In April 2005, the CQ Researcher singled out Illinois as setting the “gold standard” for child welfare reform (Price, 2005). The size of the Illinois foster care program dropped from a peak of 52,000 children in 1997 to less than 17,000 in 2005, and child removal rates were cut in half. More than 45,000 foster children in the state were moved from long-term foster care into permanent homes with relatives, adoptive parents, or legal guardians. Median length of stay in foster care decreased from 45 to less than 24 months (Children and Family Research Center, 2006; Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, 2003). Despite this solid record of accomplishment, Illinois was put on the watch list of 16 states that flunked all seven national standards, based on the results of the CFSR. This inconsistency illustrates that the federal evaluation of state child welfare services is seriously flawed. It is mainly due to the problem that the CFSR relies on state data submitted to the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), which is limited to cross-sectional snapshots of child welfare data at sixmonth intervals (Bishop, Grazian, McDonald, Testa, & Gatowski, 2002; Courtney,
Needell, & Wulczyn, 2004). While this point-in-time method provides statistical descriptions that are far superior to the aggregate counts previously reported by the states, AFCARS inability to track children prospectively from foster care entry to exit seriously limits measurement and can severely distort the assessment of performance trends.