Situating public management’s contributions to social equity: using decomposition analysis to examine U.S. child welfare outcome disparities

ABSTRACT

Despite the importance of social equity as an ideal and goal, much work remains in understanding how public services may help foster greater equity – or create and sustain social inequities. Leveraging the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method, we examine the extent to which administrative centralization and privatization contribute to outcome disparities between Black and White children in the U.S. foster care system. We find that centralized systems tend to narrow the outcome gap, as do those with higher degrees of privatization. The paper’s discussion considers how these findings compare to prior work, and the implications for social equity theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Social equity
• public management
• child welfare

Acknowledgement

The AFCARS data used in this publication were made available by the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN), Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and have been used with permission. Data from the AFCARS were originally collected by the Children’s Bureau. Funding for the NDACAN project was provided by the Children’s Bureau, Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The collector of the original data, the funder, the Archive, Cornell University and their agents or employees bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The three journals included in Blessett et al. (2019) review were Administrative Theory & Praxis, Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, and Public Administration Review.

2. While more recent AFCARS data files are available, we elected to use the 2012–2014 cohort as it provided sufficient time for children and youth to progress through the system while also mitigating the likelihood of right-censoring that would occur with more recent cohorts. Critically, our 2012–2014 cohort is generalizable across multiple years, as our dependent variable (emancipation rate) differed by less than 3% between 2012 and 2021 (with emancipation rates of 10% and 9%, respectively).