Giving Compass' Take:

• Caroline Preston explains how residential facilities in Pennsylvania - and across the country - are failing to provide foster kids with a proper education.

• How can funders help to address this problem at scale? How can the use of residential facilities be reduced? 

• Learn more about how the opioid epidemic is straining the foster care system. 

Young people in foster care across Pennsylvania — and the country — say that being sent to residential facilities often plunges them deeper into academic trouble instead of getting them on track. Schedules are filled with electives like movement therapy, art therapy and “values.” Worksheet- and computer-based education proliferate. The schools too often operate like educational black holes, failing to help kids earn relevant credits. Students complain of being kept on campus when they could be attending neighborhood schools. And government oversight is lacking.

The number of children living in group homes, treatment centers and other institutions has shrunk in recent years as the residential warehousing of kids has fallen out of favor. According to a national 2015 study, on a single day in 2013, the most recent comprehensive data available, kids in those facilities numbered 55,916, 37 percent below the figure for 2004. Federal legislation passed earlier this year is designed to nudge states to further reduce the number of kids in residentials.

But older youth still end up in residential facilities in significant numbers. According to the 2015 study, of the approximately 51,000 children 13 or older who entered foster care in one year, roughly half spent time in institutional settings. Some of these children have serious mental health needs or behavioral issues that child-welfare agencies say can make it difficult to place them with families. Some are consigned to residential schools because of truancy. In some, mostly rural, parts of the country, the opioid epidemic is driving more young people into residential care.

In Pennsylvania, lawyers say, many of the residentials are regulated like private schools, which is to say, hardly at all. While private schools are essentially monitored by affluent, tuition-paying parents who opt into them, no such checks exist for schools that serve foster youth, who by definition have been cut off from their families.

Read the full article about foster kids aren't getting an education by Caroline Preston at The Hechinger Report.