PART TWO OF FOUR: Reputation laundering in "child welfare": The Child Welfare League of America

CWLA co-opts the rhetoric of reform to promote the same old family policing agenda 

The hearings about the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection have prompted a lot of talk about “reputation laundering” as former Trump Administration officials try to distance themselves from the president they served so faithfully – the most notable example: former Attorney General William Barr. 

As America’s racial justice reckoning finally catches up with “child welfare” – or, as it should be called, family policing – the “child welfare establishment is engaged in its own campaign of reputation laundering.  Yet none of the recent trips to the reputation laundry from child welfare establishment groups includes support for any proposal that would reduce their power.  That’s how we know the real goal is to co-opt the rhetoric of change and put it to use maintaining the oppressive status quo.  Consider the first of three recent examples. 

The Child Welfare League of America 

Faced with demands to stop confusing poverty with neglect, end the misuse and overuse of foster care and purge the system of racial bias, longtime CWLA President Christine James-Brown declares: “The field is ready, hungry for this type of change.” 

But CWLA is “the field.”  CWLA could have had the system it claims to hunger for at any time because CWLA and its members have all the power.  CWLA’s agencies not only built the system we have now, they – and CWLA itself – spent decades fighting against the change for which Ms. James-Brown claims to hunger.  

● CWLA opposed real child welfare finance reform – not the tokenism of the Family First Act but the kind in which states would be free to take their vast foster-care entitlement funding as a flexible flat grant and use the money for better alternatives.  Even when the proposal was strictly voluntary -- an option for states that wanted it -- CWLA opposed it. 

● In fact CWLA went further, calling for a change in a complex funding formula that would have the effect of more than doubling federal foster care spending.  

● CWLA even opposed legislation that would stop member agencies from swiping foster youth’s social security benefits! 

But now they want us to believe that all along they’ve been hungry for change? 

In a 2006 publication, CWLA declared: 

It is often said that the nation’s foster care and child welfare system is ‘broken.’ In reality, it isn’t broken so much as it has never been fully supported and empowered to function effectively. 

Sixteen years later, they’ve tweaked the rhetoric, but it’s just old whine in new bottles.  In an echo of that claim from 2006, the chair of CWLA’s board of directors laments that “When something goes wrong, the system is described as ‘broken.'” 

How can you claim to be hungry for change in a system if you can’t even admit it’s broken?   CWLA is hungry only for what it’s always been hungry for: Power. 

What real change looks like 

If CWLA was serious about racial justice, if it was serious about ending the rampant confusion of poverty with neglect, if it was serious about ending a child welfare surveillance state that makes all vulnerable children less safe, they would endorse a due-process and finance reform agenda that includes at a minimum: 

● High-quality defense counsel for all families at risk of being caught in the family police net.

● Real child welfare finance reform – not the tokenism of Family First.

● Repeal of the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act – or at least strong backing for legislation proposed by Rep. Karen Bass that would curb its worst excesses.

● Repeal of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.

● Repeal of mandatory child abuse reporting laws. 

But CWLA and the other groups we will spotlight over the next few days will never go near an agenda like that. 

Because their real message is the same as it’s been for decades: Sure, fund “preventive services” as an add-on – that we get to run of course -- but we must continue to be judge, jury and sometimes family executioner for millions of children, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite.  We’ll just co-opt your rhetoric and hope you won’t notice. 

Tomorrow: Our next example.

 Read all the posts in this series here.

Paying for foster care and family preservation: How CWLA works to kill real reform

The most recent online newsletter from the Child Welfare League of America, the giant trade association for public and private agencies, makes clear how CWLA will try to oppose any real reform of how federal child welfare dollars are spent.

The newsletter included a rather odd account of a recent House subcommittee hearing, the one discussed in this previous post, concerning "waivers" which allow federal dollars normally reserved for foster care to be spent on better alternatives as well. While CWLA doesn't mind spending on better alternatives if that spending is in addition to the great gobs of money its private agency members scarf up in per diem payments for holding children in foster care, they are not about to sit idly by and risk having some of their members put out of business by reform which allows states and localities to use the money on alternatives instead of foster care.

But it's gotten harder to oppose reform as overtly, now that one great big state has switched sides. Florida has had enormous success with the only comprehensive statewide waiver allowing foster care funds to be used for better alternatives. Even the state's big private agencies have largely been won over – in part because the waiver actually prevented state budget cuts in child welfare. A lot of those agencies, and the Florida Department of Children and Families, are dues-paying members of CWLA.

So is Casey Family Programs, the multi-billion dollar foundation that also is a provider of direct services (but should not be confused with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which also provides both. Though both groups were endowed by the same family, and sometimes collaborate, they are run separately).

Just a few years ago, Casey Family Programs' CEO, William Bell would become angry at the very thought of funding child welfare the way Florida does it under its waiver. At last week's hearing, with his testimony strongly supporting waivers, he proved a primary tenet of the family preservation movement: people can change. While I would like to think the 51 hours CFP spent at this Blog and on www.nccpr.org last year alone had something to do with it, more likely it was the influence of two of the top executives Bell recruited to CFP, David Sanders, who obtained a Florida-style waiver while running the child welfare system in Los Angeles County, and David Berns, who used flexibility in state funding to reform the county-run system in El Paso County, Colorado.

CFP also is a CWLA member, and a prestigious one at that.

What's a trade association to do? What they always do in child welfare. Never say no, just "Yes, but…" it to death.

So the most recent online newsletter from CWLA characterized the hearing this way:

While some testimony strenuously maintained emphasis on the need for immediate flexibility in state use of IV-E funds through waivers, others pointed to the potential for action on waivers to delay comprehensive reform, particularly in light of the limited capacity of waivers to improve outcomes for children nationwide and to cultivate innovation across the continuum of needed child welfare services.

OK, let's stop there. First, none of the witnesses actually said waivers could "delay comprehensive reform." That may appear in written statements that groups like, say, CWLA, can submit, but none of the witnesses said it.

As for whether waivers can improve outcomes nationwide, that depends on how many are offered and how many states have the guts to accept them. The Bush administration proposed offering a Florida-style deal to every state without a cumbersome waiver progress – and CWLA, and the entire foster care-industrial complex through a fit over it. So first CWLA opposed making flexibility easily available nationwide, and now they claim waivers aren't enough – because they don't apply nationwide.

As for "cultivat[ing] innovation across the continuum of needed child welfare services" – whatever that gobbledygook means, since waivers allow money to be spent on just about every possible alternative to foster care, from primary prevention, to family preservation, to adoption, it's hard to see what is left out of the "continuum" – except, of course, even more foster care.

The whole argument is disingenuous, because the last thing CWLA wants is "comprehensive reform." What CWLA wants is "delinking" – the removal of the one small, clumsy brake that still exists on unlimited "entitlement" spending on foster care. (For details, see our report on child welfare financing.)

CWLA goes on to claim that the Subcommittee chair, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Washington) and Ranking Member John Linder (R-Georgia) "both agreed on the necessity to further evaluate and address the structural deficiencies of child welfare financing."

Well, yes. But they had somewhat different visions. While McDermott promised to introduce legislation to allow more waivers and then spent the rest of the hearing fretting about his own bill, Linder suggested that, if so many states wanted waivers from rules limiting funding to foster care, maybe the rules should just be abolished.

And maybe it's time for the relatively few reform-minded child welfare agencies, public and private, to quit CWLA and form their own association. Because it's hard to see what they're getting for their dues money now.

Child welfare and the latest “drug plague,” part two: How a single, unreliable source led The Washington Post astray

 Read part one here.

Part three: Comparing the Post story to a much better story in Mother Jones.

Yesterday’s post to this blog dealt with how the Washington Post misunderstood drug abuse in a story about opioids and foster care – and why that misunderstanding hurts children.

But there was an even greater failing in the story. The Post reporters didn’t just get addiction wrong.  Apparently new to child welfare, they got that field wrong as well. That’s because they relied on only one, unreliable source. 

ALL of these things are just like the others

No reporter doing a story on, say, the effects of raising the minimum wage or the impact of environmental regulations on business would talk only to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. No reporter doing a story about the high cost of prescription drugs – or their safety – would talk only to PhRMA – the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of America. No reporter doing a story on the safety of hydraulic fracking would talk only to the American Petroleum Institute (API).

But in seeking to explain the child welfare system, the Post reporters spoke only to a representative of a group that calls itself the Child Welfare League of America.

Putting “child welfare” in your name does not automatically mean you are interested in the welfare of children any more than the fact that the trade association for Payday lenders calls itself the Community Financial Services Association of America automatically means they are interested in the welfare of communities.

A more honest name for CWLA would be the Agency Welfare League of America. CWLA is, in fact, a trade association for public and private child welfare agencies.  That means they bring to the table vested interests, just like the Chamber of Commerce and PhRMA and API.

When the interests of children and the interests of its member agencies are in conflict, CWLA has a disturbing track record. That’s something the Post reporters would have known had they done the kind of digging done by the Hartford Courant in 2004. Or if they’d seen what the Dayton Daily News found even earlier in the course of exposing serious problems at a CWLA member agency.

CWLA has a profound vested interest in “solutions” that involve making its dues-paying member agencies bigger.  In the case of private agencies, their very existence may be at stake.

Foster care and Family preservation: Decoding CWLA’s priorities

One of the problems with the whole child welfare debate is that everyone says pretty much the same thing – but we all mean different things by it. For example, everyone says "foster care should be a last resort." Have you ever heard anyone say "foster care should be a first resort"?

Yet clearly, last resort must mean something different in Illinois, which takes away children at one of the lowest rates in the nation, - even as independent court monitors say that system has improved child safety – than it means in Nebraska, which year after year, takes children at one of the highest rates, a rate nearly five times the rate in Illinois. Either Nebraska is a cesspool of depravity, with vastly more child abuse than most of the rest of the nation, or their rhetoric about "last resort" is empty.

Similarly, there's the matter of "prevention." Have you ever heard anyone say: "Boy, am I against prevention – if there's one thing I hate, it's prevention." Yet efforts at prevention, and the very definition of the term vary enormously.

So when the giant trade association for child welfare agencies, the Child Welfare League of America, puts out a press release announcing its "Top 5 Child Welfare Challenges and Opportunities" you really have to read between the lines to understand it.

Allow me to translate:

WHEN CWLA SAYS: 1. Passing health care reform— This landmark legislation will strengthen the safety net for vulnerable children and youth and their families. Both House and Senate versions of the legislation will ensure that more children have access to quality health care. Both versions will support innovative home visiting programs. However, the House version has stronger, more concise language that protects the use of therapeutic foster care—which serves children with more severe special needs—under Medicaid. Either version will be a win for America's most vulnerable children.

IT REALLY MEANS: Never mind the most important part of the bill, actually providing health insurance so families are less likely to lose their children because of poverty in general or "medical neglect" in particular; we're salivating at the prospect of a giant expansion of home visiting and more reimbursement for some kinds of foster care.

THE CONTEXT: Though important questions have been raised about some of the home visiting language in some versions of the health care reform bill, the kind of home visiting proposed in this bill really is a good idea – particularly since the program is purely voluntary. But let's not kid ourselves about CWLA's primary interest.

WHEN CWLA SAYS: 2. Holding a White House Conference on Children and Youth— President Theodore Roosevelt held the first such conference in 1909. For decades, the conference brought together experts and stakeholders, resulting in significant actions that improved child welfare. No such conference has been held since 1970. Today's vulnerable economic times makes reestablishing the White House Conference a priority. Bipartisan bills are moving through Congress right now to authorize the conference.

IT REALLY MEANS: We've got to show our members we're getting something for their dues money – and think of the great photo ops with the President!

THE CONTEXT: If there is one field that is overconferenced it's child welfare. I don't know why, maybe it's because foundations seem so fond of funding conferences, or maybe it just beats actually doing something. The last thing the field needs is still another conference at which all the same people say what they say at all the other conferences. However, I actually hope CWLA gets this one. All the time and effort that goes into planning and holding and then bragging about the conference is time that otherwise might have gone into doing actual harm.

WHEN CWLA SAYS: 3. Shrinking the system— If the Fostering Connections Act continues to be implemented and funded and if the health care bill becomes law, fundamental changes are possible in how vulnerable children are treated, creating a real opportunity to sizably shrink the foster care system.

IT REALLY MEANS: By shrinking we really mean expanding, since a key feature of the Fostering Connections law is extending foster care from age 18 to 21 – a bonanza for foster care agencies. The other key feature, subsidized guardianships, will indeed allow more children to leave the system, into the custody of grandparents and other relatives. But these usually are children already living with relatives in kinship care, and our big private agencies, paid for each day they oversee a placement, generally do little or no kinship care. Since there is absolutely nothing in this law to promote reducing entries into care in the first place, there's nothing threatening to our member agencies' interests.

THE CONTEXT: The guardianship provision in this law is, in fact, a good one. Even extending foster care to 21 is the lesser evil when the alternative is kicking children to the streets at age 18. But what does it tell us that the most extensive change in federal child welfare law in more than a decade did nothing, absolutely nothing, to truly shrink the system?

WHEN CWLA SAYS: 4. Aging out gracefully— Historically, youth leaving the foster care system due to adulthood were instantly left with few connections and resources, placing them at higher risk for unemployment, health issues, welfare dependency, incarceration, and homelessness. Spurred by greater awareness and the Fostering Connections Act, foster youth are receiving more attention and resources, ensuring better long-term outcomes.

IT REALLY MEANS: We're fine with helping foster children age out – it means more money to the agencies that were paid to hold them in foster care in the first place, since they'll probably get the contracts for the various services that will be provided.

THE CONTEXT: The best way to solve the problem of children aging out is to stop so many from ever aging in. But notice there is barely a word about that on CWLA's agenda.

WHEN CWLA SAYS: 5. Focusing on disproportionality— Children of color are significantly overrepresented in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Research indicates poverty as a contributing factor compounded by the fact that those in poverty have greater difficulty accessing important services. The Fostering Connections Act provided funding for more kinship placements and more focus on child welfare training and recruiting, both of which will have a discernable impact on the issue. However, further success will come from putting more focus on preventing children from entering care.

IT REALLY MEANS: Let's take something simple - children of color are far more likely to be in foster care because the racism that permeates society doesn't stop at the child welfare agency door - and make it as complicated as possible so we can avoid facing up to the racism part. We can hold lots and lots of conferences about it, too! And there it is at the very end, half a sentence about reducing entries into care. What more do you want?

THE CONTEXT: That doesn't mean the bias is conscious; by and large it's not, and by and large, CPS workers really want to help children. But give those workers otherwise identical hypothetical cases and they are more likely to describe the child as "at risk" if the family is described as Black. Citations for this and other studies are in our Issue Paper on child welfare and race. And see also the Michigan Race Equity Review for a superb analysis of these issues.

My favorite part of this one, though, is when CWLA says, in effect: It's not race, it's poverty! For decades, the child welfare establishment has told us, over and over again, that they never, ever take away children because of poverty. If the long-overdue debate about racism in child welfare accomplishes nothing else, at least it's gotten CWLA and the rest of the foster care-industrial complex to acknowledge the class bias that permeates child welfare.

Congress takes on the bad financial incentives in foster care – and makes them worse

It is well known that, thanks to decades of poor policy at the federal level, the financial incentives in child welfare are atrocious. For every eligible child a state or local government throws into foster care, (and the cases of about half of America's foster children are eligible) the federal government will pay more than half the tab – sometimes way more than half the tab. The same is true for adoption subsidies. There is nothing close for safe, proven programs to keep children out of foster care.

As a result, this year, for every dollar the federal government spends on prevention and family preservation, it will spend more than $10 on foster care and adoption – and that's a conservative estimate.

As a result, while it is not true, as some have claimed, that government makes money on foster care, it is true that though family preservation costs less in total dollars, it sometimes costs less for a state or local government to throw a child into foster care.

All of which means one should always worry about what will happen to children on days like this coming Tuesday, when "child savers" – to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts gave themselves – swarm over the U.S. Capitol as part of the annual "advocacy day" for the giant trade association for child welfare agencies, the Child Welfare League of America. The "advocacy day" is part of CWLA's Annual Conference, highlights of which include a presentation on why supposedly there is too much accountability to the public in child welfare and an entire "track" of panels on how the people who run residential treatment centers, which are largely worthless, can save their dying industry.

CWLA has led the opposition to real reform of child welfare finance, and if CWLA gets what it wants most, those incentives will become far, far worse.

NCCPR will discuss all of this in detail in a new briefing paper on child welfare finance. We'll be releasing it on our website, www.nccpr.org, Monday.

For now, though, I want to highlight what Congress already has done lately to make things worse. It's happened twice since 2008.

One change may have happened almost by accident. States are reimbursed for foster care at the same rate they receive for Medicaid. When the economic stimulus bill raised reimbursement for Medicaid, reimbursement for foster care automatically went up as well – so the incentive to use foster care instead of alternatives actually got worse. Before the stimulus, the federal government reimbursed from 50 cents to 77 cents of every dollar spent to hold an eligible child in foster care. Now, thanks to the stimulus bill, its 56 to 83 cents on the dollar. The same is true of adoption subsidies.

THE CAMEL'S NOSE GETS IN THE TENT

But the other change was intentional. In 2008, Congress passed the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act. CWLA and the rest of what I have come to call the "foster care -industrial complex" hasn't been able to stop gushing about this for the past year. And no wonder: it increases money in all sorts of categories, without providing so much as one additional penny for efforts to keep children out of foster care.

Some of the provisions of this law actually do some good, and only one does real harm. But the harm is huge. It's in a provision that's gone by almost unnoticed:

One way the "Increasing Adoptions Act" may increase adoptions is by providing still another huge incentive to pursue them at the expense of reunifying families.

The incentives to push adoption over reunification, financial and otherwise, already are enormous. Everyone in child welfare, from the frontline worker to the agency chief, knows that the only time a child welfare agency gets good press is when it gets those adoption numbers up – and no one looks too closely at how it was done. It also is the principal means of psychic satisfaction for people in the field – witness the fact that while everyone claims the system's primary goal for children is reunification, the only option that is celebrated each year in most of the country is adoption. That is clear from all those annual "Adoption Day" events, each of which generates another favorable story in the local paper.

There's also a significant financial incentive. Since 1998, under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, child welfare agencies receive a bounty; now $4,000 to $12,000, and sometimes more, for every foster child adoption over a baseline number. There is, of course, no such payment when a child is returned to her or his own parents.

DESPERATELY SEEKING "DELINKING"

In 2008, Congress further stacked the deck. Remember how I said that all that money for foster care and adoption is given for every case in which a child is eligible, and about half the cases are eligible? In cases involving adoption, the Fostering Connections Act phases in the other half. it eliminates a link to an old funding formula that was the one and only brake on this open-ended entitlement.

That's known as "delinking." Perhaps you've heard about it. It's hard to be anywhere near anyone from CWLA and not hear about it. CWLA is desperate for delinking, not just for adoption, but also for foster care. CWLA craves delinking the way Homer Simpson craves donuts.

But while the current link (discussed in detail in our briefing paper Monday) is a cumbersome and clumsy brake on the current open-ended entitlement for foster care, it's the only brake we've got. It would be crazy to remove this brake from the runaway train of unlimited foster care funding without something better to replace it.

Unfortunately, the brake already is coming off for adoption funds.

The implications are profound.

For starters, this change ultimately will funnel at least an extra $2.46 billion per year into adoption. That money is going to have to come from somewhere, and given the current state of the federal deficit, every new dollar for foster care and adoption is one less potential dollar for prevention and family preservation.

Though the law requires that the savings states gain from this new federal aid be spent on child welfare, that doesn't mean it has to go to prevention and family preservation. So those savings are far more likely to be plowed into hiring more child abuse investigators, more foster care, and big raises in rates for group homes and institutions – further worsening the imbalance in child welfare funding.

But that isn't even the worst of it. Because this new money for adoption also creates a terrible new incentive:

Consider the hypothetical case of Tommy, an eight-year-old who's been in foster care for a year because a caseworker didn't like the conditions in the tiny apartment where Tommy was living with his parents. Tommy's case did not meet the eligibility requirements for federal aid.

That means the state or local child welfare agency is picking up the entire tab for foster care. (Don't feel too sorry for the agency. Remember, they're already getting a huge subsidy for half their cases, and, contrary to what CWLA likes to imply, those funds are spread equally among all cases, including Tommy's.)

Similarly, if the agency returns Tommy home, the federal government will provide almost no help paying for any services Tommy and his parents might need to remain together.

But, once the new law is fully in effect, the federal government will pay between 56 and 83 cents out of every dollar spent on an adoption subsidy for Tommy's adoptive parents.

So while reunification may be in Tommy's best interests, the caseworker's need for psychic satisfaction, her boss' need for good press and, most important, the lure of more money for the child welfare agency, all push the decision toward adoption.

But that's just the start. The real prize for CWLA is attaining delinking for foster care – that would pour at least another $4.7 billion per year into foster care, and make the incentive to use foster care instead of family preservation even worse. (CWLA is willing to settle for reducing the payment per case in exchange for this delinking – but that's almost as bad.)

So there is every reason to fear for the fate of vulnerable, impoverished children while people from CWLA's member agencies are swarming Capitol Hill. Because when it comes to real reform of child welfare finance, the track record of Congress in recent years is frightening.

FOR FULL DETAILS AND BETTER ALTERNATIVES, SEE NCCPR'S REPORT ON CHILD WELFARE FINANCE, COMING MONDAY.

Letting kids in foster care keep their own money: Is CWLA softening its opposition?

            The world of child welfare is filled with ugly little side streets and dark alleys – practices that may not affect huge numbers of children, relatively speaking, but which add insult to the injuries endured by some of the children already harmed by the foster care system.

            One of those dark alleys involves a practice that seems hard to believe: There are about 30,000 foster children eligible for some form of Social Security, usually disability of survivors benefits.  But, as is explained in this previous post, child welfare agencies typically swoop in and grab the money for themselves, so they can keep funding their foster care systems.  As I said last year, it’s worse than stealing candy from a baby.  But it’s perfectly legal.

            Up to now, the giant trade association for child welfare agencies, the Child Welfare League of America, has wanted to keep it that way.  After all, why should foster children get their own money when it can go to one of those oh-so-worthy CWLA member agencies instead?  So when Rep. Pete Stark (D-California) first introduced legislation to ban this practice, CWLA opposed it.  So did the Children’s Defense Fund, which has no interest in defending foster children against having their own money taken from them.  CDF is far more concerned that somewhere, somehow there might be a child welfare agency that has a little less money to use to throw children into foster care.

            That greedy stance is all the more amazing since while this money can make a huge difference to the individual foster children, it represents well under one percent of what government spends on child welfare every year.  That’s just one reason CDF really should change its slogan to “no dollar left behind.”

            Rep. Stark announced yesterday he is again introducing legislation to ban this practice. And judging by what longtime CWLA official Linda Spears told the Associated Press, they just might be modifying their position.  Said Spears:

            “In tough economic times, the states are between a rock and a hard place — they can’t afford services beyond the basic necessities. But the young person is there saying, ‘What about me?’ ... There’s so much in foster care that makes young people feel they’re not in charge of their lives, and that could be changed to give kids more say.”

            This is rather like saying “On the one hand you were mugged.  On the other hand, the mugger said he really needed the money.”  And it’s disingenuous since CWLA condoned this practice before the recession hit.  In fact, I’ve never known them to oppose this practice, no matter what the state of the economy,

            Still by CWLA standards, this may be progress.  Or it may be a calculation that the bill won’t pass, and they can remain neutral while still being sure the foster children won’t see their own money.

            Meanwhile Prof. Daniel Hatcher of the University of Baltimore continues to pursue his lawsuit challenging the practice in Maryland.  This greatly upset Judith Schagrin, assistant director for children’s services with the Baltimore County social services department.  She told AP that “States are not in fact maliciously stealing children’s money.”

            We didn’t say it was malicious.

A win for kids: House passes child welfare waiver bill, allowing flexible use of foster care funds

The House of Representatives passed legislation Thursday to restore the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services to grant funding waivers like the one that has helped Florida dramatically improve its child welfare system.

                How big a win is this?  I’m not sure.  Members of Congress want to get out of town to start campaigning as soon as possible, and I’m aware of no action at all on this in the Senate.  But this is at least a small step in the right direction.

                The bill would restore HHS’ authority to authorize a wide variety of waivers, but the most important are waivers like the one granted to Florida.  That one allows the state to use all of the federal aid other states can use only on foster care for better alternatives as well.  In exchange, Florida gave up the right to receive ever more federal money for taking away ever more children.  So it’s no wonder the child welfare establishment is not thrilled by this.

                In keeping with their approach of never say no, just “yes, but…” it to death, the Child Welfare League of America, the trade association for public and private agencies, many of which can’t exist without a steady supply of foster children, and the Children’s Defense Fund, which thinks we’re still living in 1968 and can’t conceive of anything that doesn’t involve federal control and “entitlement” funding as being good, declared that  “CDF, CWLA and others have concerns that extending waivers now will have a chilling effect next year on comprehensive child welfare financing reform.”

                But what CWLA and CDF want is neither comprehensive nor reform.  They want to keep the open-ended entitlement for foster care, and they want something called “delinking” which would eliminate the one small brake on that entitlement. (For details, see our report on child welfare financing.) Even were this a good idea – and it isn’t – this is already in the deep freeze in Congress for one simple reason: At a time when any new spending is poison, this plan is not cost-neutral.  The waivers, however, are.

                What CWLA, CDF and much of the rest of the child welfare establishment really fear is that more states will opt for such waivers and succeed, reducing needless removal of children from their homes – and putting at least a few private agencies out of business in the process.  Or worse, from CWLA’s point of view, Congress might see how well the waivers are working and simply offer the Florida option to every state without a complex waiver process.

                I suspect that’s the kind of real reform the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. John Linder (R-Georgia) had in mind in his remarks on the bill:

This bill comes to the floor in a fashion too many bills have not in this Congress: First, we held a subcommittee hearing; then the legislation was drafted with bipartisan support; and finally we ensured it does not increase the deficit by even a penny.  It is an example of what can happen if we pursue in a bipartisan way goals that are widely shared, and that have been demonstrated to achieve real results.

The legislation before us would allow all States to follow the successful child welfare reform model tested in Florida and other places.  As we learned in our hearing, those reforms reduced the number of Florida children in foster care by 36 percent, increased adoptions by 12,000, and improved child safety - all without spending more taxpayer money.  …

Since 1994, 22 States have joined Florida in using child welfare waivers. This legislation extends the authority for all States to do so for 5 years. This will allow other States to test and replicate policies that are working.  And it is my hope this will one day pave the way for successful Federal reforms covering all States.  Meanwhile, let's move this bill forward and continue our efforts to improve the lives of all children.

                Actually, Florida’s waiver wasn’t the first, as that line about “joined Florida” may imply – but it is the only comprehensive waiver that applies statewide.  Michigan initially accepted the same deal and chickened out at the last minute.

                Oh, and it was nice of CWLA to put that little “yes, but…” statement out yesterday morning, just hours after the website for Youth Today published an NCCPR Blog about how CWLA has impedes real child welfare reform. 

                I’ll have more news related to Florida on Monday.

Accountability in foster care: The sham of “accreditation”

A previous post to this Blog discusses a panel at the recent conference of the Child Welfare League of America, the giant trade association for child welfare agencies, concerning the problem of accountability in child welfare. Only the problem, according to CWLA and the presenters, is not that this system that wields vast power and operates in near total secrecy has too little accountability. Rather, say the presenters at the panel, there is too much accountability. They portray the people who toil in child welfare agencies, from caseworkers to agency chiefs, as child welfare's Gullivers, tied down by innumerable Lilliputian "watchers" to use their obnoxious term.

What they really want is summed up in the title of that earlier post: Give us more money and go away! The presenters also are authors of a "scholarly" article to the same effect. Only the abstract is available online.

And what gives away their no-accountability agenda is the one and only form of accountability they love: It's called "accreditation." And it's a sham.

Accreditation is a way for agencies to get an unearned seal of approval by keeping their paperwork in order - and then throw it in the face of critics, in order to prevent real change. That's why child welfare agencies – and people like the presenters at the CWLA panel - rush to embrace the idea whenever the alternative is real reform.

Indeed, it is quite possible, depending on the circumstances, for an agency to become fully "accredited" without the "accreditors" so much as laying eyes on one real live foster child.

And that should come as no surprise considering who invented the so-called Council on Accreditation: The Child Welfare League of America. Accreditation is simply the agencies running around giving each other pats on the back. It's self-policing and the self-policeman always is the laziest cop on the beat.

ACCREDITING FILE CABINETS

A few basics about accreditation:

· The accreditors don't inspect foster homes.

· The accreditors don't do surprise inspections of anything. Group homes and institutions get "no more than" a month's advance notice. (There were no inspections at all until a newspaper exposed this fact, something discussed in more detail below).

· They inspect group homes only if the agency seeking accreditation is running them directly. (So, if, for example, a state or private child welfare agency subcontracts all its foster care work to other agencies, it can be accredited without the accreditors ever meeting a foster child.)

· The accreditation process does nothing to examine whether a decision to remove a child in the first place is appropriate.

In short, the "Council on Accreditation" doesn't really accredit agencies at all. It accredits file cabinets.

Recently the State of Missouri won accreditation. The child welfare agency made a point of noting that the accreditors really did talk to foster families. What they did not say, until the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader asked, is that the foster children were handpicked by the agency itself. This is a bit like when the Red Cross interviews POWs while the prison guards watch. And it's not clear if the accreditors bothered to speak to birth parents at all.

As for the standards one has to meet to be accredited, mostly you meet them by hiring more social workers. No wonder the social workers who wrote the paper and conducted the anti-accountability presentation love it so. And the Council on Accreditation loves them right back – citing the authors in the very first in a list of "testimonials" on its website.

This mutual admiration society is all the more remarkable because the authors of the no-accountability article and presentation have a particular standard by which they claim to judge accountability mechanisms: Can those mechanisms prove they improve outcomes for children? Clearly, accreditation flunks this test.

For starters, a look around the country at the few systems that are generally considered "models" shows that one is, indeed, accredited. The rest are not.

But the reality behind accreditation is even worse:

I first learned about accreditation 11 years ago, from two superb former reporters, Debra Jasper then with the Cox-owned Dayton Daily News and Elliot Jaspin, then with Cox's Washington Bureau. They did a series of stories about a big private agency. Among the findings:

· Foster homes that were wretched.

· Group homes that were worse.

· The head of the agency had a conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor - a foster child who had been in his care.

Oh, and one more thing: The agency was "accredited."

(I'm not naming the agency because this happened more than a decade ago, the director in question was fired, and there is no evidence that the agency failed to clean up its act.)

Even more revealing was what happened when Jasper and Jaspin took their findings directly to CWLA:

When they e-mailed their findings to CWLA's acting director, (who is not the current director) she should have said that such conditions would not be tolerated in a CWLA member agency. But she didn't. The Daily News describes what happened instead:

"After reading the series, Shirley Marcus Allen, the league's director, sent an e-mail to Joyce Johnson, the group's director of public relations, saying 'These are all horrible stories. I have no desire to talk to the reporters on this if I don't have to. Find something more positive for me to report on.' Although intended as an internal document, Allen sent the e-mail to the newspaper by mistake."

But what about a public agency? Would it have to meet high standards to gain accreditation? Apparently not.

On Monday, we'll go inside a fully-accredited state child welfare agency. It's ugly in there.

Just what child welfare needs: One more conference!

If there is one field that is over-conferenced, it’s child welfare.  Occasionally, someone comes up with a conference in which the information is genuinely new and useful.  But  I doubt you could throw a dart at a calendar without hitting a date that includes some kind of conference (or worse, a “webinar”) somewhere in the country where all the same people gather to say all the same things.


In an age of e-mail, websites, Google and amazingly fast access to information, the typical conference should be going the way of the dinosaur.  But then, so should residential treatment centers, and we know how long that’s taking.   I take great pride in the fact that, in 11 years, NCCPR has sponsored only one conference – and that was specifically for the people left out of all the other conferences.

                So guess what a top priority is for the Child Welfare League of America, the giant national trade association for public and private child welfare agencies: Yes, another conference!

                But this would be no ordinary conference.  This would be a White House conference, something that used to occur every decade or so.  And we all know that White House conferences are to conferences as, say, a Mayoral Interagency Task Force is to a plain old, ordinary Interagency Task Force.

                Of course, the real difference between a White House conference and a plain old conference is that you get to meet in, I assume, the East Room, and get your picture taken with the President after he makes some opening remarks.

                After that, it’s down to the usual keynote speeches, “breakout sessions” and plenary sessions where participants will learn that:

●        Children are not a priority because they don’t vote.

●        Prevention costs less in the long run.

●        We can pay now, or we can pay later.

●        It takes a village.

And, the real shocker:

           ●    Children are our future.

                So, all in all, I think CWLA’s proposal is – a great idea! In fact, I wish them all the luck in the world in getting their White House conference.

                Here’s the way I figure it:

                CWLA already has expended a lot of time and effort trying to get this conference.  Imagine what happens if they succeed:  Just think of all the committees, subcommittees, steering committees and coordinating committees.  All that time planning an agenda, lining up speakers, thinking up ideas for panels.  Maybe there’ll even be focus groups to solicit “input” from “stakeholders.”  In other words, it will keep the folks at CWLA and like-minded groups very, very busy.

                And the more time they waste on the conference, the less time they’ll have to do actual harm – like undermine efforts at real reform of child welfare financing. 

                So by all means, let’s have a White House Conference on children’s issues.  In fact, let’s do it every year!

Foster care or family preservation: You get what you pay for

Today NCCPR releases its briefing paper on financing child welfare. That way, if anyone planning to go to Capitol Hill on behalf of the Child Welfare League of America tomorrow wants to know the side of the story CWLA will never tell, it's readily available on our website here. And if anyone in government or elsewhere who's only heard CWLA's spin on these issues wants to know the rest of the story, it's available to them as well.

Here's an excerpt:

Understanding the issue requires a journey into a wonkish world filled with terms like "delinking" and "eligibility lookback." It's worth the trip, because the stakes are so high.

To understand those stakes, consider what a single mother in the Bronx named Rose Mary Grant had to do every week for months, just to see her then-11-year-old son, Issa, as described in a keenly-observed story in the Westchester County, N.Y. Journal-News (which, unfortunately is not available on the Journal-News website):

"Starting from her brick apartment tower, Rose walks a block to Gun Hill Road, takes the 28 bus to the subway station, catches the 5 train to Harlem, makes her way down 125th Street, boards the Metro-North train to Dobbs Ferry, and rides a shuttle … At each step, she places two metal crutches ahead of her and swings forward on two prosthetic legs."

The journey would have been worth it, had there been something worthwhile for Issa at the end of the line. But there wasn't. Issa was trapped in a "residential treatment center" a form of "care" that does little or no good, and was utterly unnecessary for Issa.

Issa was not paranoid, he was not schizophrenic, and he was not delusional. The only label pinned on him was Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Sometimes, at home, he was seriously out-of-control. But his handicapped, impoverished single mother couldn't do what middle-class and wealthy families do: find a good psychiatrist and hire home health aides.

She couldn't do that because the federal government does almost nothing to help pay for such alternatives. But, in many cases, the federal government will gladly reimburse states between 56 and 83 cents for every one of the 86,000-or-more dollars per year it costs to keep children like Issa in an "RTC."

Issa finally did get home, and the RTC where he was housed is reforming its own practices to help more children in their home communities.

But the reason Issa couldn't be cared for in his own home by his own mother for so long is rooted in the way the federal government helps states and localities finance child welfare.

Foster care is funded by the federal government as an open-ended entitlement. It's known as Title IV-E. For every eligible child (and I'll get back to eligibility in tomorrow's post to this Blog) the states are reimbursed for anywhere from 56 percent to 83 percent of the cost of warehousing that child in a foster home, a group home, or an institution. (The percentage for each state is the same as whatever that state gets for Medicaid, which, in turn, is linked to the average income of state residents.) Aid for adoption subsidies also is an entitlement under the same program.

The only funding stream even partially reserved for prevention and family preservation, known as Title IV-B, is not an entitlement; and it is strictly limited.

The result, in Federal Fiscal Year 2010 the federal government is expected to spend, via Title IV-E, $4.7 billion to hold children in foster care and another $2.46 billion to subsidize adoptions. It will spend, at most, $660 million to help to keep children out of foster care through Title IV-B. The real figure is even lower because some money in the "prevention" funding stream can be spent on foster care and adoption.

This means that while safe proven alternatives to foster care cost less in total dollars, it sometimes can cost a state or locality less to throw a child into foster care.

So while this does not mean, as some have alleged that "government makes money on foster care" it does mean that there is a huge, perverse incentive to use foster care instead of better alternatives.

TOMORROW: CWLA CRAVES "DELINKING" THE WAY HOMER SIMPSON CRAVES DONUTS. BOTH ARE BAD FOR CHILDREN

Desperately seeking delinking: How CWLA wants to scarf up more money for foster care

IF THE ONLY BRAKE ON A RUNAWAY TRAIN IS A CLUMSY CONTRAPTION THAT ONLY RUBE GOLDBERG COULD LOVE, IT'S STILL BETTER THAN NO BRAKE AT ALL.

As people from child welfare agencies swarm over Capitol Hill today, odds are a lot of them will be talking about delinking. As I said yesterday, the Child Welfare League of America, and the rest of what I have come to call the "foster care-industrial complex" craves delinking the way Homer Simpson craves donuts, and both are bad for children. It's one of the issues discussed in NCCPR's new briefing paper on child welfare finance. The full paper is available on our website. Here's an excerpt:

So, what is delinking?

It all goes back to when a foster child's case is eligible for federal reimbursement under a program called Title IV-E. That reimbursement runs anywhere from 56 cents to 83 cents on the dollar, a huge federal subsidy for foster care. The same subsidy is available for adoption. As a result, in 2010 the federal government is expected to spend $4.7 billion on foster care and another $2.46 billion on adoption – more than ten times what it will spend on prevention and family preservation. The only brake on this fast-flowing open-spigot of foster care and adoption money involves the determination of eligibility.

Before 1996, eligibility was linked to whether the birth parents were eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). But in 1996, Congress ended AFDC. The link, however, remained. So today, for a child's case to be eligible for federal reimbursement, the child's birth parents need to be so poor that they would have qualified for AFDC by the standards in place in 1996.

It says an enormous amount about the extent to which child welfare systems target the poor that, in spite of the fact that the income limits have not been adjusted for inflation since 1996, about half of all foster care cases are eligible for this very generous federal reimbursement.

But because of that inflation, in theory, the proportion of cases eligible for federal reimbursement should decline ever so slightly every year, to the point where, in somewhere between 50 and 100 years, the federal government would be out of the foster care financing business. (In fact, as states get more aggressive about verifying eligibility, that may offset some of this decline).

Dealing with this "eligibility lookback" is time consuming, and it is cumbersome. It's a bizarre way to put a brake on the otherwise unlimited "entitlement" to foster care funding. But it's the only brake we've got.

If the only brake on a runaway train is a clumsy contraption that only Rube Goldberg could love, it's still better than no brake at all.

Removing the brake is known as "delinking" – since the link between foster care eligibility and AFDC would be broken.

Of course the foster care-industrial complex wants the brake removed. For them, it would be a bonanza. Suddenly, federal aid for foster care would double. Indeed, they crave delinking so much that they would be willing to settle for an alternative: Eliminate the link but cut the amount reimbursed for each case. That way, the change initially would be cost-neutral, though in future years it would cost far more than leaving the link in place.

The propaganda for delinking has been disheartening even by foster care industrial complex standards. CWLA repeatedly presents the issue this way:

The impact of this lack of support is felt by tens of thousands of children who have experienced abuse and neglect but do not qualify for federal assistance because of this outdated eligibility requirement.

The implication, of course, is that if a case is not eligible for federal reimbursement somehow the specific children in that case are getting less help than other children. Who knows - there might even be people from CWLA member agencies on Capitol Hill right now either misleading people on purpose with this line, or who actually believe the implication themselves.

Any such implication is flat wrong.

All foster children placed in licensed foster homes receive exactly the same benefits and services regardless of the case's eligibility for federal reimbursement. Those benefits and services may not be very good, but they are equal. And all licensed foster parents receive the same reimbursement for a IV-E-eligible child as for a non-eligible child. Such equal treatment is required for the state to get its IV-E money.

The camel's nose already is in the tent

At one time, I thought straight delinking, with its huge price tag couldn't happen. But tragically for children, it's already begun.

Just as Title IV-E provides a huge open-ended entitlement for foster care, it also includes another huge, (though not as huge) open-ended entitlement for adoption.

As noted previously on this blog, In 2008, the foster care-industrial complex managed to get a clause into new legislation, the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, that phases out the "link" for adoption subsidies.

In another words, they shoved into this law what ultimately will be at least a $2.46 billion annual windfall for adoption, and the public and private agencies that place children in adoptive homes. The law includes absolutely nothing for prevention or family preservation.

Given the state of the federal budget, every dollar spent elsewhere is one dollar less that can be used for prevention or family preservation. And this provision of the fostering connections act creates still another financial incentive for child welfare agencies to prefer adoption of foster children to reuniting them with birth parents.

So there is a very real, very frightening prospect that all the talk of reforming child welfare financing not only won't increase funding for prevention and family preservation, it could result in nothing more than delinking – in other words, nothing more than another $4.7 billion per year, at least, for the foster care-industrial complex, and a greater incentive than ever for agencies to take the child and run.

Financing foster care and family preservation: The waiver that saved Florida – again!

One of the canards used by the foster care-industrial complex to scare people away from real reform of how the federal government pays for child welfare is the claim that an "entitlement" is harder for Congress to cut than a flat grant. Therefore, groups like the Child Welfare League of America say, we have to keep the current, idiotic entitlement that pays states for every eligible child they throw into foster care.

Of course, this creates an absurd incentive to use foster care instead of better alternatives – but if you're a trade association that represents a lot of great big private agencies that need a steady supply of foster children to stay in business, you're not going to have a problem with that.

In fact, neither entitlements nor flat grants are written into the Constitution. Neither is easier or harder to change than the other. Indeed, CWLA itself is willing to see the entitlement for foster care cut in exchange for making every foster care case eligible for federal aid – so apparently cutting an entitlement isn't really so hard after all. (For details on all this see our briefing paper on child welfare finance.)

But now it turns out that not only are flat grants no easier to reduce; done right, they actually can save a child welfare system from devastating budget cuts. It's happening in Florida – for the second year in a row.

As I've noted often on this Blog, Florida is the only state that accepted a statewide waiver from federal funding rules – they traded in their "entitlement" to unlimited foster care money for every eligible child they threw into the system for a flat grant – and the flexibility to use the money for better alternatives, instead of just foster care.

The benefits for children have been huge: significantly fewer torn from everyone they know and love, and, most important, improvements in child safety, as documented by independent outside evaluations.

But there's also been a big financial gain. For starters, unlike the entitlement, which can be cut at any time, the waiver guaranteed Florida a specific level of federal aid for five years. But there's a string attached: Florida can't cut its state spending on child welfare below where it was when the waiver first was approved, in 2006. Cut below that level and the state loses all its federal money.

The result: a floor on state spending below which Florida simply won't go. As this Palm Beach Post editorial makes clear, for the second year in a row, the waiver will save Florida from devastating budget cuts in child welfare. The waiver won't prevent all budget cuts in children's services; but it significantly reduces the harm. No other state child welfare system in America has that kind of leverage.

It's too bad, that say, Michigan doesn't have a waiver like that, so the state can't impose slash-and-burn budget cuts on prevention and family preservation. Oh, wait – Michigan did have such a waiver. The state Department of Human Services even put out a press release touting it. Then, at the last minute, Michigan chickened out.

And this time, it wasn't the fault of Ismael Ahmed and his pals. The decision was made during the administration of his predecessor, Marianne Udow. Exactly who made the decision remains a mystery, in part because no reporter in Michigan has pressed DHS to name this individual so he or she can be held accountable. But, at a minimum, Udow allowed it to happen.

But the biggest lesson isn't the one that needs to be learned by Michigan, it's the one that needs to be learned by Congress: Congress needs to stand up to CWLA and the rest of the network of vested interests in child welfare - the foster care-industrial complex - and resist the kind of wimpy, non-reform reforms that the foster care-industrial complex wants. Instead, at a minimum, Congress should require the Department of Health and Human Services to make Florida-style waivers available to any state that wants it. Better yet, the Florida approach should be mandatory for every state.

The case for foster care finance reform, from those who know it best

It anyone still has any doubt about the need to reverse the perverse incentives in federal funding that encourage foster care and discourage better alternatives, they should take a few minutes to listen to Isha “Charlie” McNeeley and Jojo Murdock.

They are former foster children from Oregon and California who spoke eloquently about their own experiences at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee last week.

The hearing concerned restoring the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services to grant waivers from foster care funding restrictions, waivers like the one that has done so much to improve child safety in Florida, according to independent evaluations.

Legislation to do this passed the House of Representatives in the final days of the lame duck session last year, but it got nowhere in the Senate.  Now, it seems, some in the Senate may be ready to take up the cause.

No one at the hearing actually spoke against restoring this authority. But that’s always the m.o. of groups like the Child Welfare League of America, the giant trade association for public and private agencies, including many that would go out of business without a steady supply of foster children: never say no, just “yes, but…” reform to death.  You can bet that’s what CWLA and its allies will be doing if there are any signs that restoring waiver authority actually might pass.

Ideally, of course, Congress would go well beyond simply restoring the authority to grand waivers.  At a time when good entitlements, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are under attack, it would be nice if Congress turned its attention to an entitlement that actually does harm – the never ending open-ended entitlement to federal aid for foster care for every eligible child.

Ideally, Congress would end this entitlement, give all states what they’re getting now as a flat grant, indexed to inflation, and let the states keep any savings they achieved by reducing foster care.  But a state or county that caved in to a foster-care panic and started taking away lots of children needlessly would have to pick up the full tab for those placements. 

The Bush Administration wanted to give every state this option, on a purely voluntary basis, back in 2003.  As NCCPR reported in the trade journal Youth Today, had that passed Congress, and had every state taken the deal, states would have $5 billion more to spend on child welfare now than they got by sticking to the “entitlement.”

But CWLA and its BFFs at the Children’s Defense Fund, which is trapped in a 1960s entitlement = good, everything else = bad mentality, and their allies, killed the idea.  And it looks like they’ve learned nothing from their $5 billion blunder.

So odds are the best that young people like Ms. McNeeley and Ms. Murdock can hope for is that Congress might let HHS give more states the chance to reform foster care financing through waivers.  And given how the child welfare establishment really feels about this kind of reform, they might not even get that.

There is more about all of this in our briefing paper on child welfare finance reform.

Foster care finance reform: A Welcome-to-Washington present for George Sheldon

Child welfare waiver legislation introduced in Senate

A bipartisan bill has been introduced in the Senate to restore the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services to issue waivers from federal foster care finance restrictions.

If such a bill becomes law, many more states would have the opportunity to do what Florida did – take huge amounts of federal money now reserved for foster care and spend it on better options as well.

George Sheldon championed Florida’s waiver when he ran the Florida Department of Children and Families.  Next month, he will run HHS’ Administration for Children and Families.

It looks like a good bill.  So far, I see only one problem, on page 11: The waivers are reduced to three years each, instead of five years, and, after one renewal, a waiver can't be renewed again - so a state can benefit from the waivers for no more than six years.

Of course that makes no sense.  But it probably was put into the bill at the behest of groups that are wedded to the current open-ended entitlement for foster care and want to undercut waivers in any way they can.

Fortunately, if the bill becomes law, even with this provision, there would be six years to persuade Congress to repeal it. And if the waivers succeed, there probably will be lots of pressure to do just that.

There also are conditions states must meet to be granted a waiver.  Most notably, the states have to either have in place or promise to put in place at least six items on a long menu of services and policies for children and families.  Surprisingly, most of these are good policies and practices – in fact it’s almost a laundry list of best practices.  And it’s a long list.  A state that can’t implement six of these items probably isn’t ready for a waiver.

The biggest problem is not with the bill itself.  Rather it is a sad irony:

Opponents of waivers, or anything else that would end the foster care entitlement, even on a voluntary basis - groups like the Child Welfare League of America, the Children’s Defense Fund and the Center for Law and Social Policy - have used a series of scare tactics to kill reform.  One of those tactics is the false claim that an entitlement is more difficult to cut than a flat grant – so if the entitlement is eliminated, they claim, it will be much easier to cut spending on child welfare.

The Congressional Research Service proved this false when it estimated that had earlier reform plans been passed and had every state adopted them, states would have spent $5 billion more on child welfare over five years than they spent under the status quo.

And now, Bryan Samuels, who runs the Administration on Children, Youth and Families within ACF, points out in an interview with Youth Today, that states may be reluctant to seek waivers because a condition of the waivers is that states maintain their own child welfare spending.

IS CDF A RIGHT-WING FRONT GROUP?

It all kind of makes you wonder: CWLA is a trade association for child welfare agencies, including many that depend on a steady supply of foster children to stay in business.  So one expects CWLA to put the interests of the agencies ahead of the interests of children and try to subvert real child welfare finance reform.  Groups like CDF and CLASP, however, are widely perceived as leftist.  But given their enormous success in reducing child welfare spending, could it be that they are really brilliantly-disguised right-wing front groups?

After all, it’s thanks to the successful fear and smear campaign by CDF and CLASP that the proposals that would have led to up to $5 billion more in child welfare spending died.  So, in effect, thanks to CDF and CLASP, right-wing governors got what amounts to a $5 billion windfall to use on the kinds of things they really love, like tax breaks for big corporations and rich people.

If John Boehner knew how much CDF and CLASP had done for the far right, it would move him to tears!

And now, CDF and CLASP have made clear that, while they probably won’t overtly oppose waivers per se, they’ll do everything they can to “Yes, but …” the legislation to death.  If they succeed, right-wing governors won’t have to face embarrassing questions about why they didn’t seek a waiver to help more children.  They’ll never have to admit they didn’t do it because they wanted to remain free to slash state help for those children.


Were I a right-wing governor I’d be sending CDF and CLASP thank you notes – and maybe donations, so they could keep on helping me cut child welfare spending.

Child welfare responds to racism in the usual way: Unctuous hypocrisy and pious posturing

Statements of solidarity ring hollow when they come from groups that prop up a racist system. Or, as one lawyer for children put it:

 The first to call it out may have been Angela Burton of the New York State Office of Indigent Legal Services who tweeted:

All these "solidarity" statements from child welfare organizations, whatever.

Show us your Black Families Matter ACTION plan.

"When Deeds Speak, Words Are Nothing." African proverb

— AngelaBurton (@angieb_Bop) June 3, 2020

At about the same time Vivek Sankaran, director of the University of Michigan Child Advocacy Law Clinic and Child Advocacy Appellate Clinic tweeted:

Child advocates are speaking out against police brutality.  And an unjust criminal justice system.  And racist policies that have created structural inequities.  So why are we still okay destroying families that are victims of an unjust society?

— Vivek Sankaran (@vivekssankaran) June 3, 2020

On Saturday, Robert Latham, Associate Director of the University of Miami School of Law Children and Youth Law Clinic wrote:  

 “The child welfare system has nothing to say about anti-Black state violence because the child removal system engages in it daily.”

            As America is forced once again to confront racism, America’s child welfare establishment has responded with an outpouring of pious posturing and unctuous hypocrisy.  Go to the website or check the Twitter feed for almost any mainstream “child advocacy” organization and you’ll find a press release with boilerplate like “stands in solidarity…” “we have felt anger, hurt, fear, despair, … “Our nation must confront this crisis head on …”

Sins of the past

            To understand why the rhetoric is so empty, it’s worth reviewing some fundamentals:

            ● Foster care was racist from its inception.  The system as we know it today has its roots in the racism of Charles Loring Brace – a white, Protestant minister, and raving bigot, who hated and feared New York City’s impoverished immigrants, deemed them genetically inferior, and forcibly removed more than 120,000 children from the city to the South and Midwest on so-called “orphan trains.”  Many of the children were not orphans – they were, however, poor and of ethnic groups deemed inferior.  To accomplish this mass exercise in racism Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society, which still exists and still defends the orphan trains.

● From the 19^th Century through the 1960s, American child welfare agencies tried to effectively eradicate Native American culture and, indeed, Indian tribes, through the expedient of taking away children. First, they were warehoused in hideous orphanages, where the mantra was “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Later, there was a campaign of mass adoptions. Melissa Harris Perry called the orphanages an “explicit cultural extermination mission.” The Lakota People’s Law Project is calling for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  It wasn’t until 2001 that child welfare’s most famous trade association, the Child Welfare League of America, apologized.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1900

            ● But the apology means next to nothing, because CWLA and other trade associations, such as the one with the Orwellian name Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, continue to oppose real child welfare reform. Such reform must begin with changing federal law to allow all of the billions of federal dollars now used to hold overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite kids in foster care to be spent on better, safer alternatives. (And no, the overhyped Family First Act does not do that.)  

            Both these associations have issued the standard pious press releases in recent days.  Both also include in their membership many private foster care agencies that are paid for each day they hold children in foster care – so of course they will support no real reform.

            ● In fact, instead of real finance reform, the same organizations that condemn abuses by police are using COVID-19 as an excuse to urge Congress to pour vast sums of emergency aid money into a racist system that polices almost exclusively impoverished communities of color, and does those communities enormous harm. $500 million of that aid would be targeted largely toward the policing part of the system – child abuse investigations.

           So ask yourself: If an organization put out a statement of “solidarity” with #BlackLivesMatter while also urging Congress to spend hundreds of millions to give the police more tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets – would you believe that organization?

And make no mistake, child protective services is, in everything but name, a police force. In fact, CPS investigators have more power than police.  Their approach can best be called “knock and strip.” Effectively, they can enter homes and stripsearch children without a warrant. Say no, and they can come back with the police and even break down the door. Even when the entry is less drastic, the terror of the investigation is something a child may never forget.  More than half of Black children will endure such terror during their childhoods.  That’s best case. Worst case: the CPS caseworker takes away the children on-the-spot without so much as asking a judge first. (For a detailed discussion of the parallels between stop-and-frisk and CPS investigations see this City University of New York Law Review article by Michelle Burrell, former managing attorney of the Family Defense Team at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.)

There is no argument on behalf of this vast power to knock-and-strip that can’t also be made for stop-and-frisk. So why do so many of my fellow liberals think only one of those things is racist?

● Child welfare has its own “caucus of denial” dedicated to convincing the world that child welfare is the one and only field in America that is magically exempt from racism. (Just for the record, here’s a summary of the research that shows otherwise.) 

In what other field can a self-proclaimed liberal “scholar” call for the mass forced relocation of poor families from “terrible” neighborhoods – on penalty of losing their children to foster care if they don’t, blithely declare that “a relatively high percentage of adults who live in the worst neighborhoods are marginal to begin with…” go on to say it was wrong to close schools due to COVID-19 – because the risk of child abuse by those same “marginal” parents supposedly is greater than the risk of the disease – and still get himself a visiting professorship at Harvard?

            ● Then there’s the group that calls itself “Every Child Matters.” They tweeted “You may want to shield your kids from racial injustices in the world, but it’s important to support them in processing painful events & learning about social justice.”

            Nice thought.  But how does ECM propose to protect children from the racial injustice perpetrated by its own founder and past president, Michael Petit, when he told a Congressional committee that the states that do the best job preventing child abuse are the ones with “smaller, whiter populations.”  

            Petit has an ugly track record of misusing data to promote hype and hysteria. And he was instrumental in getting congress to create the so-called Commission on Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, where he treated one of the Commission’s two African-American members, Judge Patricia Martin with appalling condescension.  Judge Martin wrote a stinging dissent from the commission’s report.

            ● And let’s not forget the so-called “Alliance for Children’s Rights,” which specializes in dredging up ugly stereotypes about poor people, demeaning the lived experiences of foster youth, and denying that needless removal of children to foster care is a problem.  Yep, they’ve got one of those unctuous statements, too – and their using it for fundraising!

            ● Most of these groups also supported the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  It was passed in 1997, one year after the welfare “reform” law, and its target was the same – poor women and children – especially poor women and children of color. Both laws carried the same racist subtext.  ASFA led to a surge in needless removal of children, a mad rush to needlessly termination of parental rights which helped create a generation of legal orphans with no ties to their own families and no adoptive homes either.

Sins of the present

            But it’s not just child welfare’s sins of the past that reveal the field’s hypocrisy. Even as they tell us how they really, truly oppose racism, all over the country, government child protective services agencies and the usual assortment of private groups are spreading fear, smear and stereotype about poor families of color.

They’re telling reporters that as soon as overwhelmingly middle-class mostly white, professional “eyes” no longer are fixed upon impoverished children of color – because COVID-19 has closed the schools – their parents will unleash a “pandemic of child abuse” upon them. And yes, they’ve repeatedly used that, or similar terms.  I have yet to see even one child welfare agency, or journalist condemn the California district attorney who said: “For the most vulnerable people in our community ‘shelter-in-place’ is the same as putting them in a cage with a violent gorilla.”

            Of course, given the increased stress of both COVID-19 and its major side effect – poverty – a very small number of parents will succumb to the pressure and lash out at their children.  But isn’t it obvious that the notion that Black people will unleash abuse in pandemic proportions as soon as white eyes are averted is, uh, racist?  In the few cases where the pressure is too much, the solution is to provide concrete help to ameliorate poverty, not ratchet up the same child welfare surveillance state model that has failed for more than half a century – and actually makes children less safe.

            And, of course, public and private child welfare agencies have been routinely cutting off all in-person visits between foster children and their parents, even though a blanket prohibition is not necessary to curb COVID-19.  A more likely reason: To placate white, middle-class foster parents.

           

         Among the worst offenders when it comes to this fearmongering are assorted chapters of Court-Appointed Special Advocates.  CASA is a failed program that a landmark law review article brands “an exercise of white supremacy.”

         For those unfamiliar with the program: A CASA is almost always white and almost always middle-class. They have no serious training in law or social work or anything else one might need to march into the homes of poor people of color and pronounce judgment upon them. But that’s what they do – by authority handed to them by juvenile courts.

           Judges take the assessments of these mostly white middle-class amateurs very seriously.  (And let’s not forget that CASA chapter that held a fundraiser that featured a blackface act.) UPDATE: As if all that were not sickening enough, now the National CASA Association is invoking George Floyd's six-year-old daughter to promote itself - and to promote rushing poor Black foster children into adoption.

But fear not, the National CASA Association has proclaimed that CASA, too, is ready to fight for racial justice – to the last press release!

            If CASA were really serious about racial justice it would recognize that racism is baked into the CASA model. It would limit its role to two areas where it can be genuinely helpful, and that some chapters do now: mentoring foster youth and family finding to seek out extended family for young people in foster care or at risk of placement with strangers.

An anti-racist agenda for child welfare

            As for all those other organizations, if they really want to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem, here’s what they can do for families, especially families of color:

            ● Stop issuing press releases about solidarity and show some solidarity.

            ● Take this time to pause and do some serious soul searching about who you really are and what you really stand for.

            Then come back with an anti-racist agenda for child welfare.  NCCPR will be glad to get you started. Here's a summary, details below:

● Demand real child welfare finance reform – at a minimum, make all foster care money available for better alternatives, better yet, require that the money be transferred from foster care to prevention and family preservation. 

● Demand an end to per-diem reimbursement of private child welfare agencies – paying them for each day they hold a child in foster care.

● Demand an end to federal funding of child protective services investigations.

● Demand full funding for high-quality family defense.

● Demand that states repeal mandatory reporting laws, which have backfired, increasing the danger to children.

● Demand that Congress repeal two odious laws that enshrine all the worst aspects of the American approach to “child protection”: ASFA and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.

Robert Latham, whom I quoted at the top of this post, also has an agenda, which he summarized at the start of  a blog post he calls “A starter reading list on how child welfare policies harm Black people, families, and communities”

He writes:

Do the reading, and then let’s get to defunding the removal system, redirecting billions in resources directly to communities experiencing problems, and stripping child welfare decisions from bureaucrats and locating them properly back with families.

            But the child welfare establishment isn’t very good at self-reflection. 

CWLA’s statement calls for rooting out “…vestiges of racism …” But the racism in child welfare isn’t vestigial; it’s part of the system’s DNA.  And if you look closely at CWLA’s statement you’ll find they can’t resist a subtle dig at families, and a reminder of the horror stories that the child welfare system exploited to build the current system. Can you spot it? Hint: It’s in the second paragraph.

            But when it comes to lack of self-reflection, or self-knowledge, CWLA isn’t even the worst offender. Guess who else has one of those pious proclamations up on its website.  Hint, in their statement they say that other people’s racism is “compromising our own success” and their services are “acts of justice…”  Who would be that clueless?  The Children’s Aid Society.