Vouchers benefit foster children

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By Stuart Butler

More than a half-million children are in foster care. By definition, they've had it tough.

Social service agencies hesitate to remove children from their natural homes absent unmistakable signs of truly serious problems, such as neglect or abuse.

Child-welfare professionals recognize that, even when they extricate children from deeply troubled home situations and place them in protective, supportive foster homes, the change takes a toll on the children. It tears the little ones away from all that is familiar — neighborhoods, friends and entire social networks — at a critical time in their development.

Often, such gut-wrenching changes keep coming. Once in the system, children typically face one or two changes in placement each year. Nearly one in five foster children remains in care for three years or more. Such disruption increases the probability of later social problems.

Typically, a change of address also forces foster children to change schools. That alone can jeopardize their future. Studies show that children who experience frequent disruptions in their education are more likely to perform below grade level.

A recent survey of education research conducted for the Pew Charitable Trusts confirms that poor performance in school makes it harder to climb the economic ladder in later life. So the education disruption common in foster care can lead to lasting economic as well as social problems for these children.

To deal with the problem, some education experts advocate using vouchers to enable foster children to stay in the same schools even when their home placements change.

Under this approach, a foster child would be able to stay enrolled at his or her current public school, even if the new foster home is located outside the school's service boundaries. The voucher payments would go to the school teaching the child.

Vouchers also could be used to help children attending private schools before entering foster care to continue in those familiar classrooms.

Granted, education vouchers have been highly controversial when proposed as a general remedy for underperforming schools. But the political polarization frequently triggered by these broad proposals has been muted considerably when this far narrower application of vouchers has been suggested.