Every two years the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights conducts the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), which includes information about school demographics, course enrollment, discipline, and other measures of school quality. For the first time in 2013-14 and again in the 2015-16 collection, the CRDC included juvenile justice schools, which serve approximately 50,000 adjudicated youth placed in secure facilities across the country. This publication from Bellwether Education Partners explores findings from the data and examines how juvenile justice facilities fail to provide adjudicated youth with sufficient access to the courses they need to graduate high school. For example, students in juvenile justice facilities are 25 percent less likely to have access to Algebra I, a foundational class required for graduation. Moreover, these facilities offer only limited access to credit recovery programs, which are critical to helping students recoup course credits that they missed or failed to complete earlier in their academic careers.
Source: JusticeCenter