Child protection professionals work in a multidisciplinary system in which the law and the family court play central roles and which collects an increasing amount of data. Yet we know little about what impact the law has on whether a child is removed by child protective services, is deemed neglected by a family court, or reunifies with a parent. Do state‐to‐state variations in child protection laws, or changes by individual states to their laws, lead to different outcomes for children and families? The dramatic variations in child welfare practice from one state to another suggest that legal variations do matter. Yet empirical research on these questions is scarce both because we collect too little data to measure all such issues, and, because we have failed to study the data we do have. This article is a plea for researchers to rectify that problem and for policymakers to improve data collection. Doing so would facilitate a more clear understanding of the law's effect on child protection outcomes and aid policymakers and advocates in identifying both promising and problematic practices and legal reforms.

We measure the extent to which requiring a high standard of proof for substantiation of child abuse or neglect by child protection agencies actually influences the disposition of a report of abuse or neglect. Using data on nearly 8 million reports from fiscal 2000--2012, we show that a high standard is associated with lower rates of substantiation and that an increase in the standard decreases the probability of substantiation by up to 14 percent. After a change to a high standard, children may be less likely to be placed in foster care, and children and families are more likely to receive other types of services. Increases in the standard seem to be driven by perceptions of the costs of Type 1 error---that is, substantiating a report when no abuse occurred. Indeed, states' decisions to increase the standard are strongly correlated with fatalities in foster care and the size of the foster care system, suggesting that public concern about Type 1 error leading to overly invasive child protection agency action can spur a shift in the standard of proof.

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The United States’ family regulation system often begins with well-intentioned professionals making child protection hotline calls, jeopardizing their own ability to work with families and subjecting the families to surveillance. By the system’s own standards, most of this surveillance leads to no meaningful action. Nowhere is this reality more present than in schools. Educational personnel serve as the leading driver of child maltreatment allegations, yet decades worth of data reveal educator reports of maltreatment are the least likely to be screenedin and the least likely to be substantiated or confirmed. In other words, education personnel— whether motivated by genuine concern, which may nevertheless be informed by implicit biases towards low-income families and families of color; fear of liability; or the desire to access services they believe families cannot acquire elsewhere— overwhelm our child welfare system with unnecessary allegations of maltreatment. This reality has fundamentally transformed the relationship between families and schools. Carrying the heavy burden of mandated reporting laws, public schools disproportionately refer Black and low-income families to the family regulation system, abdicating schools’ opportunity to serve these same families in the communities in which they reside. Rather than serving as the great equalizer, public schools increasingly contribute to the carceral state’s regulation of families. This Article argues that schools must shift their role away from the reporting and surveillance of these families, and instead directly provide and arrange for services for families. This change begins with sharply limiting or repealing mandatory reporting obligations (permitting voluntary reports in severe cases)—but that is only the start. Schools are well-positioned to create new pathways to the supports and services from which most families reported to the family regulation system might actually benefit. Schools are already a primary source of food for impoverished children, and can help ensure low-income families access all the public benefits to which they are entitled. Schools can largely refer children and families to the same services that the family regulation system can—such as mental health services and substance abuse treatment—but without that system’s coercive authority and its associated problems. Where some services are tied to the family regulation system’s involvement, then law should permit schools to refer families directly. Schools know which families need legal services to defend their housing, access benefits, obtain orders of protection—or any of the myriad of other supports that poverty lawyers can provide. This shift would tie schools to the families and communities that they serve and benefit those families and communities far more than the surveillance and policing they experience under the current family regulation system.