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This chapter provides a general overview of key public interests and organizational principles that shape and define the public role in child welfare. Public child welfare is concerned largely with three major issues: (1) the safety issue of what minimal standards of child protection should be enforced in order to reduce agency risks to the life and health of children; (2) the permanency issue of who should be delegated the discretion to act as agents of children's care and guardianship when protective standards are violated; and (3) the wellbeing issue of how the performance of parents, guardians, and other child-caring agents can be enhanced to promote children's optimal development. These three issues supply a general framework for defining the scope of public child welfare interest and for building a results-oriented accountability (ROA) system that can advance the safety, permanence, and wellbeing of abused and neglected children.

The American child welfare system has traditionally taken a residual approach to serving families, intervening only in the worst cases of child maltreatment. A number of scathing indictments have been leveled against the traditional American child welfare system, suggesting that new ideas are needed to better meet the needs of children and families. By contrast, a social development approach enhances the capacities of parents and communities to care for children and addresses the problem of poverty, which is endemic to child maltreatment. This chapter first describes conventional child welfare practices and then compares them to a social development approach. While the social development approach to child welfare is still being formulated, potential strategies can be drawn from American and international experiences in child care and family support. These consist of linking child welfare practice with building community capacity, improving economic self-sufficiency, and promoting early child care and development.

This chapter reviews the history of university/agency partnerships in child welfare research and training. The establishment of closer research ties between universities and public agencies has frequently grown out of the desire to forge tighter linkages between universities and child welfare departments in the training of students and staff for public service careers. Many of the obstacles that have impeded educational collaborations in the past can also affect research partnerships. Thus, the chapter's review of the past record of these relations can help to clarify the opportunities and challenges involved in translating evidence-based research and education, from the academy to the field of public child welfare.

This chapter considers the issue of racial disparities in child services. Although much attention has been given to racial and ethnic differences in child welfare service receipt, the chapter looks at each major racial and ethnic group separately. In delineating the special cultural characteristics policy makers and practitioners should keep in mind when planning programs or services for U.S. children, the chapter found an otherwise almost completely unexplored research possibility within the culture and race discourse: within-group comparisons. Although the attention to cross-race comparisons is warranted, it can obscure critical variation within groups.

This chapter reviews studies of mental health service need and use in children involved in the child welfare system. It presents two comprehensive views: one of the research literature leading up to the NSCAW study, and another that depicts mental health service use in this population over a full 36 months. It considers three distinct age groups of children: those aged 2 to 5 years, those 5 to 10 years, and those 11 years or older. In addition to offering the most detailed examination of the use of mental health care by the younger children involved in child welfare, the chapter is perhaps the first study that uses a measure of developmental functioning to examine need for care in the youngest group (2-5 year olds). The striking finding is the larger gap between need and use for this youngest segment of the NSCAW cohort. Meanwhile, the findings about the powerful role of race/ethnicity in use patterns confirms at the nationwide level major findings from all local studies that have examined this question.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of results-oriented accountability (ROA), which is about holding professionals and organizations answerable for the results (outcome) of a chosen course of action rather than just for the fulfillment of assigned activities and duties (processes). It then discusses dimensions of accountability and the framework of ROA. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter considers the future of results-oriented accountability (ROA) and the use of empirical evidence to guide and improve child welfare policy. It assesses where current child welfare policy stands on each of the five dimensions of ROA outlined in Chapter 1. It considers the alternative directions that ROA might take in child welfare with respect to the accountability mismatch between the enlarged scope of public interest and the limited technical capacity of states to meet rigorous standards of evidence. The chapter offers some thoughts about the future of waivers and the flexible funding of child welfare interventions, the continued viability of market-oriented solutions to the principal-agent/principal-agent problem, and the role of university-agency partnerships in fostering accountability in child welfare.

This chapter uses data from two ongoing studies in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, to provide empirical evidence supporting the claim that workfare and child welfare programs serve increasingly similar populations with similar needs. It begins with a history of the separation of income maintenance from social services, then briefly describes the current situation. It is shown that workfare and child welfare programs serve increasingly similar populations with similar needs. However, despite the similar needs of these populations, indeed, even a large overlap between the populations, these two systems continue to operate largely independently, if not at cross-purposes. These findings call into question both the structure of service systems in jurisdictions like Milwaukee and the federal welfare and child welfare policies that lead state and local policy makers to create such misaligned systems.

This chapter shows a high level of continuity in mental health care use over the 36-month NSCAW study period. The pattern of continuity is robust across methods, which confers additional confidence in the finding. This hopeful finding suggests not only that the child welfare system serves as a gateway to the mental health system, but also that the pathway through it to mental health service survives termination of child welfare system involvement.

This presents a multiple-level contextual approach to test the impact of contextual variables on child-level outcomes. It is hypothesized that child welfare agencies with high levels of both information processing and interagency collaboration will be associated with better child functioning outcomes.

This chapter addresses two questions. First, is there anything wrong with deliberately creating a child with a disability (such as deafness)? Second, what is the proper role of child welfare considerations in reproductive decision-making? The chapter concludes that child welfare arguments do have a role, but one that is more limited and less decisive than is commonly assumed. One reason for this is that the idea of harm only applies in very extreme cases, cases where the person created has a life that is so awful that she would be ‘better off dead’. Another is that the relationship between disability and quality of life is more complicated and less direct than is sometimes thought. For these reasons (amongst others) the chapter concludes that a general legal prohibition on selecting for disability is unwarranted, or at least cannot be justified on child welfare grounds alone.

This chapter examines outcomes for infants and the youngest children in the NSCAW sample. In particular, it examines placement stability and the quality of the caregiving environment. Developmentalists have identified the early childhood period as particularly important for children's language development, social development, and readiness for formal schooling. Researchers who study the development of young children have been especially concerned about the effects of children's early attachment to caregivers, as well as the cognitive and emotional stimulation in the caregiving environment. Children who encounter child welfare services are thought to be at a particular disadvantage in both regards, because economic deprivation and unstable caregiving relationships are thought to be all too typical of their environments. The chapter illustrates that these two factors—attachment and quality of the caregiving environment—are complex: when both are considered, their respective influences are not straightforward.

US law concerning families has not tipped as unequivocally in the direction of unbridled individualism as Sandel believes, and, in any event, individualism and moral values are not diametrically opposed to one another. Because law shapes the way we conceptualize human relationships, we should make sure that “the tale told by law” reflects an understanding of the importance of communal interdependence to both individuals and society, rather than simply reflecting justice understood as the protection of individual rights. In promising wives long-term support in the event of divorce, the old marriage law provided some compensation to wives for their economic vulnerability, but it promoted an inequality in both the family and the larger society; the challenge for family law and family policy is to design measures that will allow deep affection ties to flourish while not locking some people–primarily women–into dependency. In Sandel’s eyes, the dissenters in Bowers v. Hardwick missed an opportunity to articulate the possible goods to be realized by homosexual intimacy, and in doing so impoverished political discourse, but throughout his opinion, Blackmun attempts to relate the importance to an individual of being a member of a family or an intimate association and the ability to choose to establish or enter such a relationship. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 regards neither Indian infants nor their biological parents as unencumbered individuals, but rather suggests that they are embedded in a web of relationships they have not chosen, yet which in part constitute who they are and which justify particular legal stipulations regarding jurisdiction and placement in foster care and adoption cases; it also recognizes individual rights through provisions that allow for consideration of the wishes of the biological parents and of the best interests of a particular child.

This chapter provides an overview of the first stage of results-oriented accountability (ROA): the routine monitoring of child welfare outcomes. It focuses on the federal Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSRs) and the proposed Chafee National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD). The chapter calls for strengthening these monitoring systems by adopting the methods of longitudinal data analysis and by tracking entry cohorts in order to facilitate this type of analyses. It draws attention to the problems of selectivity, truncation and censoring, which if not properly taken into account, can misguide practitioners' and administrators' assessment of child welfare trends and system performance. It also considers what may be necessary to shore up the weakest area of the CFSR process, which is the monitoring of child wellbeing. The current reliance on small samples of case reviews is insufficient for drawing reliable or valid conclusions about agency performance in promoting child wellbeing. A set of criteria for assessing both the validity and integrity of an outcomes-monitoring system is presented.