Child Welfare
The University of Wisconsin’s newswire provides details here about the Center on Child Welfare Policy and Practice, which is a new research venture that will be overseen by the university’s school of social work and the Institute for Research on Poverty.
The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times is hopeful that opening up dependency courts to public scrutiny will have a significant positive impact on the number of children who die in the city each year.
Michigan’s new child welfare director said the effort to hire more caseworkers is going well, reports Tim Martin of the Associated Press. The state agreed to hire hundreds of new caseworkers as part of the consent decree that settled the state’s lawsuit with nonprofit litigator Children’s Rights.
Education/Jobs
Mary Kelli Palka of the Florida Times Union reports on Florida’s plan to establish a statewide rating system aimed at improving early learning at licensed child-care centers.
The average debt of Iowa students keeps going up while the state posts the fourth-highest default rate in the nation, writes research analyst Deborah Thornton in a guest column for The Daily Iowan. Thornton asks: is anyone at these colleges listening?
Juvenile Justice
Steven Teske, a juvenile judge in Clayton County, Ga. and a prominent advocate on the national level, writes for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange here on the politics of fear and the superpredator myth.
