Mark Courtney is a a member of the faculty of the University of Washington School of Social Work and Executive Director of Partners for Our Children, a public-private partnership devoted to improving the child welfare system (www.partnersforourchildren.org). His fields of special interest are welfare reform, and child welfare services, such as child protection, foster care, group care, and adoption and professionalization of social work.

Professor Courtney's work has followed the outcomes over time of 1,200 families in Milwaukee that applied for public assistance in 1999. The three-wave panel study examined the well-being of parents and children in these families over three years. A second study interviewed 1,500 families that were involved in child welfare services in Milwaukee. A third study involved families in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, in collaboration with the public child welfare agencies. That study is following 755 youths who will age out of foster care in the participating states. The research team follows the experience of these youths as they make the transition out of state care from age 17 through 21. The youths have been interviewed once, at about the time of their 17th birthday and will be interviewed again at 19 and 21.

Professor Courtney's Ph.D. is from the School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation title is "Reunification of Foster Children with Their Families: The Case of California's Children." Most recently, he was associate professor, School of Social Work, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. He has written two books: Barth, Courtney, Berrick, and Albert, From child abuse to permanency planning: Child welfare services pathways and placements (Aldine de Gruyter, 1994) and Specht and Courtney, Unfaithful angels: How social work has abandoned its mission (The Free Press, 1994).