● Back in 2004, a huge, comprehensive study of that most
sacred cow in child welfare, Court-Appointed Special Advocates found that CASAs
only accomplishments were to prolong foster care and make it less likely that
foster children would be placed with relatives instead of stranger. Now there’s an even bigger, more
comprehensive study – and the results are even worse.
Compared to children who were not assigned CASAs, children
with CASAs were less likely to wind up in a permanent home and more likely to endure
the worst outcome of all: “aging out” of foster care with no home at all. I
have a blog post about it, with a link to the full study. I’ve also reprinted our annual Halloween
reminder to CASA: It’s not a good idea to have a blackface
act at your fundraiser.
● And now for something completely different: One of the
best recent takes on the child welfare system came last week from Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Full
Frontal examined the racial and class biases that permeate the system and
do enormous harm to children needlessly taken.
The program didn’t get everything right – highlighting a so-called
foster parent “shortage” that is, in fact, artificial, created by the very
problems Full Frontal examined. But the segment still is notably better than
what we get from many “serious” news organizations. That’s probably because the writing staff for
Full Frontal is more diverse than the
staff of most “serious” news organizations.
Have a look:
● Last week, I wrote a
blog post about a story in The
Correspondent which noted that IBM’s supercomputer, Watson was doing a poor
job of telling doctors how to treat illnesses.
In fact, some of Watson’s recommendations were dangerous. It was one more example about how the hype
about using big data to solve our problems doesn’t match the reality. But at least Watson wasn’t guilty of racial
bias. The
Washington Post reports that is
more than can be said for another widely-used health care predictive analytics
algorithm. That algorithm significantly underestimated the health needs of
Black patients. So if predictive analytics
is racially biased when used in law enforcement – which
it is – and racially biased when used in medicine – which it is – what does
that say about using predictive
analytics in child welfare?
● One should never take current or former child welfare
agency leaders at their word when they brag about their success. But when it comes to the
claims in this column by the former Commissioner of the Connecticut
Department of Children and Families, Joette Katz, the numbers back up the
words. Connecticut did, indeed,
dramatically reduce institutionalization and increase the use of kinship foster
care during Katz’s tenure. This column
also explains the right way to
respond to cases involving substance abuse.
● Nebraska long has removed children at one of the highest
rates in the country. Officially those
numbers are finally going down. But is
Nebraska reducing foster care, or just hiding it?
