No, you can’t use predictive analytics to reduce racial bias in child welfare

And if you’re claiming success in reducing racial disparities by ensnaring more white children in the system instead of fewer children of color, you’re missing the point.

 

Pittsburgh's supposed success in reducing child welfare racial disparities
consists mostly of slapping scarlet number "risk scores" on more children such as these.

“When it comes to stopping state-sanctioned violence – whether an unjustified police shooting or child removal – shouldn’t we use the most advanced tools at hand?” Daniel Heimpel, publisher of the Chronicle of Social Change, asks in the conclusion of a recent column. 

Since he’s long been one of the most ardent supporters of using predictive analytics in child welfare, [UPDATE: In a tweet, Heimpel takes issue with this characterization, which is based on my impression of years of Chronicle stories] his answer is unsurprising: “It seems to me that predictive analytics – which has been so maligned as the harbinger of automated racism – could actually be a key to eroding its hold.”

But the principal child welfare study Heimpel cites teaches a very different lesson.

Whodunit vs. who might do it

Heimpel begins by suggesting that predictive analytics could be used to find caseworkers who are racially biased – as demonstrated, presumably, by the fact that they are outliers in the number of times they “substantiate” alleged child abuse or neglect or remove children from families of color.  He cites research showing that it is possible to pinpoint which police officers stop and frisk African-Americans at a disproportionate rate.

But that’s not predictive analytics. That’s just math.  You’re not predicting what people are going to do – you’re just looking at what they’ve actually done. In other words, you’re looking for whodunit, not who might do it next week or next year. If all the other variables, such as nature of allegations, income of the family, etc. are the same, and a few workers are far more “trigger happy” about removing children of color than most others, odds are those workers have a bias problem.

Of course, there’s also an underlying assumption that child protective services agency administrators want to find such workers and change their behavior.  It is at least as likely that many CPS agencies would seek out and punish workers who are more cautious than most about substantiating alleged abuse and removing children – because take-the-child-and-run is a terrible policy for children but it’s often good politics.  That’s one reason why we have foster-care panics.

In any event, predictive analytics applied to families is very different. As I discuss in detail here, it’s more like the dystopian sci-fi movie Minority Report.

When the images happen to be true

Heimpel writes that “The idea of using predictive analytics in child welfare easily conjures images of child abuse investigators targeting parents a machine deems likely to harm their children.”

                                               

Yes, it does. Because those images are accurate.

The “machine” uses a series of data points, many involving whether a family is poor, and uses it to “predict” if that family will abuse or neglect a child in the future.  But if the data points are biased – confusing poverty with neglect, for example, then the predictions are likely to be biased.  Virginia Eubanks, author of Automating Inequality aptly calls it poverty profiling.  And Prof. Dorothy Roberts, an NCCPR board member, advances Eubanks’ analysis to show the racial bias as well.

Furthermore, when actually put into effect, these models have been shown to have enormously high rates of false positives – predicting terrible harm will come to children when in fact it didn’t.

But what about Pittsburgh?

Heimpel cites a recent evaluation of the nation’s most advanced predictive analytics model, one I’ve criticized often, the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) used in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County, Pa. For every neglect call received by the county, AFST generates a risk score between 1 and 20 – an invisible “scarlet number” that supposedly predicts how likely it is that a given child will be harmed.  The number then helps call screeners decide when to screen out a call and when to send a caseworker out to investigate.

The evaluation suggests that AFST reduced racial disparities at one child welfare decision point – opening a case for investigation.  And it did.  But in the worst possible way.

As the evaluation itself acknowledges, this achievement was accomplished through

increases in the rate of white children determined to be in need of further child welfare intervention coupled with slight declines in the rate at which black children were screened-in for investigation. Specifically, there was an increase in the number of white children who had cases opened for services, reducing case disparities between black and white children. [Emphasis added.]

In other words, what they’re really saying in Pittsburgh is: Great news!  We’re running around labeling so many more white parents as child abusers that we’ve reduced racial disparities!  (“Opened for services,” is a euphemism, by the way. It means the caseworker decided the allegation should be “substantiated” and the family put under the thumb of the child protective services agency.)

This is rather like a child welfare system suddenly throwing thousands more children into foster care, sending those children home after only a few days and then saying “Great news, folks!  Our average length of stay in foster care has plummeted!”

Given all we know about the enormous harm of needless child abuse investigations and needless foster care, the solution to racial disparities should involve treating black families more like white families, not the other way around.

And nowhere mentioned in the evaluation is something else that happened after AFST was implemented – something deeply disturbing: There was a sharp, sudden spike in the number of children torn from their parents in 2017.  In a typical year, Allegheny County tears children from their parents about 1,000 times. In 2017 that spiked to 1,200 before returning to 1,019 in 2018. 

We don’t know of AFST contributed to the spike – the evaluation never addresses it.  But in the past the longtime director of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS), Marc Cherna, has taken pride in avoiding such spikes in entries.  This time, there is silence.

And even the usual number of removals in Pittsburgh, about 1,000 per year, is disturbingly high. When compared to the number of impoverished children it represents a rate-of-removal as bad as Phoenix, which has the highest rate-of-removal among child welfare systems in America’s largest cities, and worse than Philadelphia, which is second worst.  If anything, all this raises questions about whether Cherna, the one-time reformer who has led Allegheny County DHS for decades, has stayed too long. 

AFST widens the net

Indeed, among the deeply disturbing findings of this evaluation is that AFST is widening the net of coercive, traumatic state intervention into families, with no actual evidence that children are safer.  And the results would be even worse if not for the fact that the human beings who screen calls are “standing up to the algorithm” more often than the county seems to have expected.  But DHS appears to want to prevent this, so the effects of AFST on families are only likely to worsen.

A flawed measure of accuracy ...

The evaluators made their case that AFST has improved accuracy based on the following premise: Workers who go out to investigate cases are concluding that a greater proportion of them warrant further intervention.  And since the investigators don’t know the actual scarlet number – somewhere between 1 and 20 for each child in the family – the evaluation assumes AFST must be singling out a greater proportion of cases where there really is a need for DHS to intervene.

Here’s the problem.  The investigators don’t know if the scarlet number was, say, a 6 or an 18. But the investigators know enough for the very existence of AFST to bias their decision-making.  They know that the algorithm that is the pride of Allegheny County, and has gotten an avalanche of favorable national attention is probably what sent them into this home in the first place. That alone probably is enough to make them more skittish about potentially “defying” the algorithm and saying there’s no problem here.  So what the report claims is an increase in accuracy is more likely a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

...as the net grows wider

A child abuse investigation is not a benign act.  Even when it does not lead to removal it can be enormously traumatic for children.  But under AFST this trauma is increasing. According to the evaluation, before AFST the proportion of reports “screened in” was declining.  AFST stopped that decline.  That is deeply disturbing in itself, all the more so when combined with the one-year increase in entries into care noted earlier.

The human factor

The one bit of good news in this evaluation is that the human beings who do the actual screening have been less afraid to stand up to the algorithm than I’d expected.  But what’s interesting here is the fact that DHS seems to be upset by this.

One of the biggest selling points for AFST has been that it’s supposedly just a tool, something that gives advice to the screeners who still, with their supervisors, are making the actual decisions.  According to the evaluation:

“…there is considerable lack of concurrence with the AFST by call screeners … only 61 percent of the referrals that scored in the ‘mandatory’ screen-in range were, in fact, screened in.  Therefore, the county will continue to work with call screeners to understand why they might be making these decisions.”

That does not sound like DHS is happy with the screeners daring to question the algorithm.  It’s frightening to think of the effects on the poorest communities in Allegheny County if DHS takes this one “brake” off AFST.

Chronicle of Social Change apologizes for – and removes – column that used a crude racial stereotype

Last week, I repeated NCCPR’s longstanding call for the Chronicle of Social Change to apologize for a column that included a section that bullied an impoverished African-American mother with a vile racial stereotype about poor people wasting money on sneakers.

I said it needed to be a real apology, without reservation - not one of those “if-anyone-was-offended” non-apology apologies.  And it needed to be prominent on the Chronicle site, in front of the paywall.

On Monday, to the credit of its editor and publisher, the Chronicle issued just such an apology.  In their statement, editor John Kelly and publisher Daniel Heimpel wrote: 

[The author of the column] has told us that she doesn’t consider this allusion to be racist. And despite criticism of the column related to this section, our initial decision was to keep it on our site.

We were wrong. The fact is that the trope of a low-income mom buying children designer clothes, at the expense of spending on more critical family needs, does exist as a crude and often racial stereotype. Its inclusion in this piece may not have been intended in that way, but our editorial process should have identified this and we should have insisted on its removal from the piece. 

Once it was live on our site, we should have considered more carefully the criticism of this reference and taken it down. We mishandled this decision, and in so doing have allowed a callous dismissal of a young single mother’s very human efforts to do right by her daughter to remain in our pages. …

We regret it, we have learned from it, and today we remove this column from our website with our sincere apologies.

I believe the apology is sincere – which is why I’m not referring to the Chronicle as the – well, you know.

J. Khadijah Abdurahman, an astute observer of issues involving race and child welfare, and someone who regularly asks challenging questions of all of us, points out in a tweet that it took a long time to reach this point and “there’s no reflection on why not a single person in their office raised a red flag before publishing.”

My guess, and my hope, is that such reflection has taken place internally. 

There also are a number of other issues with how the Chronicle approaches news coverage of child welfare.  For example, an event they sponsored in Washington yesterday on the so-called shortage of foster homes does not appear to have included  anyone taking the position that the problem isn’t too few foster parents – it’s too many foster children.

But I prefer to assume that  this is reflection of the old way of doing things at the Chronicle, and now that is going to change.  So, as far as I’m concerned, as of today, the slate is clean.

Still waiting for the Chronicle of Social Change to apologize for its exercise in bullying and racial stereotyping

UPDATE, NOV 12, 2018: THE WAIT IS OVER: To its great credit, the Chronicle has offered a full apology. I believe it is sincere.  As far as I am concerned, the slate is now clean.

A stereotype in that infamous column published by the Fox News of child welfare bears a striking resemblance to widely-condemned dog-whistle political ads

Last week, The Washington Post ran a story about a negative campaign ad in which a Jewish candidate was portrayed as “holding a wad of cash in front of him, with a crazed look in his eyes.”

The story went on to list example after example of candidates using crude racial stereotypes:

In New York, Republicans have continually assailed a Democratic congressional hopeful’s decade-old rap career, despite his work as an attorney and a Rhodes Scholar.

In Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp used an ad with a tap dancer to show his opponent in the governor’s race, black Democrat Stacey Abrams, “dancing around the truth,” that was also criticized as having a racist undertone.

In Florida, a Republican official claimed that if black Democrat Andrew Gillum won the governor’s race, “his people” would be getting paid back for slavery. …

In California, Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter … has falsely accused his opponent, an American of Palestinian and Mexican descent, of trying to “infiltrate” the government and trying to “hide” family ties to terrorism.

Now, suppose, hypothetically there had been another example.  Suppose the article also had said:

 In New Jersey, a white candidate for State Senate accused his opponent, a Black woman, of “wanting to raise your taxes so her people can waste the money.” The text was illustrated by an African-American buying expensive sneakers.

It would fit right in, wouldn’t it?  In fact, there is no such ad. 

But now consider what actually did appear in a column for the Chronicle of Social Change – the Fox News of child welfare - last year.  The column, by the Chronicle’s one-time “Blogger of the Year,” Marie Cohen, criticized a New York Times story about foster care as the new “Jane Crow.”  In the process it dredged up the sneaker stereotype. 

As I explained in a post to this blog last year:

Here’s how the Times story actually begins:

Maisha Joefield thought she was getting by pretty well as a young single mother in Brooklyn, splurging on her daughter, Deja, even though money was tight. When Deja was a baby, she bought her Luvs instead of generic diapers when she could. When her daughter got a little older, Ms. Joefield outfitted the bedroom in their apartment with a princess bed for Deja, while she slept on a pullout couch.

Here’s how Cohen paraphrases that paragraph and comments on it:

Reporters Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg began with a description of Maisha Joefield, a mother who “splurged” on her daughter even when money was tight. For example, the reporters added helpfully, Ms. Joefield “bought her Luvs instead of generic diapers when she could.” It is odd to me that the authors seem to consider splurging on brand-name diapers, sneakers, or apparel to be an indicator of good motherhood.

Sneakers?  What sneakers?  The Times story never mentions sneakers – or any other “apparel” aside from the diapers.

I don’t know why Cohen brought sneakers into the discussion. I do know that there is a crude, pernicious racial stereotype that says African-Americans are poor because they waste money on expensive sneakers.

The element of bullying

In one sense this is even worse than the campaign ads.  Vile as they are, the ads attacked opposing candidates - people who could fight back relatively easily. The Chronicle column attacked an impoverished single mother. So in addition to being an exercise in stereotyping, the Chronicle column was an exercise in bullying.

More than a year later, in a tweet on Oct. 22 Chronicle Publisher and self-proclaimed “child welfare expert” Daniel Heimpel finally acknowledged that the column was “unfortunate” and they would “correct” it. 

So, where’s the “correction”?  Either there is none, or there is, but it’s partially hidden.

After being generally available for weeks, the original column was moved behind a paywall.  It’s possible that now there is a correction of some kind there too.  I’m not going to pay to find out.  But since the original column was fully public, any correction needs to be fully public as well.  In fact a correction is not enough.  What’s needed is a full-throated apology, without reservation, without whataboutism and without hiding it behind a paywall.  [UPDATE, NOV 12: AND TO ITS CREDIT, THE CHRONICLE HAS NOW DONE JUST THAT]

In the absence of that kind of real apology, real news organizations should refuse to partner with the Chronicle and should treat its “news coverage” with the utmost skepticism.

Was it subconscious bias?

There is one possible difference between the campaign ads and the infamous Chronicle column: As much as the campaigns may deny it, it’s clear that the dog-whistling in the ads was deliberate.  It’s possible that Cohen and the editors who reviewed her column and approved it for publication misread the original Times story and thought it really did mention sneakers.  In fact, I think that is the most likely explanation.  If so, that would make this a classic example of subconscious bias.

That would make the column, and in particular, the failure to apologize for it, no less reprehensible.  But it would add a certain extra irony to something else Cohen once wrote for The Chronicle:

“As a social worker in the District of Columbia, I was subjected to multiple low-quality, heavy-handed trainings that tried to help me discover my hidden biases.”

As I’ve said before, I don’t believe either Cohen or Heimpel is a racist. In fact, I think they both really want to help vulnerable children, even if they are wrong about how to go about it.

But we all have hidden biases.  Perhaps they should try another one of those “trainings.”

Fox News and the Fox News of child welfare: We compare. You decide.

Once again, a blogger who used an ugly racial stereotype against an impoverished Black mother is showcased in the so-called Chronicle of Social Change

Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, is the Democratic nominee for governor of Florida.  Gillum is African-American.  He won an upset victory in a Democratic primary.  As soon as his Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis, found out who he’d be running against, he declared that Florida voters shouldn’t  “monkey this up” by voting for him.

The comment was widely called out for exactly what it was – a racist dog whistle. 

Of course, he made the statement on Fox News, and Fox News hosts rushed to defend him.

There are striking parallels between this incident and the behavior of the Fox News of child welfare, the so-called Chronicle of Social Change.

I refer of course to the infamous column in which the Chronicle’s one-time “blogger of the year,” Marie Cohen, used an ugly racial stereotype about a poor African-American mother.

I do not believe Marie Cohen – or Chronicle publisher Daniel Heimpel – is a racist. I am sure  both believe they are genuinely helping to “protect” children from child abusers.  But that doesn’t make the column any less ugly.  I’m sure a lot of people at Fox News sincerely believe they’re helping to “protect” America from illegal immigrants.  Good motives are no excuse for stereotyping or bullying.  Cohen’s column engaged in both.  And now, Heimpel is publishing Cohen again.

The column and the stereotype

In seeking to rebut a New York Times story about foster care as the new “Jane Crow”  Cohen implied that one of the parents  who told the Times about the needless removal of her children was wasting money buying sneakers – something that is never mentioned or suggested in the Times story itself.

As I noted at the time,

I don’t know why Cohen brought sneakers into the discussion. I do know that there is a crude, pernicious racial stereotype that says African-Americans are poor because they waste money on expensive sneakers.

It’s a staple of right-wing rants on internet comment boards. In one such rant on Glenn Beck’s site, The Blaze, about “HOW TO PREVENT BLACK CHILDREN FROM GETTING MURDERED” (caps in the original, of course) a commenter writes: “#5 INSTEAD OF BUYING THEM EXPENSIVE SNEAKERS AND SMARTPHONES - BE A REAL PARENT.”

Heimpel, the Chronicle publisher, should have apologized for the column and attached an “editor’s note” disavowing it. Instead, he promoted it on his personal Twitter feed.

If anything, what Cohen and Heimpel did was worse than what DeSantis did. At least DeSantis picked on someone his own size.  Cohen used the stereotype against one of the most defenseless members of society, a low-income African-American mother whose only “crime” was daring to tell her story to The New York Times.  That isn’t just stereotyping.  It’s bullying.

The point is not that the mother should be immune from criticism by those who may disagree with what she did that got her into trouble with child protective services. The point is that there are ways to do that without stereotyping and without bullying.

The column was not Cohen’s only blunder on matters of race. In another column, she falsely claimed that the Alliance for Racial Equity in Child Welfare had “quietly suspended its work.”  The Chronicle didn’t check the false claim before publishing it, and knew the claim was false for weeks before finally correcting it.

In still another, her defense of the use of “predictive analytics” in child welfare was almost identical to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s defense of stop-and-frisk.

In yet another column, Cohen complained that “As a social worker in the District of Columbia, I was subjected to multiple low-quality, heavy-handed trainings that tried to help me discover my hidden biases.”

Now, the encore

And now Heimpel, the self-proclaimed “child welfare expert” whose own extremist rhetoric includes dismissing concerns about racial bias in child welfare as a “panic” and suggesting that the spread of family preservation is analogous to cancer, has brought Cohen back for an encore.

She coauthors a column that tries to draw false distinctions between what Donald Trump and his administration did to children at the Mexican border and what child protective services agencies do all the time.  No, I will not link to the column because, though this column did not stereotype anyone, I try to avoid linking to people who have sunk to using racial stereotypes.  But their claim can be summarized as follows: When CPS does it it’s different because we mean well and we only take children from horrible abusers.  

It is reasonable to have a debate over the extent to which the two forms of tearing apart families are similar.  No one, in fact, claims they are identical – only that there are far more similarities than people such as Cohen – and Heimpel – want to admit.  What is unreasonable is including in the debate someone who previously invoked a crude racial stereotype and used it against a low-income African-American mother.  Once you do that you’ve crossed a red line – and journalists should recognize that line.

There are plenty of people who sincerely disagree with the analogy between what Trump did at the border and how the foster care system works who do not resort to racial stereotyping.  In fact, the Chronicle already had run a column by one such person, who attempted to make the same case as the Cohen column.  Since that author has not used racial stereotypes, I will link to it.

The Cohen column was redundant.  Perhaps Heimpel published it because he is such a fan of that point of view – and of his former “blogger of the year.”  Or perhaps he published it because what Trump did has indeed brought home to millions of Americans just how awful it is for children to be taken from their parents, and some of those Americans might indeed reach a conclusion the Chronicle doesn’t like: that U.S. child welfare agencies can and should take away far fewer children.

Other parallels to Fox News

This is not the only way in which Heimpel’s behavior mirrors that of Fox News.  In a recent post to this blog I wrote about how Trump has exploited the death of Mollie Tibbetts, allegedly killed by an undocumented worker, to push his agenda of fear and hatred toward immigrants.  As Columbia Journalism Review noted, the White House rushed out a video featuring relatives of people killed by undocumented workers – and, of course, Fox News was glad to amplify the message.

All of it was in support of the Big Lie of American immigration. Or, as CJR explained:

The president’s hardline immigration stance is grounded in the false belief that undocumented immigrants represent a clear and present danger to American citizens, and Tibbetts’s murder fits the narrative that has been a hallmark of Trump’s rhetoric since the first moments of his campaign.

(CJR should have said false claim – we don’t know if even Trump really believes it.)

The exploitation of the Tibbets case by Trump – and by Fox News - is very much like the way Heimpel exploited another tragedy, the death of five-year-old Jeremiah Oliver in Massachusetts, in support of the Big Lie of American child welfare – that family preservation is inherently at odds with child safety.

Heimpel co-authored an op-ed for the Boston Globe with Elizabeth Bartholet, one of the most extreme advocates of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, and a leader of a movement that denies the existence of racial bias in child welfare. Heimpel and Bartholet used the Oliver case to attack “differential response” an approach to handling child abuse allegations that has been found safe and effective in more than two dozen studies.

It would have been bad enough to exploit the tragedy had Oliver’s case actually been diverted to differential response.  But it wasn’t.  Heimpel and Bartholet admit this – in the fourth paragraph. Then, they argue, Trump-style, that it’s o.k. to exploit the tragedy because other cases that might be like Oliver’s might be diverted to differential response.

Just the kind of argument Fox News would love.

In recent months the Chronicle had tried to pass itself off as more mainstream – more Shep Smith, less Sean Hannity.  It even publishes dissent from its party line once in awhile, just as Fox News occasionally brings on a liberal pundit.  And because of all the cutbacks in newspapers, editors may find it tempting to reprint material that the Chronicle hands to them.

But any potential partner should understand: This is an organization that accepts, and condones racial stereotyping.  Almost everything it publishes comes with an agenda.  Until that changes, the Chronicle should be viewed as a conduit for extremism, not a news organization.  Just like Fox News.

For the record: No, Los Angeles County does NOT have the nation’s largest child welfare system

No matter how many times the Fox News of Child Welfare says it does, it’s still not true.

I have previously noted the serious potential for harm caused by the slanted “journalism” practiced by the so-called Chronicle of Social Change – the Fox News of child welfare. Things like promoting a column using a vile racial stereotype to attack an impoverished birth mother, or the Chronicle’s cozying up to the group home industry. 

But there’s something else worth noting: A bizarre, if relatively harmless, obsession on the part of its publisher - and self-proclaimed "child welfare expert" -- Daniel Heimpel:  His demonstrably erroneous claim, repeated over and over, that Los Angeles County has the largest child welfare system in America.

It does not.

Even using Heimpel’s measure of choice, it does not. 

I have no idea why it matters so much to him. Sure, he lives in Los Angeles, but it’s not as if having a super-sized child welfare system is anything to be proud of. Yet Heimpel’s fervor about this runs so deep that less than a month after Chronicle’s editor John Kelly corrected the error, Heimpel repeated it, and seemed to double down on it. It’s been repeated in story after story ever since.  It’s reached the point where people in Los Angeles County child welfare are starting to believe it.

Does it really matter? Not nearly as much as the Chronicle’s other failings.  But if they can’t – or won’t – get something so basic correct, why should they be trusted on larger policy issues?

It’s big – but not biggest

The Los Angeles County child welfare system is very, very big. That makes sense given that Los Angeles County is very, very big. It’s likely that Los Angeles has the largest child welfare system run by a county or other unit of local government.  But in most of America, states, not individual counties, run child welfare. And it’s easy to forget that there are states that have many more children than Los Angeles County – so many more that it’s unlikely on its face that Los Angeles County would have a larger child welfare system.

TABLE #1: Sources are listed at the end of this post

So if you simply measure the system by the number of children it has the potential to be involved with, Florida and Texas (as well as Georgia and Illinois, by the way) all are bigger. (Other states with larger child populations are like California – individual counties run child welfare.)

Another approach is to use only measures that detail how often the child welfare agency actually intervenes in a family’s life.

This table offers several possible measures, including Heimpel’s choice, discussed below. Los Angeles comes out third in all of them:

TABLE #2: Definitions and sources are listed at the end of this post.

● Number of children who were subjected to child abuse investigations? Los Angeles is third,  behind Texas and Florida.

● Number of children in foster care? Los Angeles is third again, behind Texas and Florida.

But Heimpel offers an answer for this one, writing:

Los Angeles’ child welfare agency is the largest in the nation, serving more than 34,000 children, almost 21,000 of whom are placed in out-of-home foster care.

In other words, he simply combines the number of children in foster care and the number receiving “services” in their own homes.

There’s just one problem: Florida and Texas also provide in-home “services.”  And yes, they report doing it for a larger number of children than Los Angeles.

So in category after category after category – including Heimpel’s category of choice -- Los Angeles County, California is not the largest child welfare system in America.

Complicating things further: There is plenty of room for fudging some of these figures. For example, Texas coerces large numbers of children into kinship foster care placements without taking the family to court - and doesn’t count them in its statistics on the number of children in foster care.

And, of course, these figures say nothing about the rate at which these jurisdictions place children in foster care. One reason the Los Angeles system is so large is the simple fact that it takes away too many children.

The UN-correction

The Chronicle’s error actually used to be even bigger. A year ago, the Chronicle published this story which, in its original form, called the Los Angeles system the biggest in the whole world!  So I sent an email to Chronicle Editor John Kelly pointing out the problem. I’ve excerpted it here:

From: Richard Wexler 
Date: Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 5:10 PM
Subject: Errors in the Charity Chandler-Cole story
To: John Kelly

I know it’s difficult for Heimpel & Co. to grasp that Los Angeles is not the center of the universe, but there is one blatant factual error in this story,  …

Los Angeles County does not have the largest child welfare system in the world, or even in the United States.  The state-run systems in Texas and Florida both are larger, whether measured by the number of children living in those states or the number of children trapped in foster care in those states.  If you measure only by child population, Illinois and Georgia also are larger. …

Kelly corrected the text of the story and, after I sent a second email, he corrected the headline.

But while the Chronicle has never again called the L.A. system the largest in the world, in story after story the Fox News of Child Welfare has insisted it’s the largest in the United States.  The story citing the combined in-home and foster care numbers – published only a month after the Chronicle corrected the earlier story - seemed to be Heimpel’s way of doubling down.

That only made him doubly wrong.

It may not be true that everything’s bigger in Texas, but the child welfare system is.

Table #1: Sources:

Texas and Florida: Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, 2016: http://bit.ly/2Oq5uBY (Impoverished child data average the figures for 2014, 2015 and 2016); Los Angeles: Bureau of the Census, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, 2016: http://bit.ly/2AVRSwj

Table #2 Definitions and sources:

 CPS investigations are for the most recent 12 month period for which data are available; the other categories are snapshots of the number of children receiving services on the indicated date. 

Definition of in-home services: Texas: Children receiving Family Preservation Services, August 31, 2017; Florida: Children receiving in-home services and family support services, April 30, 2018; Los Angeles: Defined as “In-home Services” mostly “Family Maintenance Services,” August 31, 2017  Dates are the same for number of children in foster care.

Sources:

Florida: Florida Department of Children and Families, Out of Home care and In-home services, DCF dashboard: http://bit.ly/2KG56N3 Children in CPS investigations: Office Of Child Welfare, 2017 Annual Performance Report, Fiscal Year 2016-2017 http://bit.ly/2OWV8u3; Texas: Department of Family and Protective Services, DFPS Data Book: http://bit.ly/2ATQF8K; Los Angeles County: Department of Children and Family Services, Out of Home care and In-home services: Child Welfare Services Data Monthly Fact Sheet, August – 2017 http://bit.ly/2vRv0rN CPS investigations: California Child Welfare Indicators Project http://bit.ly/2nozJNO   

Los Angeles child welfare and the definition of insanity

If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then politicians and child welfare officials in Los Angeles need what parents so often are put through when child welfare agencies get into their lives: a psychiatric evaluation.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is doing what it does best
after a child-abuse tragedy: grandstanding at children's expense

Do we really have to go through this again?

Do we really have to go through another round of preening, posturing, finger-pointing and general sound and fury signifying nothing in the aftermath of a horrible child abuse death?  Do we really need another round of “[name of politician here] demands answers”-type press releases?  Don’t political leaders in Los Angeles finally owe the county’s most vulnerable children more?

Those are the questions we should be asking after the latest high-profile death of a child “known to the system” – the death of Anthony Avalos.  But so far, all we’ve gotten is more of the same. Take out the name Anthony Avalos and substitute Gabriel Fernandez, or Yonatan Aguilar or Dae’von Bailey or Lars Sanchez, among other Los Angeles child welfare tragedies, and you could barely tell the difference. 

That’s because the real root of the problem is that Los Angeles takes away too many children, not too few. That overloads the system, leaving less time for workers to find children in real danger. Each time there’s a high-profile death it sets off a foster-care panic – encouraged by those grandstanding politicians. Even more children are taken needlessly. So workers have even less time. So the cycle repeats over and over.

It happens almost everywhere, of course.  But part of the reason it’s often worse in Los Angeles is that Los Angeles child welfare has long suffered from being overseen by one of the worst governing bodies in America on these issues, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors – or as I’ve called them before, the B.S. 

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote about the m.o. of the B.S.:

In 1954, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont denounced his notorious colleague Joe McCarthy in words that need be changed only slightly to explain the modus operandi of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in child welfare cases. To paraphrase Flanders:

They don their war paint; they go into their war dance; they emit their war whoops; they go forth to battle -- and proudly return with the scalp of a social worker.

Though there’s been a lot of turnover on the B.S. in recent years, when it comes to child welfare, most of them share their predecessors’ fondness for clueless grandstanding.

Consider this statement from supervisor Kathryn Barger, who said that after Gabriel’s death:  “I didn’t think something like that could happen again…”

In fact, it’s never stopped happening.  Every year, among the tens of thousands of cases investigated by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, there are some in which warning signs, sometimes subtle, sometimes achingly obvious, are overlooked.  And every year some of those children die.  It’s just that every few years, for reasons ranging from particularly horrible details to random chance, media and politicians fixate on a single case.

That distorts our entire perception of what’s wrong with DCFS and how to fix it.  Child welfare systems are more secret than the CIA.  They can hide almost all their blunders behind “confidentiality.”  Almost the only time we see their failures is when a child “known-to-the- system” dies. So we assume that all the errors go in only one direction – leaving children in dangerous homes.

But child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and cruel – they err in all directions.  They tear many children from their homes needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect.  In other cases, there are real problems but they could be solved without resorting to traumatizing the children by taking them from their homes.

Lessons from the border

One need only look about 129 miles south of Los Angeles, to the Mexican border, to see just how horrible such separation can be.  A professor of pediatrics called the trauma of separation “catastrophic.”

Remember those sounds of crying children smuggled out of a detention center and published by ProPublica?  It doesn’t matter if the person separating parent from child is a border patrol officer carrying out a policy of pure evil or a DCFS caseworker with the best of intentions – the children shed the same sorts of tears for the same sorts of reasons; the damage done to them is the same.  So it’s no wonder massive studies have found that, in typical cases, children left in their own home fare better even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.

That harm is done even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But study after study has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. As for group homes and institutions: The record in California speaks for itself.

The typical response to high-profile tragedies – the general chest thumping and calls for heads to roll - makes everything worse. Workers become terrified of having the next tragedy on their caseload and facing everything from media censure to criminal charges. So there’s a foster-care panic: Workers rush to inflict more catastrophes on children by taking more of them needlessly. 

That only makes the other kind of catastrophe – the death of a child “known to the system” – more likely, because overloaded workers have even less time to find children in real danger.

Just as tearing apart more families at the border doesn’t improve border security, tearing apart more families in Los Angeles County won’t improve child safety.

Enter the Fox News of Child Welfare

Already the so-called Chronicle of Social Change, the Fox News of child welfare, is laying the groundwork for the next foster-care panic in Los Angeles. The Chronicle ran a story that seeks to justify the panic in advance, arguing, in effect: What do you expect? More people call in reports alleging child abuse so of course more children will be removed. 

 

But often, during foster-care panics the increase in removals far exceeds the increase in reports.  And because, during a foster-care panic, anyone and everyone is hectored repeatedly to report anything and everything, no matter how absurd, a greater proportion of reports is likely to be false. There should be no automatic assumption that more people calling in their slightest suspicion should mean more children torn from their homes.

And, of course, the story quoted DCFS director Bobby Cagle falsely equating child removal with child safety – just the way Donald Trump falsely equates child removal with border security.  But then that’s the same Big Lie of American Child Welfare that Chronicle publisher and self-proclaimed "child welfare expert" Daniel Heimpel pushes at every opportunity. 

(A quick reminder of Heimpel’s track record: He has analogized the increase use of family preservation to cancer, dismissed concerns about racial bias in child welfare as a “panic” and published and promoted a column using a vile racial stereotype to attack one of the mothers profiled in the New York Times story about foster care as the new Jane Crow.)

Computerized “poverty profiling” won’t help

Nor will we fix the system by taking all the human biases that exist now and automating them. That’s what the current fad sweeping through child welfare, “predictive analytics” really is all about.  Predictive analytics involves using masses of data about people – mostly, it turns out, poor people – and coughing up a score that supposedly tells workers for agencies like DCFS who is most likely to abuse a child.

Contrary to a column in the Los Angeles Times by Naomi Schaefer Riley (the same Naomi Schaefer Riley who was barred from blogging for an education trade journal after writing a column widely viewed as racist) the first Los Angeles experiment with this approach was not dropped because the county used a private company. It was dropped because the software produced a false positive rate of 95 percent.  As Judge Michael Nash, director of the county’s Office of Child Protection explained, 95 percent of the time, the software labeled as “high risk” children “who were not at risk for a negative outcome.” 

The same column goes on to praise the predictive analytics experiment in Pittsburgh.  But, as I discuss here, that experiment doesn’t correct the biases of humans, it magnifies them.  In her book, Automating Inequality, Prof. Virginia Eubanks aptly called it “poverty profiling.”

Los Angeles already takes away children at more than double the rate of New York City and more than triple the rate of Chicago, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. There is no evidence L.A. children are two and three times as safe from abuse.

If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then politicians and child welfare officials in Los Angeles need what parents so often are put through when DCFS gets into their lives: a psychiatric evaluation.

No large child welfare system in America ever has been able to stop every child abuse death – just as no police department can stop every murder.  But the few that do better at curbing child abuse have one thing in common: They do far more than Los Angeles to keep families together and avoid needless foster care.

Why not try that for a change?