“Ready to Succeed: Changing Systems to Give California’s Foster Children the Opportunities They Deserve to be Ready for and Succeed in School” is our site of the day.

The California Education Collaborative for Children in Foster Care released a new report today calling for a sharper focus on educational outcomes for children in foster care in our state and offering recommendations for strengthening the policies and systems that support them.

Ready to Succeed: Changing Systems to Give California’s Foster Children the Opportunities They Deserve to be Ready for and Succeed in School is a 36 page summary report that connects the dots between foster care, social service and the education system> Even in a year of budget cutbacks, or especially in a year such as this one, the findings and recommendations of this report should be considered. Failure here will only lead to increased costs for incarceration, broken lives, and an unhappy future for our state and these children as adults.

A few of the many statistics you will learn from reading this report:

• Nearly one-half (46%) of these children will drop out before they finish high school

• 50% of these kids have been held back in school

• Fewer than 3% go on to a 4-year college

• Of the half million American children who are placed in the foster care system, approximately 20% — or at least 74,000 — live in California

The most significant barriers to educational success of foster children identified in this report are:

• Children entering foster care have often already experienced significant emotional or physical trauma or maltreatment that harms their ability to function in a classroom setting and interferes with their ability to learn. Most children entering the foster care system are already a year behind their peers in school.

• Frequent changes in foster care placements often mean transferring to a new school, leading to a bewildering array of teachers, administrators, classmates and routines. Typically, school records do not follow students in a timely manner, magnifying the problems, and when records do arrive they are often incomplete.

• Too often, there is no single person with an interest in a foster child’s educational outcomes, nor the authority and accountability to provide guidance when necessary.

• Child welfare advocates, educators and other service providers do not and sometimes cannot share information about foster children for whom they are responsible, making it more difficult to coordinate a child’s education and education-related interventions.

Recommendations include measures to strengthen and increase access to high quality pre-school; ensure school stability and increase training, support and incentives for educators; and improve the collection and sharing of data related to the educational progress of foster care youth.

A full 54 page report is also available.

The California Education Collaborative for Children in Foster Care is co-sponsored by The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning and Mental Health Advocacy Services, Inc. The Center is a public, non-profit organization based in Santa Cruz. Mental Health Advocacy is a private nonprofit corporation providing free legal services to people with mental and developmental disabilities. The Stuart Foundation provided funding for the project.