History

In 2005, with support from the Stuart Foundation, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning and Mental Health Advocacy Services, Inc. joined forces to convene The California Education Collaborative for Children in Foster Care. The intent of the initiative was to both model and promote greater collaboration between the public education and child welfare sectors to improve educational outcomes for California’s 74,000 foster care children and youth.

The Collaborative’s findings were released in the report, Ready to Succeed: Changing Systems to Give California’s Foster Children the Opportunities They Deserve to be Ready for and Succeed in School.

The state’s success rate with those in foster care is abysmal: Half of foster children and youth have been held back at least one grade, 25-52% are placed in special education (compared to 10-12% of the general student population), 46% do not complete high school, and fewer than 3% go on to a four-year college.

Goal of the Initiative

Following the release of the report the initiative was renamed Ready to Succeed, and it was reorganized to directly follow up on recommendations included in the report. The work of the initiative supports and reinforces the work of others involved in child welfare and education issues concerning foster youth. However, this work is distinct from these other efforts in its focus on educational outcomes for children and youth. A central focus of the Center’s work includes discovering classroom instructional strategies that educators have found successful in supporting students in foster care and, to this end, the voices of teachers and administrators feature prominently in the initiative’s work.

Activities of the Initiative

In 2009, the Center convened six Teacher Discussion Groups throughout the state, bringing teachers from elementary, middle, secondary, and alternative settings together to explore the unique issues facing children in foster care in the classroom. Findings from these discussion groups have been released to education groups and posted on this Web site. Look for Ready to Succeed in the Classroom as well as a set of resources cards for schools, district personnel and community members.

The Center is also undertaking statewide policy efforts to support other recommendations made in the first Ready to Succeed report. Based on research conducted thus far and documented in Grappling with the Gaps, the Center has determined that a deliberate effort is first necessary to raise awareness about the educational needs of children and youth growing up in foster care so that policies and practices can be more precisely targeted. Hence, the Center hosted a policy forum in the spring of 2010 designed to develop strategies to link data from the state’s Child Welfare Services Case Management System with mainstream education data systems, including CALPADS. More documents from the policy forum, including a case statement for linking data, are forthcoming.