How Long Do States Let Children in Foster Care Wait for Permanent Families? Timely Permanency Report Cards

Children need safe and permanent families for healthy development. Therefore, states are tasked with moving children in foster care to permanency through reunification with the family of origin, adoption, guardianship, or other custodial arrangements with relatives. Federal laws that guide states emphasize timely permanency, but states exercise substantial discretion in implementation.This report summarizes a new analysis of states' performance on four permanency measures—overall, by the child's age at entry, and by race or ethnicity. Performance across measures is summarized by an overall ranking, from 1 to 51. Complete project results are available at www.aei.org/foster-care-report-card. The analysis demonstrates that children's chances of permanency, especially through adoption, depend largely on where they live

Timely Permanency for Children in Foster Care: Revisiting Core Assumptions about Children’s Options and Outcomes

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA, 1997) represented an emerging consensus that foster care should not be a long-term solution for children. Foster care is intended to provide a temporary living arrangement until permanency can be achieved, but, at the time ASFA was passed, some children were spending large proportions of their childhoods in temporary homes. In many cases, these children had a permanency plan of reunification that had little chance of being realized. Thus, the overarching goals of ASFA were to reduce the amount of time children spent “in limbo” and to promote permanency, while maintaining explicit preferences for family preservation and reunification

Juvenile offending among maltreated youth:Assessing type-specificity and offense specialization in the cycle of violence

This study assesses how different forms of abuse and neglect are associated with juvenile offending, with specific emphasis on whether youth commit offenses analogous to the illicit parental behaviors to which they were exposed. Using statewide child welfare system data linked with juvenile offending records, we assess rates and types of offending among a cohort of youth exposed to child maltreatment, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect (N = 7,787). Findings suggest that the maltreatment-delinquency link is better characterized as a general rather than a specific cycle of violence, though sex abuse victims tend to specialize in sex offending. Youth exposed to physical abuse, moral neglect, and parent incarceration offend at high rates overall and should be prioritized for prevention and treatment services

A Little Blue Bird Told Me: Sentiment Change on Orphanage Tourism

This study examined Twitter conversations to understand the changes in the sentiments related to orphanage tourism between 2009 and 2019. Past research on orphanage tourism mostly took a qualitative approach, which provided profound knowledge but was limited to a single time and those directly involved. This study fills the gap by analyzing the tweets posted by different parties, including the individuals that have participated or are willing to participate in orphanage tourism, institutions that have campaigned against the phenomenon, and organizations that have promoted orphanage volunteering. Analysis of 109,723 tweets using lexicons and supervised learning—Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Naive Bayes, and Logistic regression—revealed that the year 2014 marked a turning point for orphanage tourism conversations as the number of posts dropped significantly, and the messages against orphanage tourism received attention. However, the positive sentiment still prevailed throughout the decade when all tweets were considered

The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) presents the first spectroscopic data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This ninth data release (DR9) of the SDSS project includes 535,995 new galaxy spectra (median z=0.52), 102,100 new quasar spectra (median z=2.32), and 90,897 new stellar spectra, along with the data presented in previous data releases. These spectra were obtained with the new BOSS spectrograph and were taken between 2009 December and 2011 July. In addition, the stellar parameters pipeline, which determines radial velocities, surface temperatures, surface gravities, and metallicities of stars, has been updated and refined with improvements in temperature estimates for stars with T_eff<5000 K and in metallicity estimates for stars with [Fe/H]>-0.5. DR9 includes new stellar parameters for all stars presented in DR8, including stars from SDSS-I and II, as well as those observed as part of the SDSS-III Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration-2 (SEGUE-2). The astrometry error introduced in the DR8 imaging catalogs has been corrected in the DR9 data products. The next data release for SDSS-III will be in Summer 2013, which will present the first data from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) along with another year of data from BOSS, followed by the final SDSS-III data release in December 2014.Comment: 9 figures; 2 tables. Submitted to ApJS. DR9 is available at http://www.sdss3.org/dr

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15<z<3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Lyman alpha forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z=0.3 and z=0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyman alpha forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D_A(z) and H^{-1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z~2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS.Comment: 49 pages, 16 figures, accepted by A

DESI Survey Validation Spectra Reveal an Increasing Fraction of Recently Quenched Galaxies at z∼1z\sim1

We utilize $\sim17000$ bright Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) from the novel Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Survey Validation spectroscopic sample, leveraging its deep ($\sim2.5$ hour/galaxy exposure time) spectra to characterize the contribution of recently quenched galaxies to the massive galaxy population at $0.4<z<1.3$. We use Prospector to infer non-parametric star formation histories and identify a significant population of post-starburst galaxies that have joined the quiescent population within the past $\sim1$ Gyr. The highest redshift subset (277 at $z>1$) of our sample of recently quenched galaxies represents the largest spectroscopic sample of post-starburst galaxies at that epoch. At $0.4<z<0.8$, we measure the number density of quiescent LRGs, finding that recently quenched galaxies constitute a growing fraction of the massive galaxy population with increasing lookback time. Finally, we quantify the importance of this population amongst massive ($\mathrm{log}(M_\star/M_\odot)>11.2$) LRGs by measuring the fraction of stellar mass each galaxy formed in the Gyr before observation, $f_{\mathrm{1 Gyr}}$. Although galaxies with $f_{\mathrm{1 Gyr}}>0.1$ are rare at $z\sim0.4$ ($\lesssim 0.5\%$ of the population), by $z\sim0.8$ they constitute $\sim3\%$ of massive galaxies. Relaxing this threshold, we find that galaxies with $f_\mathrm{1 Gyr}>5\%$ constitute $\sim10\%$ of the massive galaxy population at $z\sim0.8$. We also identify a small but significant sample of galaxies at $z=1.1-1.3$ that formed with $f_{\mathrm{1 Gyr}}>50\%$, implying that they may be analogues to high-redshift quiescent galaxies that formed on similar timescales. Future analysis of this unprecedented sample promises to illuminate the physical mechanisms that drive the quenching of massive galaxies after cosmic noon.Comment: Submitted to ApJ Letters after DESI Collaboration Review. 14 pages, 5 figures, comments welcome

The Eighth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Data from SDSS-III

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) started a new phase in August 2008, with new instrumentation and new surveys focused on Galactic structure and chemical evolution, measurements of the baryon oscillation feature in the clustering of galaxies and the quasar Ly alpha forest, and a radial velocity search for planets around ~8000 stars. This paper describes the first data release of SDSS-III (and the eighth counting from the beginning of the SDSS). The release includes five-band imaging of roughly 5200 deg^2 in the Southern Galactic Cap, bringing the total footprint of the SDSS imaging to 14,555 deg^2, or over a third of the Celestial Sphere. All the imaging data have been reprocessed with an improved sky-subtraction algorithm and a final, self-consistent photometric recalibration and flat-field determination. This release also includes all data from the second phase of the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Evolution (SEGUE-2), consisting of spectroscopy of approximately 118,000 stars at both high and low Galactic latitudes. All the more than half a million stellar spectra obtained with the SDSS spectrograph have been reprocessed through an improved stellar parameters pipeline, which has better determination of metallicity for high metallicity stars.Comment: Astrophysical Journal Supplements, in press (minor updates from submitted version

Beta Dips in the Gaia Era: Simulation Predictions of the Galactic Velocity Anisotropy Parameter (β) for Stellar Halos

The velocity anisotropy parameter, β, is a measure of the kinematic state of orbits in the stellar halo, which holds promise for constraining the merger history of the Milky Way (MW). We determine global trends for β as a function of radius from three suites of simulations, including accretion-only and cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. We find that the two types of simulations are consistent and predict strong radial anisotropy ($\langle \beta \rangle \sim 0.7$) for Galactocentric radii greater than 10 kpc. Previous observations of β for the MW's stellar halo claim a detection of an isotropic or tangential "dip" at r ~ 20 kpc. Using the N-body+SPH simulations, we investigate the temporal persistence, population origin, and severity of "dips" in β. We find that dips in the in situ stellar halo are long-lived, while dips in the accreted stellar halo are short-lived and tied to the recent accretion of satellite material. We also find that a major merger as early as z ~ 1 can result in a present-day low (isotropic to tangential) value of β over a broad range of radii and angles. While all of these mechanisms are plausible drivers for the β dip observed in the MW, each mechanism in the simulations has a unique metallicity signature associated with it, implying that future spectroscopic surveys could distinguish between them. Since an accurate knowledge of β(r) is required for measuring the mass of the MW halo, we note that significant transient dips in β could cause an overestimate of the halo's mass when using spherical Jeans equation modeling

Detecting and Characterizing Mg II absorption in DESI Survey Validation Quasar Spectra

In this paper we will present findings on the detection of Magnesium II (MgII, lambda = 2796 {\AA}, 2803 {\AA}) absorption systems observed in data from the Early Data Release (EDR) of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). DESI is projected to obtain spectroscopy of approximately 3 million quasars (QSOs), of which over 99% are anticipated to be found at redshifts greater than z < 0.3, such that DESI would be able to observe an associated or intervening Mg II absorber illuminated by the background QSO. We have developed an autonomous supplementary spectral pipeline that detects such systems through an initial line-fitting process and then confirms line properties using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler. Based upon both a visual inspection and the reanalysis of coadded observations, we estimate this sample of absorption systems to have a completeness of 82.56% and purity of 99.08%. As the spectra in which Mg II systems are detected are the result of coadding multiple observations, we can determine the sensitivity, and therefore completeness, of the sample by searching for known Mg II systems in coadded data with fewer observations (and therefore lower signal-to-noise). From a parent catalog containing 83,207 quasars, we detect a total of 23,921 Mg II absorption systems following a series of quality cuts. Extrapolating from this occurrence rate of 28.75% implies a catalog at the completion of the five-year DESI survey that contains over eight hundred thousand Mg II absorbers. The cataloging of these systems will enable significant further research as they carry information regarding circumgalactic medium (CGM) environments, the distribution of intervening galaxies, and the growth of metallicity across the redshift range 0.3 < z < 2.5.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure