New York City Confronts Massive Overrepresentation of Black Children in Foster Care

Michael Fitzgerald - Chronicle of Social Change

New York City's "foster care and juvenile justice system’s 12,000-person workforce, mostly housed at the city’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), has begun taking a new course exploring how subtle, unconscious prejudice ­– often called implicit bias – influences everything from interactions with co-workers to high-stakes child abuse and neglect investigations," according to this article from the Chronicle of Social Change. The new program has been initiated in an effort to address "longstanding disparities, especially for Black children whose presence in the [foster care] system is roughly double their share of the general population." The article explores some of the data pointing to a large racial disproportionality in the foster care system and the efforts to address it with this training.