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ExpectMore.govExpectMore.gov home pageEXPECT FEDERAL PROGRAMS TO PERFORM WELL, AND BETTER EVERY YEAR.
 
Program Assessment

Program

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Adoption Opportunities

Adoption Opportunities aims to eliminate barriers to adoption and helps to find permanent families for children in the foster care system, particularly children with special needs. The program facilitates adoptions nationally and promotes quality standards for adoption services by awarding competitive grants and contracts.

Rating

What This Rating Means

PERFORMING
Adequate

This rating describes a program that needs to set more ambitious goals, achieve better results, improve accountability or strengthen its management practices.
  • The program awards competitive grants to develop and test innovative approaches to removing barriers to adoption. Activities include efforts to eliminate interjurisdictional adoption barriers, recruit minority families to adopt minority children, and child specific recruitment strategies for older children. The program also provides for an adoption information clearinghouse and resource center.
  • The program was found to lack an acceptable efficiency measure and needs to refine existing measures. The current adoption targets were found not ambitious. Also, there are challenges in collecting uniform data associated with the program's measure to increase the number of grantees, whose results are applied in practice and are an impetus for policy changes.
  • The program lacks a way to measure the program's impact. This information is critical to identifying the program's strengths and weaknesses, and determining if changes are needed to better facilitate adoptions.

Improvement Plan

About Improvement Plans

We are taking the following actions to improve the performance of the program:

  • Identifying and addressing the barriers to increasing the proportion of children adopted from the foster care system.
  • Setting baseline and targets for program's newly developed efficiency measure.
  • Working with grantees and other agency partners to support and improve child welfare program evaluation.

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