Historical Analysis and Contemporary Assessment of Foster Care in Texas: Perceptions of Social Workers in a Private, Non-Profit Foster Care Agency (original) (raw)
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Rethinking Foster Care: Why Our Current Approach to Child Welfare Has Failed
SMU Law Review Forum, 2020
Over the past decade, the child welfare system has expanded, with vast public and private resources being spent on the system. Despite this investment, there is scant evidence suggesting a meaningful return on investment. This Article argues that without a change in the values held by the system, increased funding will not address the public health problems of child abuse and neglect.
Perspectives of Foster-Care Providers, Service Providers, and Judges Regarding
2015
This qualitative study examined perceptions offoster-care providers, service providers, and juvenile-court judges regarding privatized foster-care services in Kansas. Kansas was the first state to privatize all foster care, adoption, and family-preservation services. Most states report either beginning to im-plement managed-care principles in their child welfare services or exploring this option. Fifty-eight interviews with 33participants (youth in out-of-home placements, theirparents,foster-careproviders, service providers, and judges) were conducted. The impact ofprivatization on access to services (i.e., men-tal health, appropriate out-of-home placement, aftercare, family support and family preservation, and reunification), communication, caseload levels, and spending is discussed. Recommendations regard-ing these issues are presented. In 1997, the Kansas legislature and governor, acting together, privatized Kansas's foster-care, adoption, and family preserva-tion services. ...
Her name is Jazzy. She is a beautiful 17-year-old with shiny brown hair and big brown eyes. Her contagious laughter is complemented by the deep dimples on her cheeks. She loves to cheer for the football team at her high school and go to the movies with her friends on the weekends. What many people do not know about Jazzy is that her biological mother was a prostitute. Jazzy was conceived while her mother was with one of her "clients." Soon after Jazzy's birth, her mother was arrested and taken to prison for her crimes as a prostitute. Jazzy was left to live with her half siblings and the man whom she shared a last name with because her mother had no idea who her real father was. Jazzy does not like to talk about the things that happened in that home. She gets flashbacks every once in a while of the horrors of living there, but for the most part she has tried to forget. The only thing she allows herself to remember is the time she spent with her siblings. They were there for each other. But when the police discovered that Jazzy's step-father was not a suitable caretaker for her or the other children, they took the children away from him and into the foster care system. Is the foster care system the best solution for children like these? Does the system improve the lives of these children or does it complicate and destroy their lives even further? By exploring what the foster care system is, identifying problems within the system, examining solutions that have been attempted in the past, and establishing how the problems need to be addressed now, this essay will demonstrate that the foster care system has many areas in need of improvement in regards to its treatment of children and effectiveness with finding permanent homes and bettering the lives of not just children, but family units as a whole.
Foster care: Core problems and intervention strategies
Children and Youth Services Review, 1981
Despite consensus that the foster care system can improve service delivery to the children entrusted to it, there is less agreement on appropriate targets for change and intervention strategies. It is argued that one of two formulations of the core problem expressed by the client group receiving foster care services are implicit in the remaining three core problems identified as targets for change in the literature. Consequences of the implicit selection of either formulation and related strategies is presented. The author wishes to express appreciation for their helpful comments on-earlier drafts of this article to the following colleagues: Alfred Kadushin, Sharon Berlin, Lynn Wikler and students: Linda Moore, and Joan Dobrof. The journal reviewers were exceptionally helpful in aiding me to develop more fully the ideas in the article. 53706.
A Comparison of Foster Care Outcomes Across Four Child Welfare Agencies
Journal of Family Social Work, 2003
from foster care services. Outcome domains, based on common measurement practices in child welfare and on social validation studies, include type of living environment (e.g., restrictiveness), placement stability, homelessness, school performance, employment, self-sufficiency, aggression, criminal behavior, substance use, relationships, community involvement, protection from harm, satisfaction, and impact of services. Results of the outcomes were compared to nationally sampled studies of children not in care. Generally, alumni reported positive outcomes across the various domains. The type of foster care, length of care, and age of alumni influenced the results. Implications for expanding this study to establish national benchmarks for outcomes, service use, and cost in foster care conclude the article.
FOSTERED VOICES: NARRATIVES OF U.S. FOSTER CARE
Dissertation, 2019
Critiques of the U.S. foster care system as “broken” span multiple disciplines, including journalism, social work, sociology, psychology, and legal studies. Foster care “brokenness” is poorly defined in these critiques but generally refers to how policies and practices fail to adequately help and support people involved with the foster care system. These disciplines approach understanding “brokenness” via a single problem (e.g., specific policies, inadequate prevention programs, family and community deficits) or measures of “outcomes” (e.g., the foster-care-to-prison-pipeline, low educational attainment for fostered youth, drug abuse). This study applied anthropological methods and theories to the problem of the system’s “brokenness.” In particular, I used participant observation, semi-structured interviews, qualitative surveys, and media and historical analyses to examine foster care as a social, political, economic, and hierarchical institution comprised of the subjects of foster care, namely fostered youth, their kin, foster parents, and foster care professionals. I conducted data collection for 46 months and relied on two fieldsites: a geographic expanse of urban and rural South Texas consisting of courts, community meetings, non- profit foster care organizations, foster care training sites, and private homes, and a digital, qualitative survey with respondents across the U.S. The local South Texas fieldsite and digital field together allowed me to collect 101 narratives of foster care. A holistic anthropological approach revealed that the premise that foster care is “broken” is flawed. The assertion of “brokenness” presumes the primary goal of foster care is to help and support families and children. Exploring what the foster care system iii actually does for and to the families, youth, foster parents, and professionals involved with the institution made clear that the system’s most basic function is to shape, control and reform its subjects into compliant neoliberal citizens. Media analysis demonstrates how persistent meta-narratives of foster care obscure the production of structural inequalities. A historical review illuminates how foster care has always been primarily a system for managing impoverished people, rather than a system for aiding families or protecting children. Ethnographic data elucidates how well-meaning and kind judges, social workers, and foster parents become unwitting participants in structural violence that subjugates kin and fostered youth and limits their resistance.
The Journal of Sociology Social Welfare, 2014
The social welfare literature-whether embodied in the ideology of the profession, claimed in its social policy, substantiated through empirical research, or espoused in practice-suggests that children should not be removed from their natural hones as a solution to economic woes or to the unavailability of social support services. This apparent convergence of ideology, policy and practice-buttressed by social values which recognize the importance of family life-would suggest that few children, if any, would enter foster care because of inadequate income or the absence of social services. Yet, in 1977, between one quarter and one half a million children in the United States are in foster care and most of them are children of the poor. While policy statements claim that substitute care should be a last resort, it is more often than not the only resource available to child welfare practitioners.
Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 2006
This qualitative study examined perceptions offoster-care providers, service providers, and juvenilecourt judges regarding privatized foster-care services in Kansas. Kansas was the first state to privatize all foster care, adoption, and family-preservation services. Most states report either beginning to implement managed-care principles in their child welfare services or exploring this option. Fifty-eight interviews with 33participants (youth in out-of-home placements, theirparents,foster-careproviders, service providers, and judges) were conducted. The impact ofprivatization on access to services (i.e., mental health, appropriate out-of-home placement, aftercare, family support and family preservation, and reunification), communication, caseload levels, and spending is discussed. Recommendations regarding these issues are presented.