Since 2007, the federal Office for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has provided more than $143 million to establish or expand juvenile drug treatment courts, family drug courts, and tribal juvenile healing to wellness courts. Juvenile drug treatment courts provide treatment services for youth with substance abuse problems. Family drug court programs serve parents and guardians who require treatment for a substance abuse disorder and are involved with a child welfare system as a result of child abuse or neglect. Tribal healing to wellness courts use culturally informed approaches that promote accountability, healing, and tribal identity for Native-American youth younger than age 21. Grants from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention help communities establish or expand juvenile drug treatment courts, family treatment courts, and tribal juvenile healing to wellness courts. The courts use a multidisciplinary team—composed of judges, prosecutors, community corrections officers, social workers, and treatment professionals—to help participants overcome the effects of substance use and co-occurring mental health disorders. Training and technical assistance from the Office for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s providers improve program effectiveness. Also, in order to improve the effectiveness of drug courts, funds support research, training, and technical assistance.

Formerly incarcerated people are 10 times more likely than the general public to be without housing, with a rate of 203 people experiencing homelessness per 10,000 people. Homeless people are more likely to interact with police and are 11 times more likely to be arrested than those with stable housing. There are about 3,300 public housing authorities that serve approximately 1.2 million households, but they are often inaccessible resources for people released from incarceration. Exclusionary criteria governing much of public housing bar people who were formerly incarcerated from moving back with their families, who are often committed to helping the returning family member reintegrate into society. Such housing restrictions affect local public housing development as well as federal housing-choice vouchers under Section B. The latter provide rental assistance to low- and moderate-income families. In 2017, the Vera Institute of Justice launched the Opening Doors initiative to remove barriers to housing for people with conviction histories. This initiative has worked with a wide range of partners, including public housing authorities, law enforcement agencies, county and state corrections departments, reentry service providers, homeless service providers, continuum of care organizations, and resident advocates. As a result of their partnership with Vera, some public housing authorities created reentry programs to increase access to public housing for people with conviction histories. From 2017 to 2021, Vera collaborated with 13 public housing authorities. Four of these collaborations are described, along with other jurisdictions that are exploring innovations in policies and practices that expand housing access for people with criminal records.

The role of computers in daily life and the economy grows yearly, and that trend is only expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Those who learn and master computer science (CS) skills are widely expected to enjoy increased employment opportunities and more flexibility in their futures, though the U.S. currently produces too few specialists to meet future employment demands. Thus, providing exposure to CS during compulsory schooling years is believed to be key to maintaining economic growth, increasing employment outcomes for individuals, and reducing historical gaps in participation in technology fields by gender and race. Consequently, providing young people with access to quality CS education is increasingly seen as an urgent priority for public school systems in the U.S. and around the globe. The past decade has been an active period of policy expansion in CS education across states and growing student engagement in CS courses. Yet, little is known about how policies may have influenced student outcomes. This report offers a first look at the relationship between recent policy changes and participation, as well as pass rates on the Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) exams. The report presents five key findings regarding participation in and pass rates for the AP CS exams, including: (1) sharp, coinciding increases in both state adoption of computer science education policies and overall participation in AP CS exams; (2) an overall increase in AP CS participation; (3) female participation gaps have narrowed since introducing a new AP CS exam (the CS Principles exam), especially for Black and Latino students; (4) during the last decade, pass rates on AP CS exams have modestly increased for underrepresented student groups; and (5) AP CS student participation overall is associated with increased computer science policy adoption, though participation gaps between over- and underrepresented groups appear to be uncorrelated with recent policy adoptions.

Much of the policy debate emerging from concerns over student debt has focused on the structure and operation of income-driven repayment. As the number of available income-driven repayment plans and the share of borrowers enrolling in these plans have increased, the system has become more confusing and difficult to navigate. The current problems with the income-driven repayment system are not an indictment of the basic approach but are signs of problematic design details and implementation failures. A student loan repayment system that bases required payments on borrowers’ current circumstances can significantly mitigate the difficulties associated with unaffordable education debt. Reform should focus on equity across borrowers and between borrowers and taxpayers. Recommended changes include 1) creating one income-driven federal student loan repayment plan into which borrowers are automatically enrolled, with clear options for making larger payments to cover interest payments or to pay off the debt more quickly; 2) raising the income threshold at which borrowers must make payments to 200% of the federal poverty level; 3) forgiving remaining balances for borrowers whose incomes do not support retirement of their debts; and 4) diminishing the extent to which borrowers see their balances grow because of interest charges.

Support for expanding access to high-quality prekindergarten (pre-K) is at an all-time high. Increased investments in early care and education have been spurred in part by rigorous evidence finding that four-year-old students who attend pre-K score higher on assessments of language, literacy, math, and executive functioning skills than children who do not attend pre-K. Yet these initial positive impacts on cognitive and academic skills tend to diminish quickly after pre-K ends and disappear during kinder­garten or first grade. A growing number of policymakers, practitioners, and researchers have proposed that vertical instructional alignment—or the implementation of standards, curricula, and assess­ments that build on one another as children move from pre-K to elementary school—is a key factor in supporting sustained impacts of pre-K. The Boston Public Schools (BPS) district is the first large school system in the United States to design and implement a curriculum and professional model—called Focus on Early Learning—to align instruction across its public school pre-K program and early elementary school grades. Schools opt in and can choose how much of the curriculum to adopt. Further, BPS’s school assignment process combines information on parents’ preferences for where they would like their child to attend pre-K. When there are more students who prefer a school than there are available spots, this process uses naturally occurring lotteries—which approximate random assignment—to determine which students are assigned to each school. Boston Public School’s implementation of Focus on Early Learning across its pre-K and kindergarten programs, coupled with this school assignment process, present a unique opportunity to rigorously examine the effects of a district-wide rollout of instructional alignment on student outcomes across time.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, hiring and retaining high-quality early care and education educators was difficult. Early care and education has minimum preservice qualification requirements that establish a gateway into the profession, but inconsistent requirements across early care and education sectors create incentives for educators to change jobs for better compensation and working conditions, causing a drain of talent. Federal, state, and local governments administer the wide range of programs that care for and educate young children, which creates different standards for staff, facilities, and program quality across sectors. For example, states set different lead teacher education requirements for home-based child care, child care centers, and public prekindergarten programs. State education requirements are highest for lead teachers in prekindergarten, while home-based child care teachers have the lowest education requirements, on average, with center-based lead teachers having slightly higher requirements. With such a variety of policies on hiring qualifications and standards, who gets hired in early care and education programs widely differ from state to state and could have long-term impacts on the diversity of the fieald. In 2019, 29 states required a high school diploma or a high school equivalency for home-based providers, while 36 states required a bachelor’s degree for lead teachers in prekindergarten programs. In states that require one more year of education and training for center-based educators, prekindergarten educators are about 2 percentage points more likely to be people of color. The prekindergarten workforce became more racially diverse between 2012 and 2019, increasing from 13.7% people of color to 28.4%. But there was a slight decrease in ethnic diversity; 7% of prekindergarten educators were Hispanic or Latina in 2012 compared with 18.9% in 2019. In contrast, the child care center workforce became slightly less racially diverse from 2012 to 2019, shifting from 25.2% to 24.3% people of color, while becoming more ethnically diverse, increasing from 11.4% of Hispanic or Latina center-based educators to 13.3%.

The 2021 temporary expansion of the child tax credit was unprecedented in its reach, lifting 3.7 million children out of poverty as of December 2021. It provided families with up to $3,600 for every child in the household under the age of six, and up to $3,000 for every child between the ages of 6 and 17. Half the credit was issued monthly between July and December, 2021. Almost all middle- and low-income families with children were eligible for the child tax credit. Married parents making less than $150,000 and single parents making less than $112,500 per year were eligible to receive the full amount of the credit, which began to phase out slowly after these income cut-offs. The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of the expanded child tax credit on families and to inform current proposals to make the credit permanent. Overall, our findings suggest that the expanded child tax credit supported eligible families in several critical ways. First, the credit allowed families to cover routine expenses, such as housing, food, utilities, clothing, and other essential items for their children while also helping families to save for emergencies and pay off debt. Because one of the primary uses of the benefit was on food, it is not surprising that the child tax credit significantly lowered eligible families’ food insecurity and helped them afford healthier, balanced meals for their children. Additionally, the child tax credit reduced overall economic insecurity for eligible households, as evidenced by their declining credit card debt, lower eviction risks, stronger rainy-day funds, and reduced reliance on payday loans, pawn shops, and selling blood plasma to make ends meet. It was, however, surprising to find such mixed results regarding depression and parental stress. These discrepancies require further examination, but the authors hypothesize that the extra strain on child tax credit-eligible households compared to those ineligible (mostly non-parents) amidst a peaking COVID-19 Omicron variant, winter break, the holidays, and other seasonal components may help to explain these findings and makes it all the more striking that family households experienced so many other positive outcomes.

In recent years, many workforce organization leaders have expressed interest in learning how to conduct their own worker-focused research and have asked for tools to help them build worker input into design and delivery of programs and business services. This is because both workforce providers and many business leaders recognize that workers hold unique expertise related to business operations, training needs, and process improvements that could enhance retention and business performance. In response, the authors have developed two tools: this tool for conducting worker surveys, and a guide to conducting worker focus groups. The authors hope that these tools are helpful to workforce organizations seeking to tap into worker knowledge and to listen and respond to the ideas, needs, and aspirations of frontline workers. This guide is based on practices the authors have developed over years of conducting research and is informed by a careful review of several employee surveys, including those developed by Gallup, the Good Jobs Institute, Illinois Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and Civic Works in partnership with Pacific Community Ventures. It is intended to help workforce development professionals partner with local businesses to gather input about frontline workers’ experience. There are many ways to gather worker input. This tool provides an example set of survey questions that readers can adapt based on the interests and needs of a business and its workforce.

Over 9 million Americans ages 50 and older (about 1 in 12) were food insecure in 2020, meaning they had limited or uncertain access to adequate, nutritious food. That number that did not change substantially from 2019, despite a pandemic that caused widespread job loss that hit older workers particularly hard. This finding suggests that congressional actions such as boosts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) may have helped millions of older adults put food on the table in a time of need and prevented overall increases in food insecurity. However, the data also reveal important differences by state, age, race and ethnicity, and other demographics. Food insecurity is most prevalent among older adults who: are younger (i.e., ages 50–59); are Black, Native American, or Hispanic; are lower income; and have lower levels of educational attainment. In 2020, Florida had 8.3% (733,915 people) of its population over age 50 who experienced food insecurity.

Foster care provides substitute living arrangements to protect maltreated children. The practice is remarkably common: it is estimated that 5% of children in the United States are placed in foster care at some point during childhood. These children exhibit poor outcomes as children and adults, and economists have begun to estimate the causal relationship between foster care and life outcomes. This paper describes tradeoffs in child welfare policy and provides background on the latest trends in foster care practice to highlight areas most in need of rigorous evidence. These trends include efforts to prevent foster care on the demand side and to improve foster home recruitment on the supply side. With increasing data availability and a growing interest in evidence-based practices, there are opportunities for economic research to inform policies that protect vulnerable children.

Many of the ethnic and racial workforce inequities in the United States are present in health care systems. Low representation of African American/Black individuals in the health care system workforce can be traced to a history of exclusionary practices that leave such individuals less likely to pursue health careers. Past research found that low representation is driven by inequities in health, education, and employment that are a result of structural racism. This report describes the development of key factors in framework design for the Health System–Community Pathways Program, which aims to increase representation of African American/Black communities in the health care system workforce and improve the quality of their experience in pursuing careers in these fields. The program framework of key factors is informed by an environmental scan, interviews and focus groups, and an expert discussion panel session. Key findings include that to boost the number and quality of experience of African American/Black learners and ultimately their representation in health care, the following factors are key to program design: (1) student recruitment, admission, and retention, (2) mentor recruitment and training, (3) programming, (4) program outcome measurement, and (5) long-term program sustainability strategies. Admissions committees should be more diverse, social and financial support should be provided to students, and students should be encouraged to participate in decision making and leadership of curriculum committees and oversight boards. Different types of mentor-mentee relationships should be encouraged to support student success in the program, including peer-peer, near-peer, and senior, and mentors should be trained in racism, micro-aggression, unconscious bias, and cultural understanding. Programming should include educational and non-educational support and clinical experiences to expose students to opportunities in health care professions.

This study focuses on identifying COVID-19 related exposure, stress, and mental health concerns in the larger Charlotte, North Carolina region, an area with many low-income and under resourced communities. A community-academic partnership conducted a regional COVID-19 needs assessment. Low-income adults completed an online-administered survey of demographic information, COVID-19 exposure, stress, coping-related factors, and mental health. Frequency data showed that common COVID-19 related stressors included job exposure, lost job/income, and increased home responsibilities. Frequency data further showed elevated screening risk rates for mental health concerns were observed for post-traumatic stress (83.3%), depression (52.2%), problematic drinking (50.0%), generalized anxiety (43.0%), and suicide (40.4%). Bivariate correlation and multivariate regression models identified robust mental health risk factors including COVID-19 related stress affecting close persons, fear/worry reaction to the pandemic, and use of venting as a coping strategy; protective factors included active coping and problem-focused coping beliefs. Findings are discussed with respect to informing regional public health efforts during the pandemic.