The Multiple-Family Group Intervention (MFGI) was developed to address the need for an effective and yet affordable treatment for reducing recidivism for incarcerated adolescents and altering the families' coercive interactional patterns from an affect regulation and attachment perspective. The 8-week MFGI program was conducted in two Indiana juvenile correctional institutions. The research study utilized pre- and postintervention assessments and a 6-month follow-up assessment. Data from both male (n = 43) and female (n = 30) adolescents were combined, yielding a total sample of 140 respondents (73 adolescents, 67 caretakers). The 6-month follow-up assessment indicated a recidivism rate of only 44% compared to the national norm of 65-85%. Linear growth models were fit to determine the nature of the changes in adolescent behavior over the three assessments. Adolescents and caregivers reported that adolescents' externalizing behaviors significantly declined over time. Adolescent-reported internalizing symptoms as well as their alcohol and drug use significantly declined over the follow-up period, while caregiver reports of these behaviors showed no change over time. Adolescent-reported attachment to their parents, particularly mothers, increased significantly as did both adolescent and caregiver-reported functional affect regulation.

At present, many adolescents after release from correctional facilities to which they have been remanded for criminal behavior return to these delinquent behaviors, alcohol and drug abuse, and sexual offending (Santos, Henggeler, Burns, Arana, & Meisler, 1995). The recidivism rate for incarcerated adolescents is extremely high, hovering in the range of 65-85%;1 many re-offend and are re-incarcerated at great cost to communities, court systems, and mental health service agencies (Deschenes & Greenwood, 1998; Henggeler, 2003; Santos et al., 1995). Often, this cycle is repeated until adolescents reach the age of 18 and transition into the adult mental health and criminal justice systems (Borduin, 1994; Lipsey, 2000).

While incarcerated, the adolescents attend school and individual and/or group therapy, but their relationships with their families are often not targets for treatment. As a result, the coercive interactional patterns common in these families do not improve (Henggeler, Smith, & Schoenwald, 1994; Patterson, 1982, 1994, 2002). These conflictual cycles are associated with high levels of negative emotion that disrupt family members' attachment bonds (Ducharme, Doyle, & Markiewicz, 2002), impair cognitive functioning (Gottman, 1993), and foster chronic physiological arousal (El-Sheikh, 2001; Gottman & Katz, 2002). The result is that adolescents leave the institutions disconnected from their families, unable to cope well with conflict and negative affect/emotion, and therefore are less likely to integrate new information and develop alternative solutions to problems. Instead, they are more likely to revert to old, overlearned and often maladaptive behaviors, leaving them at risk for re-offending and relapse (Henggeler, 2003; Santos et al., 1995). Evidence-based and effective family treatments exist for delinquency and conduct disorder (see Keiley, 2002a, for a review), but many of them are expensive to implement, requiring extensive resources and additional personnel that state-funded juvenile correctional systems seldom can afford. The clinical and research project Multiple-Family Group Intervention (MFGI) was developed and conducted to address the need for effective, yet affordable, treatment for incarcerated adolescents and their families.

Development of Delinquent Behaviors

Adolescents at risk for entry into the juvenile justice system often have already experienced behavior problems in early (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) or late (Conduct Disorder) childhood (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). As a result, they may have social information processing and other cognitive deficits such as hostile attributional bias and poor problemsolving abilities (Dodge, 1993). These processing biases support children's views of the world as unfriendly. seeing only hostility, they limit the means that they use to obtain desired goals to behaviors that are coercive, if not aggressive (Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1996). Aggressive children with these cognitive deficits and biases, which interfere with the development of social competence, then may be rejected by typically developing peers, associate with deviant ones, and experience academic failure (Dishion & Andrews, 1995). As adolescents, they often feel alone, fearful of negative evaluation, and full of self-blame (Dodge, 1993). The resulting preponderance of negative affect, lack of useful affect regulation skills, and problems in relationships that the youth then experiences are frequently self-medicated by the use of substances (e.g., alcohol, drugs) or behaviors (e.g., sex, gang membership, violence), and they thus fall into the juvenile justice system (Henggeler & Santos, 1997; Henggeler et al., 1994).

Beginning in the late 1960s, and accelerating unabated through to the present, plaintiffs have filed more than 125 court cases questioning the constitutionality of school district and school spending levels. In 2005 alone, high-court decisions were handed down in eight states, including Kansas and Texas, with a decision rendered in South Carolina that has national implications.

Cases in seven more states, including Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, and Nebraska, are now pending decisions concerning issues of adequacy in state funding mechanisms. And legal challenges to state funding mechanisms are not one-off endeavors. Arizona, California, Connecticut, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming are states in which there have been not one, not two, but as many as five or six legal challenges to legislatively determined spending levels.

Much of the litigation, particularly early on, centered on the issue of funding equity. As of 2005, funding mechanisms in 36 states had been challenged on the grounds that interdistrict spending was inequitable. Increasingly, however, cases have focused instead on the overall amount, or adequacy, of funding. Beginning in the 1990s, enactment in virtually every state of learning objectives and curriculum standards provided a new reference point for plaintiffs arguing that funding was inadequate overall. By 2006, the constitutionality of funding mechanisms in 39 states had been challenged on adequacy grounds (see "Judging Money", research, p. 68). Indeed, through the first half of 2006, funding mechanisms in only five states--Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah--have been spared constitutional challenge.

Few would seek to deny American public school students access to the courts when inadequate school funding threatens their chances for achieving academic, and ultimately economic, success. But contemporary school-finance adequacy litigation goes far beyond seeking equity for the educationally disadvantaged. The movement is becoming a self-serving cause whereby plaintiffs have gained relatively uncontested judicial access to the policy process. Indeed, unsubstantiated claims and unreasonable requests contained in costing-out studies commissioned by plaintiffs have successfully circumvented democratic executive and legislative funding dynamics. The trend threatens to erode public interest in and support for K-12 education policy.

Plaintiff Victories Pick Taxpayer Pockets

Amounts awarded by courts are often substantial. Wyoming and New Jersey are fine examples. Wyoming plaintiffs have returned to court six times and have so far doubled Wyoming's per-pupil spending, elevating it from $5,971 in 1996-97 to an estimated $12,422 for 2006-07. Beginning teacher salaries, for those with master's degrees, rose in constant dollars from $24,402 in 1997 to $32,451 in 2004, a 33 percent increase. The average student-teacher ratio declined from 15 to 1 in 1993 to 13 to 1 in 2003. In spite of dramatic increases in spending, Wyoming student achievement levels in math as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have either been stagnant or dropped relative to the United States as a whole.

While Wyoming is a poster child for litigant success, it is not all that extreme. New Jersey per-pupil spending, in response to Robinson v. Cahill and Abbott v. Burke, has been elevated in constant dollars from $4,688 in 1970, when the litigation began, to $13,229 in 2003. So-called Abbott districts, those that receive the largest share of new state funding, in select instances spend in excess of $19,000 per pupil, a figure that rivals day-student tuition at many of the nation's most prestigious independent schools.

How Much Is Adequate?

The underlying question seems reasonable enough: after all, if Johnny's school is underresourced, how can Johnny be expected to meet the state's expectations for learning? The problem is that no one knows with any degree of certainty how much money it takes for Johnny to meet state-derived learning standards.

Ensuring that sufficient resources are available for all students to meet state-specified learning standards is a laudable policy objective. Unfortunately, contemporary legal petitions for resource adequacy go far beyond the analytic capacity of present-day social science. The evolving concept of financial adequacy requires researchers to ascertain far more elusive relationships between education inputs, processes, throughputs, and outcomes. Researchers have simply not yet discovered answers to many of the questions regarding these relationships. For example, the amount of money or configuration of schooling resources needed to compensate educationally for impoverishment, disability, or language deficiency is simply not known.

Still, court cases proceed, and even proliferate, with the primary evidence coming in the form of adequacy cost studies. According to ACCESS, a project of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc., a total of 58 cost studies had been conducted in 39 states as of January 2006. Of these cost studies, state courts initiated 7, state government agencies initiated 34, and independent groups initiated 17. At least 20 cost studies in 14 different states were undertaken between January 2004 and December 2005, with a potential for at least 5 additional studies in 2006. Two adequacy cost-modeling methods are employed most often: the econometric or cost function approach and the professional judgment approach.