Today, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) released a new issue brief, Modernizing Child Welfare Technologies and Tools: Opportunities for Predictive Risk Modeling to Improve Child Safety and Outcomes. The brief highlights an increasingly urgent reality: child welfare systems collect enormous amounts of data but often lack the tools to apply that information to support better decisions for children and families. As the field works to strengthen safety and stability for children, modernizing data utilization must be part of the conversation.
The focus of ACF’s “A Home for Every Child”—both reducing the need for foster care and increasing the availability of foster homes for strategic placements— is galvanizing. Achieving that goal necessarily involves both sides of that equation. Yes, there are important details to sort. And the realities of implementation are, as always, critical. This cannot be a conversation that is isolated to D.C.; it must engage and leverage the expertise and experience of states and counties.
There is broad recognition that child welfare data and accountability systems are, at best, static “digital filing cabinets” that capture and store data, but little else besides checking a box of ‘doing something.’ Those systems do not equip the child welfare workforce to analyze and use the data. They fail to equip agencies to harness the extensive data on families who interact with multiple public systems and translate the data into insights that reflect the complexity of their lives. Without the capabilities to use data, child welfare systems are flying blind, risking the safety of far too many children. At the same time, these systems intrude into the lives of families where intervention could potentially be avoided.
There has long been a push from the child welfare field to better account for and address the comprehensive needs of families. Reflecting this, many of the families who come to the attention of child welfare have multi-system involvement. Each of those systems collects its own data. As the societal approach to vulnerable families evolves to better reflect families, the available data has grown, far surpassing the ability of human processing even in the best of circumstances. This problem is particularly acute in the high-risk, high-urgency context that typifies child protection.
Americans expect data and analytics to provide usable information and improve outcomes in every other domain of life—it’s time to expect the same when it comes to safety and stability for children.