Education Outcomes for Children in Foster Care

Children in out-of-home placement (foster care) as a result of child protective services (CPS) involvement are at increased risk of adverse school outcomes, relative to the general population of children. This raises concerns about the adequacy of child welfare and educational policy for these vulnerable children. However, the implication of the difference in school outcomes depends critically on the role that placement in care, per se, plays in determining school achievement. For example, if children who enter care have a prior history of low achievement, then a continued achievement gap may simply demonstrate that placement does not fully compensate for past disadvantage. On the other hand, if the disruption associated with out-of-home placement significantly compromises school achievement, this unintended negative consequence would have important implications for policy and practice. This presentation will largely be drawn from a paper analyzing associations between out-of-home placement and school achievement, focusing on reading and mathematics achievement in grades 3 through 8. We used linked administrative data on more than 200,000 children who experienced out-of-home placement or were in a comparison group. We estimated three models: a pooled ordinary least squares regression that considered placement status and test scores net of the full set of control variables; an identical model that added the previous year’s test scores as an additional control; and a final model that included child-specific fixed effects. Results suggest that children in out-of-home placement had achievement test scores at least 0.6 standard deviations below average. However, we find similar deficits across children with past, current, and future exposure to OHP and, in our preferred model, out-of-home placement (past, current, or future placement) had no statistically discernible relation with either reading or math achievement. Thus, we conclude that out-of-home placement, itself, is not significantly related to school achievement; however, evidence reveals consistently low average math and reading achievement among children involved with child protective services. In-progress extensions of these analyses will also be discussed.