Acknowledging disproportionate outcomes and changing service delivery.

This special issue of Child Welfare is very timely, as there is a need for immediate attention to racial disparities in the U.S. foster care system. Unfortunately, child welfare is not the only system in which disparities have been identified. According to the recent Children's Defense Fund's (2007) report America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline, racial and economic disparities exist in many systems including child welfare, health care, mental health, education (including preschool), and juvenile and criminal justice (p. 3). It is clearly time to look at the multisystemic context of racial disparities in child welfare and to explore multisystemic solutions. In 2006 Representative Charlie Rangel of New York called for a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) study to examine the experiences of African American children in foster care. After multiple surveys and interviews with child welfare officials, judges, researchers, and many others involved in or tangential to the child welfare system, the GAO issued a report in July 2007. According to the GAO, not only are African American children more likely than white children to be placed in foster care, "[0]nce [African American] children are removed from their homes, their lengths of stay in foster care average NINE months longer than those of [w]hite children. A number of factors including limited access to family support services (parenting skills and counseling), limited, or inadequate legal representation of birth parents increased the likelihood of children being removed. Difficulties in recruiting and retaining permanent homes also were found to lead to longer stays in care for African American children (Children's Defense Fund, 2007, p. 13). To better understand these outcomes, the GAO explored the possible interrelated factors which might impact these disparate removals and lengths of stay. Despite the fact that African Americans are not significantly more likely to be involved in substance abuse than whites, more African American children are removed due to parental substance abuse (Children's Defense Fund, 2007, p. 19). Once in the system families have to be able to access treatment in a timely manner. However, the GAO found that the long waiting lists and sometimes two-year time frame of many substance abuse treatment programs, serve to delay family reunification. Also, if children were removed due to inadequate housing, many families find that they end up on long waiting lists for subsidized housing, which also can impact length of stay of children in the system. Often, when a child is removed, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits may be reduced for the family, which can limit the family's ability to maintain the safe and adequate home environment, needed for reunification. These disparities for African American children are not new and have been reported by a number of researchers and advocacy groups (McRoy, 2004). For example, Courtney, Barth, Berrick, Brooks, Needell, and Park (1996), 10 years earlier, found that once children enter the foster care system, there are inequities in exit rates, length of care, placement stability, and likelihood of adoption and reunification. The recent study by the Children's Defense Fund (2007) reported extremely alarming results about the experiences of African American foster children. They are more likely to be retained in school, have lower standardized test scores, more likely to be absent, tardy or truant and have higher dropout rates and are less likely to receive mental health services than other children in foster care. Moreover, when children age out of foster care, they are less likely to graduate from high school, more likely to experience mental health problems, yet less likely to receive services and more likely to be homeless and in the criminal justice system (p. 16). Since African American children are overrepresented in care and are less likely to be adopted, these adverse consequences have an even greater impact on this population. …