Results-Based Accountability Success Story

Turn the Curve Action Plan Details

Story Behind the Curve: 

Baltimore City Department of Social Services was easily among the worst organizations of its kind in the country. All of the things that could go wrong in an agency were going wrong. The agency didn’t know where the children were. Bad things were happening to children in foster care, and children weren’t leaving foster care for permanency. They were coming in to foster care in ways that we would now consider unwarranted. And, so we set about a plan of changing that, drastically.

Imagine an organization that didn’t really have a method. It didn’t have practices articulated for how we do things like “aid monthly visits.” It didn’t have a method for assigning cases to workers in an equitable or transparent fashion. It didn’t have a method for ensuring that every worker had a supervisor. It felt like there were 2,500 free lancers each of whom worked for a different radio station.

First, we articulated a mission. We got disciplined about data. The trick is, of course, to be data driven, which means you need an elegant amount of data from which you can see patterns and drive decision-making.

We introduced practice standards around considering families our partners and not as people in whom we’ve identified there is something wrong and they need us to fix them. We approached it as there is nothing wrong with anybody; people are having different struggles, and our great hope is that we can be present for them in such a way that they can choose to act in their own best interest and send their families on different trajectories. We also set standards for practice internally on what our expectations of our staff were. We came to a collective agreement about the basic things we do and how we go about doing them. We also invested an enormous amount of time and energy in leadership development.

Next, we engaged in overlapping waves of activities that included work on the front end to reduce the size of the “opening of the front door.” Instead of thinking, “at the first sign of trouble, the thing to do is to take someone’s kid,” we started thinking, “is there anything we can possibly do to keep children safe at home?” And so, over the course of this time period, we reduced intake by 31%.

Reducing intake is much more tricky than increasing exits, because nobody wants to reduce the number of children in foster care by leaving children at home to their own peril. So moving that threshold was a tricky surgical operation that involved a lot of support for decision-making on the front line and ensuring that no decision ever came down to one person.

Simultaneously, we had to do something to open up much more widely, “the back door.” There are many kids who had come in to foster care when we saw the first sign of trouble. And, then the agency had gone about its intention of keeping them in foster care. And we decided, no, we have work to do to make sure every kid transitions to a home of their very own as rapidly as possible, and began to reverse engineer from that fate by imagining foster care as an intervention that is rare and brief.

That meant measuring our success at the speed at which we were assessing and planning for every kid that came into care and the richness with which we were pursuing reunification. And when that was not an option, the speed with which we were pursuing adoption or guardianship. So, you can imagine we were watching the trend of reunification and targeting very specific goals for adoption and guardianship that put an equally important role in reducing the size of the case load.

Results-Based accountability and results based leadership is the key to the future of this area of government. It’s much more than a class you have to take, or a tool that you use once in a blue moon. Being results focused is a way of being. It’s not a task, it’s not a book you read, and it’s not a formula. It’s about the very way you think and everything you do, all day, every day. I would convert those pronouns; it’s about everything we did all day, every day. And up to this minute, it is our way of being in the world. We feel like anything less than that would not have yielded the results that we accomplished.

Additional Resources: