Many government bodies and policymakers have embraced privatization of child welfare services, while others question whether privatization is truly more cost effective or provides the best services. An Assessment of the Privatization of Child Welfare reports on six states' efforts to privatize their child welfare systems and their varying levels of success. This research documents the rich experiences of a variety of communities that have moved to private service delivery and will help child welfare practitioners everywhere understand what privatization can -- and cannot -- do to help them help children. Book jacket.
The U.S. child welfare system has continuously struggled to meet and maintain national performance outcome standards that reflect how well they are ensuring safety, facilitating permanency, and promoting well-being for children. These are the specific mandates of public foster care agencies responsible for providing these services, an economic public good, for the greater benefit of our society. Quasi-market solutions, such as privatization, have been increasingly promoted among states, and in some cases implemented, to reform public foster care agencies otherwise deemed ineffective and inefficient. The promoted promise of privatization has been its ability to increase efficiency, accountability, decrease costs, and consequently improve outcomes for children and their families. However, given the economic theory of market competition and public goods, this study questions if privatization measures up to its promise in terms of overall system performance and safety and permanency outcomes for children served. The primary aim of this study was to examine non-privatized and privatized foster care agencies to compare overall system-level performance in terms of national safety and permanency outcome standards; and explore possible differences in child-level outcomes by racial groups between non-privatized and privatized agencies to ascertain relationships between privatization and the issues of disproportionality and disparity. Using a state-level dataset of N1 = 10 states and a large national secondary data set of N2 = 118,761 child abuse and neglect and foster care cases, a series of rigorous analyses were conducted to accomplish the study's goals. The resultant findings of this study suggest that overall, privatized foster care agencies perform no better than non-privatized agencies, and where statistical significant differences were found, results marginally favored non-privatized agency performance over privatized agencies.
In the United States, at any given time, there are nearly 400,000 children in foster care due to maltreatment or for reasons such as parental incarceration, parental death or voluntary relinquishment. Youth in out of home care are a small proportion of all children served by the child welfare system, but they comprise the majority of the system costs and are at high risk for poor outcomes across a number of domains. Concerns regarding both cost and poor outcomes began a trend toward privatization of child welfare in the mid-1990s. Despite the long history, there has been very little evaluation of outcomes outside of assessing cost savings. This dissertation used data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) supplemented with policy information available through the Child Welfare Gateway and state websites to assess whether youth permanency outcomes (length of stay, type of exit from care and re-entry into care) varied according to privatization of services. Results indicate that overall youth served by privatized systems stay longer in care and are somewhat less likely to have a positive exit (return home, adoption or permanent residence with relative). On the other hand, among those who did exit care, youth served in privatized systems were less likely to return to care. Implications for continued research, policy and program planning are discussed.
The Child Welfare League of America's Managed Care Institute works to advance best practices in children's services operating in a managed care environment. Each year, the Institute's tracking project attempts to determine the extent to which public child welfare agencies are applying managed care tools to the services they offer.Managed Care & Privatization Child Welfare Tracking Project reports on a 50-state survey conducted by the Institute to identify managed care and privatization initiatives. It examines the goals of the initiatives, the populations they serve, the services and supports they offer, their quality assurance policies, and their funding and risk-sharing arrangements. This extensive report on cutting-edge issues makes a valuable contribution to the child welfare field.
More than two million child abuse reports are filed annually on behalf of children in the United States. Each of the reported children becomes a concern, at least temporarily, of the professional who files the report, and each family is assessed by additional professionals. A substantial number of children in these families will subsequently enter foster care. Until now, the relationships between the performance of our child welfare system and the growth and outcomes of foster care have not been understood. In an effort to clarify them, Barth and his colleagues have synthesized the results of their longitudinal study in California of the paths taken by children after the initial abuse report: foster care, a return to their homes, or placement for adoption. Because of the outcomes of child welfare services in California have national significance, this is far more than a regional study. It provides a comprehensive picture of children's experiences in the child welfare system and a gauge of the effectiveness of that system. The policy implications of the California study have bearing on major federal and state initiatives to prevent child abuse and reduce unnecessary foster and group home care.
