Can Educators Be More Than Mandated Reporters? A New Vision for Higher Education’s Role in Family Support
Brendan Chan had already spent years in classrooms, watching students carry more than just textbooks into school. As a high school math teacher, he saw young people walk through the door with invisible burdens—unstable housing, absent caregivers, unexplained exhaustion. These signs didn’t show up in report cards, but they had everything to do with how students performed. By the time Chan entered his third year in the Ed.L.D. doctoral program, he had one mission: to do more than notice the signs. He wanted to change what happened next.
During his search for a residency placement, Chan explored nearly 100 organizations. One resonated deeply—Foster America, a nonprofit working to reduce the number of children entering foster care by supporting families before they fall apart. It wasn’t just about child welfare; it was about education, equity, and untapped potential. For Chan, it wasn’t a career detour. It was an extension of what higher education should be doing all along—cultivating leaders who can reimagine social systems.
What intrigued Chan most about Foster America was a question they were beginning to wrestle with: What if educators, who are often the first to see signs of family distress, had tools beyond a phone number and a mandate? Currently, school staff are designated as “mandated reporters,” legally required to report suspected abuse or neglect. But when nearly half of all hotline calls are dismissed before any investigation, it raises a serious issue. Educators are sounding alarms, but often those alarms go unanswered—or worse, they trigger disruptions with no real resolution.
Marie Zemler Wu, co-founder and executive director of Foster America, wasn’t surprised. She had seen this pattern unfold across the country. Educators, she noted, were calling not out of suspicion alone, but because they cared—and because they had no alternatives. Their instincts were right, but the system didn’t provide a spectrum of responses. Everything was binary. Either a family was in crisis, or they weren’t. Either a report was substantiated, or it was dismissed. But what about the vast space in between?
This is where higher education, particularly in programs that train future leaders, needs to pay attention. The gap between mandated reporting and meaningful support isn't just a child welfare issue. It's an education leadership issue, a public policy issue, and a community-building issue. And it belongs in the curriculum of every graduate school claiming to shape the next generation of changemakers.
In Chan’s capstone research, he underscored just how grim the educational outcomes are for students in foster care. Only 64 percent of them graduate high school, compared to 87 percent of their peers. They’re far more likely to be suspended, expelled, or chronically absent. Their trajectory veers off course not because they’re less capable, but because they’re more burdened. When universities talk about equity, this is where the conversation must begin—not at graduation, but at the cracks in the system where students first begin to slip through.
What Chan and Foster America are proposing is not a simple reform. It's a cultural shift. Imagine a system where teachers could call a centralized support hub—not just to report abuse, but to express concern about a family’s food insecurity, unstable housing, or a parent struggling with addiction. The goal would not be punishment or removal. It would be early intervention, peer support, and resource mobilization. Such a model wouldn’t replace existing child protection agencies but would operate in tandem with them, driven by empathy and evidence rather than fear and compliance.
In Boston, Chan worked with districts exploring exactly this kind of support network. One principal described how she constantly debated whether to report a family with inconsistent attendance. She knew the child wasn't being abused in the traditional sense—but the parents were working three jobs, and the home was falling apart. There was no hotline for that. There was no form to check “exhausted, under-resourced, doing-their-best family.” There was only the choice to report—or to do nothing.
The potential for change lies in higher education's ability to foster new kinds of leadership. Graduate programs must stop treating education and child welfare as separate tracks. Future superintendents, nonprofit leaders, and policymakers need a shared language—and shared training—in how to recognize, respond to, and support family needs without defaulting to crisis mode. That means embedding coursework on trauma-informed care, interdisciplinary collaboration, and systems-level design into education programs. It means recruiting students who understand that solving social problems doesn't happen in silos.
The financial implications of this shift are significant. Federal and state governments spend billions annually on foster care and child welfare interventions. But research consistently shows that upstream investments—like family stabilization services, mental health support, and early childhood programs—yield higher returns. For educators, administrators, and public servants alike, understanding this landscape isn't just moral. It’s strategic. And it’s a conversation that higher education institutions, especially those training leaders in education, public health, and public policy, must take seriously.
For prospective students seeking graduate programs that deliver real-world impact and professional growth, this convergence of child welfare and education is where the most innovative work is happening. Search interest in terms like “education leadership programs,” “doctoral programs in public policy,” and “trauma-informed education” continues to rise, alongside high-CPC keywords such as “online education degree,” “education grants,” “graduate school scholarships,” and “child psychology programs.” Universities that lean into these intersections are not only serving students—they’re serving the communities those students will one day lead.
Chan’s journey reminds us that sometimes, the biggest changes come not from mandates, but from reimagining roles entirely. His work asks us to rethink what support looks like, and more importantly, who is responsible for delivering it. What if, instead of being compliance-driven reporters, educators could be compassion-driven supporters? What if the classroom could be the starting point for systemic healing, not just academic achievement?
In practice, this shift would require more than policy reform. It would demand a cultural recalibration. Teachers would need ongoing professional development. Districts would need partnerships with social services. Universities would need to prepare students not just with theory, but with the tools to build new structures entirely.
That future is not far-fetched. In fact, it’s already being quietly prototyped by leaders like Chan and organizations like Foster America. Their work speaks not just to one profession, but to a higher calling across sectors: to create systems that see the whole child, and to prepare leaders who act on what they see.
And maybe that’s what higher education is ultimately for—not to produce perfect transcripts, but to produce people who can stand at the intersection of policy and humanity, and choose the latter every time.