@article{18ecbeb4bca7434b8c78bc8a29f86b38,
title = "The Push for Racial Equity in Child Welfare: Can Blind Removals Reduce Disproportionality?",
abstract = "We conduct the first quantitative analysis of “blind removals,” an increasingly popular reform that seeks to reduce the over-representation of Black children in foster care by eliminating biases in the removal decisions of investigators. We first show that over-representation in most foster care systems is driven by Black children being substantially more likely than White children to be investigated for maltreatment to begin with. Conditional on initial rates of investigation, investigators remove White and Black children similarly. Second, we find no evidence that blind removals impacted the already small racial disparities in the removal decision, but they substantially increased time to removal.",
author = "{Jason Baron}, E. and Goldstein, {Ezra G.} and Joseph Ryan",
note = "Funding Information: We received valuable feedback from Anthony Bald, Patrick Bayer, Joseph Doyle, Brett Drake, Sarah Font, Marie‐Pascale Grimon, Max Gross, Brian Jacob, Bridgette Lery, Nicholas Lovett, Chris Mills, Peter Nencka, Jessica Pryce, Emily Putnam‐Hornstein, Luke Rodgers, Cullen Wallace, David Welsch, Fred Wulczyn, Cathy Xue, and participants at the University of Michigan's Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar and the University of Southern California Children's Data Network. We also thank the Child Welfare Director and Departmental Specialist in Kent County, and the many other child welfare employees across Michigan and Kent County for their help in understanding how the blind removals program works in practice and for bringing humanity to the data. We appreciate Brian Jacob, the Child and Adolescent Data Lab, the Education Policy Initiative, and the Youth Policy Lab for their generosity in sharing data. The project received approval from the University of Michigan's Institutional Review Board: HUM00104615. This research was funded with help from training grant R305B170015 from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. Some of the data used in this study were obtained from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect and have been used in accordance with its Terms of Use Agreement license. The Administration on Children, Youth and Families, the Children's Bureau, the original dataset collection personnel, the funding source, NDACAN, and Cornell University bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of any other entity. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2022 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.",
year = "2022",
doi = "10.1002/pam.22461",
language = "English (US)",
journal = "Journal of Policy Analysis and Management",
issn = "0276-8739",
publisher = "Wiley-Liss Inc.",
}