This report describes delinquency and petitioned status offense cases handled in U.S. courts with jurisdiction over juvenile populations between 2005 and 2022. Characteristics are presented on an estimated 549,500 delinquency cases and 62,000 petitioned status offense cases handled in 2022. Key findings include that in 2022, juvenile courts handled about 1,500 delinquency cases per day. Though delinquency caseloads increased in 2022, the number of cases was below pre-pandemic levels for all offenses. The report also tracks caseload trends from 2005 to 2022, including case counts and rates, juvenile demographics, and offenses charged.

This interim evaluation report presents descriptive, process, and outcome findings regarding the Oakland Department of Violence Prevention’s (DVP’s) community healing and restoration strategy. Activities encompassed in this strategy are intended to help families affected by homicide and support neighborhoods and communities most impacted by group violence and gender-based violence. These services and activities help community members cope and heal in response to incidents of violence while strengthening social capital in neighborhoods as a protective factor against violence. The efforts under this strategy are reaching areas and populations most affected by violence while fostering community bonds. Between July 2022 and June 2024, the DVP assisted 156 individuals through its family-support services, most commonly providing case management, financial support, relocation, and funeral/vigil planning services. Additionally, 76 people received therapeutic support services and 69 people received restorative services focused on supporting families affected by violence over the same two-year period. In summer 2023, they occurred in nine locations over six consecutive weeks (54 total events) and in summer 2024, there were 31 events in eight locations. Each site was funded to host three events, and some hosted more either by stretching the DVP funding or supplementing it from other sources. In 2023 Town Nights events were attended by thousands of people, and they provided employment to an average of 185 young people each Friday.

K-12 students who are impacted by the justice system — particularly those in residential placement — face barriers related to a lack of coordination between state agencies, inadequate access to high-quality educational experiences and disjointed re-entry practices. States are uniquely able to address these barriers in a comprehensive way that ensures all students receive the services and supports they need to set them up for success in the system and life outside of detainment. Research shows youth who achieve higher levels of education while in residential placement are more likely to have positive outcomes upon release, yet many of their needs are not identified or addressed. The most recent available survey of youth in residential placement, conducted in 2016, found that: 1) at least 61% said they had previously been suspended and/or expelled from school; 2) at least 24% reported they were not enrolled in a school when they entered custody; 3) at least 48% demonstrated academic proficiency below grade level; 4) at least 25% of youth surveyed said they had repeated a grade; 5) at least 30% reported that an expert, such as a doctor or counselor, had told them they have a learning disability compared to 5% of youth in the general population between ages 10-20. State policymakers play an important role in ensuring that youth who are impacted by the justice system get the education services and supports they need to thrive in the system and beyond. Youth impacted by the justice system face intertwined education challenges at every stage of their journey. These barriers include exclusionary school discipline practices before custody, limited access to quality education and learning support during placement, and difficulties with reentry and academic continuity after release.

Boys are less likely than girls to enter college, a gap that is often attributed to a lack of non-cognitive skills such as motivation and self-discipline. This review studies how being classified as gifted – determined by having an IQ score of 116 or higher – affects college entry rates of disadvantaged children in a large urban school district. For boys with IQ’s around the cutoff, gifted identification raises the college entry rate by 25-30 percentage points – enough to catch up with girls in the same IQ range. In contrast, it finds small effects for girls. Looking at course-taking and grade outcomes in middle and high school, there are large effects of gifted status for boys that close most of the gaps with girls, but no detectable effects on standardized tests scores of either gender. Overall, the authors interpret the evidence as demonstrating that gifted services raise the non-cognitive skills of boys conditional on their cognitive skills, leading to gains in educational attainment.

Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s. A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which increasingly prevent students with poor introductory grades from declaring popular majors. We investigate these major restriction policies by constructing a novel 50-year dataset covering four public research universities' student transcripts and employing a staggered difference-in-difference design around the implementation of 25 GPA-based restrictions. Restrictions disproportionately filter out less-prepared students with fewer pre-college academic opportunities, decreasing average URM enrollment shares by 20%. They do not measurably improve allocative efficiency across majors, departments' wage value-added, or filtered students' educational attainment. Using first-term course enrollments to identify students who intend to earn restricted majors, we find that major restrictions disproportionately lead URM students toward less lucrative majors, explaining nearly all growth in within-institution ethnic stratification since the 1990s.

Bachelor’s degree (BA) attainment is one of the most reliable indicators of an individual’s future economic and social advantage. Four-year college graduates earn more, pay more in taxes, practice healthier behaviors, and are more likely to vote and volunteer. Despite these documented benefits, gaps in BA attainment have widened over time, even as overall rates of attainment have increased. In 2015, the City University of New York (CUNY) launched a new program—Accelerate, Complete, and Engage (ACE)—aimed at improving bachelor’s degree completion rates. A randomized-control evaluation of the program found a nearly 12 percentage point increase in graduation five years after college entry. Despite this compelling evidence, public funding for ACE is not a foregone conclusion. Programs like ACE may be disadvantaged during budget cycles, as policymakers weigh quantifiable up-front costs against unquantified future benefits. This working paper uses the ACE impact estimates, along with national data on earnings, to estimate the expected incremental long-run benefits and costs from CUNY ACE participation, as well as intergenerational benefits to the children of participants, relative to “business as usual.” The authors find that net social benefits are large, even under their most conservative assumptions. They estimate net social benefits of nearly $43,000 per CUNY ACE participant, which are primarily driven by greater earnings of participants over their lifetime. When considering intergenerational benefits for children of ACE participants, that number nearly triples to $125,000 in net social benefits per participant. These results may be larger or smaller depending upon whether ACE’s impact on graduation after five years persists indefinitely, or whether the control group eventually catches up—but net social benefits are strongly positive in all scenarios. While the analysis is focused on CUNY ACE, the approach highlights the long-term value of both increasing and accelerating college completion more generally.

Like many states across the nation, California is facing persistent teacher shortages. School districts continue to find it difficult to fill vacancies with fully credentialed teachers, especially math, science, special education, and bilingual education teachers. Teacher shortages impact student learning as districts resort to relying on a revolving door of underprepared teachers and substitute teachers, increasing class sizes, and cutting course offerings altogether. To tackle teacher shortages, especially in high-need schools, California has invested more than $1 billion to strengthen the teacher workforce. Much of this funding has been allocated since 2021 and began to be implemented in 2022 or 2023. Three of California’s largest investments in the teacher workforce are the Teacher Residency Grant Program ($605 million), Golden State Teacher Grant Program ($611 million), and National Board Certified Teacher Incentive Program ($250 million). There are early signs of improvement in the teacher workforce, even as teacher shortages in several fields remain a serious challenge. Beginning in 2020, California saw an uptick in the number of candidates completing teacher preparation programs, although this number dipped in 2022. The state investments have led to large increases in the number of teachers prepared through residency programs, which research shows is a high-retention pathway that effectively prepares teachers for the classroom. Finally, the number of teachers pursuing National Board Certification—which research shows is linked to teacher effectiveness—more than tripled after the subsidy and incentive program became available in 2022, a trend mirrored in high-need schools.

Tornadoes are narrow, violently rotating columns of air, extending from the base of a thunderstorm to the ground. They affect communities across the United States every year. Tornadoes can cause fatalities and injuries, destroy property and crops, and disrupt businesses. For example, a weather system on April 25-28, 2024, produced over 150 tornadoes, high winds, and large hail; it caused multiple deaths and injuries across parts of the Midwest and South, according to preliminary estimates from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Tornadoes have been reported on all continents except Antarctica. They occur most commonly in North America, particularly in the United States, which reports approximately 1,200 tornadoes per year based on official data dating back to the 1950s. Tornadoes occur across the United States but form frequently in three regions: (1) southern plains (e.g., Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas), (2) Gulf Coast (e.g., Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi), and (3) northern plains and upper Midwest (e.g., North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota). Although tornadoes can form at any time, they occur mostly during spring and summer and usually during the late afternoon or early evening. NOAA has estimated that in 2024, April had the second highest tornado count on record and May had the highest count, surpassing the 550 tornados of May 2003. However, experts have difficulty discerning if the average number of tornadoes each year has changed over time or if tornados are being reported more often today as a function of better detection, greater media coverage and verification efforts, more storm spotting and chasing, a growing population, and the advent of cell phone cameras.

Concrete is the world's most widely used building material, valued for its versatility and strength. However, its production is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. The use of concrete for building construction represents about 4% of all CO2 emissions globally; 90% of these emissions come from cement production. Supporting the shift to a cleaner production of concrete as well as rethinking how it is used are essential steps towards making buildings more sustainable. Emissions from cement can be mainly split in two stages: calciner and kiln. As the global demand for buildings and infrastructure is rising, so is the use of concrete – by up to 20% until 2050.

The Social Security Amendments of 1972 created a special minimum benefit to protect low-earning seniors against poverty in old age by giving them a higher benefit than they would receive through the regular Social Security benefit formula. But the minimum benefit has failed to reach many poor beneficiaries due to design limitations. In fact, no new retirees have become eligible for it since 1998. The minimum benefit itself has become nearly obsolete because it is indexed annually to the growth in prices. In December 2022, just 20,560 people received retired worker benefits based on the minimum benefit; that was out of almost 49 million retired worker beneficiaries altogether, or roughly one for every 2,380 receiving a benefit using the regular formula. To reduce poverty among older and disabled adults and survivors, a minimum benefit that is narrowly focused on long-term low earners is not sufficient. Such proposals miss most people who receive low benefits and have incomes below the poverty line, in large part because they do not assist beneficiaries with significant time out of the paid labor force. This includes women, who are more likely to take time out of the labor force to care for family, and people of color, who face discrimination in the labor market and higher unemployment rates during their work years. The report models two separate hypothetical minimum benefit options: one would set the highest level for the minimum benefit at 125% of the poverty level but require 30 years of work; the other would set it at a flat 100% of the poverty level but require just 10 years of work to qualify.

This report presents final 2023 U.S. mortality data on deaths and death rates by demographic and medical characteristics. Key findings from this report include that life expectancy for the U.S. population in 2023 was 78.4 years, an increase of 0.9 year from 2022. The age-adjusted death rate decreased by 6.0% from 798.8 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2022 to 750.5 in 2023. Age-specific death rates decreased from 2022 to 2023 for all age groups 5 years and older. The 10 leading causes of death in 2023 remained the same as in 2022, although some causes changed ranks; heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injuries remained the top 3 leading causes in 2023. The remaining top ten leading causes of death in 2023 were stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer disease, diabetes, kidney disease, chronic liver disease, and COVID-19. The infant mortality rate of 560.2 infant deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023 did not change significantly from the rate in 2022 (560.4).

Drug overdoses are one of the leading causes of injury death in adults and have risen over the past several decades in the United States. Overdoses involving synthetic opioids (fentanyl, for example) and stimulants (cocaine and methamphetamine, for example) have also risen in the past few years. This report presents rates of drug overdose deaths from the National Vital Statistics System over a 20-year period by demographic group and by the type of drugs involved, specifically, opioids and stimulants, with a focus on changes from 2022 to 2023. Key findings from the report include that the age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths increased from 8.9 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2003 to 32.6 in 2022; however, the rate decreased to 31.3 in 2023. Rates decreased between 2022 and 2023 for people ages 15–54 and increased for adults age 55 and older. From 2022 to 2023, rates decreased for White non-Hispanic people, while rates for other race and Hispanic-origin groups generally stayed the same or increased. Between 2022 and 2023, rates declined for deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, heroin, and natural and semisynthetic opioids, while the rate for methadone remained the same. From 2022 to 2023, rates increased for deaths involving cocaine by 4.9% (from 8.2 to 8.6) and psychostimulants with abuse potential by 1.9% (10.4 to 10.6).

To engage communities across the county in their strategic planning process, the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (DMH) created YourDMH stakeholder groups. By regularly convening these groups, DMH aims to communicate its goals, processes, and procedures; better understand local needs and allocate resources; and assess the impact of its work. In this report, the authors evaluated YourDMH by fielding a survey of group members to understand their satisfaction with the groups and perceptions of group representation and inclusiveness. The authors also aimed to identify future topics of interest that would enhance participation. The authors provide recommendations to improve YourDMH. These recommendations focus on ways to enhance representation and foster equitable engagement in a safe and inclusive environment, particularly for mental health consumers. Key findings in the report include that just over half of participants were satisfied with YourDMH stakeholder meetings, and most reported that they know how to get involved. With respect to representation, just under half of respondents reported that they felt heard and valued by the DMH and that their feedback makes a difference, and only about one-third reported that they felt their community was adequately represented in meetings. Mental health consumers were significantly less satisfied with the stakeholder groups than were respondents who did not identify as consumers. Mental health consumers gave the groups lower ratings for inclusiveness and for being safe places to be honest and voice concerns. Mental health consumers also reported not feeling adequately represented at meetings. Respondents noted that more information on the DMH and a sense that their feedback was valued and impactful would increase their participation. In addition to information on the DMH, respondents desired more information on mental health service delivery, funding, legislation, and policies.