Archive: May 2013

Lily Alpert | 2013 How many school-age children are in foster care, when during the school year do they enter the system, and how long do they stay in care? The answers to these questions have implications for practice and resource allocation in both the child welfare and education sectors. Download PDF >

Fred Wulczyn | 2007 Using permanency outcomes for children placed in foster care (e.g., reunification or adoption), we illustrate some of the issues encountered when attempting to use baselines to establish goals and monitor progress. Download the PDF >

Case record review gives you an in-depth look at how aspects of casework may be driving variability in outcomes for children in foster care. In this webinar, we discussed how to identify an appropriate sampling frame and how to use the FCDA web tool to select cases for review. View the PowerPoint slides >

This two-day webinar focused on how to use advanced analytics to diagnose child and family outcomes that need improvement, identify opportinies for intervention, and measure the impact of implemented strategies, both programatically and fiscally. View the PowerPoint slides >

2012 Read this post from the Data Center’s user-support blog, Recipes, about how longitudinal data can help your agency answer questions about system performance throughout the cycle of continuous quality improvement. Read the post >

Fred Wulczyn, Eileen Sheu | 1997 Child welfare services currently operate in an environment characterized by increasing need for services and calls for cost containment and system reform. The authors of this paper suggest that capitated rates represent a potentially useful strategy for meeting those demands. This paper discusses issues related to setting a capitation rate and how to estimate the maximum rate of expenditure permissible for solvency under the proposed capitation rate. Download the PDF  >

Fred Wulczyn, Britany Orlebeke, Jennifer Haight | 2009 From year to year, child welfare directors allocate resources in the hope that their efforts will improve children’s outcomes. In this paper, we present a framework that state and local child welfare agencies can use to monitor their return on those investments. Focusing on traditional child welfare outcomes pertaining to child maltreatment and foster care, the goal is to burrow through the complexity involved in understanding whether system performance is improving and whether the improvements are connected to changes in how resources are invested. Download the PDF  >

Fred Wulczyn, Deborah Daro, John Fluke, Sara Feldman, Christin Glodek, and Kate Lifanda | 2010 In this collaboration between UNICEF, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, and the Child Protection Research Center (CPRC) of the American Humane Association, the authors review the existing multidisciplinary literature on systems approaches to child protection and present findings from interviews with key stakeholders engaged in creating or monitoring such systems at the international and national levels. Download the PDF >

Fred Wulczyn | 2011 A great deal of work has already been done to explore racial disparity in maltreatment rates and admission to out-of-home care. However, there are still fundamental research questions and policy and practice implications that must be addressed before we can reasonably expect to make progress on such a deep and important problem. This report explores the issue of disparity and the reasons for investing more in understanding it. Download the PDF >

On February 2, 2012, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago hosted a Child & Family Policy Forum on research, policy, and practice issues regarding racial disparity in the child welfare system. Watch the webcast >