Since 2001 the Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has conducted periodic reviews of state child welfare systems. These reviews monitor compliance with federal child welfare requirements and determine how children and families experience being served by the child welfare system. Three rounds of these “Child and Family Service Reviews” or CFSRs have been conducted, and the fourth round (CFSR-4) is underway. (See the most recent reports.) Ensuring that child welfare is serving all people equitably is a critical part of this work.
In a new project funded by the federal government, Chapin Hall and partners at Georgia State University will apply a race equity lens using national CFSR-3 administrative data performance measures. Specifically, we will examine whether state program improvement performance is associated with reduced racial disparities in the child welfare system. We will assess if there is a difference between state-administered versus county-administered child welfare systems. We will also examine how the provision of other available public benefits such as state TANF expenditures, SNAP participation rates, and other county-level social and economic conditions impact performance and disparities.
Children of color, including children from Native communities, are more likely to be among those reported to child protective services relative to their proportion in the population. This has cascading implications for the overrepresentation of children of color in the child welfare system.
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