Racial Discrimination in Child Protection

Joseph Doyle, Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management and Applied Economics, MIT Sloan School of Management

Abstract: Ten percent of Black children in the U.S. spend time in foster care—twice the rate of white children. We estimate unwarranted disparities in foster care placement decisions, adjusting for differences in the potential for future maltreatment by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of cases to investigators. Using a sample of nearly 220,000 maltreatment investigations, we find that Black children are 1.7 percentage points (50%) more likely to be placed into foster care following an investigation than white children conditional on subsequent maltreatment potential. This disparity is entirely driven by white investigators and by cases where maltreatment potential is present, in which Black children are twice as likely to be placed as white children (12% vs. 6%). These results suggest white children may be harmed by “under-placement” in high-risk situations via the leniency that white investigators afford to white parents. Leveraging the additional quasi-random assignment of hotline call screeners, we find that both screeners and investigators are responsible for unwarranted disparities in placement, with investigators amplifying the disparity for cases with subsequent maltreatment potential and mitigating it for lower-risk cases. This finding highlights the importance of “systems-based” analyses of inequity in high-stakes decisions, where discrimination can compound across multiple decision-makers.

Joseph Doyle is the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management and Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies public economics in the areas of healthcare and child welfare. His healthcare research investigates sources of value and waste to inform policies aimed at improving the quality and cost-effectiveness of the US healthcare system. This includes partnering with large healthcare providers and payers to conduct randomized controlled trials of changes in the ways healthcare is delivered with an emphasis on addressing social determinants of health. He conducts similar investigations into foster care and juvenile justice programs. Doyle is codirector of the MIT Sloan Initiative for Health Systems Innovation and cochair of the Health Sector of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab. He holds a BS from Cornell University and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

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