Post written by Milbrey McLaughlin, founding director of theJohn W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University, and Rebecca A. London, senior researcher at the John W. Gardner Center overseeing all analyses conducted with the Youth Data Archive. They are the editors of From Data to Action: A Community Approach to Improving Youth Outcomes.
Policy discussions about how to improve academic, social, and physical outcomes for today's youth typically take place solely within the domains of many individual youth-serving sectors. For instance, much of educators' current deliberation considers responses to the new Common Core State Standards and how to increase students' high school graduation and college attendance. Health professionals may focus on asthma management or obesity reduction. In social services, providers may talk about how to create seamless transitions for foster youth. Despite their common focus on young people, these youth-serving sectors typically are disconnected from, and uninformed about, each other's programs, policies, and approaches to serving youth—when in fact, local youth are constantly moving between them. These so-called institutional "silos" can result in unintended gaps in the web of supports that
