Missed appearances are a common occurrence in almost all state trial courts across the country. Thus, isolating the impact of missed appearances is challenging. Courts use time, personnel, and money to prepare a case for, and move a case along after, a hearing. If the hearing’s original purpose is frustrated by a missed appearance, what does that mean for the work on either side of that hearing, in addition to the work of the hearing itself? This report identifies four main ways that missed appearances impact court operations. These categories are case flow and workload, staffing, downstream effects, and financial. Based on the research team’s calculations and assumptions, the report found that a hypothetical courthouse could incur costs of around $39.99 per minute during regular business hours. Though this report discusses each category of impact separately, it is important to note that many of these categories interact with one another, and only some can be quantified, meaning that any calculations likely underestimate the true impact of a missed appearance. Additionally, many of these impacts in turn affect appearance rates. For example, some court responses to missed appearances may in fact add barriers for litigants to come to court, thus increasing the likelihood of future missed appearances. Finally, the report highlights proven strategies for increasing court participation. These strategies range from relatively simple, such as ensuring hearing notices are in plain language, to more complex, such as implementing an electronic reminder system.

Securing stable employment is a critical factor in reducing recidivism among formerly incarcerated people. Every year, around 10,000 people are released from prison in New York, entering a labor market filled with barriers, restrictions, and stigma for those with conviction histories. Recognizing this fact, New York State offers a variety of programs to help incarcerated people prepare for employment after release. Inspired by these efforts, this report explores access to in-prison vocational programming and post-release employment pathways in New York State. Researchers surveyed 104 formerly incarcerated people and found that employment outcomes for people who participate in vocational training while incarcerated can improve by ensuring that training curricula in prisons are relevant to job market opportunities, increasing job placement support, and providing more opportunities to earn externally recognized certifications. The likelihood of returning to prison is reduced by nearly 33% through participation in in-prison vocational training. About 34% of survey participants reported barriers to employment due to not having the right degree, certificate, or credential. More than 50% of survey participants who found employment after release had an hourly wage at their first job of $19 an hour or less.

This brief details the establishment and operational success of North Carolina’s Joint Reentry Council (JRC), a body created by executive order to lead the state’s Reentry 2030 initiative through a unifying "whole-of-government" framework. By shifting responsibilities from solely criminal justice agencies to a collaborative network spanning housing, health, commerce, and digital technology departments, the council addresses the holistic needs of individuals returning from incarceration. This brief highlights the council’s structure and outlines key strategies such as the deployment of digital literacy programs, the funding of local reentry councils, and the launch of a transparent public data dashboard. Ultimately, the brief serves as a strategic blueprint for other states, demonstrating how cross-agency coordination and accountability can significantly improve economic mobility, public safety, and community reintegration outcomes. The North Carolina Department of Commerce awarded $750,000 in grants to support the creation of new local reentry councils. These local reentry councils deliver direct services and connect people returning from incarceration to housing, employment, and other supports.

This report examines how multilingual learners at five City University of New York Community colleges navigate pathways from English as a Second Language (ESL) into corequisite and other credit-bearing English courses. Drawing on interviews and institutional documents, the study describes how placement processes, departmental structures, ESL course sequences, and instructional models shape multilingual learners’ access to and experiences in corequisite or standalone college-level English. The findings suggest that, while the corequisite model—along with changes to ESL placement and ESL course structure—can help many multilingual learners by accelerating their progression into credit-bearing coursework, rigid placement systems, departmental silos, and the elimination of prerequisite developmental English may compress timelines in ways that do not always benefit some learners and that reduce the number of entry points that learners have into lower-level ESL courses. Yet the findings also highlight promising practices — including the use of ESL-specific corequisites and paired ESL/general education courses, extended instructional time, and culturally affirming pedagogy—that integrate language development with credit-bearing coursework. The report concludes with considerations for strengthening multilingual learner pathways, emphasizing the need for flexible, coordinated, and linguistically responsive approaches that balance acceleration with sustained language development.

Following Texas public high school graduates for up to 20 years through college and the labor market, this review assesses gender and racial differences in college major choices and the consequences of these choices. Women and underrepresented minorities are less likely than men, Whites, and Asians to major in high earning fields like business, economics, engineering, and computer science, however the review shows that they experience lower returns to these majors. Differences in major-specific returns relative to liberal arts explain about one quarter of the gender, White-Black, and White-Hispanic (but not White-Asian) earnings gaps among four-year college students and become larger contributors to earnings gaps than differential major distributions as workers age. Researchers present suggestive evidence that differences in occupation choices within field are a key driver of the differences in returns across groups.

Approximately one-third of children who had limited or no spoken language at baseline did not advance to spoken language stages following intervention. The research team examined an aggregate dataset comprising 707 preschoolers on the autism spectrum who had received evidence-supported interventions to determine the proportion and profile of those who experienced limited progress in spoken language. Interventions were delivered through programs affiliated with university research settings and ranged in duration from 6 to 24 months. Approximately two-thirds of children who were non-speaking at baseline were using single words or more complex spoken language by intervention exit. Those who remained non-speaking had lower baseline motor imitation scores, derived mainly from parent reports. Approximately half of the children who were minimally speaking (i.e. had single words or no words) at baseline were combining words by intervention exit. Those who did not acquire word combinations had lower baseline scores in cognitive, social, adaptive and motor imitation measures, and shorter intervention duration. Age at intervention start influenced spoken language advancement differently depending on the initial spoken language level. The odds of acquiring spoken language did not differ based on the intervention received.

An increasing share of U.S. inventions are generated by large, well-established firms but the radical and impactful innovations more likely to come from younger firms are declining. The research, which linked patent inventors to the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, showed that older firms tended to produce more but less impactful patents. Their growth may signal a slowdown in innovation. The 20 U.S. counties with the most inventors accounted for 39% of inventors in 2001, which rose to 47% in 2016. Previous research found that younger firms tend to produce radical innovations with more far-reaching impacts, while older, larger firms tend to produce incremental innovations that build upon the firm’s existing products and technological capabilities. Using a new database on the employment histories of inventors, the share of inventors working for “incumbent firms” — at least 20 years old and with at least 1,000 employees — rose from about 49% in 2000 to 58% in 2015. During that period, the share of inventors at young firms had dropped from 15% to below 8%. Among inventors, women were significantly underrepresented relative to the U.S. civilian workforce: In 2016, they accounted for about 47% of the workforce but less than 12% of all inventors and 16% among inventors under age 36, according to the analysis. Foreign-born individuals, on the other hand, were overrepresented. Although they made up approximately 17% of the U.S. workforce in 2016, they accounted for over 30% of patent inventors.

The U.S. Poison Center Network provides a wide variety of services to the public, government entities, health care providers and institutions, product manufacturers, and public health organizations and researchers. To assess the economic and societal value of the network, the authors conducted a survey of individual Poison and developed a logic model framework, mapping Poison Center inputs (i.e., resources and staff) to activities (i.e., essential and ancillary functions), outcomes, and impacts. Overall, the research found that Poison Centers provide significant returns to society for every dollar spent, including cost savings because of avoidable medical utilization, reduced patient length of stay, mortality risk reduction, and enhanced national public health surveillance. The network yields benefits totaling approximately $3.1 billion each year. Every $1 spent by Poison Centers on services generates $16.77 in benefits. Further, it has taken on an expanded public health role, particularly in toxic surveillance and emergency preparedness and response. The total number of Poison Center encounters has decreased since the early 2010s because of a large decline in information requests, possibly driven by the proliferation of alternative online information sources. Congressionally appropriated funding and some state funding sources have declined in real dollar terms because funding amounts have not been adjusted for inflation in more than a decade. In-kind support from a host institution or other affiliate — usually a hospital or university providing facilities, utilities, information technology, human resources functions, or salaries — has also decreased. The expansion of Poison Centers' ancillary functions may be a response to financial pressures because of the rising costs of providing services to ensure that operational needs are met.

Bullying remains a serious public health concern in the United States, with lasting consequences for adolescents’ mental, physical and social well-being. Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine examined bullying risk among U.S. adolescents ages 12 to 17 using data from the National Survey of Children’s Health. The study focused on how social determinants of health, family dynamics, and underlying health conditions shape the likelihood of both experiencing and engaging in bullying, offering insight into how these interconnected factors influence adolescent behavior. The findings show that adolescents who were overweight, struggled to make friends, were born outside the U.S., or faced mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression, ADD/ADHD or learning disabilities were at greater risk of involvement in bullying, either as victims, perpetrators or both. The results also reveal a cyclical pattern, in which being bullied can increase the likelihood of bullying others, underscoring the need for prevention strategies that address social, family and health-related risk factors while engaging schools, parents and communities.

This report presents provisional 2024 data on infant mortality rates using the U.S. linked birth/infant death files. In 2024, the U.S. provisional infant mortality rate was 5.52 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, not significantly different from the rate in 2023 (5.61). From 2023 to 2024, the neonatal mortality rate was essentially unchanged (from 3.65 to 3.66), while the post-neonatal mortality rate declined 5% (from 1.96 to 1.87). The infant mortality rate declined 5% for infants of mothers ages 20–24 (from 7.23 to 6.89), 5% for infants born full-term (39–40 weeks of gestation) (1.64 to 1.55), 3% for male infants (6.04 to 5.88), and 8% for sudden infant death syndrome (from 40.2 deaths per 100,000 live births to 37.0). Changes in infant mortality rates by maternal race and Hispanic origin were not significant. By state, the infant mortality rate increased in West Virginia (+19%) and declined in North Carolina (-10%). The infant mortality rate decreased in Florida (-6%) but the change was not statistically significant.

Food Is Medicine (FIM) interventions that offer nutrition access and health education may improve diabetes outcomes among people experiencing food insecurity. Health systems typically offer FIM interventions through referrals to onsite services and to partner organizations that provide healthy food, health education, or both. This comparative case study assessed effectiveness, costs, and culturally tailored components of four diabetes self-management education and support (DSMES) sites, two with a FIM intervention and two without. Despite small sample sizes, clinical trends indicate that both a FIM intervention and DSMES services may effectively lower A1C, which measures the average amount of sugar in our blood over the past few months, (-0.64 percentage points [n = 28, P = 0.017] and -1.86 percentage points [n = 74, P < .001], respectively). Despite differences in design, total annual ongoing costs for both FIM interventions were similar ($102,011 vs. $95,652). More research and evaluation are needed to understand the impact of FIM interventions and how to increase reach and culturally tailor interventions among populations.