In our March 15 issue, where we covered a provocative and insightful presentation by CWLA Senior Consultant Jeffrey Bormaster, we promised to follow up on Bormaster's assertion that child welfare service providers should stop selling their "services" and start selling their "outcomes." Exactly what did "outcomes" mean as he used the term?

JB: The federal government has told states that if they wish to continue to use federal dollars to provide child welfare services, they need to demonstrate they can achieve positive outcomes for children.

For children who are removed from their families because the child cannot be safely maintained in the family, the first desire is to re-unite children and their families in a timely manner. When looking at how long that should take, the federal government set a benchmark that for children whose plan is to reunite with their families, that should occur in less than 12 months 85% of the time (Child and Family Service Review round one).

The purpose of setting the standard was to urge states to focus services to reunite children so they do not stay in government custody for long periods of time. History is clear the government is not a "good" parent for raising children and that system interventions should be time limited and focused on getting children into lifetime relationships and out of the state's custody.

Foster care, group care and residential are service delivery vehicles, they are not services. What the government wants is providers who can deliver the services they need. For the majority of children the state wants reunification services. As a result, group providers need to talk about their success at reunifying children and their families and stop focusing on foster and residential which are merely the service delivery vehicles.

For example, a residential program was bragging that 55% of the children they discharged from their facility last year were reunified. When asked, they admitted that 100% of the children discharged were not intended to be reunified and in fact 25% were for guardianship and adoption.

When I asked them to recompute the percent of children for whom the case plan [was reunification] were actually reunified, their success rate went up to 85%, which matches the national standard. So when the agency started talking about services and not facilities, they began to "sell" outcomes. This what the government wants to buy.

Private providers need to begin to define the positive outcomes for children that the government wants and start showing how well they do at achieving those outcomes.