Education Barriers To Education

Barriers to Education
Foster youth faced many barriers when it came to education. There has been an abundance of research and data completed with the intent of identifying barriers to education for foster youth. Among the previously completed research was a study by Zetlin, Weinberg, and Shea, (2006), titled, Seeing the Whole Picture: Views from Diverse Participants on Barriers to Educating Foster Youths. These three authors built on prior data to establish foster youth as a vulnerable population. The peer reviewed article expressed the need for collaborative support between the child welfare system, the schools and other community resources to address the profound needs of underperforming foster youth in education. The authors used an exploratory study bringing together focus groups consisting of current and former foster youths, caretakers, school representative’s child welfare representatives, researchers and policy makers. The objective of the focus groups was to identify and discuss barriers to learning and achievement and strategies to address educational hurdles facing foster youth in California.
The researchers were able to code transcriptions of focus groups to identify 6 major themes: placement and instability, treatment/education programs, records transfer/database, accountability/monitoring outcomes/advocacy, interagency collaboration/coordination, and confidentiality. The article highlighted, “a major factor affecting educational outcomes of foster youth is the residential instability that they experience. The high level of residential mobility results in constant school transfers” (p. 167). These school transfers resulted in educational setbacks for foster youth. The article sums up with recommendati...

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