On June 24, the Future of the Middle Class Initiative hosted an event marking the release of a new report by Brookings Senior Fellow Isabel Sawhill and Senior Research Assistant Katherine Guyot. The event featured former Governor Jack Markell, who led the path-breaking efforts in Delaware to reduce the rate of unplanned pregnancies. The panels that followed focus on state experiences and efforts, new approaches to reducing unplanned pregnancies, and what the research says about their success.

       

May 31^st is Foster Parent appreciation day. There are many ways to recognize and thank the foster parents who work every day to provide a stable home for the children and youth in foster care. To celebrate foster parent appreciation day and national foster care month, CHAMPS has prepared a list of ideas that child welfare agencies, legislators and other community-based organizations can reference to show their support for foster families. See the list and other foster family appreciation tools and resources here. CHAMPS has also collected stories of amazing foster families, view these stories on the CHAMPS website.

Not only today, but every day, we should recognize and celebrate foster parents for the essential role they play in the development, healing, and success of youth in foster care. As we celebrate foster parents today, we must keep in mind that while their job is an important one, it is certainly not easy. Foster parents not only face their own personal and emotional stress that come as part of the job, but many take on this role without receiving adequate training, support, and the respect they deserve. Child welfare agencies must take steps to better support foster parents, so they can receive valuable training and be connected to the necessary resources to best serve the children they welcome into their homes.

Today, we would like to show support for foster parents by listening to their stories and gaining their perspective on issues relevant to them and their families. We were lucky to have the opportunity to speak with 22 representatives of state associations representing foster parents during a meeting of the National Foster Parent Association (NFPA) Council of State Affiliates. During this discussion, the foster parents spoke freely of issues in training, support, and respect, and proposed solutions that would strengthen the capacity of foster parents to help children thrive.

Training

It is hardly a surprise that the state affiliate representatives emphasized the need for improved foster parent training. Foster parents often talk about how they wish more trainings were provided and about how they often feel poorly prepared to assume the duties of a foster parent in the beginning. Some foster parents even emphasized that they had either no pre-service training or just minimal training to prepare for such a big job and an even bigger change in their life and in their existing family relationships.

During the course of the interviews, foster parents raised specific issues about training requirements and provided suggestions on how to tailor trainings in a way that will result in better-prepared foster parents. Many of the foster parents agreed that the number of required hours of training were far too low. One foster parent from Montana said that her state had cut its number of pre-service hours of training to six, which are usually delivered in a single day. As the foster parent in our group who raised this point stated: “How do you prepare any family to be a foster family in six hours?” No one in our group seemed to think that six hours was enough. Only 25 States and the District of Columbia require a specific number of pre-service training hours to become a licensed foster parent. Other states do not require the completion of pre-service training.

The foster parents also had many critiques of the content of required trainings, mainly that the trainings are redundant and rarely updated. Many states require up to 20 hours of annual training for current foster parents to keep their license. While the foster parents we interviewed agreed that ongoing training is necessary, they stated that they received the same training year after year. One foster parent commented that the training in her state has not changed at all in five years. For many foster parents attending this training means leaving their home and being away from their children for a few days, just to receive the same training as the year before.

The foster parents also noted that the difference in training programs across the states are vast. Consider the case of the hours of training requirement, which varies from 6 hours to 45 hours. Given the independence of the states in building their child protection programs within broad federal guidelines, some differences across programs are to be expected. But how can such a huge difference in the basic requirement of required hours of training be justified? To reduce these differences and bring states that are far below some reasonable standard to a more acceptable level, the federal government could impose some minimum hour requirement on state training programs. The federal government could take a similar approach to bring standards to other program characteristics so that they align with best practices. But states would be likely to resist attempts to impose standards on them. A better approach might be for The Department of Health and Human Services to work with states to develop a model training curriculum and making it available to states, perhaps with some funding for states that agree to meet standards that include hours and other important characteristics.

Foster parents think training is important but that it should be responsive to the changing needs of foster families and address a wide range of topics that are pertinent given the different needs of children. The training requirements should also reflect foster parents’ busy lives by offering more accessible and useful training options, such as web-based courses and flexible schedule courses. All the foster parents agreed that trainings could be improved by included foster parents as instructors. They agreed that it is difficult to be receptive of training from instructors who do not personally understand what it is like to be a foster parent. One participant observed that many foster care caseworkers are young and have little or no parenting experience, which may impede their understanding of day-to-day parenting challenges faced by foster parents. Including foster parents as instructors in trainings would also help inform current or new foster parents of the issues that are likely to arise, and the best way to respond to a variety of situations they may encounter. Their first-hand experiences and informed instruction could be monumental in helping new foster parents navigate this exciting, but difficult, life change.

“The family has to be well in order to provide well being to foster children.”

Support

Support from the state agencies, social workers, and peers is essential for foster parents to ensure that they have all the tools they need to succeed. The foster parents we spoke with emphasized that they are in need of more and better information and services about foster parenting. They also need support during the transition period after welcoming a foster child into their home, not only for the child, but also for their biological family. As one participant put it, “the family has to be well in order to provide well being to foster children.”

Participants also strongly advocated for peer support and tighter networks for foster parents. Foster parents often feel isolated, especially in light of the fact that they are prohibited from sharing some information because of confidentiality practices insisted on by state foster care agencies. One solution that could be arranged by state agencies would be to provide opportunities for foster parents to meet and talk with each other on a routine basis. According to one parent, being able to share with other foster parents and have a community would be “huge.”

Another very important type of support mentioned by participants was respite care, which provides relief to foster families for several hours or even overnight on an intermittent basis. This type of support is essential for foster families who too often face barriers in designating temporary care of foster children to grandparents, babysitters, or other relatives in the way that all parents do to take a breather. Currently, foster parents must jump through administrative hoops so that they can get an afternoon off to rest and recharge. On top of this, foster parents often feel pressure to not take respite. By making respite care more accessible and destigmatized, foster parents can take a much needed and well-deserved break and ensure that their foster child is in good hands.

We must give foster parents a voice, and trust and invest in their suggestions.

Respect

Several participants indicated by their comments that they felt they did not receive the respect they deserved as foster parents. As one of the participants stated, they wanted to be recognized as part of a professional team that was organized to support the foster child and the child’s development. Above all, they were concerned that their views about the child were not given adequate attention. Further, they expressed concern about punitive measures. For example, they shared their worry that if they disagreed with the views of agency social workers and were too outspoken, they could lose custody of the child. One foster parent, who was a lawyer, explained that foster parents had a lot of “good information” about the foster child and good ideas about what to do, but they are not aggressive in expressing their views because they fear reprisal.

These interviews indicate that foster parents who have many years of experience in foster parenting and who now lead foster parent associations believe there is much to be done to help foster parents perform more effectively. Most of the responsibility for helping foster parents would fall to child welfare agencies responsible for overseeing the foster care program. The specific aims would be to improve training, arrange peer support and more opportunities for respite care, and increase policies and practices that show foster parents they are valued and appreciated as an important part of the child’s life. It is certain from these interviews that in order to improve the foster care system as a whole, we must give foster parents a voice, and trust and invest in their suggestions.

       

Following an overview of the latest journal volume and the accompanying policy brief, Cynthia Osborne, Associate Dean for Academic Strategies at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, gave keynote remarks and examine the home visiting landscape. Presentations then highlighted the Family Connects program and give an overview of the First 5 LA program in Los Angeles County. The event concluded with an expert panel discussion moderated by Ron Haskins, a Senior Editor of the volume and the Co-Director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution.

       

On May 9, the Brookings Institution hosted an event to discuss the subsequent report, “A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty.” The event featured comments from Greg Duncan, who served as Chair of the Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years, as well as a panel discussion on the report, its recommendations, and barriers to implementation. A second panel highlighted national and state policy perspectives of the consensus study report.

       

The number of children in foster care has risen for the fifth consecutive year, reaching nearly 443,000 children in 2017, in part due to child welfare agencies’ response to the rising incidence of parents’ opioid addiction. Given this increase in caseload, coupled with the fact that between 30 to 50 percent of foster families step down each year, there is a growing need to prioritize effective recruitment and retention for foster parents, including relative (or kinship) foster parents. That’s why, earlier this year, the CHAMPS campaign[1] and the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families hosted a national convening to help states deliver better outcomes for children through improved foster parent recruitment and retention. The convening helped to shape the development of a foster parent recruitment and retention guide “A CHAMPS Guide on Foster Parent Recruitment and Retention: Strategies for Developing a Comprehensive Program,” which is available as a strategic planning and implementation tool for state and tribal child welfare agencies.[2]

The convening brought together 80 public and private child welfare agency staff, foster parents, former foster youth, issue experts, policy makers, advocates, and philanthropic leaders to share information about innovative solutions and best practices, including many examples from Quality Parenting Initiative sites.[3] Presentations focused on best practices for addressing common challenges, including the need to better train and support families caring for children, especially teens, strategies for involving parents and youth as valued partners, building a culture that prioritizes relationships and parenting, and the game-changing benefits of using data to shape foster parent recruitment and retention efforts.

“Support from the agency kept us going in the game of caring for teens.”  Hue Osbourne, foster parent from New York

Throughout the convening, there was lively discussion of “key drivers” of better outcomes for children. These key drivers, also featured in the new CHAMPS guide, demonstrate how foster parent recruitment programs and policies are most effective when they are:

1. Child-centered;
2. Data-driven and informed by continuous quality improvement;
3. Governed by multi-level agency leadership;
4. Collaborative and transparent within the agency and with families and community;
5. Reflective of youth and parent voice; and
6. Sustainable.

Keynote remarks at the convening were delivered[4] by Jerry Milner, Associate Commissioner at the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the Acting Commissioner for the HHS Administration on Children, Youth and Families. In speaking about foster parents, Milner acknowledged the important role that foster parents play as a support system for a whole family – not only for the child, but for the child’s birth parents as well. He emphasized what we know from child development research, which is that parent-child relationships are essential to healthy child development.  

“These children come into our homes as strangers and they leave as family.” Darlene Bell, foster parent, Minnesota

We are grateful for the leadership and innovation being driven by so many of the convening’s participants from 20 states and tribes across the county: California, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, Missouri, Wisconsin, Washington, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Vermont, Maine and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

It’s our hope that the strategies shared at the convening and highlighted in the new guide will inform collaborative approaches to developing not just a plan, but a comprehensive approach aimed at achieving and sustaining excellence in foster parent recruitment and retention. We know that one of the most powerful ways we can help children in foster care is by ensuring safe and stable family-based care. We therefore urge state policy makers, program directors, and community leaders to commit to supporting excellent foster parents in their states and communities. Specifically, we ask that they consider ways to leverage the six key drivers for effective foster parent recruitment and retention.

5 FACTS ABOUT FOSTER CARE

1. The number of children in foster care has increased for five consecutive years.[5]  This past year, 39 states experienced an increase in the rate of children and young people in foster care.[6]

    

2. Over one-third of children entering foster care do so at least in part as a result of parental substance abuse.[7] Of the states with the highest rates of opioid overdose deaths in 2016 (West Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Massachusetts), all but the District of Columbia had increases in foster care rates. West Virginia had both the highest opioid overdose death rates and foster care rates.[8]

    

3. The high turnover of foster parents contributes to reported foster parent shortages. Estimates show that between 30 and 50 percent of families quit foster parenting within the first year.[9] These families often say their reason for leaving is that they don’t feel supported or respected as decision makers in the child’s life.[10] The large number of parents leaving foster care makes it more difficult to recruit and train the number of foster parents needed just to hold steady each year.

    

4. Several governors have already elevated foster parenting as a top priority. In their State of the State addresses earlier this year, Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota spoke eloquently about the need for foster parents in her state and how every child deserved a family to love them. Governor Laura Brown from Kansas emphasized the “emergency” of needing to fix foster care and meet the demand associated with a 45 percent increase of the numbers of kids in foster care in Kansas since 2011.

    

5. In February, the National Governor’s Association held a session on child welfare at its annual winter meeting in Washington, D.C. and a main focus was on foster parenting issues. Governor Matt Bevan of Kentucky and Louisiana’s First Lady Donna Edwards spoke to colleagues about their states’ initiatives to strengthen and support foster parents.

^{[1] CHAMPS promotes foster parenting policy improvements in states and nationally. More information about CHAMPS is available at www.fosteringchamps.org.}

^{[2] As a condition of federal funding, these agencies must submit a five-year plan on foster and adoptive family recruitment no later than June 30, 2019.} 

^{[3] The Quality Parenting Initiative (QPI) was developed by San Francisco-based Youth Law Center. QPI seeks to promote excellent parenting for all children in the child welfare system. Launched in 2008, the QPI approach has been adopted by over 75 state and local jurisdictions across 10 states. More information can be found at www.qpi4kids.org.}

^{[4] Many of the theme and priorities Milner spoke about, including the importance of enlisting youths and parents as valued partners is highlighted in the March 2019 edition of the Children’s Bureau Express: “Spotlight on Integrating Youth and Parent Voices in Program Design, Planning, and Improvement” and retrieved here: https://cbexpress.acf.hhs.gov/index.cfm?event=website.viewHomepage&issueID=204}

^{[5] https://www.acf.hhs.gov/media/press/substance-abuse-impacts-foster-care-adoption-new-afcars-data-released}

^{[6] https://www.childtrends.org/2017-the-number-of-children-in-foster-care-rose-in-39-states}

^{[7] American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Foster Care, Adoption, and Kinship Care; Waite, Douglas; Greiner, Mary V.; and Laris, Zach (2018) “Putting Families First: How the Opioid Epidemic is Affecting Children and Families, and the Child Welfare Policy Options to Address It,” Journal of Applied Research on Children: Informing Policy for Children at Risk: Vol. 9 : Iss. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/childrenatrisk/vol9/iss1/4}

^{[8] Retrieved from https://www.childtrends.org/2017-the-number-of-children-in-foster-care-rose-in-39-states}

^{[9] Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2005). Understanding foster parenting: Using administrative data to explore retention. Retrieved from: https://aspe.hhs.gov/execsum/understanding-foster-parenting-using-administrative-data-explore-retention} 

^{[10] Retrieved from http://fosteringchamps.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CHAMPS-Research-Highlights-for-Policy-Goals.pdf}

       

In the half century since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, the United States has spent trillions of dollars in an effort to reduce poverty, especially for the young and the elderly. The federal government today spends about $500 billion a year on programs that guarantee cash, food, and medical benefits to the families of poor children as well as for other programs that provide housing benefits, education, training and, in some cases, encourage work and marriage. Yet in 2015, more than 9.6 million American children lived in households with incomes below the threshold that is defined by the widely recognized supplemental poverty measure.

Poor children have weaker language and memory than their peers, and these problems continue into adulthood. When they grow up, they have lower earnings and income, are more dependent on public assistance, have more health problems, and are more likely to commit crimes. Robust evidence has shown that low income itself, rather than other conditions poor children face, is responsible for many of these negative impacts of poverty on child development. This is a tragedy for poor children and their families, but it also compromises our goal of equality of opportunity for all its citizens and threatens the vitality and future prosperity of our nation.

Congress voted on a bipartisan basis to request a consensus study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2015 so that a committee of experts could formulate a plan for reducing child poverty in the United States by half within 10 years. The committee, on which we both served, has recently released its findings. We attached great importance to ensuring its recommendations were supported by strong research and evaluation. We focused not only on the degree to which a given course of action would reduce poverty among children, but also on likely impacts on high risk subgroups such as minorities, budget costs, and impacts on work, marriage, opportunity, and social inclusion.

Nations must be judged by the way they treat their children.

In examining the effectiveness of current government programs, we found that a number of them, in particular the supplemental nutrition assistance program and refundable tax credits, have been effective in reducing child poverty and improving child health and achievement. We also examined the experiences of peer countries and found that the United Kingdom was able to reduce its child poverty by 50 percent, and that Canada is poised to do so as well. We then formulated a set of 20 proposals for expanding existing programs or starting new ones. We also combined some of those into four program packages. We concluded that none of the 20 policy and program expansions we developed would be able, on its own, to meet the goal of reducing child poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.

One of the packages also would increase the minimum wage to $10.25. Additionally, both packages expand benefit programs, one by increasing housing vouchers and food stamps and the other by replacing the current child tax credit with a universal child allowance and by creating a child support assurance program that would guarantee the payment of legally established child support, even if the noncustodial parent does not make the payment. This second package explained here would also eliminate some restrictions on access to benefit programs for legal immigrants.

At $90 billion to $110 billion a year, the costs of these two packages would be substantial, although much less than the aggregate costs that child poverty impose on the nation, which have been estimated to amount to $800 billion to $1.1 trillion each year. At a lower cost of about $44 billion each year, a promising smaller package comprised of the earned income tax credit and child care tax credit expansions plus a $2,000 each year child allowance would reduce child poverty by a third, rather than a half, while at the same time increasing employment among low income adults by 570,000 as well as increasing their earnings by $10 billion each year.

Nations must be judged by the way they treat their children. If our country is actually serious about reducing child poverty and promoting economic opportunity and upward mobility for all children, it is going to have to implement better solutions. Other countries have demonstrated that where there is a will, there is a way to accomplish this goal. Without strong action by policymakers, poverty and its inevitable consequences will continue to impose great costs on children, families, and the nation.

Ron Haskins is the Cabot Family chair and a senior fellow in economics at the Brookings Institution. Timothy Smeeding is the Lee Rainwater professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

       

On January 15 and 16, 2019, the CHAMPS campaign and Center on Children and Families at Brookings hosted a national convening with the goal of fostering collaboration and information sharing to help advance the progress on foster parent recruitment, support, and retention. The convening brought together 80 public and private child welfare agency staff, issue experts, advocates, foster parents, and foundation partners and featured several panels and roundtables that highlighted the perspectives of key stakeholders from a variety of disciplines within the child welfare sector, including foster parents, community advocates, state agency leaders, and foster care alumni.

The convening comes at a time when national trends highlight the growing urgency for state leaders to identify solutions for strengthening foster parenting in their states. In 2017, the number of children in foster care rose for the fifth consecutive year, from 396,966 in 2012 to 442,995. Approximately 13 percent of these children were placed in congregate care in 2017, where youth experience poorer outcomes than those in family-care placements. In light of many studies that show children do best in the care of stable, loving families, why do youth in foster care experience multiple placements and continue to be placed in congregate care settings? As the number of children in foster care rises and the turnover rate among foster parents remains high, many state child welfare agencies are experiencing foster parent shortages. While the pressures of an increasing caseload and increased foster parent turnover continue to rise, the Family First Prevention Services Act, which passed in February 2018, emphasizes yet again the importance of family-based care for children and youth in foster care. In response to all these forces, the foster care system must increase its focus on the role of foster parents as partners in the success of children in foster care and invest in best practices for recruiting and retaining them.

Jerry Milner, the Associate Commissioner at the Children’s Bureau and the Acting Commissioner for the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, delivered remarks, sharing insights on the priorities of the Children’s Bureau. Milner urged the child welfare field to focus its attention on the role of primary prevention.

The CHAMPS campaign will issue a toolkit in February 2019 to assist child welfare agencies plan and implement best practices for recruiting and training foster parents. Called “diligent recruitment plans,” these plans are required as part of each state’s Child and Family Service Plan. The toolkit will incorporate the ideas and examples of policy and best practice shared at the CHAMPS-Brookings convening and will be available on the CHAMPS website (www.fosteringchamps.org).

       

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, recently wrote a provocative New York Times opinion piece titled, “There Are Worse Things Than Foster Care.”

The Riley column highlights a longstanding debate in the child protection community: When children are abused or neglected, officials must decide whether they should be removed from their home to protect their safety. If the child is removed, officials must decide who will care for the child and what the parents must do to get the child back. These decisions are made more complex and risky when parental drug addiction is involved, which is the case in about one third of removals. In short, the child protection world is complex and there are no formulas that guarantee good outcomes.

A close examination of a recent report written by the New York City Department of Investigation, and cited by Riley, shows that the conclusions she draws from the report about the city’s child protection program are questionable. The Department of Investigation report shows that many children who have been removed from their homes are further maltreated by their parents when the parents are allowed to visit them or when the children are returned home on a trial basis. Riley suggests that the New York City child protection agency takes a greater risk and tolerates this situation because it has a bias toward reunifying families that have been separated. Moreover, she believes that most child welfare agencies and family court systems in the county aim to keep families together, even in the face of maltreatment by the parents, and “even if it can mean risking a child’s safety.”

The child protection world is complex and there are no formulas that guarantee good outcomes.

While we agree that anytime a child is hurt, the child protection system must accept some of the responsibility, we were surprised by Riley’s broad generalization that the foster care system’s commitment to family reunification is intentionally placing children at risk of harm. This framing of the dilemma faced by child protection agencies in New York City and elsewhere is typical of too much of today’s media coverage of child abuse and neglect, which often favors dramatic headlines over factual analysis and pragmatic solutions. It also ignores the legal and practical complexities of child protection in which practitioners and the courts must balance the rights of children and their parents while also considering the capacities and limitations of the various interventions available. Once children are removed from their homes, there is no assurance that the alternative settings will support the child’s development or safety.

Another important issue is that these foster care records formed an important part of the evidence used by the Department of Investigation. The records for 2016 and 2017 showed that about 1,100 of the children placed in foster care over this period had been maltreated again and that a majority of the maltreatment was committed by birth parents during visits or trial reunions, standard parts of the procedure for attempting to reunite parents and children. Nearly 90 percent of these cases of repeat maltreatment were neglect and not abuse. Neglect, while still of great concern, is generally considered to pose less risk to the child’s well-being, especially when it occurs on a short-term basis as it did in most of these cases involving visitation.

Based on these and other data, the Department of Investigation issued 12 recommendations to the New York Administration for Children’s Services for corrective action, all of which were accepted by the Administration. The Administration began almost immediately to implement the recommendations while the Department of Investigation put in place a system for following up to be sure their recommendations are being implemented.

These facts, all published by the Department of Investigation, demonstrate that New York City is following abuse and neglect cases that go awry, that the Department is requiring the Administration for Children’s Services to take corrective action, and that the Department is holding the Administration accountable for addressing the problems by working with the contractors that implement the city’s programs for both protecting children in foster care and children who are returned home.

Following cases from the first instance of abuse or neglect that come to the attention of children’s services to whether the child is removed or stays with the family; if removed where the child is placed; and how long the child is allowed to stay in a particular setting, by no means settles all the issues that child serving agencies must address. Every one of these steps, or some subset of them, can be repeated, sometimes more than once. Although there is no formula for making the best decision at each of these stages, this review of the course cases can take gives a good idea of the complexity faced by Children’s Administration officials.

As if the complexity faced by child protection agencies reviewed here is not enough, a major issue that envelopes the entire system is the shortage of resources that characterize the families of these children. In general, families that become involved with children’s services are highly disadvantaged. They are almost all poor; they tend to be minorities; they live in the nation’s most dangerous neighborhoods; they often attend inferior and even unsafe schools; and they are subject to strong and sometimes unfair tactics by the local police. A result of this disparity in disadvantage is that poor and minority children are much more likely to be caught up in the child protection system than children from more advantaged and white families. In 2016, white children made up 51 percent of American children but only 44 percent of those in foster care. By contrast, black children made up 14 percent of children but 23 percent of those in foster care.

Nearly everyone agrees that child safety is the top priority, but achieving permanent placements is a close second – and a tested way to achieve safety and promote child development.

Riley acknowledges that race and poverty are important parts of the story with her statement that “these points are legitimate and we shouldn’t dismiss them,” but she does not go far enough. Many officials pretend, in defiance of all reality, that black, brown, and indigenous families are more of a threat to their own children than the circumstances in which these children live. The result is a foster care system in which poor children of color are disproportionately removed from their families, and are disproportionately likely to age out of the system without permanent family connections, which research shows is likely to have negative long-term impacts.

We are not arguing that the nation’s foster care system is without flaws, or that a child’s safety should not be the top priority. Rather, we question Riley’s criticism of the child protection system for taking such a strong stance against family reunification, and deeming it the main barrier for the prioritization of children’s safety. If we steer the system toward placing a premium on removing maltreated children from their families and placing them in out-of-home care as a remedy to child maltreatment, as Riley seems to prefer, the children may still be at high risk for maltreatment and multiple placements. Nearly everyone agrees that child safety is the top priority, but achieving permanent placements is a close second – and a tested way to achieve safety and promote child development. The more children bounce around to multiple foster family placements or the longer they are removed from their home before reunification or adoption, the higher the risk for negative outcomes. So, why not invest in helping children stay safe in their own families whenever possible, and preventing placement instability and permanent placement in the uncertainties of out-of-home care.

Luckily, recent legislation enacted by Congress is providing a new opportunity and new funds to encourage implementation of just such a system. The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), enacted into law in February 2018 on a bipartisan basis, creates the opportunity for states to use federal funds to provide greater support through mental health and substance abuse prevention services, parental skills-based programs, and support services for grandparent and relative caregivers, to the families of children who are at risk of having their children removed from home and placed in foster care. FFPSA has the potential to initiate prevention services that will be vital in helping families in need get help before their children are removed and placed into foster care.

Ms. Riley is correct that there are worse things than foster care, but that does not mean we should ignore a system that is making strong efforts to protect children and in many places in the country has successfully dealt with the sharp increase in opioid-related child removals without succumbing to the chaos experienced during the crack epidemic. It does mean that we should continue to invest in prevention services for families whose children are at risk of entering foster care, and promote a culture in which both the child protection system and the families receive support from all sides. Moving toward a system that prioritizes children’s safety is only possible if we support workers in making the decision that is right for the child, regardless of public discourse surrounding the issue.

Jeremy Kohomban is the President and CEO of the Children’s Village, a national partner of the CHAMPS campaign to ensure bright futures for kids in foster care by promoting the highest quality parenting. Ron Haskins is a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at Brookings, which serves as a research partner of the CHAMPS campaign. The authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. Beyond the aforementioned affiliations, they are currently not an officer, director, or board member of any organization with an interest in this article.

       

Even if we cannot agree whether government is too big or too small, we should be able to agree that we want government to be as effective as possible. Using taxpayer funding efficiently requires having reliable information about what government policies are actually accomplishing.

Lawmakers and administration officials come to Washington with the laudable intention of making government work better, but often soon realize just how complex many of the problems the nation faces are and how difficult it can be to know whether policy goals are being achieved. Over the last 20 years, better monitoring of agency performance has helped to identify and correct gaps in the services provided to the public, but performance metrics too often are indicators that reflect what can easily be measured rather than what is most important.

We can do better. There is strong bipartisan support for making more effective use of data already being collected to determine whether policies are having their desired impact. The Commission on Evidence Based Policymaking unanimously supported this goal in its 2017 report. Making better use of the data the government holds is something that was emphasized by former President Obama and recently highlighted in President Trump’s management agenda.

While there are considerable benefits to using government data to provide insights about how programs are working, some observers see the increased use of data for these purposes as a threat to individual privacy. Fortunately, advances in statistical methods and computing technology provide ways to protect data while extracting value.

The value of new analyses based on existing data can be considerable. Consider the efforts led by Stanford University researcher Raj Chetty to link together government collected data on income, education, housing, and patents for a series of landmark studies. His team removed personal information before analyzing the data. The findings suggest policy approaches to closing the innovation gap among the members of low income and minority communities. This work has changed the discussion around innovation as well as around economic mobility and inequality.

In another research project, Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and his former student Nikolas Mittag have linked administrative data for welfare programs to the current population survey, the data used for official poverty statistics. They have found that the survey greatly underestimates program benefits for low income families, making efforts to fight poverty appear much less successful than they in fact have been.

These are just two examples of research that would not have been possible without secure access to confidential government data. Both projects demonstrate the value of enabling this type of access and show that new insights can be realized while protecting individuals. Today, researchers finding ways to improve the effectiveness of government programs must navigate a daunting bureaucratic process. They also must work within a poorly defined legal framework that is not necessarily supportive of the government need for good information to guide policy.

Thanks to the leadership of Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.), cosponsors of the Foundations of Evidence Based Policymaking Act, all of this soon could begin to change. The bill, which unanimously passed the House in 2017, now is awaiting consideration in the Senate. The legislation begins to implement recommendations that were made by the commission we formerly chaired and that we continue to champion because of the impact they would have on making important federal data more available for research.

The bill will strengthen privacy protections without expanding government bureaucracy, help researchers securely access the data they need with strong controls to protect personal information, increase transparency about what data government collects and how those data are used, encourage government to make data not sensitive more publicly available, establish processes for government to articulate where better information is needed to inform future decisions, and begin to change government culture to more readily engage in evidence based policy.

Without this legislation, our data infrastructure and evidence culture will remain a relic of the 20th century. The Foundations of Evidence Based Policymaking Act will help agencies achieve overdue improvements and provide government with the tools it needs to operate more effectively and efficiently. It will go a long way to achieving the accountability that the American public demands of its government. It is time for the Senate to take action and move the bill forward.