Out of Sight, Out of Mind: How California’s Education Data and Accountability Systems Fail Youth in Juvenile Court Schools

This report analyzes available data – collected through DataQuest, Ed Data, and public records act requests – about juvenile court schools, which primarily operate to serve students detained in juvenile halls or other detention facilities, in the hopes of providing a snap- shot of how court schools are serving their students. We discussed many of the challenges that juvenile court school students en- counter in our original 2016 Educational Injustice report. These issues included lack of support for regular school attendance, high suspension rates, high drop-out rates, and poor academic outcomes. Our original report found that some court schools and probation departments failed to adequately pro- vide the most basic level of education to the youth in their care. This 2023 update, based on data from the 2018-2019 and 2021-2022 school years, notes continued challenges in some of these areas, as well as some areas of improvement. In our full report, we provide more specific recommendations on ways to improve data collection.