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| When you swing an ax madly and chop down virtually everything, once in a while you’ll hit something that really should be cut |
A whole lot of research shows that the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program, the most sacred cow in child welfare, does harm. So do facts matter? Or does wallowing in a warm, fuzzy narrative about overwhelmingly white, middle-class amateurs saving overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children matter more?
Links to all of the research cited in this post can be found here.
A ProPublica story aptly calls what’s happening now “The Trump Administration’s War on Children”:
The staff of a
program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part
so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. … Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers
their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en
masse, some as soon as May 1…
That doesn’t include more general proposed slashing and burning, such as cutting housing assistance, health care, and SNAP benefits with more on the horizon.
But when you swing an ax madly and chop down virtually everything, once in a while you’ll hit something that really should be cut. And so one cut should be cause for celebration: The Administration is trying to cut $48.9 million in grants to the National CASA Association. The Association “sets standards” for hundreds of Court-Appointed Special Advocates programs and passes on some of that federal funding to some of them.
Almost immediately, local reporters started churning out hand-wringing stories about how horrible this would be – because, obviously CASA is so wonderful, right?
So while I don’t suppose this will do much good, I’m going to cling to the notion that facts matter and point out a simple fact concerning what abundant research tells us about Court-Appointed Special Advocates.
Research tells us CASA doesn’t work. In fact, it documents how CASA does harm.
CASA is a program in which overwhelmingly white middle-class amateurs, almost always well-intentioned, are given 30 hours of training (sometimes 40) and then sent off into the homes of overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families to pass judgment upon them.
Technically, they make recommendations, but National CASA brags about how often the recommendations are rubber-stamped by judges. So a bunch of white middle-class amateurs often effectively decide if overwhelmingly impoverished disproportionately nonwhite children will be taken from their homes or, if already taken, will ever get to live with their own families again. What could possibly go wrong?
The answer to that can be found in research:
No matter how warm and fuzzy the program makes the volunteers (and the reporters who cover it) feel, study after study shows CASA is a failure.
The research tells us that CASA’s only real “accomplishments” are:
● Prolonging foster
care.
● Making it less likely
families will reunify.
● Making it less
likely children will achieve permanence through guardianship with a relative.
● Making it more
likely children will age out with no home at all.
● Spending less time on a case when the child is Black.
● Doing nothing to make children safer.
No wonder one law review article calls CASA “an act of white supremacy.”
Could it be that the researchers were biased – and out to get CASA? On the contrary, these findings come from studies commissioned by National CASA and Texas CASA, and another done by a former CASA in the program she evaluated.
Does every study come out this way on every measure? No. But the largest and most rigorous do. Indeed, when researchers conducted a review of the literature seeking to find out if CASA is an evidence-based program, their answer was clear: No.
Again, links to the studies are here.
On the extremely rare occasions when anyone at CASA is asked about this mass of research, the program seeks to divert attention from those findings by pointing to other things it does, such as providing emotional support and mentoring for foster youth, and advocating to get them the services they need. Some CASA chapters also engage in intensive efforts to find extended family to take in children so they don't have to be in foster care with strangers. Those are fine things to do – and if CASA were willing to limit itself to doing only things like that, it would be making a useful contribution. It’s when the overwhelmingly white middle-class amateurs effectively become judge, jury and, sometimes, family executioner for overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families that they do vastly more harm than good.
A classic example is CASA’s new program to help young people aging out of foster care. That’s a great thing to do. But wouldn’t it be better if CASA didn’t make it more likely that those children would age out in the first place?
And yet, none of this information makes its way into all those local news stories. In most cases, CASA propaganda simply has been repeated so often that reporters don’t think to question it. But that’s not good enough.
All over America news organizations rally behind the slogan “facts matter.” Do they? Or do feel-good myths matter more?
