Being placed in foster care is a necessary intervention for some children. But many advocates worry that kids can languish in foster care too long, with harmful effects for children who are temporarily unattached from a permanent family.

A new study co-authored by an MIT economist shows that an innovative Chilean program providing legal aid to children shortens the length of foster-care stays, returning them to families faster. In the process, it improves long-term social outcomes for kids and even reduces government spending on the foster care system.

“It was amazingly successful because the program got kids out of foster care about 30 percent faster,” says Joseph Doyle, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who helped lead the research. “Because foster care is expensive, that paid for the program by itself about four times over. If you improve the case management of kids in foster care, you can improve a child’s well-being and save money.”

The paper, “ Effects of Enhanced Legal Aid in Child Welfare: Evidence from a Randomized Trial of Mi Abogado ,” is published in the American Economic Review .

The authors are Ryan Cooper, a professor and director of government innovation at the University of Chicago; Doyle, who is the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management at MIT Sloan; and Andrés P. Hojman, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Rigorous design

To conduct the study, the scholars examined the Chilean government’s new program “Mi Abogado” — meaning, “My Lawyer” — which provided enhanced legal support to children in foster care, as well as access to psychologists and social workers. Legal advocates in the program were given a reduced caseload, for one thing, to help them focus further on each individual case.

Chile introduced Mi Abogado in 2017, with a feature that made it ripe for careful study: The program randomizes most of the participants selected, as part of how it was rolled out. From the pool of children in the foster care system, randomly being part of the program makes it easier to identify its causal impact on later outcomes.

“Very few foster-care redesigns are evaluated in such a rigorous way, and we need more of this innovative approach to policy improvement,” Doyle notes.

The experiment included 1,781 children who were in Chile’s foster care program in 2019, with 581 selected for the Mi Abogado services; it tracked their trajectories over more than two years. Almost all the participants were in group foster-care homes.

In addition to reduced time spent in foster care, the Chilean data showed that children in the Mi Abogado program had a subsequent 30 percent reduction in terms of contact with the criminal justice system and a 5 percent increase in school attendance, compared to children in foster care who did not participate in the program.

“They were getting involved with crime less and attending school more,” Doyle says.

As powerful as the results appear, Doyle acknowledges that he would like to be able to analyze further which elements of the Mi Abogado program had the biggest impact — legal help, counseling and therapy, or other factors.

“We would like to see more about what exactly they are doing for children to speed their exit from care,” Doyle says. “Is it mostly about therapy? Is it working with judges and cutting through red tape? We think the lawyer is a very important part. But the results suggest it is not just the lawyer that improves outcomes.”

More programs in other places?

The current paper is one of many studies Doyle has developed during his career that relate to foster care and related issues. In another forthcoming paper, Doyle and some co-authors find that about 5 percent of U.S. children spend some time in foster care — a number that appears to be fairly common internationally, too.

“People don’t appreciate how common child protective services and foster care are,” Doyle says. Moreover, he adds, “Children involved in these systems are particularly vulnerable.”

With a variety of U.S. jurisdictions running their own foster-care systems, Doyle notes that many people have the opportunity to usefully learn about the Mi Abogado program and consider if its principles might be worth testing. And while that requires some political will, Doyle expresses optimism that policymakers might be open to new ideas.

“It’s not really a partisan issue,” Doyle says. “Most people want to help protect kids, and, if an intervention is needed for kids, have an interest in making the intervention run well.”

After all, he notes, the impact of the Mi Abogado program appears to be both substantial and lasting, making it an interesting example to consider.

“Here we have a case where the child outcomes are improved and the government saved money,” Doyle observes. “I’d like to see more experimentation with programs like this in other places.”

Support for the research was provided in part by the MIT Sloan Latin America Office. Chile’s Studies Department of the Ministry of Education made data available from the education system.