(983)OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO EDUCATION AND CHILD WELFARE DATA SHARING: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE CALIFORNIA READY TO SUCCEED PILOT PROJECT

摘要

Background: In the United States, privacy standards under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)limit the sharing of individual student information between education and child welfare agencies. Although many entities identify foster youth as an educationally vulnerable population, this distinction does not exist within federal law. Foster youth are not delineated as an atrisk subgroup which limits the ability to exchange data in order to investigate education outcomes. While local jurisdictions may allow for the merging of student data, they vary with respect to information sharing and the interpretation of laws governing confidentiality. In California, additional data sharing challenges exist. California lacks a viable statewide education data system. Each school district collects its own student data and reports aggregate numbers to the state. Though a statewide child welfare data system, the California State Child Welfare Services/Case Management System (CWS/CMS)exists, youth identifiers are system specific, creating an obstacle to match children in this database to records from other institutions. Ultimately, coordination to address these challenges does not exist at the state level. Therefore, educators do not receive information that they need to appropriately respond to unique challenges associated with maltreatment and foster care placement. Current Paper: The current paper addresses multiple privacy and data challenges and lessons learned in a successful effort to link California education and child welfare administrative datasets. The California Department of Social Services (CDSS), the Center for Social Services Research at the University of California Berkeley (CSSR), the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (Cal-PASS), and the Stuart Foundation initiated a collaborative partnership, called the Ready to Succeed Pilot Project, to link child welfare and education data. CSSR and Cal-PASS conducted the data merge with support from the other partners. CSSR receives quarterly extracts from the Child Welfare Services Case Management System (CWS/CMS). The Cal-PASS initiative collects, analyzes, and shares student data in order to track performance statewide. The California Ready to Succeed Pilot Project was able to overcome external legislative and legal constraints regarding data sharing. The team worked with various oversight agencies and committees in order to satisfy agency memorandums of understanding (MOU’s)and Institutional Review Board (IRB)mandates. Many challenges to educational district support and agreement for project inclusion were mitigated. Lastly, using probabilistic matching, youth were linked in the two longitudinal data systems. Overall, the team was able to delineate a process that set a precedent for Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)compliant data sharing between child welfare and education. The resulting dataset provided an opportunity to investigate aggregate education outcomes of foster youth in California with an emphasis on exploring the relationship between foster care placement and student performance.