For decades, hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country have had a rare opportunity to shape the lives of foster children. Court-Appointed Special Advocates meet with kids, confer with social workers and lawyers, and write official reports to judges. These unique relationships begin when the juvenile courts assign a “CASA” or “guardian ad litem.”
But today, the 40-year-old organization overseeing this national network of volunteers faces unprecedented scrutiny. Following a financial review, in early 2023 the U.S. Department of Justice declared the National CASA/GAL Association for Children a “high-risk” grantee, freezing the group’s largest funding source. Leaders of the $16 million Seattle-based nonprofit have attempted to soothe alarmed employees, saying accounting glitches that surfaced during the review will soon be fixed. Few of the government’s specific concerns have been made public, and many employees began the new year on unpaid furlough and unsure of their futures.
Yet while the national CASA group struggles, state and local affiliates continue to thrive. Revenue for roughly 900 independent affiliates exceeded a combined $477 million in 2021 — a 57% increase since 2016, the groups’ data shows. The cumulative budgets are heavily reliant on public funding from every level of government, and rival what states such as Colorado, Wisconsin, Kansas, Alabama, Oklahoma and Nebraska spend on their entire child welfare systems.
Given the model’s prominence and popularity, what is the actual impact on children matched with a CASA volunteer? To answer that question, The Imprint reviewed published findings and interviewed independent social scientists who have written or reviewed relevant research. Seven scholars echoed one common theme: Despite the vast amount of taxpayer spending, public attention and millions of children’s lives involved, rigorous evaluation of CASAs has been limited.
The CASA/GAL Association is not alone among social service groups lacking in consistent findings on their outcomes. And some of the independent state organizations have worked with outside researchers to build evidence. Yet for the most part, national leaders tout overwhelmingly positive survey responses from judges; anecdotal testimony; unpublished papers and a 33-year-old study on “minority children” that scholars have since described as having “grave” limitations. In some instances, network leaders have publicly refuted or attempted to discredit negative findings.
“There’s a lot we do in child welfare that has a thin or mixed evidence base. All of it should be scrutinized, and all of it should be subject to further study.”
— University of California, Berkeley professor Jill Duerr Berrick
Meanwhile, two of the most recent studies of the CASA model produced conflicting results on key measures such as whether foster children who are appointed volunteers are more or less likely to leave the system for a permanent home.
“I know cases where, anecdotally, CASAs have done great work — and they want to show they are doing great work,” said Associate Professor Clark Peters of the University of Missouri. Peters has served on an advisory board for the National CASA/GAL Association, part of what he described as a halting effort to improve its evidence base. “But you can’t do that unless you’re also willing to find the bruises, to find the places where you aren’t doing such a great job.”
An executive from a high-powered Washington, D.C., political strategy firm responded to questions from The Imprint sent to the National CASA/GAL Association. Michael Frazier of SKDK stated in an email that the group plans a “greater focus on evidence-based research practices.” He noted that although rigorous evaluation has been difficult due to vast differences in how the hundreds of CASA groups operate, the network is “constantly evaluating and identifying ways to assess and improve its model.”
The statement also pointed to favorable reviews from family and juvenile court judges, highlighting a recent unpublished national survey that found 93% of bench officers had positive views of the volunteers. “We believe these types of studies provide the best assessment of outcomes most relevant to the CASA/GAL core model,” Frazier stated.
Yet even some supporters of the model and former employees remain unsatisfied. Among them is Robert Latham, a former senior attorney for Miami’s court advocate program, who pointed to years of taxpayer spending on the state-managed volunteer “guardians ad litem.”
“The question of whether the GAL Program is ethical, effective, or even good for children is all the same: we don’t know,” Latham, now associate director of a children and youth law clinic at the University of Miami School of Law, wrote on his blog in 2019. “And before we spend another $600 million we should probably find out.”
The growth of a massive charity
The first “special advocate” volunteers were invited into court in 1977 by Washington state Judge David Soukup, who died in December at age 90. By 2007, there were more than 900 local offices supporting over 50,000 volunteers, a cohort that has since doubled and now serves more than 200,000 children annually.
CASA has been touted by prominent public figures for decades, from the legendary civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman to the television host Dr. Phil. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan conferred a medal on a CASA volunteer leader at the White House.
At an October Senate hearing, Mon’a Houston described the wrenching experience of cycling through more than a dozen foster and group homes, and being overmedicated, incarcerated and neglected by caseworkers from the Georgia Division of Family & Children Services (DFCS) — until a CASA volunteer got involved.
“I was 17 when I was finally assigned a court-appointed special advocate, CASA,” Houston said tearfully. “Ms. Paige was the first adult who listened to me. She would regularly fight with DFCS to get me what I needed.”
Proponents describe numerous other benefits of CASAs, who are able to help just one or two kids at a time when social workers are otherwise deluged. In fundraising pitches, billboards and promotional ads across the country, the groups cite helping children reach permanent homes and broader goals of addressing their trauma.
There is a distinct appeal for the volunteers as well, said Professor Jill Duerr Berrick, a leading social work scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. “CASA gives people somewhere to place their caring if they don’t have the bandwidth to be a foster parent but want to be more helpful than making a financial contribution,” she said.
Far-reaching roles
Duerr Berrick and other scholars confirmed that the CASA programs are uniquely difficult to evaluate due to vast differences between programs from state to state.
Many CASA volunteers participate in hearings as “friends of the court.” But the volunteers can also be granted “party” status in litigation — meaning they have a right to attend hearings and file objections and appeals on substantial “best interest” questions, such as whether a child should be adopted. They can be assisted by their organizations’ attorneys, even when children are not assigned their own court-appointed lawyers.
Either way, in communities nationwide, the role of CASA volunteers can be far-reaching. Many CASA websites include variations on the following language: “In order to make a recommendation to the court, the CASA volunteer must independently investigate a case.” That includes talking with the child, parents, family members, social workers, school officials and health care providers, and reviewing “all records pertaining to the child’s school, medical and social worker reports.” The CASA websites also describe volunteers as “highly effective in getting their recommendations accepted in court,” with judges accepting “all or almost all” of them in “four out of five cases.”
The volunteers’ ubiquity and influence has critics. A recent report from Minnesota’s management and budget office raised concerns about volunteers “maintaining appropriate behavior, boundaries, and expectations for oneself and other parties to a case” — a finding the board president of CASA Minnesota told The Minnesota Star Tribune amounted to “slander.”
Others have questioned courts asking nonprofessional volunteers — who national association data shows are typically white, college-educated women — for their views on the “best interests” of vulnerable foster children who are disproportionately Black and Indigenous and from low-income communities.
A 2016 law review article, “However Kindly Intentioned: Structural Racism and Volunteer CASA Programs,” condemned the role of volunteers with “party” status.
“When that power — not just the power to determine a child’s fate, but the power to even speak one’s own opinion on the matter — is distributed away from poor families and children of color and given to a group of middle-class white volunteers,” two family court attorneys argued, racial bias is “given a seat at the table in court for all to see.”
Frazier, the spokesperson for the national CASA organization, said diversifying the CASA network remains a priority, and the group has its “eyes wide open on this recruitment imperative.”
CASA under limited review
Designing the most rigorous kind of study on CASA — with randomly selected “control” and “intervention” groups and large enough sample sizes — is a difficult task. Judges often assign CASAs in more complex cases, and those bench officers are the final arbiters of decisions made in court, so teasing out the specific results from the volunteers’ recommendations can be challenging.
Since the mid-1980s, CASA groups have instead reported their effectiveness through testimonials and survey responses. A 2021 New York City interview study of 15 young adults, mostly Black women over age 18, described the volunteers as fierce advocates who encourage “empowerment.” They helped solve basic needs for those aging out of foster care, like filling out job and housing applications, visiting colleges and appealing unfair school grades.
A 2008 “consumer satisfaction” survey published in the Children and Youth Services Review quoted an unnamed judge saying, “I wish I had one for every case.” A frontline worker described the CASA as someone who “tag-teamed” one child’s case, “helping to dig up more information about the parents and the kids.” (Parents of the children in foster care responded less enthusiastically: “some parents and child welfare workers believe CASA volunteers have their own bias against parents,” noted the study authors.)
Two papers touted on the national CASA association’s website have never been published, including one that reported children with CASAs experienced “significantly higher levels of hope.”
Peters, of the University of Missouri, found the weak or publicly unavailable research base that the National CASA/GAL Association highlights on its website “troublesome” — including some studies conducted more than 30 years ago. “For the most part,” Peters said, “these are some dusty articles, to be sure.”
Although CASAs have been active in children’s cases across the country for four decades, only one study has attempted to meet the scientific gold standard using a randomized sample. Yet that study was “hampered by a multitude of grave methodological flaws,” according to UC Berkeley’s Duerr Berrick and co-author Jennifer Lawson, who published two comprehensive analyses of CASA research in 2013 and 2015.
“The literature base seems to affirm the legitimacy of findings that may not be legitimate at all.”
— A 2013 Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work review of CASA studies
The researchers acknowledged many of the purported benefits of volunteers, including their consistency on a child’s case, even as attorneys and caseworkers turn over. But they concluded that much of what was claimed by CASA organizations had little or no scientific basis, with conflicting results on how the volunteers affected children’s lengths of stay and placement stability in foster care, and their prospects for adoption or reuniting with family or other close kin.
Selection bias and inadequate statistical controls could be found across studies frequently cited by other researchers: The common consensus — that court-appointed advocates contributed to higher rates of foster children finding permanent homes, or achieving greater “well-being over time” — lacked evidence.
“The literature base seems to affirm the legitimacy of findings that may not be legitimate at all,” Lawson and Duerr Berrick wrote.
In a recent email, Duerr Berrick noted that judges’ positive opinions are “an important starting point for any program,” while it continues to build an evidence base.
“There’s a lot we do in child welfare that has a thin or mixed evidence base,” she said. “All of it should be scrutinized, and all of it should be subject to further study.”
The latest, most ambitious CASA studies
Since the UC Berkeley review, CASA leaders in some states have embraced the challenge it posed, and invited more rigorous scientific scrutiny. Two recent efforts sought to improve on the small sample sizes and selection bias issues that have characterized past research. Yet while both papers are praised by uninvolved researchers, neither was a full-blown randomized trial, and they reached roughly opposite conclusions on some measures.
One unique study came out last October. It compared 8,000 children’s outcomes: some with CASA programs, and some without. The study broadened previous analyses by looking beyond “permanency” outcomes to examine children’s health, finding that having a volunteer correlated with more regular doctor appointments.
At the Ohio CASA organization’s request, lead researcher Dushka Crane also incorporated focus groups with young people in the paper, to highlight their needs and how the volunteers could better serve them.
“Their stories were very difficult,” Crane said. “We heard a pervasive sense that youth don’t feel like they had a trusted adult, and fear they felt while being in the system, and wanting to be more involved in decisions about their lives.”
Among the more negative results, Crane’s team found children of color with volunteers were likely to move between foster homes more frequently than their white peers. But an Ohio CASA press release highlighted the upsides, stating that children appointed volunteers “spent less time in an out-of-home placement” and were “more likely to be reunified with family.”
“I was disappointed because I believe that the organization I worked with cares very deeply about supporting children while they are in care.”
— Vanderbilt University Professor Cynthia Osborne
A 2019 Texas study with a far larger sample size found something quite different: Children matched with a court volunteer had “significantly lower odds” of ending up in permanent homes, and “lower odds of being reunified” with family. Those outcomes conflict with some CASA groups’ own claims and decades-old federal policies that require child welfare authorities to reduce lengths of stay in foster care, and to prioritize family reunification with parents or kin.
The Texas study’s lead author, child and family policy expert Cynthia Osborne, describes herself as a CASA supporter. While she was surprised by the results, she applauded statewide leaders for being “courageous” in pursuing the study.
“I was disappointed because I believe that the organization I worked with cares very deeply about supporting children while they are in care,” said Osborne, now a professor and research director at Vanderbilt University. She added that no one study should be the final word on such a varied program.
Nevertheless, some Texas CASA leaders publicly disputed the results from the study they had helped design.
“Flawed Study Fails to Measure CASA’s Impact,” declared a November 2019 blog post by president and CEO of Dallas CASA Kathleen LaValle. “Flaws in the underlying study methodology and generalizations based on small data differences render Osborne’s findings unreliable and unremarkable.” LaValle further warned that Osborne’s study could have “negative repercussions” that are “real and immediate,” and stir up “claims that CASA programs are a haven for white supremacists.”
LaValle echoed those arguments in a recent interview and series of emails, and shared a more detailed five-page rebuttal she had provided to her local board of directors. She also said her local CASA chapter is not resistant to studies of volunteers’ effectiveness. But she disputed evaluating CASA based on “permanency” outcomes because judges, not volunteers, have the ultimate say in children’s cases.
Osborne — and every other scholar interviewed for this story — stands by her research. She said she worked closely for more than a year with Texas CASA leaders, judges and CPS agencies to select the outcomes to be measured.
Some CASA leaders said they have read the mixed results to date closely. Rather than disputing critical findings, Jennifer DeBalko, executive director of Pennsylvania CASA, noted the importance of CASA groups figuring out “where the gaps are.”
“We have to use the information we receive to adjust the way we’re doing things in order to meet the needs of kids and families we work with,” DeBalko said. “I’ve seen change, and CASA has shifted with the trends in child welfare and the feedback from these studies — but certainly there are always areas for improvement.”
Jan. 31, update: This story has been updated to clarify language describing a Department of Justice financial review of the National CASA/GAL Association for Children.