About Fragmentation

In interviews with young people across the country, we heard unique stories with consistent themes: One bad-luck event or misstep rapidly snowballs into life-changing consequences. Each disruptive event compounds from the last.

Across the U.S., at least 12,388,000 students are likely to be educationally marginalized. If schools close, they are at risk of not receiving any education at all.

This includes students in foster care, students experiencing homelessness, students with disabilities, English language learners, and migrant students.

When adults in youth-serving systems and organizations fail to communicate or collaborate effectively, that’s fragmentation. It’s a business-as-usual approach in most places where schools, foster care agencies, juvenile justice systems, and other organizations don’t look across a young person’s life to understand their needs. It’s systemic and it has real-life consequences for millions of young people.

In a coherent system, processes and policies are designed around what young people need. Adults share a vision for each young person’s success. Young people are guided to the support they need, when they need it. Adults communicate and collaborate well, and navigating across systems — both in the moment and over time — is seamless and easy.

In a coherent system, when something does go wrong, it doesn’t leave a lasting effect on a young person’s life.

Fragmentation makes itself evident in multiple ways. The relationships between different kinds of disruptions and poor life outcomes are signs that unmet needs are causing one disruption to cascade into the next. But these correlations shouldn’t be a young person’s destiny. 

Fragmentation worsens inequities of all kinds. Because of the effects of racism, young people who experience disruptive events are disproportionately Black, brown, and Native. They are more likely to live in low-income households without the extra resources or access to the support they need to weather an event like illness or job loss. Many have disabilities and unmet special education or accessibility needs. LGBTQ+ young people are more likely to be discriminated against, to be rejected by their families, and to experience violence and homelessness. And young people who do not have legal status or who are learning English as a new language face additional barriers to accessing the services and programs that they might need.

Warning signs of fragmentation come through clearly in interviews with young people who experience it directly. Young people describe frustration, a lack of communication, and a feeling that the adults trying to help them don’t understand or don’t care.

Adults are also frustrated by not having the information or resources they need to make a difference. Leaders see other organizations as competitors, not collaborators. Turnover is high. Caseloads are unmanageable. Resources are scarce. Attempts at improvement within just one organization tend to yield small returns for young people.

Leaders might balk at the perceived cost of building a coherent system. But the short- and long-term costs of fragmentation are staggering. As disruptions layer on top of one another, each problem requires more intensive long-term support and intervention — and doesn’t always meaningfully improve young people’s lives.

Disruptions cost money. But funding coherent systems that help youth emerge from the first disruption to live a healthy, happy life adds $612,000 per person back into the system. That’s the value of harms avoided. Added up, that’s $1.5 trillion. These funds could be reinvested in preventative action to improve the lives of young people, their families, and their communities.