When the Children’s ScoreCard was released in October, it brought both good news and bad.

In the last 15 years, the teen birthrate has been halved, child abuse cases have decreased by 22 percent and violent crime dropped by 41 percent. Still, child poverty rates increased by almost 16 percent between 2002 and 2004, and high school graduation rates have shown a downward trend for the past four years.

It’s this very treasure of information that openly points out both successes and failures – culled from various agencies and institutions that don’t always work together though their goals are often the same – that has given Los Angeles organizations a clear indication of when programs are working and when they need to be worked on.

The ScoreCard shines a light on the plight of the children, USC professor Jacquelyn McCroskey said.

And the credit for using the information to improve their plight goes to the Children’s Planning Council, she added.

The group – run by the county with 50 members from government departments, nonprofit agencies, city and school district officials, and business leaders – uses the data as a measuring stick for grading how Los Angeles County cares for its kids, and then changes the programs when the numbers show they aren’t working.

McCroskey, a professor in the USC School of Social Work, helped create the county’s Children’s Planning Council and has helped compile the seven biennial Children’s ScoreCards that have been released.

All of the major agencies designed to help children, along with members of the business community, began meeting in the late 1980s to follow the money, document results and learn to collaborate around their common goal.

The results have been tracked every two years with the Children’s ScoreCard, which publishes results in five overall outcome areas – health, safety and survival, economic well-being, social and emotional well-being and education/workforce readiness. It includes measures such as prenatal care, juvenile arrests, wages, poverty levels, child-care access, teen births, percentage of credentialed teachers and computers available in public schools.

“We focused on the outcomes,” McCroskey said, “and if the efforts of all these agencies are making a difference.”

McCroskey said one of the developments that has made such evaluation possible was the computer age, which allows individual institutions and groups such as the planning council to look at more than one family, one year or one program at a time.

Cross-agency information can be compiled and results tracked, instead of relying only on the processes of policy implementation or good intentions.

One of the biggest successes over the past 15 years has been the coordination and teamwork across county departments and with many other institutional partners to increase access to health insurance for children, with the ScoreCard showing that 92 percent of the county’s children had health insurance by 2004.

Part of the challenge was that the county itself had two departments working on children’s health care – Health Services and the Department of Public Social Services. But before the Planning Council, there was very little coordination of efforts around children and families.

“It’s so confusing how many health insurance schemes there are,” McCroskey said. “People can tell you what you are not eligible for but not what to sign up for. Because of our efforts, they stopped and said, ‘Whoa. We can do significant things if we do them together and continue to monitor them as part of a coalition.”

The coalition also helped break down roadblocks, such as getting the clearance to allow county health care eligibility workers on school campuses. It would seem a natural place to reach out to students, but the bureaucracy between a school district and a county agency can be tough to manage, McCroskey said.

The health-care issue highlights one of McCroskey’s most important findings: the money was being spent, the programs were in place and the desire was there.

But until the Planning Council was formed in 1991 and the ScoreCard began compiling results, no one really knew if the billions spent by Los Angeles County, 88 cities, 82 school districts and 1,100 not-for-profits were changing the lives of the children for the better.

“In the early 1990s, we were spending over $11 billion annually; now it must be over $20 billion,” McCroskey said.

“Institutions were spending a good portion on children and families, but it was not coordinated well. The idea was to find out what we who care about children can do when we band together to improve outcomes.”