Education Suspended: The Use of High School Disciplinary Records in College Admissions

The use of harsh discipline in elementary and high schools – suspensions and expulsions – has skyrocketed since the mid-1990s. More than 3 million children per year are suspended from school and an additional 100,000 are expelled. Over the last several years, however, there has been growing awareness that excluding young people from school has devastating effects that include increased student dropout/pushout rates, decreased graduation rates, and increased youth involvement in the criminal and juvenile justice systems.This report investigates how colleges are using high school disciplinary information in the admissions process and how high schools are responding to requests for such information about their students. We frame our fndings in the context of the increased criminalization of normative adolescent behavior and the disparate impact of suspensions and  expulsions on students of color and students with disabilities. Efforts to improve access to education for young people from low income communities of color and frst-generation college students are undermined by policies that includehigh school disciplinary information in admissions decision making. Instead of promoting campus safety, excluding students with past disciplinary records is likely to decrease public safety in society at large by denying opportunities for higher education to otherwise qualifed applicants

Moving Beyond Youth Prisons: Lessons from New York City’s Implementation of Close to Home

In the mid-1990s, New York’s youth prison system reflected the dominant paradigm across the country – a heavy reliance on incarceration for young people caught up in the juvenile justice system. During this time, roughly 3,800 youth convicted of crimes annually were sent to large facilities, operated either by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) or by private providers contracted by OCFS. These facilities were largely located in upstate New York, far from youths’ homes and communities, particularly for youth from New York City (Sickmund et al. 2017; New York State (NYS) Office of the State Comptroller 2001). Upon returning home from these placements, youth often felt disconnected, resulting in poor outcomes. A 2009 study indicated that by age 28, 71 percent of boys released from New York State’s juvenile placement system spent some time in an adult jail or prison (Coleman, Do Han Kim & Therese 2009). Fast forward twenty years, and things in New York looked dramatically different. By 2016, New York City no longer sent any youth from its Family Court to state-operated youth prisons. Today, only around 100 New York City youth are placed from Family Court into any kind of residential facility, about a dozen of whom are in a locked facility. Not only are there dramatically fewer youth in residential placements, but those who do get placed now go to smaller, more home-like settings that attend to public safety without mirroring the punitive, correctional approaches embodied by previous youth prisons. This case study outlines what happened in the intervening years to achieve these remarkable results. By sharing New York City’s story, we offer a roadmap for other jurisdictions looking to realign their juvenile justice systems, adapting the lessons learned about what worked and what did not to meet their specific circumstances

A prudent path forward for genomic engineering and germline gene modification

A framework for open discourse on the use of CRISPR-Cas9 technology to manipulate the human genome is urgently needed

Induction of Asthma and the Environment: What We Know and Need to Know

The prevalence of asthma has increased dramatically over the last 25 years in the United States and in other nations as a result of ill-defined changes in living conditions in modern society. On 18 and 19 October 2004 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences sponsored the workshop “Environmental Influences on the Induction and Incidence of Asthma” to review current scientific evidence with respect to factors that may contribute to the induction of asthma. Participants addressed two broad questions: a) What does the science suggest that regulatory and public health agencies could do now to reduce the incidence of asthma? and b) What research is needed to improve our understanding of the factors that contribute to the induction of asthma and our ability to manage this problem? In this article (one of four articles resulting from the workshop), we briefly characterize asthma and its public health and economic impacts, and intervention strategies that have been successfully used to prevent induction of asthma in the workplace. We conclude with the findings of seven working groups that focus on ambient air, indoor pollutants (biologics), occupational exposures, early life stages, older adults, intrinsic susceptibility, and lifestyle. These groups found strong scientific support for public health efforts to limit in utero and postnatal exposure to cigarette smoke. However, with respect to other potential types of interventions, participants noted many scientific questions, which are summarized in this article. Research to address these questions could have a significant public health and economic impact that would be well worth the investment

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29

Prelude to prison: Student perspectives on school suspension

By the close of the twentieth century, the United States became known for its reliance on incarceration, with exceedingly high incarceration rates for men of color. Policing and law enforcement control were ubiquitous in poor communities of color, and eventually extended into the public school system in these communities. The meshing of the school and the carceral has become known as the “school-to-prison pipeline.” This dissertation describes the perceptions of young people traveling through this pipeline. Through qualitative interviews with students who have been suspended from mainstream school and placed in an alternative school, I examine zero tolerance disciplinary approaches and the transformation of schools into penal-like institutions. The interviews offered me insight into what the youth who are subjected to carceral policies, practices and environments make of their experience. The research findings suggest that zero tolerance and other harsh school disciplinary policies help to prepare certain young people for a life in the criminal justice system and environments of penalizing social control. The implementation of school discipline has come to resemble criminal justice strategies of arrest, trial, sentence and exclusion to stigmatizing institutions. Harsh school discipline is imposed on young people without regard to the circumstances that influence their behaviors or how punishment erodes their belief in fairness and further alienates them from school. The findings from the interviews with youth suggest that the theoretical frameworks of structural violence and social reproduction literature are useful to understanding how the process of suspension quietly prepares marginalized kids for their place in the carceral state