EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS IN FOSTER YOUTH

Educational Success in Foster Youth

Educational Success in Foster Youth

Introduction

Approximately 72% of children in foster care in California are school age (Needell, Webster, Cuccaro-Alamin, Armijo, & Brookhart, 2000) and child welfare services regulations require social workers to monitor children's educational progress. With the Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997) the main goals of the child welfare system have been identified to ensure children's safety, permanence, and well-being. Concern for meeting foster children's educational needs falls clearly within the social services domain of child well-being, yet it is the school system that ultimately is responsible for ensuring that all children receive appropriate education. Thus, these two social systems share in certain practical matters involved in the education of foster children. Ideally, these two systems could work together to enrich and enhance educational opportunities for foster children.

Internal Validity Threats

In reality, however, both systems represent large social institutions with complex sets of regulations and practices. Unfortunately, the complexity of these systems may create multiple problems for foster children and evidence suggests that large proportions of these children perform poorly in reading, math, and vocabulary (Sawyer and Dubowitz, 1994; Stein, 1997), leave foster care without a high school diploma (Blome, 1997), fail or repeat grades (Benedict, Zuravin, and Stallings, 1996), have difficulty performing at grade level (English, Kouidou-Giles, & Plocke, 1994; Fox and Arcuri, 1980; Iglehart, 1994; Fanshel, & Shinn, 1978), and need special education services (Berrick et al., 1994; English et al., 1994; Goerge, Van Voorhis, Grant, Casey, & Robinson, 1992). Both the child welfare system and the school system may contribute to these poor educational outcomes for foster children. For example, as children move through the child welfare system they tend to have various social workers assigned responsibility for their care. Among other challenges social service agencies face in the governance of the care of dependent children, this general discontinuity in the management of children's lives may create problems in child welfare professional's ability to advocate for the educational needs of individual children. Furthermore, these problems are complicated by the fact that foster children represent our region's most vulnerable youth, having entered the child welfare system (and their respective school systems) following traumatic events in their lives.

Compounding this situation, it is unclear whether school districts have the resources to meet the educational needs of this special population. While fiscal responsibility for children's educational needs lies in their individual school districts, the transitory nature of foster care for many children may affect their educational needs and access to educational resources. For example, it is unknown to what extent foster children may experience delays in school admittance if the school and child welfare agency perceives that some children may not be assigned to a particular school district for the duration of time it would take to secure records needed for enrollment procedures. When children do enter new schools, the circumstances that may prompt an Individual Educational Plan (IEP) request are unclear and questions exist regarding the extent to which there ...