UC Berkeley

As the city’s economy booms, foster-parent recruitment in San Francisco lags, creating financial and demographic barriers to finding foster parents for the city’s most vulnerable children.

As the recently released report “The Invisible Achievement Gap” outlines, foster students require more funding and services than the typical student, and getting them this attention requires a new degree of communication and transparency in what has heretofore been a closed-book system.

By Darian Woods Imagine that in a Child, Youth and Family (CYF) call center in Auckland, New Zealand, operators are interpreting rows of numbers on a computer monitor. Among the data points: The age of mothers on a benefit, the date of their first benefit payment, family type and 129 other details.

By Allen Ng Sabah is the poorest state in Malaysia. Of the 3.2 million people who make up its population, more than 30,000 are children who are not recognized as citizens of Malaysia – or any other country.

Note: This story was updated on July 23 to reflect the correct job title of a source. Despite California’s steep decline in juvenile crime and incarceration rates, the state is spending millions of dollars helping counties finance the renovation and expansion of juvenile halls and camps.

Last month, the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association selected David Kirp’s “Improbable Scholars” for its 2014 Outstanding Book Award. The honor, reserved for education’s intellectual heavyweights, is not only a nod to Kirp’s scholarly achievement, but more, an acknowledgement of the power of marrying journalism and policy into a narrative that can drive public interest where there is seemingly so little: systems change.

By Josh Neff My friend Steven decided to become a doctor because he wanted to serve the poor. When it came time to choose a specialty, however, he picked pediatrics because he said he had run out of patience for the self-destructive behavior he saw among some adult patients in underserved communities.

By Nora Bacher In the wake of the Great Recession, child welfare administrators and policymakers have to make tough choices about where to invest in foster children. A study published in the January issue of Children and Youth Services Review found that a program for foster preschoolers may double their chances of finding a permanent home while also saving money for cash-strapped counties.

By Claudia L. Romeu A study published in April of last year makes an association between being victim of child abuse and becoming a perpetrator of intimate partner violence as an adult, begging a large-scale response, according to the study’s principal investigator.