Greg Abbott’s (and Ron DeSantis') liberal enablers

Greg Abbott (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

A giant vehicle with nearly unchecked power to destroy families was built largely by the Left.  Too bad it never occurred to a lot of my fellow liberals that, someday, someone like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott [or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis] would get the keys. 

UPDATE, JUNE 12: NBC News reports that another right-wing governor, Florida’s Ron DeSantis also wants to exploit power handed to him both by liberal politicians and by liberal media, particularly the Miami Herald, which has campaigned for years to make the state’s family policing agency ever more oppressive and more powerful. 

My fellow liberals are very upset – as they should be. 

Everywhere you turn, it seems, the liberal child welfare establishment is churning out statements “blasting” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for unleashing the state’s family policing agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare agency”) against transgender children and their families. 

The Children’s Defense Fund is doing what it does best, issuing a statement. Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago did the same and included endnotes. The American Civil Liberties Union is doing what it does best – suing.  The group that calls itself Children’s Rights is doing what it does best – exploiting the whole situation to collect email addresses for endless fundraising appeals. 

And it’s not just the usual suspects. The federal government’s Administration for Children and Families, which can take six months just to clear its throat, already has an entire “information memorandum” out.  Even President Biden weighed in, condemning Texas for “weaponizing child protective services against loving families.”  (Meanwhile, some of the same news organizations who are outraged by Abbott bought into the whole racist COVID “pandemic of child abuse” myth.) 

President Biden is right.  CDF is right. The ACLU is right. Chapin Hall is right. Even Children’s Rights is right.  Greg Abbott’s cynical, callous, breathtakingly cruel attack targeting transgender children deserves all the condemnation it is getting – and more.   (And while Abbott has systematized such attacks, they are not limited to Texas.  This case is from Michigan.) 

It’s just too bad all these groups didn’t think of consequences like this when, either by action or omission, they built the very system that Abbott is abusing.  Some of them continue to prop up that system.  It’s too bad all these groups and individuals didn’t notice that the family policing system has been “weaponizing child protective services against loving families” – in particular nonwhite families -- from its inception.  

As Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore School of Law wrote in The Washington Post on Feb. 28: 

Though many are rightly outraged [by what Abbott has done], those familiar with the child welfare system are not surprised.  Vague definitions of abuse and neglect open the door to state-approved discrimination. These laws have historically been used to control Black and Native families, and these parents live in constant fear that their children could be removed. … Child welfare laws invite discrimination and have been used to regulate marginalized communities. 

How bad is this system that runs roughshod over families and was largely built by my fellow liberals? 

NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda, called Civil Liberties Without Exception, begins with this hypothetical: 

Suppose, when he was attorney general, William Barr had proposed anti-terrorism legislation with the following provisions: 

Special anti-terrorism police could search any home without a warrant – and stripsearch any occupant — based solely on an anonymous telephone tip.  Any occupant of the home could be detained for 24 hours to two weeks without so much as a hearing – and they’ll probably be detained far longer because, in the special anti-terrorism court set up by this legislation, all the judges are afraid to look soft on “terrorists.” 

At that first hearing the detainees may – or may not – get a lawyer just before the hearing begins, and they almost never get effective counsel. 

At almost every stage, the standard of proof is not “beyond a reasonable doubt” or even “clear and convincing” but merely “preponderance of the evidence,” the lowest standard in American jurisprudence, the same one used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender. 

And in most states, all the hearings and all the records are secret. 

Had Barr proposed such legislation, it’s reasonable to expect that civil libertarians would have responded with fury. 

Yet this hypothetical anti-terrorism law already is the law governing the system we call “child welfare.”  And sadly, many who in other circumstances are quick to defend civil liberties either stand silent or support it. 

Now Greg Abbott has driven home the consequences of liberal silence and liberal support for a child welfare surveillance state that tramples on civil liberties. 

The Right bears responsibility, too 

The Right should not be let off the hook here.  This is an issue that creates unusual divisions and unusual alliances.  It was, after all, Newt Gingrich who called for putting poor people’s children into orphanages.  It was the Right that watered down the Family First Prevention Services Act to eliminate the kinds of help families need most – concrete help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.  (They’re still at it, blocking President Biden’s anti-poverty agenda – which is the ultimate anti-child abuse agenda.) And much of the backlash against racial justice in child welfare comes from right-wing ideologues, including one who proudly analogizes her work to that of Charles Murray. 

There also are groups, on the Left and the Right who do understand this and have worked together to curb the family policing system. 

But when you look at the lawmakers who lead efforts to make state and local family policing systems even bigger and more powerful, they tend to come from the Left.  At the federal level, while right-wing Republican Tom DeLay was a prime mover behind the odious, racist Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, a law that passed almost unanimously, it had an even more powerful backer: Hillary Clinton. She was still bragging about it when she ran for president in 2016. 

So now, thanks to ASFA, if Greg Abbott’s family police take away transgender children and stall the process for 15 months, federal law actually requires the family police to seek termination of those children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights). Because under ASFA it doesn’t matter why a child was taken in the first place.  

Enablers in Texas 

It is much the same in Texas. 

For decades Texas media fawned over Scott McCown, first when he was a judge in Austin and then when he ran a liberal think tank, the Center for Public Policy Priorities.  For at least a decade McCown was the Godsource for Texas media – no story about Texas child welfare was complete without an obligatory Scott McCown quote.  His skill at portraying himself as the lone Voice of the Left fighting for children against the right-wing Texas political establishment enhanced his appeal. 

McCown was the personification of everything wrong with the liberal child welfare establishment.  He said there was no problem with wrongful removal, that families had all the due process they needed and he was explicit in demanding that Texas take away more children.  You can read all about him in NCCPR’s 2005 report on Texas child welfare. 

McCown’s legacy lives on.  Even as they write story after story about the hellscape that is Texas foster care, with rare exceptions, Texas media won’t even consider that the problem involves taking away too many children and the widespread confusion of poverty with neglect. 

Last year, the Texas legislature considered a bill to modestly narrow the grounds for coercive intervention into families and make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect. In a "news story" dripping with sarcasm, Dallas Morning News Austin Bureau Chief Robert T. Garrett almost brags about refusing to report himself on issues of wrongful removal and due process. He writes: 

GOP leaders want to put a tighter leash on [child protective services]; make it harder to remove children from their birth families … Some staunchly conservative Republican lawmakers have helped make individual families’ fights with CPS, covered by right-leaning news outlets, into causes célèbres.

In fact, in a legislature where Democrats are greatly outnumbered, they made up more than one-third of the bill’s sponsors and cosponsors.  The bill passed almost unanimously.  One of those apparently not too keen on it: Greg Abbott. He let it become law without his signature. 

So which is it, Dallas Morning News?  Is the vast right-wing conspiracy in Texas out to crush innocent families by misusing its vast power?  Or is the vast right-wing conspiracy in Texas tying the hands of noble caseworkers and turning a blind eye to child abuse by cutting back on that same power? 

It’s not just the Dallas Morning News.  On March 4, the Texas Tribune ran a very good story about parents of transgender children rushing to lawyer-up – as they should.  Because, as one expert said: “Once you're in the clutch of the child welfare system, you're very vulnerable.”   

But back when she was editor of the Tribune, and before that when she covered child welfare for that respected online news outlet, Emily Ramshaw (now CEO of The 19^th) wrote stories much like Garrett’s – and she, too, systematically shut out all dissent. 

Even now there’s a subtle bias.  Although the story about the rush to hire lawyers briefly mentions that some are working pro bono, it says no more about all the families who can’t afford to pay and aren't likely to find such a lawyer – which is most families “in the clutch of the child welfare system.”

UPDATE, MARCH 9: One Texas-based reporter does get it. In this excellent story for Slate, Roxanna Asgarian writes:

The child welfare system—decried as “family policing” by critics—is a particularly potent tool for transphobic politicians because it was set up to surveil families that fall outside of the white, middle class norm.

Not much of a learning curve 

Maybe all this would be excusable if these various organizations really learned anything.  We’ve seen that most Texas media have not.  At the national level, the ACLU has – they’re doing excellent work countering the use of predictive analytics (computerized racial profiling) in child welfare.  

But the Children’s Defense Fund, which has been fine with ASFA and opposed real child welfare finance reform is as regressive as ever.  Have you heard what they said about legislation to curb ASFA?  Neither have I. I haven't seen a word about it from Chapin Hall either.

And the award for chutzpah goes to Children’s Rights,  They have radically changed their rhetoric, especially their Twitter feed, but not their awful litigation – which repeatedly has made family policing systems bigger and more powerful.  CR even cites its own Texas McLawsuit – which does nothing to curb the power of the family policing system as somehow putting them “in a unique position” to recognize Greg Abbott’s hypocrisy!  (CR has an even worse settlement in Michigan, but they have leveraged none of their influence to do anything about what happened in the case cited above.) 

So here’s a test for any individual or organization who claims to oppose “weaponizing child protective services against loving families.” Are you ready to acknowledge your own complicity in building the weapon?  Are you ready to sue to stop wrongful removal? Are you ready to seek to reopen old settlements that fail to address the issue?  Are you ready to demand repeal of ASFA, or at least support significant reform?  What about it ACLU?  Where do you stand CDF?  Are you willing to do more than exploit the issue to raise money, Children’s Rights? 

And what about you, Mr. President?  Are you ready to support repealing a law that doesn’t just weaponize the family police – it gives them the equivalent of a nuclear arsenal? 

A teachable moment? 

Perhaps this is another teachable moment in child welfare.  Just as what Donald Trump did to children at the Mexican border brought home to millions of Americans the trauma of needless family separation, perhaps Gregg Abbott’s behavior will help my fellow liberals understand the need for civil liberties – without exception. 

It all boils down to this: A whole lot of people and organizations whose politics are a whole lot like mine decided that everything they professed to believe in about civil liberties did not apply as soon as someone whispered the words “child abuse” in their ears.  So they built a monstrous vehicle – like a giant tank - with the power to crush almost any family. 

But they never expected that, someday, someone like Greg Abbott would get the keys.

On our blog at Youth Today: The $5 billion blunder

            How would you like to be responsible for helping to kill a plan that would have given states $5 billion more in child welfare funding over the past five years than they actually got? 

            The Child Welfare League of America and the Children’s Defense Fund now find themselves in just such a position.  And here’s what’s really scary: They don’t seem to have learned from the mistake.

            The details are in a memo from the Congressional Research Service obtained by NCCPR, and discussed in detail in our monthly blog on the website of Youth Today.

Foster care in California: A bigger Band-Aid for the wrong wound

            Few things say more about the real priorities of America’s child welfare establishment than the most recent big law about foster care to pass Congress.

            There actually is some good stuff in the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act.  The law provides federal reimbursement for subsidized guardianship – and that was enough, finally, to get New York to join other states in offering this smart, sensible option for children who really can’t return to their own homes. (The law passed over the strong objections of New York City Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner John Mattingly.) 

            Even a provision allowing young people to stay in foster care to age 21 (again if states opt in) falls into the category of lesser evil.  If the only options are being bounced from foster home to foster home and being kicked out at 18 or being bounced from foster home to foster home and being kicked out at 21, the latter usually isn’t as bad.

            In fact, there’s only one really bad provision in the whole law -  a “delinking” of federal reimbursement for adoption subsidies from previous limits.  It’s a first step toward trying to do the same for foster care payments.  Unless such “delinking” is part of a much bigger, more comprehensive reform, it will do enormous harm to children.  (For details see our paper on child welfare finance.)

            But by and large, the problem with the Fostering Connections act is what’s not there. Consider the categories on a website devoted to the law:

● Adoption

● Education

●Health

●Kinship/guardianship

●Older youth

●Tribal

●Training

            Notice anything missing?

            Even though groups like the Child Welfare League of America, the Children’s Defense Fund, the Center for Law and Social Policy and the rest of the child welfare establishment prattle on incessantly about how the first priority should be keeping children safely in their own homes, somehow the Fostering Connections Act has not one word – and not one penny to advance this supposed top priority.  There’s plenty about what is said to be the second priority – adoption – it’s even in the name of the law. 

            And, of course, the foster care providers among CWLA’s member agencies win big with that three more years of foster care.

           How odd.  Unless, of course, all that stuff about really, truly wanting to avoid foster care is just a lot of empty rhetoric to hide the child welfare establishment’s real priorities.

           All of which leads me to the obscene spectacle that played out in California last month when governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 12, the bill implementing the Fostering Connections act in California: An orgy of self-indulgent self-congratulation by that state’s child welfare establishment, which did not lift a finger to add anything to the bill to keep children out of the system in the first place. 

           As I discuss in this op ed column in the San Jose Mercury News all they did is put a bigger Band-Aid on the wrong wound.

Worse than stealing candy from a baby

            It sounds like something out of a bad melodrama:

            A child is placed in foster care, but before he can be reunited, his parents die.  As with many other children in that situation, he is entitled to Social Security “survivors” benefits.  But, being a child, the checks can’t simply be sent to him.

            Were the child living with, say, a grandparent or an uncle, that adult guardian would receive the checks and be responsible for spending it on the child’s behalf.  They might well put it away for the child’s college or some other future expense.

            But when the child is in foster care it is common for state and local child welfare agencies to rush forward and say to the Social Security Administration, in effect: “Just send the money to us.  Of course you can trust us.  After all, we’re a child welfare agency.”

            The agency then loots the money, sending it straight into its general fund to help pay to throw some other child into foster care – or for anything else it wants to do.

            Not only does this happen, it’s actually the norm for the relatively small proportion of foster children who qualify either for survivors or disability benefits from Social Security.

            And, believe it or not, under some circumstances, at least some of this cash grab is legal – the U.S. Supreme Court said so.

            In 2007, Rep. Pete Stark (D-California) introduced legislation to try to stop child welfare agencies from stealing foster children’s money.  But he ran into a wall of opposition from the foster-care industrial complex. 

The Child Welfare League of America opposed anything that would take money from its member agencies.  And the Children’s Defense Fund, whose slogan should be “leave no dollar behind” opposed it, too, apparently on the theory that the child welfare system does such a wonderful job on behalf of all foster children that it would be a shame if it lost any of its desperately-needed money – even the money that comes from foster children being forced to subsidize the system.

            But there are many reasons why this practice probably is not just unconscionable, immoral, and just plain evil, but also illegal.  And some of those grounds are the basis for a lawsuit from Baltimore.  The University of Baltimore Civil Advocacy Clinic is co-counsel for a former foster child suing the Baltimore County Department of Social Services.  Their press release tells the story well:

CHILD WELFARE AGENCY SUED OVER TAKING FOSTER CHILDREN’S ASSETS

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, October 11, 2010 – The Baltimore County Department of Social Services (BCDSS) has secretly taken the only asset left to an orphaned foster child by his deceased father. 

In a lawsuit filed by the University of Baltimore Civil Advocacy Clinic and a Washington D.C. law firm, Alex M. alleges that BCDSS and the Maryland Department of Human Resources secretly applied for Social Security Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance benefits (“survivor benefits”) on Alex’s behalf when his father died, and took the money for the state’s fiscal self-interests rather than for Alex’s benefit.  Alex appealed a judge’s dismissal of the lawsuit, and an appellate brief has just been filed on his behalf in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.

Alex was taken into foster care at age 12 when his mother died, and his father died soon after.  Alex never knew his father left him with an entitlement to survivor benefits, because BCDSS never told him.  BCDSS never told Alex it applied for the benefits, never told him it sought to become his representative payee to gain fiduciary power over the funds, and never told him it was routing his money into state revenue.  In fact, notices were sent by the Social Security Administration, intended to ensure Alex was aware of BCDSS’s actions, but they were received by BCDSS itself – and the agency never shared the notices with Alex.  Alex’s complaint alleges that while BDCDSS was taking his money, he was shuffled between over 20 different placements and was not provided adequate care by the agency – and he left foster care penniless. 

The agency sought to dismiss the lawsuit by arguing Alex’s claim should have been filed within one year of when the agency began taking his funds, although Alex had no knowledge of the agency’s actions.  Also, the agency argued that its practices of taking foster children’s assets are appropriate to reimburse state costs – although foster children have no statutory obligation to pay for their own care.  

An appellate brief has just been filed on Alex’s behalf by Professor Daniel L. Hatcher, who teaches in the University of Baltimore Civil Advocacy Clinic, and an amicus brief has been filed in support of Alex’s appeal on behalf of Maryland and national child advocacy organizations.  According to Hatcher, who also published a law review article and has testified before Congress regarding this practice, “the actions of BCDSS are unfortunately similar to those of foster care agencies across the country – converting foster children’s assets into state revenue, rather than using the funds to actually help the children.”

The lawsuit, and now the appeal, argue that BCDSS’s actions are unconstitutional, violate the Social Security Act, and violate the agency’s inherent fiduciary duty to serve the best interests of foster children.

Daniel L. Hatcher is an associate professor of law at the University of Baltimore, and he teaches in the Law School’s Civil Advocacy Clinic, in which law students and their faculty supervisors help low-income individuals and community organizations that could not otherwise afford legal representation.  The appellate brief and other court papers are available on request, and Hatcher’s law review article on this subject is available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=942007

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.

Could foster care finance reform have a friend in high places?

I've often noted that the left is as prone to march in lockstep with the "foster care-industrial complex" as the right is to march with the military-industrial complex. So it was a pleasant surprise to come across come comments made by Bryan Samuels. Samuels used to run the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. President Obama chose him to run the federal government's Administration on Children Youth and Families (which is a division of the Administration for Children and Families, which is a division of the federal Department of Health and Human Services).

During his confirmation hearings last October, Samuels opened the door to considering comprehensive reform of child welfare financing – not the fake reform pushed by the Child Welfare League of America and its allies, but the real kind, like the kind that helped transform child welfare in Florida.

Samuels indicated he might be willing to support legislation to let every state take the approach now taken by Florida. That state received a "waiver" allowing it to trade the open-ended "entitlement" to more and more foster care funding for taking away more and more "eligible" children for a flat grant, indexed to inflation, that could be used for better alternatives and not just foster care.

This has helped Florida significantly and safety reduce foster care while keeping the savings that other states doing the same have to give back to the federal government. And because Florida was not allowed to use the federal funds to replace existing state money, the waiver has prevented Florida from slashing child welfare spending during the recession.

Given how extraordinary it is for any of my fellow liberals even to consider this, it's worth quoting in full what Samuels said, when asked a general question about child welfare by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). This is from the hearing transcript:

Mr. Samuels:
I think the biggest challenge is the need for more resources. That would be the easy answer, which is that I think, as a director of child welfare, I found myself often having to choose between two very unattractive options in terms of what I could afford to do for kids.
I think there are a number of State directors who would simply argue that they need access to additional resources. But given that that is unlikely to occur, I think that—again I would like to play with the details a little bit on this, but—I would like to look very closely at the block granting option.
I think that the States need some flexibility. I think States take different approaches to it. A good example is, the work that we did in Illinois resulted in us having about 16,000 kids in care, 17,000
when I left, but today there are about 16,000. If you look at the county of Los Angeles alone, they have almost 15,000 kids in care. So, you take one county versus an entire State, the reality is that
each of these systems looks very different. You also have the phenomenon of States that have county-based systems, so each county is making decisions about how to create and craft support services for children in the child welfare system.
I think block granting is worth exploring because it would give States the flexibility to attune what their kids need with the system that they currently have and support. I would like to take a
look at that, but it is a complex system, obviously, and there would have to be a whole lot of discussions about what we would do to really get the kind of results we want. I agree with you that right now we are funding the wrong things in terms of the kinds of outcomes
we want to achieve. [Emphasis added].

A couple of things are worth noting here:

First, it shows how effective the fear and smear campaign against this kind of comprehensive reform has been, from groups like CWLA, the Children's Defense Fund and the Center for Law and Social Policy, that even in raising the possibility of opposing their position, Samuels used their scare phrase – "block grant." As is discussed in NCCPR's report on child welfare finance, this kind of flexibility option is nothing of the kind.

Second, Samuels made these comments ten months ago. I'm sure the hearing room was filled with lobbyists for the foster care-industrial complex, and they've had all this time to give him hell for even hinting at departing from their orthodoxy.

Indeed, Samuels isn't the first on the left at least to consider breaking ranks on this. Here's what then-Sen. Hillary Clinton said in an op ed column for USA Today in 2003, which she co-signed with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay:

We can find a bipartisan solution to reform the way we finance our child welfare system, but both the House and Senate must make reforms a priority. President Bush has offered one proposal that deserves careful consideration. He wants to give states an option to change the way foster care is financed so they can do more to prevent children from entering foster care, shorten the time spent in such care and provide more assistance to children and their families after they leave the system.

The plan Clinton and DeLay refer to essentially would have offered every state a Florida-style waiver.

I hear Clinton caught hell for those comments. I know she never brought it up publicly again.

On the other hand, unlike most state child welfare leaders, Samuels actually has seen how much can be accomplished by real reform of child welfare finance. Samuels continued an approach begun by his predecessor, Jess McDonald, who made dramatic improvements in Illinois child welfare by changing financial incentives.

Illinois used a waiver to pioneer subsidized guardianship, and the huge decline in the foster care population in that state, from more than 50,000 in the late 1990s to under 16,000 now, has a lot to do with Illinois changing its own financial incentives for private child welfare agencies. In Illinois, agencies can't simply sit there raking in per diem payments for holding children in foster care. And independent, court-appointed monitors have found that the changes have improved child safety.

So maybe, unlike Clinton, Samuels won't cave.

Does Chapin Hall want YOU (investigated for child abuse)?

In the previous post to this Blog, I said that home visiting programs like the Nurse Family Partnership or Healthy Families America have such strong support in the child welfare community that they should be called "goody-two-shoes prevention." The people whose 19th Century counterparts proudly called themselves "child savers" like these programs because they enormously expand the scope of intervention into families. Advocates of family preservation like them because the intervention is voluntary, and such programs really can be helpful.

Almost the only dissenters are a few on the political right who see it as a way to impose government child-rearing standards and take away children when the parents don't comply. Absurd, of course – except for the fact that every once in awhile, someone from the mainstream of American child saving says something to fuel those very fears.

A SPY IN EVERY LIVING ROOM

A little over a decade ago, for example, one of the most zealous crusaders against family preservation, Elizabeth Bartholet, suggested making home visiting programs like Healthy Families America mandatory – specifically for what she described as their "surveillance" value. Under Bartholet's spy-in-every-living-room scheme, parents would be required to admit the visitors and the visitors required to turn in any parent who falls short of Bartholet's standards for child rearing. Bartholet, a self-proclaimed liberal, explains that this "would simply provide society with a realistic means of enforcing" child maltreatment laws.

Which brings me to Dr. Deborah Daro, advocate-turned-"scholar."

In the previous post to this Blog, I discussed the extremist agenda of the group now called Prevent Child Abuse America when Daro was the group's "research director." Daro now is a "research fellow" at the Chapin Hall Center for Children, a place which claims to be a center of objective scholarship but I would argue has a checkered record in that regard.

Last February, Daro wrote an Issue Brief discussing the most recent National Incidence Study of child maltreatment (NIS-4). In addition to taking the findings of the study out of context (our own analysis is available here), toward the end of the Brief, Daro offers her own four-point plan for exactly what government should do in response to the data. Point three calls for "Universal assessments of all new parents that carry the dual mission of assessing parental capacity to provide for a child's safety, and linking families with services commensurate with their needs."

But Daro is remarkably vague about what this means. Does "universal" mean every new parent must be assessed, or has the opportunity to be assessed? If it's the latter, what happens to the parent who says no – does that make her automatically suspect? Who does these assessments? Are they also mandated reporters of child abuse? Before "volunteering," how much is the parent told about the risk of letting someone who may be a mandated reporter of child abuse into the home to "assess" her "capacity to provide for a child's safety"? The brief article doesn't say.

Daro's other writing, including a much longer article about a variety of prevention strategies, doesn't answer these questions either. That article suggests that what Daro has in mind is what they're trying to implement in Durham, North Carolina, as part of something called the Durham Family Initiative. The goal is to get a home visitor into the home of every newborn, apparently within 48 hours of the mother's discharge from the hospital. The visitor would complete "the standard risk assessment protocol" and do a "comprehensive psychosocial assessment." The goal is to "expand coverage to the families of newborns that are not now offered or do not accept these visits" [emphasis added].

THE MEANING OF "VOLUNTARY"

Once again this remarkably vague description (especially for "scholarly" writing) is all the reader gets about how the process works. So we don't know if the visitor is a mandated reporter of child abuse and what happens if, after knocking on the door, the new parent tells the visitor to go away.

And even if this is purely voluntary, there is a huge difference between stopping by to offer help and stopping by with "the standard risk assessment protocol" to assess "parental capacity to provide for a child's safety" – both of which sound remarkably like what Child Protective Services workers do after they've received a report alleging maltreatment.

Of course Daro couches all this in the language of help. The point of the process, she writes is to "ensure that the family is linked to a medical provider and that any immediate needs identified though the risk assessment are addressed through an appropriate service referral."

And I'm sure Daro would argue that family preservation advocates should favor this approach, since, if it gets families "services" and prevents maltreatment, no one will report them and their children won't be taken away. But that assumes the assessment instrument is strictly objective and all these friendly "home visitors" can check their prejudices at the door. We've learned through the failure of Structured Decision Making, a similar set of assessment tools used by CPS workers that was found by this excellent study to be permeated with racial and class bias, just how dangerous "help" can be when the prerequisite for getting it is submitting to a "comprehensive psychosocial assessment." And the failure of the CASA program illustrates the danger of letting overwhelmingly white middle-class strangers pass judgment on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately minority families.

In short, what Daro is talking about is sending what are likely to be overwhelmingly white, middle-class professionals into homes they can identify with, and a whole lot of homes they can't – the homes of poor, minority families, in a way that may be voluntary in name only, even when these families have not even been accused of maltreating their children.

In other words, a spy in every living room.

And, indeed, if point three of Daro's agenda was the velvet glove, point four is the iron fist: "Creating child welfare systems that have the capacity to work with parents who require mandatory intervention to insure their child's safety and the willingness to remove children in those cases in which parents are either unwilling or unable to change." As if somehow we don't have that already.

WERE THE RIGHT-WINGERS RIGHT?

So does this mean the critics on the right were right about home visiting programs?

I don't think so. These programs have been around for a long time. I'm aware of no evidence linking them to increased removals of children from their homes – and there is evidence, with varying degrees of strength depending on the program – linking them to better outcomes for children. I don't think an entire program should be condemned because a few extremists want to pervert it.

But there also is an obligation on the part of mainstream supporters of these programs, like the Children's Defense Fund, the Child Welfare League of America and, especially, Prevent Child Abuse America, to take the initiative and speak out, loudly, against the extremists in their midst. They need to say that they won't tolerate having the program distorted the way people like Bartholet and Daro suggest.

And I haven't heard that yet.

"SCHOLARS" WITH AN AGENDA

The other question here is why does a "scholar" have an advocacy agenda? According to the recent Youth Today story on evidenced-based evaluation of youth service programs:

Mark Dynarski, vice president and director of the Center for Improving Research Evidence at the research company Mathematica, said a researcher must be neutral in carrying out any study, "very transparent" about the methodology of the evaluation, and then should step out of the way and "let the debate ensue." Even if there are significant findings, researchers "don't want to be over strong" in reporting them, Dynarski said. "Over-strong discussions are a kind of advocacy." Researchers must "stay in the line of science and let the policymakers pick up from there."

But at Chapin Hall, it seems, the line between advocate and scholar can be blurry – sometimes it's even indistinguishable. And that makes the "scholarship" suspect.