This paper examines the role that the type of defense counsel plays in federal justice system outcomes. The authors begin with a background on federal indigent defense systems and a review of the prior research examining the impact of counsel type on sentencing. The authors then describe the study and present descriptive results, which explore the frequency and variation in the use of each type of defense counsel (public defenders, assigned counsel, and private attorneys) and other key variables (disposition, incarceration decision, sentence length, year, district, case, and defendant characteristics). The authors model the outcomes of incarceration and sentence length to test whether type of counsel significantly impacts these decisions after controlling for legal and extra-legal factors. The results indicate that defendants who utilize federal public defenders had higher rates of accepting a plea deal than those who were provided a Criminal Justice Act panel attorney or who retained a private attorney. The enactment of the Criminal Justice Act of 1964 charged the federal district courts with providing indigent defense services. Today, there are 81 federal defender organizations, including federal public defender offices and community defender organizations. However, the findings also indicate that individuals represented by Criminal Justice Act panel attorneys and private counsel have 18-25% greater odds of being sent to prison once convicted than those represented by a federal public defender, after controlling for numerous legal and extra-legal factors. These findings indicate that federal public defenders may be more likely to encourage their clients to take plea deals but may also secure their clients favorable sentencing outcomes.

On any given day in the United States, more than half a million people who have not been convicted of any crime are held in local jails. Most are held because, following their arrest, they could not afford to pay the bail amount set as a condition of their release. The negative consequences of pretrial detention can extend beyond a short-term jail stay and include an increased likelihood of receiving a conviction (as opposed to a dismissal); longer sentences; and an increased chance the individuals will lose their jobs, homes, and custody of their children. Despite a growing body of evidence showing that substantial increases in pretrial release do not pose a threat to public safety, communities spend about $14 billion each year to incarcerate people who have not been convicted of crimes. The article looks at reforms in New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York, where research suggests that reforms that focus on restructuring pretrial policy to strengthen the presumption of release have positive results like reducing jail populations, and no major ill effects on court appearance or public safety.

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) encourages states and school districts to support students’ transitions from one level of schooling to the next to reduce the risk of their dropping out. This report presents findings from recent national surveys, which suggest that most states and school districts are providing some types of transition and dropout prevention services, such as individualized career plans to help students identify and work toward their long-term goals and course offerings to help students who have fallen behind get back on track for graduation. However, many fewer states and districts have early warning systems designed to proactively identify the students most at-risk and in need of services and target such services.

Low-skilled adults in literacy in English are those with skills insufficient to complete tasks requiring comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences. Low-skilled adults in numeracy in English are those who would have difficulty making calculations with whole numbers and percentages, estimating numbers or quantity, and interpreting simple statistics in text or tables. The results in this report are presented as the number and percentage of adults at the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) literacy or numeracy proficiency levels. The PIAAC has five literacy and five numeracy proficiency levels: from below Level 1 to Level 5. These levels are described in terms of the types of tasks that adults are likely to complete successfully at a particular level. Between 2012/2014 and 2017, the overall percentages of U.S. adults with low skills did not change significantly in literacy (21% in 2012/2014; 23% in 2017) or numeracy (30% in 2012/2014; 33% in 2017). The same was true for the percentages of adults at Level 1 or at below Level 1. However, the percentage of adults who could not participate in the assessment increased from 4% in 2012/2014 to 5% in 2017. The percentage of adults with a language barrier as the reason for nonparticipation grew from 3% in 2012/2014 to 4% in 2017, while the percentage of adults with a cognitive or physical inability as the reason for non-participation, at about 1%, did not differ significantly between the years.

When students struggle with the foundational math skills taught in the early elementary grades, they are likely to continue to struggle well into middle and high school. Mathematics knowledge is highly cumulative in nature, meaning that the ability to master each new concept is highly dependent upon having mastered the content that came before. Skill by skill. Grade by grade. As early as in kindergarten, the role of teachers in building and cementing these math skills is all-important. Unfortunately, many elementary teachers do not themselves feel adequately confident of their own basic math skills. Potentially lacking confidence or sufficient content knowledge, they may dedicate less time to teaching math than students need, unsure of how to help their students avoid common misconceptions and errors. Compounding the issue, a basic problem for years has been the assumption that anyone who has graduated from high school has all the knowledge they need to teach elementary math. However, teaching elementary math requires a conceptual understanding of foundational mathematics and pedagogical knowledge, neither of which is addressed in a general mathematics course. Preparation programs must dedicate sufficient time to both. While weak math instruction in elementary schools is not a new problem, learning loss as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic brings new urgency to this issue. Multiple studies find that elementary students, already well behind their peers in other nations, lost more learning in math than in reading during the pandemic. Programs that earned an A or A+ in 2022 add the most amount of new credit hours (2.3 credits on average), they also dedicated most of this additional time to much neglected math content, as opposed to math pedagogy, the area in which preparation programs had already been dedicating sufficient time. Conversely, while programs earning an F in 2022 also slightly raised the total time allocated to mathematics preparation (in their case, an increase of 0.5 credit hours), they tended to allocate their additional time to math pedagogy. In fact, F-rated programs, on average, actually reduced the number of credits dedicated to teaching mathematics content from 1.9 credits in 2014 to 1.6 credits in 2022, a 16% reduction.

State and local government tax revenues from major sources—personal income, corporate income, sales, and property taxes—increased 13% in nominal terms and 6.7% in inflation-adjusted terms in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared with the same quarter in 2020. State and local government tax revenues increased 11.7% in real terms when compared with the fourth quarter in 2019. Inflation-adjusted state government tax revenues from major sources increased 18.9% in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared with the same quarter in 2020 and 25.7% compared with the same period in 2019. Because the global pandemic and individual, business, and government responses had an unprecedented impact on state budgets, including shifting revenues between quarters and fiscal years, the authors also present the revenue picture for the second through fourth quarters of 2021 combined compared with the previous year. State government tax revenues from major sources increased 20.5% in real terms for the second through fourth quarters of 2021 combined, compared with the same period in 2020. Economic factors that drive revenue growth were strong in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared with the same quarter in 2020. State economic performance plummeted early in the pandemic as governments, businesses, and individuals took actions to curtail the spread of the virus across the nation. The pandemic had a very uneven impact on various sectors of the economy, which has translated into very different effects across different jobs and places. These patterns continued to fluctuate in the fourth quarter of 2021 as different regions experienced different ebbs and flows in cases and hospitalizations because of variants of SARS-CoV-2.

Since 2007, the National Health Interview Survey Early Release Program has regularly released preliminary estimates of the percentages of adults and children living in homes with only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones). These estimates are the most up-to-date estimates available from the federal government concerning the size and characteristics of this population. Estimates in this report are based on the second six months of 2021. During this time period, 68.7% of adults and 79.1% of children lived in wireless-only households. More than four in five adults aged 25–29 (87.4%) and aged 30-34 (86.4%) were wireless-only. The percentage of adults who were wireless-only decreased as age increased beyond 35 years: 79.6% for those 35–44; 66.2% for those 45–64; and 43.4% for those 65 and over. Hispanic adults (79.1%) were more likely than non-Hispanic White (65.6%), non-Hispanic Black (65.0%), or non-Hispanic Asian (67.2%) adults to be wireless-only. Men (69.1%) were more likely than women (66.9%) to be wireless-only. Adults living in the midwest (69.9%), south (72.5%), and west (69.6%) were more likely than those living in the northeast (53.6%) to be wireless-only. Four in five adults living in rented homes (82.0%) were wireless-only. This percentage is higher than the percentage for adults living in homes owned by a household member (61.5%).

Popular discussion commonly presumes an outsized role for minimum wage increases as a driver of wage increases for minimum wage workers. In this paper, the authors investigate the accuracy of this presumption using data from the earnings studies of the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS wage and earnings data enable the authors to assess the fraction of minimum wage workers who receive a raise within 12 months of their initial appearance as a minimum wage worker. On average from 2010 to 2019, the authors find that roughly 75% of minimum wage workers who remain employed experience a wage increase within 12 months. This fraction is higher during the later years of the sample, when the labor market has been strong, than in the earlier years. The fraction of minimum wage workers receiving wage increases is moderately higher when states enact minimum wage increases than when they do not. The authors also find that the fraction of minimum wage workers receiving wage increases is correlated with several measures of labor market tightness. Finally, wage gains are quite commonly associated with industry and/or occupation switches. This highlights the importance of career progression for the growth of earnings among entry-level workers. The vast majority of the wage gains realized by minimum wage workers thus appear to be driven by career progression and increases in labor demand. Minimum wage increases play a modest role as a driver of earnings trajectories beyond shaping the initial, typically short-lived, minimum wage job itself.

Predictive analytics, or the use of historical data to forecast future outcomes, has long been a feature of business and marketing research. But increasingly, predictive analytics is being applied in the social service and education domains. Program administrators can use relatively simple approaches, such as models with a limited number of measures, to predict outcomes of interest. Or they may consider more complex machine-learning models, taking advantage of the large amounts of data that organizations often collect, to improve their ability to make predictions. Either way, the promise of predictive analytics is to help programs identify those clients who could most benefit from targeted interventions—facilitating effective service delivery at an efficient cost. While it was possible to create predictive models that performed better than random chance with the data collected by a home visiting program at intake, these models made numerous mistakes, and, the models were unable to sufficiently pinpoint the families at risk while limiting extra expenditures on families not at risk.

Suicidal thoughts and behaviors are important public health concerns in the United States. In 2019, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death among persons aged ≥18 years (adults); in that year, 45,861 adults died as a result of suicide, and an estimated 381,295 adults visited hospital emergency departments for nonfatal, self-inflicted injuries. Regional- and state-level data on self-inflicted injuries are needed to help localities establish priorities and evaluate the effectiveness of suicide prevention strategies. During 2015–2019, an estimated 10.6 million (annual average) adults in the United States (4.3% of the adult population) reported having had suicidal thoughts during the preceding year. The findings in this report highlight differences in the adult prevalence of suicidal thoughts, plans to attempt suicide, and attempted suicide during the 12 months preceding the survey at the national, regional, and state levels during 2015–2019. Geographic differences in suicidal thoughts and behavior varied by sociodemographic characteristics and might be attributable to sociodemographic composition of the population, selective migration, or the local cultural milieu. These findings underscore the importance of ongoing surveillance to collect locally relevant data on which to base prevention and intervention strategies. Understanding the patterns of and risk factors for suicide is essential for designing, implementing, and evaluating public health programs for suicide prevention and policies that reduce morbidity and mortality related to suicidal thoughts and behaviors. State health departments and federal agencies can use the results from this report to assess progress toward achieving national and state health objectives in suicide prevention. Strategies might include identifying and supporting persons at risk, promoting connectedness, and creating protective environments.

Over the last decade, the National Survey of Residential Care Facilities (NSRCF) and multiple waves of the National Study of Long-Term Care Providers (NSLTCP) (renamed National Post-acute and Long-term Care Study in 2020) have collected data about residential care communities. This report provides a review of residential care community eligibility rates over survey years and describes design differences and methodological changes—including minor wording changes to screener questions and placement of question-specific instructions—that may be related to observed differences in eligibility rates. The NSRCF and the residential care component of NSLTCP collected data on residential care providers and their service users. The residential care sector includes settings such as assisted living facilities, residential care homes, personal care homes, residential care facilities, and adult family homes. Over the survey years, eligibility rates have varied overall as well as by bed size and mode of survey. The 2012 wave presented the lowest eligibility rate among all survey years. Eligibility rates increased when modifications were made based on respondent comments, field staff observations, and cognitive testing. Differences in eligibility rates have an impact on the estimated size of the residential care sector.