An Assessment Of The Privatization Of Child Welfare Services PDF Download

The U.S. child welfare system has continuously struggled to meet and maintain national performance outcome standards that reflect how well they are ensuring safety, facilitating permanency, and promoting well-being for children. These are the specific mandates of public foster care agencies responsible for providing these services, an economic public good, for the greater benefit of our society. Quasi-market solutions, such as privatization, have been increasingly promoted among states, and in some cases implemented, to reform public foster care agencies otherwise deemed ineffective and inefficient. The promoted promise of privatization has been its ability to increase efficiency, accountability, decrease costs, and consequently improve outcomes for children and their families. However, given the economic theory of market competition and public goods, this study questions if privatization measures up to its promise in terms of overall system performance and safety and permanency outcomes for children served. The primary aim of this study was to examine non-privatized and privatized foster care agencies to compare overall system-level performance in terms of national safety and permanency outcome standards; and explore possible differences in child-level outcomes by racial groups between non-privatized and privatized agencies to ascertain relationships between privatization and the issues of disproportionality and disparity. Using a state-level dataset of N1 = 10 states and a large national secondary data set of N2 = 118,761 child abuse and neglect and foster care cases, a series of rigorous analyses were conducted to accomplish the study's goals. The resultant findings of this study suggest that overall, privatized foster care agencies perform no better than non-privatized agencies, and where statistical significant differences were found, results marginally favored non-privatized agency performance over privatized agencies.