Public child welfare systems operate within a politico-legal context that expects them to be able to achieve positive outcomes for the children and families that they serve. All states must participate in Federal Child and Family Service Reviews (CFSR) that seek to measure their performance on certain core or "mission-critical" outcomes involving child safety, permanence, and well-being.

Even prior to the establishment of the Federal Child Welfare Performance Review Process and the establishment of national indicators, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and the Children and Family Research Center had developed an outcome monitoring process in response to mandates related to the B.H. consent decree. In fact, the Children and Family Research Center was created, in part, to be "responsible for evaluating and issuing public reports on the performance of the child welfare system operated by DCFS and its agents. The Research Center shall be independent of DCFS and shall be within an entity independent of DCFS" [from B.H. v. McDonald (1996). Joint Memorandum in Support of Agreed Supplemental Order, No. 88-cv-5599. (N.D. Ill 1996)].

Researchers at CFRC were pioneers in the shift from process-oriented efforts at monitoring system functioning to the now widely-accepted outcome-based performance measures. Several of the early publications on this subject are listed below, as well each of the B.H. monitoring reports, the first of which was produced in 1998. The early B.H. monitoring reports include measures of child safety and permanence via reunification and adoption. Limitations in the availability of reliable and valid administrative data on indicators of child and family well-being prevented any sort of systematic data reporting. To fill this gap, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services funded the Center to conduct a series of Illinois Child Well-Being Studies, beginning in 2001, and four waves of results were reported. These studies provided critical data on the educational status, physical health, and mental health of children living in substitute care in Illinois. More recently, data on child well-being among children in or at risk of substitute care in Illinois have been gathered from the Illinois Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being.