college-level courses. Using more than one measure
to assess students’ skills—a strategy known as a multiple
measures assessment—can be an excellent way to achieve
this goal. This report summarizes the findings from a
study of the impacts of two multiple measures assessment
models at seven 2-year state colleges in New York and at
four 2-year state colleges in Minnesota as an alternative
to the high-stakes testing that colleges typically use to
make placement decisions. The study found that students
who are placed into college-level courses using multiple
measures assessment are more likely to complete
gatekeeper courses—basic introductory or prerequisite
college-level courses—than their counterparts who are
placed into developmental courses using placement tests.
These findings held for placements in math and English
courses in the first semester and after three semesters.
The study also found that student success rates can
improve when multiple measures assessment is applied and
students who would have otherwise been placed into
developmental education courses are instead referred to
college-level courses.
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Source: MDRC
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To help inform the policymaking process, it is important
to understand the connections and distinctions between
the many terms and phrases used in the context of child
development, student mental wellness, and school-based
mental health services. This glossary defines common
terms related to student mental wellness at the
individual and system levels and highlights potential
connections between them. Definitions are provided for
terms such as adverse childhood experiences, behavioral
health, executive function, mental health, resilience,
and trauma. Links to additional resources are also
provided.
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Source: Education Commission of the States
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Evidence-based policymaking techniques hold the potential
for enabling Florida to spend existing resources more
strategically. These techniques – sometimes called the
“Moneyball for Government” approach – use the best
research and data on program results to guide policy and
budget decisions, targeting resources to programs that
work, and eliminating interventions that deliver poor
results regardless of intentions. This information is now
available from a growing network of research
clearinghouses that rate the effectiveness of programs in
many policy areas. This report describes the components
of evidenced-based policymaking and how it has been used
in several states. It highlights examples of components
of this approach used in Florida and makes
recommendations of next steps for Florida to take
advantage of these techniques including: (1) compiling a
comprehensive inventory of state programs; (2) requiring
that agency programs be classified by their
effectiveness; (3) giving preference for funding to
programs that achieve high returns on investment dollars;
(4) creating monitoring standards to assure programs are
implemented with fidelity; and (5) creating a central
database of agency performance measures that can be used
to issue agency report cards.
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Source: LeRoy Collins Institute, Florida State University
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Federal research funding is key for advancing science and
innovation. But federal funding comes with administrative
requirements—e.g., documentation and reporting—that allow
for oversight. Are those requirements getting in the way
of research? The federal Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) could find out. As of January 2021, OMB had not
established the Research Policy Board as required by the
21st Century Cures Act. The act requires OMB to establish
the board within 1 year of the December 13, 2016
enactment of the act. The board is to provide information
on the effects of regulations related to federal research
requirements. The OMB stated that it had not established
the Board because of issues with the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services’ (HHS) and other federal
agencies’ full participation in the board’s potential
activities to develop or implement a modified approach to
indirect cost policies. By not having established the
board, OMB is missing opportunities for the board to
provide information on the effects of regulations related
to requirements for federally funded research, and to
make recommendations to harmonize and streamline such
requirements. Further, OMB has limited time to establish
the board and the board may have insufficient time to
complete its work before the board is set to terminate on
September 30, 2021.
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Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office
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For the 100 largest public employee pension systems in
the country, assets (cash and investments) totaled
$4,170.4 billion in the third quarter of 2020, increasing
by 4.7% from the second quarter of 2020 level of $3,982.7
billion. Compared to the same quarter in 2019, assets for
these major public-pension systems increased 4.1% from
$4,006.5 billion.
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Source: U.S. Census Bureau
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The benefits of new technologies accrue not only to
high-skilled labor but also to owners of capital in the
form of higher capital incomes. This increases
inequality. To make this argument, the authors develop a
tractable theory that links technology to the personal
income and wealth distributions – and not just that of
wages – and use it to study the distributional effects of
automation. The authors isolate a new theoretical
mechanism: automation increases inequality via returns to
wealth. The flip side of such return movements is that
automation is more likely to lead to stagnant wages and
therefore stagnant incomes at the bottom of the
distribution. The authors use a multi-asset model
extension to confront differing empirical trends in
returns to productive and safe assets and show that the
relevant return measures have increased over time.
Automation accounts for part of the observed trends in
income and wealth inequality and macroeconomic aggregates.
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Source: National Bureau of Economic Research
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As the United States prepares for a COVID-19 recovery,
policymakers need to understand why some cities and
communities were more vulnerable to the pandemic’s
economic consequences than others. In this paper, the
authors consider the association between a city’s core
industry, its economic susceptibility to the pandemic,
and the recession’s racially disparate impact across six
select metropolitan areas. The authors find that areas
with economies that rely on the movement of people—like
Las Vegas with tourism—faced substantially higher
unemployment at the end of 2020 than cities with core
industries based on the movement of information. Further,
they find the hardest-hit areas have larger Hispanic or
Latino communities, reflecting the demographic
composition of workers in heavily impacted industries and
susceptible areas. The authors conclude by recommending
targeted federal policy to address the regions and
communities most impacted by the COVID-19 recession.
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Source: Brookings Institute
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The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2015–2020 suggest
that a healthy eating pattern include consuming a variety
of different fruit and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables
are sources of many essential nutrients, such as
vitamins, minerals, and fiber, and consumption is
associated with decreased risk of chronic disease. This
report examines the percentage of adults aged 20 and over
who consumed fruit and vegetables on a given day by sex
and income in 2015–2018 and trends in fruit and vegetable
consumption. Key findings include that more than
two-thirds (67.3%) of adults aged 20 and over consumed
any fruit on a given day, and fruit consumption was
higher among women (70.5%) compared with men (63.8%).
Approximately 95% of adults consumed any vegetables on a
given day. The percentage of adults who consumed any
fruit; citrus, melon, or berries; and other types of
whole fruit on a given day increased with income. The
percentage of adults who consumed dark green, red and
orange, other vegetables, and any vegetable types on a
given day increased with income.
The percentage of adults who consumed any fruit on a
given day decreased from 77.2% in 1999–2000 to 64.9% in
2017–2018, but there was no change in the percentage
consuming any vegetables.
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Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services
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The authors provide a brief background on (1) the
important role that home care workers play in the United
States, particularly during the coronavirus disease 2019
(COVID-19) pandemic; (2) how they gathered these workers'
perspectives through the use of journaling; and (3) how
journaling can serve as a valuable source of support and
a flexible data collection method, especially when
circumstances are changing rapidly, as in a public health
crisis. The authors gathered qualitative data to examine
the concerns of, and potential solutions to support, home
care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journaling
offered a way to obtain home care workers' reflections on
their work experiences during the pandemic while
minimizing constraints on when data would be collected by
the study team and eliminating physical contact, in
compliance with public health measures. Participants were
encouraged to express thoughts and experiences in other
areas on a weekly basis, and to submit written or verbal
diary entries. The study team then provided feedback to
participants to build rapport, encourage participation,
and make participants feel heard. Journaling is a
promising intervention to help home care workers and
other caregiving professionals exercise self-care and
cope with the various stressors they face in their
professional and personal lives – particularly in very
demanding periods, such as during a pandemic.
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Source: RAND Corporation
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