There are a lot of great things happening at the intersection of juvenile justice and education reform these days—and we hope that the work we’re starting to do to improve educational programming inside long-term youth correctional settings will both benefit from and be a lever for more positive change. Here are some highlights on three topics: Youth Corrections, School-to-Prison Pipeline, and High School Graduation Options.
Youth Corrections. After years of hard work by the advocacy community, buoyed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and in response to state budget squeezes, states around the country continue to reduce the number of teens locked up in large, often far-off youth correctional settings. In California, although Governor Brown's plan to close all of the remaining state facilities probably won’t go through, more and more California youth are ending up in county facilities instead of facing long-term stays in state-run youth—and adult—facilities. New York has taken steps to house young detainees closer to their families. And just a few weeks ago, Illinois’s governor announced his intention to close two of that state’s youth facilities. (Click "Read more" below for more details.)
School-to-Prison Pipeline. The US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released dispiriting statistics revealing significant racial disparities in rates of suspension, expulsion, and referrals to the police during the 2009-2010 school year. The release has highlighted concerns that the Advancement Project and the Dignity in Schools campaign and others have focused on, and built a grassroots movement around, over the last few years. (Click "Read more" below for more details.)
High School Graduation Alternatives. On March 7, Ed Week ran a feature story highlighting the slow move away from seat time and Carnegie unit-based credits and graduation standards, toward content mastery and skill proficiency as the key to earning a high school diploma. Creative thinkers in the field of alternative education (including Chris Sturgis and Ephraim Weisstein) have been advocating this position for years, and a number of states (Oregon, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Indiana, to name a few) have already passed laws enabling school districts to adopt performance-based promotion requirements.