Graduation rate of 35 percent? Many foster children ‘robbed of a good education’
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Throwaway Kids - Part Four of Six
Star investigation reveals stark outcomes for America’s foster care children.
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‘We are sending more foster kids to prison than college’
As U.S. spends billions on foster care, families are pulled apart and forgotten
Frequent moves don’t just harm foster kids’ emotions — they hurt their brains
Aging out: Thousands of foster youth graduate to the streets every year
‘The state that neglected me as a kid is the same state that wants to kill me’
When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, there were some struggling children it did leave behind.
And it would be another 14 years — when that landmark education measure was replaced — before lawmakers would notice the nation’s most at-risk students:
Foster children.
“It’s terribly ironic,” said Phillip Lovell, of the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance for Excellent Education. “These are our children. They are legally our children. The least that we could do is report on their progress in school. We should know it and do something about it.”
Yet two years after the Every Student Succeeds Act required states to tally and report graduation rates of its foster children, the federal government has yet to make that information public.
Of the states that have reported, most are shockingly low. In Oregon, 35 percent of students in foster care graduated from high school in 2017, compared to 77 percent of the general population.
The Star spent the past year examining the long-term outcomes for kids who age out of foster care. It found that many will end up homeless, jobless and in prison because, in part, they were shortchanged on education. Shuffled from home to home, often sent outside their original school districts, they fall behind early and don’t catch up.
In every pocket of the nation, the graduation rates for foster children are significantly lower than for all other “special population groups,” including homeless students and those with disabilities.
Most years, a little more than half of the country’s foster kids will graduate from high school.
“People just don’t think about them — they are lost,” said Lori Burns-Bucklew, a child welfare law expert who has been advocating and representing children for more than 30 years. “It is neglect. Horrible neglect.”
As part of its investigation, The Star surveyed nearly 6,000 inmates and found that 16 percent of those who said they had been in foster care got a high school diploma. Another 29 percent said they got a GED. Only 3 percent said they had a college degree, matching the national numbers in other studies.
“They bounced me everywhere and made me know I didn’t belong anywhere,” an Oklahoma inmate who received her GED wrote on her survey. “I got a horrible education due to always bouncing around.”
Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro of Texas, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, told The Star the low graduation rates are “a shame.”
“I want these kids to be able to reach their dreams like anybody else in this country,” Castro said. “This is something we don’t hear about in our national dialogue. I’ve never heard this discussed in a presidential debate.
“It’s like we allow this to happen without reaching our conscience as a nation, but we need to understand it and we can do something about it.”
Maggie Stevens, president and CEO of Foster Success, an Indiana nonprofit helping young people transition out of state care, said education often is not the state’s top priority when foster kids are involved.
“I’m constantly reminded that child welfare is focused on the basic needs — you know, housing, food, basic security,” she said. “But if we can’t get these kids in quality education, they’re just going to be stuck in a cycle of challenges.”
In Kansas, education outcomes have been tracked for many years in the fully privatized system. The numbers vary widely, which has caused some to wonder if they are completely accurate.
For fiscal year 2019, only about 39 percent of Kansas kids in foster care graduated from high school — dropping from 68 percent the previous year. In 2012, just 20 percent graduated.
Zachary Lawrence, a special education administrator in south-central Kansas, told members of a legislative task force last year that many foster kids live such unstable and unpredictable lives that it’s tough for them to be able to learn each day.
“They are literally packing a suitcase and moving every morning, after which they are transported, sometimes for an hour or more, to school and participate in learning activities,” he told the task force. “They frequently have no idea where they will be sleeping that night, only that it will likely be in a different and more distant town from where they are asked to attend school.”
Current research, Lawrence said, shows that each time children change foster homes, it sets them back academically four to six months.
Being an adolescent is hard enough, said Lovell, of the Alliance for Excellent Education.
“But when you add to that the trauma of what’s happening at home to cause them to be placed in care with new teachers, new school and new friends,” he said, “it becomes this vortex that becomes hard for anyone to navigate.
“We’ve all let these kids down.”
Losing ground academically
Taylor McClellan, of Oklahoma, wanted to walk across the stage to get her high school diploma 13 years ago. But when her dad died, she went into foster care right before she turned 15 and aged out when she was 18.
In that short time, she went through 13 placements. Not counting, she says, the short-term emergency placements. Between grieving her dad’s death and going from strange home to strange home, never feeling wanted, she couldn’t focus on school.
In the end, she didn’t have the credits to graduate.
“I didn’t feel like I had value,” McClellan said. “I think it’s traumatic every single time you are walking into a different placement. I felt like I was treated like a criminal.”
School became an afterthought, like it does for so many foster youth. And it shows in the statistics.
The goal of No Child Left Behind was, in part, to boost the lagging performance of certain students, such as those in special education, English-language learners and poor and minority children. Its replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act, added foster children as another subgroup in late 2015 — the first time that the tracking and reporting of foster kids was recognized in federal education law.
Early the next year, during a hearing to discuss how ESSA would be implemented, MaryLee Allen of the Children’s Defense Fund urged the Department of Education to give kids in state care more attention to ensure they had “educational stability and success.”
“They are often referred to, in fact, as invisible children,” said Allen, who died of cancer earlier this year. “The benefits of school stability for foster children are clear, and we are eager to see the new protections fully implemented as quickly as possible.”
McClellan, after not having enough credits to get her high school diploma, made a promise to herself: I will walk across that stage in college.
And she did. Now, McClellan works at a university helping other young people.
“It’s constantly on my mind,” McClellan said, “how do we stop that pipeline to homelessness or prison or addiction? I don’t know exactly what it will take for things to change, for outcomes to be better.”
Behind in class, lost for years
Foster children who move often get lost in the classroom — especially in math, said Burns-Bucklew, the Missouri lawyer.
“It’s almost impossible to catch up if you miss a piece,” she said. “Math is a subject that is foundational. If you miss some essential math concepts in second grade and go on to third grade, you can’t do third grade math, unless someone figures out what you missed in second grade.”
And teachers may not be able to spend enough time with the student to understand where the child is academically. If they are able to work with foster children for awhile, it’s often inevitable that the students will be moved again and have to start over.
Natalie Zarate was determined not to let that happen to her. The former Kansas foster youth said she attended more than six schools, three of them in a two-month period.
“It was hard keeping up because every time I got moved, every school was at a different lesson,” she said. “But I knew I couldn’t give up. And so I just tried to focus on getting good grades and getting my education.”
Others aren’t as fortunate.
“So many foster kids lose track,” said Zarate, who got her high school diploma and started college but dropped out after a year. “They don’t know how many credits they have, they don’t know what they’re learning. I’ve just seen so many kids not go to school, so many kids fail or just because of moving around, they don’t understand anything.”
Leecia Welch is the director of legal advocacy at the National Center for Youth Law in California, a state that has led the nation in improving educational opportunities for foster children. Welch, who specializes in foster youth education, has studied legislative changes across the country and said states have to do more.
“We know that education is the key to having a future,” Welch said. “When you have a child moved, 10, 20, over 30, sometimes 100 times, there is no way their education is being thought about.”
Phillip Wrigley sees it in his Topeka, Kansas, high school classroom all the time.
“You get them caught up, you get them going, you start building a relationship and then one day they’re gone,” Wrigley said. “They just disappear, there’s no, ‘Oh, I’ll see you later.’ They just don’t show up anymore.
“You ask, like, ‘So, what happened?’ Their one friend they made in the school is like, ‘Yeah, I think they got a new foster family.’”
A few years ago Wrigley had a student who went into foster care when he was 15. The teen had struggled in some classes, but Wrigley thought that with some work, he would make it to graduation.
Then the student was sent to a group home in southeast Kansas, where school became less of a priority.
“As I understand it from him, basically there was this decision that school just wasn’t for him,” Wrigley said. “They just didn’t want to go to the trouble of pushing him a little bit. He eventually stopped going to school, stopped earning credits.”
Two years later, the teen was back with his mom and the two went to see Wrigley. The young man wanted to graduate. But because he was so far behind in credits, he wouldn’t be able to catch up in the allotted time.
The whole child welfare cycle becomes frustrating, Wrigley said. For both the student and the teacher.
“In an ideal world, it’s the state saying, ‘You’re not in a safe place and now we are going to take care of you,’” Wrigley said. “But we aren’t taking kids out of a bad situation and putting them in a good situation. Sometimes we do OK. And sometimes we’re just another abuser.”
Holding one state accountable
In Indiana, child advocate Brent Kent has worked the past 3½ years to bring change for the thousands of kids in his state’s care.
First, he and others at Foster Success, the nonprofit that helps kids transition into adulthood, worked with lawmakers to make sure former foster youth had Medicaid until age 26. Then, under Kent’s leadership, the goal was to improve education.
“It’s really hard to fix problems at the terminal end of foster care,” Kent said. “You can only do so much when someone didn’t graduate high school and is reading at a seventh grade level.”
What he discovered, though, was that no one was truly seeing foster children’s struggles in the classroom, their dropout rate, lack of a high school diploma and the road to homelessness they get trapped on.
Kent and others didn’t think the Every Student Succeeds Act went far enough. More information was needed.
“You’re the state, you’re the parent and you have no idea what the graduation rate is for your kids,” he said. “You have no idea what the third grade reading rate is. You don’t know in real time where they are going to school, but you are responsible for the educational decisions. You know nothing.”
No school or system was being held accountable when foster children fell through the academic cracks, Kent said. And legislators didn’t know what resources were needed to help these kids, mainly because no one knew the outcomes.
In 2018, Kent and his organization worked with lawmakers on legislation to require Indiana to track how foster kids are doing in the classroom. Once a year, a detailed report card must be published so the public is informed about how children in the state’s custody are doing relative to their peers.
The first report card was published last spring.
About 65 percent of Indiana foster kids graduated from high school compared to the state average of 88 percent. Nearly 21 percent of foster youth received a graduation waiver — meaning some requirements for a diploma were waived — compared to 8.3 percent of all students. And only 9.1 percent of foster kids passed the 10th grade state math test and 28.7 percent passed the English exam.
People “couldn’t believe it,” Kent said. “I had mixed feelings about the response because we had been saying this for so long, that this is a problem, but you really need sort of accountability and transparency of a state report to make people realize the impact.”
The law also ordered Indiana’s Department of Education to create a “remediation plan” and present it to the state Board of Education over the summer to explain how it would work with communities and other state agencies to improve outcomes for children.
That came in July, but board members and advocates, including Kent, weren’t satisfied with the plan, which in their minds didn’t provide strong ideas or measures — just “bullet points.”
Still, a child advocate in Nebraska said Indiana’s law could serve as a model for others.
“States have an obligation to make sure that children have access to their right to an education,” said Sarah Helvey, of Nebraska Appleseed, a justice nonprofit that represents vulnerable Nebraskans. “The state is the parent and the state should have a report card with that information.”
Kansas Sen. Molly Baumgardner, a Republican and chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, said a report card sounds like a good idea for her state as well. Then everyone — from lawmakers to agencies to communities — can work together to improve education for foster kids, she said.
“If I were governor, I would make that an executive order,” Baumgardner said. “You’re never going to achieve a goal if you don’t know how far away it is.”
Stevens, who took over leadership of Foster Success in Indiana this fall, said her state still has work to do to provide equal education for foster children.
“I think the most important thing to remember is they are kids,” she said. “And it doesn’t matter how you came into foster care. … We owe it to them to give them opportunities and a chance to experience the same thing that all the kids in our neighborhoods are experiencing.”
‘I was robbed ...’
Morriah Bosco, 21, still keeps a list of some of the “emergency” places she stayed as a kid in Massachusetts’ foster care system. Each one represents a night-to-night stay — beyond the regular, longer-term placements — when social workers couldn’t find anywhere else for her to go.
For Bosco, the list is a reminder of a past she’s trying to move beyond.
“There’s nine that I can remember,” she says.
In all, though, she says she had more than 40 placements since she was 3, when she was removed from her mom’s care. And the number of schools she attended?
“Sixteen.”
Four of those schools were in seventh grade alone. With each move, she fell more behind.
“I would consider that educational abuse at that point,” Bosco said.
“You come to school, everyone has friends, they know what they are learning. You are just dropping in. I felt stupid because my grades were really poor.”
When she was close to turning 18, Bosco ran away from state care because she knew she was about to age out and wouldn’t have any support during her senior year. She had to help herself.
Bosco began researching what assistance was available for foster youth who age out. With help from a local nonprofit, she bought a car and lived in it from July to mid-October of that year. That same nonprofit helped her get a place of her own.
She continued to work during the day and attended school at night, getting to the point where she graduated from high school a month ahead of her class. But she missed out on moments and memories other kids take for granted.
“I never got to learn Spanish,” she said. “Or play an instrument or be on a team.
“I feel like I was robbed of a normal childhood and a good education other kids get. In my dreams, I wish I had a stable upbringing where I went to school and was encouraged to get good grades. Where people helped me with my homework.”
She tried community college, but no matter how hard she worked, she struggled. Especially in math.
“I think I’m put at an incredible disadvantage,” she said. “It’s not like I’m not trying. It’s too late to learn the basic math skills I missed. Because of that I may not graduate from college.”
Friends she made while living in care, who stayed with her in some homes, haven’t fared as well as Bosco.
Some are homeless and struggling to get by, she said. Others have been “sex trafficked and continue to live that lifestyle.”
“I know people who have died,” she said. “A lot of them have substance abuse issues and alcoholism … Sometimes I have survivor’s guilt. I feel so guilty that they’re not able to advocate for themselves.”
Now she’s advocating for others.
Bosco recently testified at a Massachusetts legislative hearing on foster care. And she just became a member of the Massachusetts Commission on Unaccompanied Homeless Youth.
Next fall, she plans to start cosmetology school. And she still has hopes to one day finish her degree.
She replays the words she heard in seventh grade, the year her teacher pulled her aside and gave her life-changing advice. It was a similar message to the one she received from her late grandmother, with whom she lived for a few years.
“Education is your only way out.”
This story was originally published December 15, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
