Session: Foster Care Exit Disparity: Trends and Dynamics, Context, and Targeting (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Background and Purpose: Because science can and should contribute to the larger conversation about racial disparity in the foster care system and its causes, it is important to get the science right. This symposium aims to place racial disparity into an accountability framework by focusing on how children leave foster care (i.e., exit rates). To do that, the three papers focus on these interrelated topics: how exit disparities have changed over time, and the differential impact of social context on racial disparity. The last paper of the symposium explores how limited budget and service resources can be directed to where they are most needed.

Methods: This symposium consists of papers that use the multistate foster care data archive, the oldest source of longitudinal foster care data in the U.S. The papers deal with three issues at the intersection of how children leave foster care, how long they were in care, and race/ethnicity. The first paper investigates exit rate disparity over time based on exit reason (e.g., reunification, adoption, and guardianship), race/ethnicity, and time in care. The second paper draws on the insights from the first and examines the influence of ecological context using race-specific poverty rates, urbanicity, and counties' adjusted admission rate to better understand exit rate disparity. For each of these papers, we rely on county random effects models and state fixed effects models that account for state and county context. The third paper describes targeting approaches that use the county and race-specific and age-specific Empirical Bayes residuals to pinpoint where in a given state exit rate disparity is especially acute.

Results: The first paper found that exit rate disparities have decreased substantially over the years. However, adoption disparities persist. Children who are reunified and children who leave care to live with relatives have exit patterns that depend on the time spent in care. The second paper shows that rate disparity is correlated with county poverty rates on exit rates, though the effect depends on the race/ethnicity of the child. In addition, exit rate disparity decreased in non-urban counties. The number of kids coming into care was not a useful predictor of exit rates. The third paper uses the foregoing to reveal within-state exit rate disparities that are organized around the state average.

Implications: Entry rate and exit rate disparity drive the over-representation of Black children in foster care. As such, long-term efforts to eliminate racial disparity depend on strategies that address each contributor. Our results suggest that those strategies have to account for how disparity is already changing, where the observed racial disparity is already changing, and for which subpopulations (i.e., children of different age groups). In the end, solutions that aim to reduce disparity but fail to account for the local manifestations of disparity run the risk of making matters worse.2023-->