Cross-System Data Linkage: Education & Justice

Every state collects vast amounts of youth data—attendance records, special education status, disciplinary incidents, referrals to court—but few connect them. When data stay in silos, the same child can be counted as “missing” by a school and “inactive” by probation, while no one sees the full picture. Linking education and justice data is one of the most important reforms of the next decade: it makes invisible youth visible.

Key Findings

Arkansas’s 2024 pilot between the Administrative Office of the Courts and Department of Education is a case study in pragmatic progress. The two agencies created a shared crosswalk using encrypted student identifiers—no names, only hashed IDs—to track whether court-involved youth re-enrolled in school within 30 days of release. Within one year, re-enrollment rates increased from 56% to 72%. Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services and state education agency launched a similar pilot in 2025 that integrated suspension, probation, and attendance data to identify early-warning patterns of disengagement.

Research from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (2024) suggests that youth who maintain continuous school enrollment after adjudication are 40% less likely to reoffend. Linking education and justice data helps identify those at greatest risk of dropout, guiding diversion resources more precisely.

State Comparisons

Missouri’s Division of Youth Services already operates a fully integrated educational database for youth in custody, ensuring transcripts follow them between facilities and home districts. In contrast, Texas’s 254 counties each maintain separate juvenile case systems, making integration uneven. Mississippi and Louisiana are beginning to build “data trust” frameworks—federated data-sharing agreements that allow participating agencies to contribute limited datasets to a neutral host system while maintaining compliance with both FERPA and HIPAA. Early versions of these trusts are supported by the National Governors Association and the Mid-South Data Collaborative, a new 2025 regional initiative.

What Works

Data linkage succeeds when it serves a purpose. Arkansas’s initiative focused on one measurable question: “Did the youth return to school within 30 days?” That clarity made the system easy to build and justify. Missouri’s DYS model, meanwhile, shows the long-term benefit: educational progress becomes a continuous variable in recidivism prediction models. Texas’s new pilot counties (Harris and Tarrant) now require joint sign-off between school districts and probation departments before youth are referred to court for truancy, demonstrating how integrated data can change front-end decisions.

The key lesson is that technology is secondary. Governance comes first. States that succeed invest in “data stewards”—trusted professionals who control access, audit use, and ensure that analytics never outpace consent. A 2025 review by the State Justice Institute found that programs with clear governance charters had three times higher interagency participation than those without.

Future Outlook

The near future will likely see a standardized “Education–Justice Data Exchange” API, allowing states to upload de-identified data into national benchmarks. This could enable dashboards showing, for example, what percentage of diverted youth complete a school year without suspension. Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri are already contributing schema drafts to the U.S. Department of Education’s data modernization project.

The larger goal isn’t surveillance—it’s accountability. Youth shouldn’t have to disappear from one system to appear in another. When education and justice data finally talk to each other, prevention stops being guesswork and starts being policy.

Sources

Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts & Department of Education Data Linkage Pilot, 2024.
Tennessee Department of Education–DCS Interagency Data Project, Policy Brief, 2025.
OJJDP Research Brief: “Education Continuity and Recidivism,” 2024.
National Governors Association, Mid-South Data Trust Report, 2025.