Race, class and child welfare: AEI gets it wrong again

The Charles Murray faction of the extreme right offers up a remarkable collection of half-truths, straw men, and statistics abuse. 

"So you see," says the child welfare establishment, 
"of course we'll accept your approach. All you have to do is clear the bar!"

The American Enterprise Institute is the right-wing think tank that is the longtime home of Charles Murray, author of the notorious exercise in what the Southern Policy Law Center aptly calls “racist pseudo-science” known as The Bell Curve. So it makes sense that AEI has become the center of what should be called child welfare’s “Caucus of Denial” – those who argue that child welfare is magically immune from the racism that permeates every other aspect of American life. They also deny that poverty is confused with neglect. 

While other conservatives, those who recognize the danger of abuse of government power, are among the leaders in bipartisan efforts to reform the system, (and conversely, I’m sorry to say, plenty of my fellow liberals are in denial as well) AEI is trapped in a Charles Murray mentality.  

AEI’s efforts to promote fallacies about race, poverty and child welfare are led by Naomi Schaefer Riley, who writes screeds with titles like “Wokeness Has Come for Child Protective Services” and who proudly analogizes her book attacking family preservation to another of Murray’s books. 

Riley’s book was given to the world by a publisher whose other titles include American Bolsheviks: The Persecution of Donald Trump, The Case To Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, The Myth Of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault On Clean Elections, Crime Inc.: How Democrats Employ Mafia And Gangster Tactics To Gain And Hold Power and Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting Covid Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again. 

So it’s not surprising that a charter member of the Caucus of Denial, Brett Drake, got AEI to publish a summary of the caucus’ major claims. In Drake’s Bizarro World, facts are myths and myths are facts. 

He squeezes a remarkable number of half-truths, straw men, statistics abuse, and distortion of what anyone who dares to disagree with him has to say into two pages. Let’s set the record straight: 

● Drake’s claim: He says the idea that there is widespread racial bias in child welfare is rooted in a single study, the third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3), but that study was flawed and the findings were not replicated in NIS-4. 

That’s a classic half-truth. NIS-3 was flawed and NIS-4 did not replicate its findings. But the case that child welfare is permeated with racism is not based entirely or even mostly on NIS-3.  There are a wealth of other, rigorous studies, controlling carefully for other variables that show racial bias in child welfare decision-making. Some of them are summarized, with citations, in this NCCPR Issue Paper.  

I found out about many of these studies when I read Shattered Bonds, the first book on this topic by Prof. Dorothy Roberts (a member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors). So Drake’s implication that Roberts relied mostly on NIS-3 also is incorrect. And, Drake does not mention the additional research cited in Prof. Roberts’ second book on this topic, Torn Apart. 

Instead, Drake repeatedly cites one study – his own – purporting to show no racial bias. I analyze the many failings of that study in detail here.

● Drake’s claim: It’s supposedly a myth that most neglect cases investigated by child protective services (CPS) agencies are “just poverty.” 

This is simply a regurgitation of the puerile debate over whether a case is “poverty alone.” First of all, plenty of cases are poverty alone. Three separate studies found that 30% of America’s foster children could be home right now if their families simply had adequate housing. 

But whether poverty is “alone” or not ignores the central question: Do you need to tear apart a family to fix whatever might there along with the poverty? The answer is a resounding no.  The way to tell if a case is a poverty case actually is pretty simple: If the solution is money, the problem is poverty.  Study after study finds that in a great many cases, the solution is money.

When the problem is poverty alone the solution is money. But, as this article from 23 leading scholars explains, often when the problem is poverty plus something else the solution still is money – which makes sense since the “something else” often is caused by or exacerbated by poverty. I discuss the whole “just poverty” debate in detail in this presentation at a Kempe Center conference. 

● Drake’s claim: It’s supposedly a myth that neglect is less serious than abuse – and we know this because 76.4% of fatalities are due to neglect. 

But that tells us nothing about neglect allegations in general. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, family police agencies “substantiated” neglect allegations concerning 377,742 children. There were 1,252 fatalities attributed to neglect.  The fact that 33/100ths of one percent of “substantiated” neglect allegations involved fatalities tells you nothing about the other 99 and 66/100ths percent - yet this is the entire basis for Drake’s claim. 

Drake’s whole argument about neglect and fatalities is based on statistics abuse, but teasing out the facts gets a bit wonky. If there  happen to be any child welfare wonks out there who want to go into the weeds on this, I have a detailed explanation in this column for The Imprint. 

Drake sets up a straw man when he implies those who challenge the approach he champions, and which has dominated child welfare for more than half a century think neglect is “trivial or something that can be ignored.” 

On the contrary, we think it is urgent to address what agencies call neglect – by addressing the poverty that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is confused with neglect or caused by neglect; as opposed to tearing children from their homes at least 179,000 times per year and putting many more families under oppressive, traumatizing surveillance. 

● Drake’s claim: He says it’s a myth that anonymous reports are “unnecessary at best and are often simply harassment.” 

OK, now things are getting weird: Anonymous reports are among those least likely to be substantiated. In New York City, for example, 22.7% of all reports are “substantiated” – which means only that a worker checked a box on a form. For anonymous reports, it’s 6.7%.  To which Drake replies: Yes, but other categories of reporters have substantiation rates almost as bad! 

So, does that prove the need for anonymous reports, or does it prove the need to also replace mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, so workers are not deluged with false reports from all sorts of sources, stealing time from finding children in real danger? 

But wait, it gets weirder: Drake makes the case for anonymous reports by saying: 

Surprisingly, reports from “unclassified” sources (including anonymous, “other,” and “unknown or missing” sources) are actually slightly more likely to result in re-reports in multivariate models than are reports from professional sources. 

But that’s not surprising at all – if you understand that anonymous reports are, in fact, often simply harassment.  Of course someone engaged in harassment will “re-report”! 

By the way, those data from New York City come from this column in The Imprint calling for replacing anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. The column was not written by lawyers who represent parents; it was written by lawyers who lead an agency that represents children. They’re on the frontlines. They see the harm such reports do to children every day. Maybe lawmakers – and “scholars” like Drake -- should listen to them. 

And then comes a claim that’s weirder still … 

● Drake’s claim: “It’s a myth that CPS spends most of its resources investigating unnecessary calls.”  

This is a myth, Drake claims, because CPS spends even more of its money on things like holding children in foster care (and, though he doesn’t mention it, warehousing children in institutions that can cost well over $100,000 per year per child). 

Well, sure, Brett, we’re glad to second any the claim that CPS is spending vast amounts of money on foster care! But of course, he’s missing the point. What we actually say is that of the resources – not just money but caseworker time and effort – expended on investigations, most of that is devoted to unnecessary calls. This is demonstrated by the huge number of investigations where workers themselves find that the allegation was false. And that steals worker time from finding the relatively few children in real danger. 

● Drake’s claim: It’s a myth that foster care is toxic to children. The basis for his claim: 

“The limited research we have is mixed, but the majority of well-controlled studies do not find that foster care is harmful to children, and it is sometimes found to be protective …” 

OK, let’s parse this one. 

“The limited research we have is mixed …” 

Let’s stop right there. There are multiple rigorous studies that find that foster care is indeed harmful; not for every child, but in typical cases children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

And consider what a low bar the system is setting for itself. These studies find foster care is worse even than leaving children in their own homes with little or no help to their families at all. Consider how much better still the outcomes would be compared to foster care if systems actually took some of that vast amount of money Drake rightly notes is spent on foster care and spent it on helping families instead. 

Now consider the implications of tearing nearly 200,000 children from their families every year  based, at best, on research that is “mixed.” 

No one denies that removal from the home is inherently traumatic – at least I hope not. No one denies that much of foster care is dismal.  

Just read what current and former foster youth themselves have to say about what foster care is really like. In this report, and this one, and this one. Yes, some foster youth believe, almost certainly correctly, that they needed to be taken away anyway. But that’s no excuse for ignoring so much lived experience to the contrary. And that is not the same thing as claiming that the system does not do harm. 

As for the inherent trauma of removal itself, just listen to the cries of children torn from their parents at the Mexican border during the first Trump Administration. No, seriously, Prof. Drake: Listen to them. Right here. Right now: 

Of course, unlike Trump’s Border Patrol, CPS workers almost always mean well, but the overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children torn from their families by those workers, yes, often when their poverty is confused with neglect, cry out the same way for the same reason.  Yet Drake defends doing this to children based on the claim that the research concerning whether they also will be, for example, more likely to be unemployed, become pregnant as teenagers or wind up in jail is mixed?

Now, back to Drake:

 … the majority of well-controlled studies…

 Note the hyphenated weasel-word there. Drake offers no definition of “well-controlled;” so it may just mean “the studies that reach the conclusion I want.”  But more important is the rest of that sentence: 

… do not find that foster care is harmful to children. 

Here again, what an astoundingly low bar the child welfare establishment sets for itself, particularly when compared to the enormously high bar set for any program that works to keep families together. We should keep on doing what so many current and former foster youth say traumatized them because there are some studies out there that find that foster care didn’t do harm? 

As for the studies supposedly showing it’s sometimes “protective,” at least one of those studies found that the improvement occurred after reunification. So it wasn’t the foster care, it was being back with their families. 

And Drake never even mentions all the studies showing stunningly high rates of abuse in foster care itself. 

Drake begins this section of his screed by declaring “There is near-universal agreement that keeping children in their families is best so long as the child is safe.” 

But if you really believe foster care is harmless and maybe even beneficial, why is keeping children in their families “best so long as the child is safe”?  After all, if it’s actually beneficial wouldn’t it be good for children who are safe but are simply being denied the “benefits” of being around white middle-class people? So I have to wonder how much confidence Drake really has in his own claims about the benefits, or at least the lack of harm, of foster care. 

In fact, foster care is toxic to children. Yes, on rare occasions it may be less toxic than the home from which the children were taken – particularly if you don’t actually do anything to make things better in the home. And even when it doesn’t result in foster care, investigations themselves can be enormously traumatic for children.  Because they are so toxic, they need to be used rarely and in very small doses. 

Instead, we have created a massive child welfare surveillance state that will force one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children to endure the trauma of investigation before they turn 18 – according to a study co-authored by Brett Drake. 

As for safety, consider what one of the architects of the current system, one of the many having second thoughts, has to say. 

Responding to a commentary co-authored by another member of the Caucus of Denial defending the current system, Dr. Richard Krugman wrote that he agreed with the commentary authors that …

“… just ablating CPS agencies is the wrong approach. BUT we now have 40 years of experience with this approach and have made no progress in reducing the mortality from physical abuse of children (decades with 1500-2500 children dying annually). … Doing the same thing for 40 years that doesn't seem (or can't be shown) to be working was someone's definition of insanity. [Emphasis in original; full quote here].