Abstract:

Background: In the United States, privacy standards under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) limit the sharing of individual student information between education and child welfare agencies. Although many entities identify foster youth as an educationally vulnerable population, this distinction does not exist within federal law. Foster youth are not delineated as an at-risk subgroup which limits the ability to exchange information between education and child welfare in order to investigate education outcomes. While local jurisdictions have the ability to interpret the federal law to allow for the merging of student data, they vary with respect to information sharing and the interpretation of laws governing confidentiality.

In California, additional data sharing challenges exist. California lacks a viable education statewide data system and each school district collects its own student data and reports aggregate numbers to the state. Though a statewide child welfare data system, California State Child Welfare System/Case Management System (CWS/CMS) exists, youth identifiers are system specific, creating an obstacle to matching children in other data systems. Overall, as coordination of addressing these obstacles does not exist at the state level, educators do not receive information that they need to appropriately respond to unique challenges associated with maltreatment and foster care placement.

Current Paper: The current paper will address multiple challenges and lessons learned in a successful effort to link education and child welfare administrative datasets. To overcome challenges of data-sharing, a collaborative partnership among the California Department of Social Services (CDSS), the Center for Social Services Research at the University of California Berkeley (CSSR), the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (Cal-PASS), and the Stuart Foundation was initiated. The Center for Social Services Research (CSSR), receives quarterly extracts from the Child Welfare Services Case Management System (CWS/CMS). Cal-PASS is a statewide initiative that collects, analyzes, and shares student data in order to track performance in over 56 counties.

The California Ready to Succeed Pilot Project was able to overcome external legislative and legal constraints regarding data sharing. The team worked with various oversight agencies and committees in order to satisfy between agency memorandums of understanding (MOU’s) and Institutional Review Board (IRB) mandates. Many challenges to educational district support and agreement for project inclusion were mitigated. Lastly, using probabilistic matching, youth were linked in the two longitudinal data systems. Overall, the team was able to delineate a process that set a precedent for Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) compliant data sharing between child welfare and education. The resulting dataset provided an opportunity to investigate aggregate education outcomes of foster youth in California, with an emphasis on exploring the relationship between foster care placement and student performance.

Keywords:

Research, data sharing collaborations, education, child welfare.