Supporting Youth with the Most Need

An estimated five million young people were experiencing disruptions to their education through experiences like a placement in foster care, an experience with homelessness, or incarceration. Despite these students' different circumstances, the root causes of their educational challenges are consistent: interrupted learning, barriers to enrollment, and disconnected care. The impact is also the same: inconsistent, disjointed learning experiences. As a result, they are more likely to achieve far below grade level, be excluded from postsecondary opportunities, drop out of high school, become early parents, be employed in low-wage and insecure jobs, grow increasingly reliant on the social safety net over time, and enter (or return to) the criminal justice system. Local efforts to plan and coordinate more intentionally, like collective-impact efforts or cross-agency task forces, are a step in the right direction but often fall short when designed around the "average" or "typical" student--the 80 percent at the center of a bell curve. Newer approaches to designing systems for learning or policy--universal design for learning, design for accessibility, targeted universalism, and human-centered design--suggest that the right starting place is at the middle of concentric circles of layered needs. Design methods like these center the perspectives of people who are experiencing problems and give them the power to generate solutions. Designing for students with the greatest needs does two things simultaneously: (1) it addresses the needs of students who otherwise are afterthoughts or "someone else's job;" and (2) in doing so, it meaningfully advances equity for all students and solves for other less dire or less complex needs.