Expediting Permanency: A central long-term goal of most CIP reform efforts is to ensure that dependency cases progress through the required sequence of court hearings in a timely fashion, thus ensuring the timely achievement of permanency. The time to permanency is a key outcome of interest in the study sites. Similarly, reforms that reduce time to permanency are being highlighted in the other three study components.
Maintaining Child Safety:A key concern is that expedited permanency not be achieved at the expense of child safety (for instance, children are returned home more quickly, but to an unsafe environment). Thus, success in this domain is measured in two ways: (1) efforts that resulted in decreased time to permanency with no commensurate observable increase in child maltreatment; and (2) efforts that resulted in actual improvements in child safety.
Facilitating Child Well-being: Of the three primary outcomes of interest, child well-being is the least well-defined by the child welfare field. Generally, it is accepted that measures of a child's health and educational status are good indicators of well-being. However, it is undecided whether child welfare systems nationally should place equal emphasis on achieving child well-being, or whether they should be primarily concerned with the conditions necessary for ultimately achieving this; namely, concentrating on ensuring children are safe and moving them to permanency as quickly as possible. In this way they will be able to grow and thrive within the most family-like setting possible thereby achieving well-being. Regardless, this evaluation takes into account certain conditions thought to form the foundation for healthy child development and thus well-being. These include placement stability while in foster care, the degree to which services are incorporated into court and child welfare agency plans for the child, and the timely achievement of permanency.
