Saving lives in boarding schools?(the Welfare Economist)

For most of the last century, children who have been removed from their families have been placed in foster care. Today, there are about 600,000 such children, and the system is beset by problems--a shortage of competent staff, children who spend much of their youth bouncing around from one family to another, and poor outcomes (high rates of teen pregnancy, for instance). And the system is overburdened. Caseloads have doubled over the last 20 years (largely as a result of the crack epidemic), while the number of foster families has declined.

Faced with these challenges, some reformers propose making greater use of boarding schools. Such institutions exist across the nation--like Boys Town in Nebraska, Philadelphia's Girard College, and the Piney Woods School in Mississippi--and many have good track records in preparing disadvantaged children for college and future careers. But the social services people want no part of that, as Newt Gingrich discovered in 1994 when he spoke out on the subject. Society's sole objective should be to unite children with their families, they argue.

The problem with this position can be summarized in two words: Brianna Blackwood. Brianna was the two-year-old who was taken from a loving foster family and returned to her mentally retarded mother in the District of Columbia three years ago. Two weeks later, Brianna was dead. Her case is hardly unique. Many biological parents are unfit to look after their children either because of drug use, mental illness, family instability, or similar problems.

In such cases, say the family preservationists, the children should be put up for adoption. If only it were that easy. While there is a high demand for healthy white infants, over 60 percent of the children in foster care are minorities. In 1999, the average age of a child waiting to be adopted was eight, and over 25 percent of children were over ten. This is not what the average adoptive parents are looking for. The legislative history of child welfare services, writes Joyce Ladner, former Howard University provost and now a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution, has focused on family reunification and adoption. "But Congress has never grasped the fact that, for an increasing number of children, neither is appropriate to ...