Want to reduce the number of kids entering foster care? Put the ones who are at risk in Head Start. That’s the advice of some advocates in Illinois, who say that children enrolled in early education are 93 percent less likely to go into foster care than those who are not. The research supporting this claim is shoddy at best, but the idea that expanding government safety-net programs like Head Start will reduce child maltreatment, which can lead to placement in foster care, has become ubiquitous. Sadly, the reason kids are in foster care is almost never a simple lack of material resources or other support. Using our limited child-welfare dollars on such blunt instruments targeted too broadly will only make it harder to help kids who are truly in danger.
The claim regarding Head Start comes from a 2017 study, published in Children and Youth Services Review, whose findings are hardly robust. First, the study includes children in “informal kinship care” — meaning kids who were living with relatives other than parents but who had never been legally removed from their homes — as being in foster care. Second, of the 1,995 kids in the study, only 29 percent of the sample had been enrolled in early childcare at all, and only 7 percent of those (about 40 kids) were enrolled exclusively in Head Start. Third, only 8 percent of children in the study entered foster care (including informal kin situations). It is very hard to model such a low-risk event with so few kids in the Head Start group.
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