KEY POINTS
A huge, new study of Court-Appointed Special
Advocates is out. It was commissioned –
and paid for – by a state CASA program.
It claims to have fixed the alleged methodological failings in other
studies. The results, straight from the
study:
“Overall, children appointed a CASA have significantly
LOWER odds than children without a CASA of achieving permanency.” [Emphasis
added]
Compared to
children not burdened with a CASA on the case, foster children with CASAs were:
● Less likely to be
reunified with their own parents.
● Less likely to
find permanence in the form of guardianship by a relative.
● More likely to “age
out” of foster care with no home at all.
● The results are NOT due to the fact that CASAs are said to be assigned to “the toughest cases.” The researchers took extraordinary steps
to account for that.
The findings are
disturbingly similar to a devastating 2004 study of the program. If anything,
the new findings are even worse.
Back in 2004,
Youth
Today revealed the results of the most
comprehensive study done to that point concerning the most sacred cow in child
welfare: Court-Appointed Special Advocates.
CASAs are overwhelmingly
white overwhelmingly middle-class amateurs sent into the homes of people who
are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately of color. The amateurs then
tell judges what decisions to make and, to a frightening degree, the judges rubber-stamp
the recommendations. Though CASAs almost always mean well, their only real
“qualification” typically is their white, middle-class status.
What could possibly go wrong?
Plenty, according to that 2004 study. The study was commissioned by the National
CASA Association itself, which thought it would show the world how successful
the program is. But it didn’t. Instead, the study found that having a CASA
assigned to a case prolonged the time children were trapped in foster care, and
made it less likely that children would be placed with relatives instead of
strangers – even though
multiple
studies
have found kinship foster care to be
far less harmful to children than what should properly be called stranger care.
The study also found that CASAs didn’t really spend that
much time on their cases - an average of only 4.3 hours per month for white
children – and only 2.67 hours per month for Black children.
CASA has an all-purpose excuse whenever a study doesn't find what CASA wants it to find: Of course we got poorer results, they say, but that's only because we take on the toughest cases. The findings, CASA claims, are due to "selection bias." But the researchers who conducted the 2004 study took rigorous
steps to avoid “selection bias” – that is, to be sure they adjusted for any
differences in the circumstances of the children with and without CASAs. Nevertheless, when the results didn’t go the
way CASA wanted, National CASA blamed selection bias. At the time, Youth Today concluded that National CASA’s efforts to spin the
study “can border on duplicity.”
What National CASA did not do was commission another study.
But, 15 years later, Texas CASA did.
And
it’s
a Texas-size study. The researchers
looked at outcomes for 31,754 children, far larger than any previous
study. Not only did Texas CASA
commission the study, they also paid for it – and they chose the group that
would do the research. The researchers
go on at length about how they’re confident they dealt with the "selection bias." problem. So no, the results are not because the CASAs dealt with tougher cases.
And those results are even worse than the results from the
2004 study.
Delaying “permanency”
If their own writing is to be believed, the Holy Grail for
those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, is “permanence”
– or, as they call it “permanency,” presumably because adding an extra syllable
makes them feel more important.
There are actually good reasons for this. Part of the reason
foster care is so inherently harmful is because it is impermanent. Children are
first traumatized by being taken from everyone they know and love and then
traumatized over and over as they are moved from foster home to foster home,
sometimes emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone.
But there are many ways to achieve permanency. The best, of
course, is not to tear children needlessly from their parents in the first
place. Second best is swift
reunification. Third best is allowing
the child to live in the permanent custody of a relative instead of a
stranger. Fourth on the list is adoption
by strangers. That option has an
honorable place in child welfare. Sometimes it is, indeed, the best option.
But when latter-day “child savers” (to use the term their
19th Century counterparts proudly gave themselves) talk “permanency”
they’re typically not interested in the first three – they want to jump to
option 4: adoption by total strangers; people with whom the child savers can
identify because they are more likely to be of the same race and class.
But officially their standard of success is “permanency” –
period.
As the Texas study notes:
The CASA program was
designed to help children in foster care, and one way the program believes it accomplishes this goal is
by getting children into safe, stable, permanent placements.” [Emphasis added.]
So here’s the stunning finding from the massive Texas study:
If a child has a CASA, her or his odds of achieving permanency are
significantly reduced.
It should come as no surprise that children with a CASA are
16 percent less likely to be reunified with their own parents. The racial and
class bias that prompted one law review article to call CASA an
“exercise of
white supremacy” ensures this.
But the Texas study found that a child with a CASA is 20
percent less likely to find permanency in any
form – and more likely to wind up with the worst outcome of all: “aging out” of
the system with no ties to their own family and no permanent home with anyone
else either.
Among those who do find “permanency,” children with a CASA
are less likely to find that permanency with a relative, and more likely to
find it with a total stranger through adoption.
The researchers acknowledge that their study is not an
outlier, writing: “Our findings largely confirm the conclusions of prior
research on CASA.”
The spin: Maybe
permanency isn’t that important after
all
As was the case in 2004, the dismal findings from the new
study did not seem to please the study’s authors. So they came up with all sorts of ways to
spin those findings.
First, of course, they speculated that the lower rates of
permanency might be because, with all that time to investigate, CASAs may have
concluded that “a given placement is not a safe, stable, permanent option.” But the study itself doesn’t measure whether
any such conclusions are accurate. The
2004 study found, however, that when CASAs prolonged children’s time in foster
care and reduced the chances they would be placed with relatives this did
nothing to improve child safety. (It also found, of course, that CASAs aren’t really
spending all that much time on their cases.)
Then the authors of the new study seem to suggest that
permanence may not be all it’s cracked up to be. They write:
While traditionally
legal permanency has been the primary focus of the child welfare system there has
been a recent shift by some toward a focus on wellbeing and social support
outside of permanent placement.
The “some” in question seems to be the Texas CASA program
itself, since the only support cited for this claim is a promotional
publication from Texas CASA. But if that's really what the researchers and/or Texas CASA believe you have to wonder: Why did they go to all this trouble to do a massive study of
legal permanency outcomes if legal permanency isn’t really that important?
Then the researchers take it a step further, seeming to
suggest that aging out might not be so bad.
They write:
Youth who are likely
to age out of the child welfare system receive services to help prepare them
for adult living and additional services after aging out of care, some of which
are not provided to those youth who reach a permanent outcome before age
eighteen.
Leaving aside the fact that the description of help to youth
who age out is overly optimistic, this offers a wonderful insight into the
mindset of the child welfare establishment. They seem to be saying: Youth who
age out get help that youth placed in permanent homes don’t, so maybe it’s o.k.
to just let them age out.
Quick: Can anyone think of a better way to fix this disparity?
Only toward the very end do the authors’ ever-so-gently
raise the most likely reason for these awful results:
Another limitation of
the present study is the lack of demographic information available about the
CASA volunteers. CASAs’ age, experience, ethnicity, and socioeconomic
background could influence their activities or their interpretation of what is
in the best interest of a child. Without access to this information, we are
unable to explore the influence of CASA characteristics.
First of all, this begs the question: Why didn’t they have
access to this information?
As for income, that can be reasonably inferred from the
simple fact that you have to have enough time and money on your hands to be
able to volunteer.
We can also get a sense of the outlook of CASA concerning
issues of race and class by things like:
● The CASA chapter that held a fundraiser featuring a
blackface act.
● The CASA chapter that fell apart over a simple request to
try to become more diverse.
● The former CASA volunteer whose rants about the families
he investigated read like a Donald Trump tweetstorm.
● The whole wretched mess in Snohomish County.
The limits of CASA
None of this means that no child ever has been helped by
having a CASA volunteer. But the study findings indicate that children are more likely to be harmed than helped. If a medicine were found to be more likely to
make patients sicker instead of better, we know what would happen: It would be
pulled off the market.
CASA might have a useful role to play in child welfare – if it
were converted into strictly a mentoring program for foster children, without
allowing these usually white, middle-class amateurs to tell judges where those children
should grow up.
But in its current form, CASA should be pulled off the
market.
It’s time for Congress, which helps to fund CASA, for the
judges who appoint CASAs and for the well-meaning people in the programs
themselves to stop.
Stop denying children the chance to live safely in their own
homes.
Stop denying children the chance to live with their extended
families.
Stop denying children permanency.
