Educational Alternatives for Vulnerable Youth: Student Needs, Program Types, and Research Directions

Chapter 1 of this document examines the need for alternative education among vulnerable youth by reviewing the numbers and characteristics of youth who disconnect from mainstream developmental pathways in various ways. The second chapter examines the question of "what is an alternative education school or program" and draws on a variety of elements from the literature to suggest the beginnings of a typology that might be used to define and organize the varieties of educational alternatives that currently exist and might be promoted in the future. Finally, Chapter 3 summarizes the findings of a roundtable on directions for future research on alternative education and describes the types of information and studies that are needed to advance the field of alternative education and foster more support for the development of high quality educational alternatives that all children can choose and benefit from

Recommendations to the Social Security Administration on the Design of the Mental Health Treatment Study

Many beneficiaries with mental illness who have a strong desire to work nevertheless continue to seek the protection and security of disability benefits, not only because of the income such benefits provide but also for the health care coverage that comes with it. Further complicating matters is that few jobs available to people with mental illnesses have mental health care coverage, forcing individuals to choose between employment and access to care. These barriers, coupled with the limited treatment options and negative employer attitudes and even discrimination when it comes to employing people with serious metal illness, help "explain" the very rates of low labor force participation among people with psychiatric disabilities

Deadly Dilemmas II: Bail and Crime

This is another in a series of papers examining the interaction between the implications of the deadly dilemma of governing that virtually all governmental action involves unavoidable conflict between equally laudatory goals and the conventional way of thinking about social errors. Typically the pursuit of any particular goal has as its consequence precisely the kind of harm that is desired to be avoided. For example, serious felons are sent to prison in part to protect innocent parties from their future predations, but those same felons often prey upon fellow prisoners, including murder. Moreover, felonies committed in prison only begin the catalogue of wrongful consequences to innocent individuals flowing from incarceration. If it is sufficient to end a social practice because it causes innocents to die, then we are obliged to eliminate prisons—and hospitals for that matter. The point cuts even deeper. Virtually every governmental decision affects who will live and die. Whether roads are built, where, and to what standard of safety do this. Decisions on welfare programs do, as does the allocation of medical research funds or the choice to fund research instead of primary education, or vice-versa, or whatever. To the extent such matters are considered in the literature at all, the explicit treatment of errors by both the legal system and legal scholars has been curious both analytically and normatively. The simplest example of this is the virtually exclusive focus of both on false positives (false findings of liability, civil or criminal) and false negatives (false findings of no liability). This neglects two fundamental issues: first that there are four possible findings at trial, the two mistakes and the two possible correct verdicts; second and even more importantly, that sensible social regulation must be concerned not just with outcomes at trial and the resultant effect on litigation behavior but also with the effect of trial decisions on primary behavior. In sum, we suggest that sensible social policy must involve an analytically sound approach to decisions involving such deadly dilemmas. As we have demonstrated in previous work, the failure to do so leads to both analytically and morally perverse results in some areas. We demonstrate that same failure here in the context of pre-trial release decisions. We also suggest a modification of current practice that might ameliorate costs without altogether eliminating bail

Deadly Dilemmas II: Bail and Crime

This is another in a series of papers examining the interaction between the implications of the deadly dilemma of governing that virtually all governmental action involves unavoidable conflict between equally laudatory goals and the conventional way of thinking about social errors. Typically the pursuit of any particular goal has as its consequence precisely the kind of harm that is desired to be avoided. For example, serious felons are sent to prison in part to protect innocent parties from their future predations, but those same felons often prey upon fellow prisoners, including murder. Moreover, felonies committed in prison only begin the catalogue of wrongful consequences to innocent individuals flowing from incarceration. If it is sufficient to end a social practice because it causes innocents to die, then we are obliged to eliminate prisons—and hospitals for that matter. The point cuts even deeper. Virtually every governmental decision affects who will live and die. Whether roads are built, where, and to what standard of safety do this. Decisions on welfare programs do, as does the allocation of medical research funds or the choice to fund research instead of primary education, or vice-versa, or whatever. To the extent such matters are considered in the literature at all, the explicit treatment of errors by both the legal system and legal scholars has been curious both analytically and normatively. The simplest example of this is the virtually exclusive focus of both on false positives (false findings of liability, civil or criminal) and false negatives (false findings of no liability). This neglects two fundamental issues: first that there are four possible findings at trial, the two mistakes and the two possible correct verdicts; second and even more importantly, that sensible social regulation must be concerned not just with outcomes at trial and the resultant effect on litigation behavior but also with the effect of trial decisions on primary behavior. In sum, we suggest that sensible social policy must involve an analytically sound approach to decisions involving such deadly dilemmas. As we have demonstrated in previous work, the failure to do so leads to both analytically and morally perverse results in some areas. We demonstrate that same failure here in the context of pre-trial release decisions. We also suggest a modification of current practice that might ameliorate costs without altogether eliminating bail