Foster care in Arizona: The failed journalism of Laurie Roberts (Part two)

UPDATE, OCTOBER 19: Laurie Roberts proved me wrong today - not about Arizona child welfare, but about Laurie Roberts. See this post to see what I mean.

Yesterday’s post to this blog discussed the harm to Arizona’s vulnerable children caused by the state’s perennial foster care panic, and how that panic is kept alive in part by Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts.

Since the panic began in 2003, Roberts has written at least 40 columns (or, more accurately, the same basic column 40 times) in an attempt to pressure caseworkers to tear apart more families.

Those columns contributed to the fact that, since she began this crusade, the number of children torn from their parents in Arizona has soared by 70 percent, even as nationwide, the number has declined by 15 percent.

Yet just this past Saturday, Roberts herself said her efforts to make children safer have utterly failed.   So it should be obvious that taking away more children and shoveling them into foster care is not the answer. 

One of the real reasons the tragedies continue actually was cited in Roberts’ column on Aug. 24, when she wrote:

…[C]caseworkers say privately that they can’t possibly do the job with workloads that exceed the recommended level by 60 percent or more.

But Roberts is either oblivious to the contradiction in her own column – scapegoating family preservation and then admitting workers don’t have time to make good decisions - or simply doesn’t care.

In part the overload almost certainly is because of budget cuts by the legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer, just as Roberts says. 

(Oh, wait: Perhaps because she had a chance to see a preview of these Blog posts when I sent excerpts to NCCPR’s list of Arizona journalists on Friday, she backed away from the one part of her writing that makes any sense on Saturday.  Now she says:

But budget cuts are neither an excuse nor the whole story. I've been watching and writing about kids like Jacob Gibson for 20 years, during times when caseloads were half of what they are now.)

In fact, the rest of the story is the part Roberts keeps leaving out: Children in real danger are missed because caseworkers are overloaded with all those hotline calls that never got screened out (the way they would have been screened out in other states, something discussed in detail in the previous post).  And in part it’s because of all the time workers have wasted taking children needlessly from everyone they know and love because they are terrified of things like being the subject of Roberts’ 41st iteration of The Column – and the likely response from their boss.

Indeed, it appears that their current boss, Clarence Carter, director of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, is big on scapegoating frontline workers – and Roberts loves it.  She writes:

Carter has vowed … to hold workers accountable if they blew it, to fix systems if they aren't working and to change the culture, in the hope that the ashes of no more children will be swept under that well-worn rug over at the CPS.  He promised much the same thing after 23-month-old Janie Buelna died in March while the CPS should have been watching.

 The caseworker and her supervisor were fired, and the supervisor's boss was reassigned.   And so, I take Carter at his word, that he will sort out what happened here and, if warranted, hold people accountable.

So Roberts approves of Carter sending a message to the frontlines that boils down to: Take away all the kids you want and, though the kids will suffer terribly, your job will be safe.  Leave one child home and have something go wrong and you’re fired.  That is, of course, the perfect formula for continuing the foster-care panic.

Roberts also is pleased with another Carter initiative:

Effective immediately, he said, all active cases in which there have been three or more reports of abuse will be reviewed monthly by senior management -- something that already is supposed to be happening at the lower supervisory levels.

           

In other words, if you want to be sure your attempt to use the Arizona child abuse hotline to harass your ex-spouse or neighbor, or anyone else is effective, don’t forget to make that third call.

FOSTER CARE PANIC TODAY, MORE CHILD ABUSE DEATHS TOMORROW

The heart of the problem with all this, of course, is that foster care panics can cost children’s lives.   In one city and state after another, such panics have done nothing to reduce child abuse deaths – often those deaths have increased.   Arizona is a classic example.

According to the annual reports from Arizona Child Fatality Review Program,  in 2002, the last year before the Arizona Foster Care Panic, there were 36 child abuse deaths in Arizona.  By 2009, after seven years of Laurie Roberts writing that same column over and over again, and seven years of foster care panic, the number had reached at least 57.  (The official figure for 2009 is 64, but seven of those deaths are attributed to a change in the state’s definition of a maltreatment fatality.)

The reports did not break down child maltreatment deaths of children “known to the system” until 2004.  But that year there were 18 such deaths.  By 2009, the figure had doubled to 36. 

Both these increases far outpace the growth in both the total child population and the impoverished child population in the state.

As readers of this Blog know, I’m not keen on using fatalities, or horror stories in general, as a yardstick.  But I didn’t choose that measure for Arizona, Laurie Roberts did – in column after column after column.

And every time Laurie Roberts hits the send button on that same basic column, it feeds the panic just a little more and makes Arizona’s children just a little less safe.

DESPAIR-MONGERING

But that isn’t the only danger in Roberts’ approach.  The other danger is that people will conclude that because Roberts’ bad idea – 40 columns explicitly or implicitly demanding that Arizona CPS tear apart more families - doesn’t work, nothing will work.

Roberts herself suggested as much in her column Saturday when she wrote:

Yeah, I know. I'm angry, too. And astonished, and amazed and about ready to throw in the towel and admit that there is no hope for these children. The last line of defense is just too often absent.

The part about no hope is as wrong as almost everything else Laurie Roberts has written about child welfare.  There is hope.  There are states and localities all over America that have made children significantly safer.  Examples are in our publication about best practices across the country.

But Roberts’ regurgitation of her same failed party line over and over only convinces everyone, apparently including herself, that nothing works, so why bother even trying?  That is child abandonment on a mass scale.

That kind of despair-mongering is especially dangerous in Arizona, which if some of the state’s journalists are any indication, operates with a bizarre sort of inferiority complex unlike anything I’ve seen in any other state.

Over and over, when I met with Arizona journalists, a startling number of them, especially among the editorial writers, would insist that no other state could possibly have problems as severe as Arizona problems, no citizenry was as hapless, incompetent and/or malevolent as Arizona citizenry.  Therefore, it was argued, there are no lessons from any other state that could possibly apply to Arizona.  The fact that Alabama – about the last state anyone would expect – is among those to transform its child welfare system into, relatively speaking, a national model, is irrelevant, I was told.  Though none of these various Arizona doom-sayers knew a thing about Alabama, all were certain that state’s  problems were nothing compared to Arizona’s. 

Nowhere else in America have I encountered a state where so many journalists are imbued with such a strong can’t-do spirit.  And the despair-mongering of Laurie Roberts only encourages that nonsense.

THE USUAL RESPONSE

The usual response of journalists called out on their sloppy work covering child welfare is to set up a straw man.  They write something like this:  “Oh, so you don’t want me to report it when children die horrible deaths! You want journalists to ignore the horrors parents inflicted on their children! You want us to cover up for CPS!  Well, I’m not about to stop showing how much I care about (fill in names of dead children) no matter who demands that I look the other way!”

The “journalists” who write that kind of defensive drivel know it’s b.s.  What someone like myself wants, having spent 35 years following this issue, first as a reporter and now as an advocate, is not less coverage of child welfare – including the worst of the horrors - but more coverage, and most important, better coverage.

For starters, Laurie, ask yourself one question:  If caseworkers are as overloaded as you say they are, (or said they were on Aug. 24 before having some second thoughts on Aug. 27) how can all of the errors possibly go only in one direction?

Then, get out from behind that desk, Laurie.  Go out and meet the leaders of Black and Hispanic advocacy groups in Phoenix and see how CPS looks to them.  Check with the people who run anti-poverty programs, and housing aid programs and programs to help people with what passes for public assistance in Arizona and see the CPS they see.  Find out the danger of having an agency with so much power that law enforcement can use it to try to intimidate just about anyone (you can find that story right in your own newsroom.) Check out what’s going on in other states – states that are doing a better job than Arizona – in some cases without even spending much more.

Then come back and write columns that are informed by some original reporting for once.  Write some columns that tell Arizonans how to really fix their system, instead of just scaring workers into taking away more kids, persuading the public there’s no point even trying to fix the system, and prolonging Arizona’s perennial panic.  If you want to see how it’s done, check out the work of Issac Bailey, metro columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Who knows?  You might finally write something that helps to make kids safer.

Foster care in Arizona: The failed journalism of Laurie Roberts (Part one)

A columnist for the state’s largest newspaper apparently believes tearing apart 70 percent more families just isn’t enough.


UPDATE, OCTOBER 19: Laurie Roberts proved me wrong today - not about Arizona child welfare, but about Laurie Roberts. See this post to see what I mean.

In a post on August 18, I wrote about the perennial state of foster care panic in the State of Arizona.  I wrote about how, four days after taking office in 2003, in the wake of the disclosure of a high-profile tragedy, then-Gov. Janet Napolitano told caseworkers to just take away the kids “and we’ll sort it out later.” 

More than seven years later, they still haven’t sorted it out - the panic never stopped.  From 2002 through 2010, a time when nationwide, the number of children torn from their parents over the course of a year declined 15 percent, in Arizona removals soared 70 percent, with no end in sight.  (For a detailed discussion of child welfare in Arizona, see the full report we issued in 2007.) 

As I noted on Aug. 18, that’s partly because whenever there were signs the panic might abate, someone at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix and /or the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson would respond to a horror story by pouring on the hype and hysteria and start it up again.

The someone at the Republic almost always is columnist Laurie Roberts.  At some point in the weeks after a horror story, Roberts rewrites the same column.   There are minor variations, but the formula is simple:

● Regurgitate in pornographic detail the most gruesome facts unearthed by other journalists.           

●Make one phone call. (Maybe.)     
●Condemn the state for being so stingy about spending on child protective services (she’s right about that one).

­● Condemn CPS for supposedly putting “parents rights” ahead of child safety.

● Hit the send button.

That's been the basic formula for at least 38 columns from when the panic began in 2003 through June of this year.

The one beneficiary of this has been Laurie Roberts.  It fills column space and it’s won her at least two journalism awards.

The columns serve only to help scare frontline caseworkers into tearing apart more families year after year while doing absolutely nothing to make children safer – and possibly putting them at greater risk.

REGURGITATING INSTEAD OF REPORTING

           

Given her track record, it was no surprise when, less than a week after that August 18 NCCPR blog post, Laurie Roberts regurgitated The Column  for the 39^th time, in response to a horror story and then offered up iteration number 40 two days ago.  In the Aug. 24 column, Roberts writes:

[We] are left to wonder why no one came to Jacob Gibson’s rescue.   And why so few reports of abuse in this state are substantiated by the CPS -- 8 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, compared with 22 percent nationwide.

Arizona law likely has something to do with that. Despite attempts in recent years to better protect children, the rights of a parent to a second (and third and fourth and fifth) chance still trump the right of a little boy to be safe, and that is an outrage.

Of course Roberts doesn’t actually cite a section of Arizona law that might cause this alleged problem and compare it to the norm in other states.  That would involve actual reporting – and it might spoil the master narrative she’s been trying to peddle year after year, even as more and more families are separated while more and more children keep dying. 

And, it would appear, Roberts has forgotten about the times when The Column celebrated the fact that the law had, in fact, been changed in 2003 to declare “that a child's right to be safe trumps a parent's right to a second chance.” (That is the Sept. 16, 2006 version of that Roberts’ favorite, as opposed to the Aug. 24, 2011 version quoted two paragraphs above.  I wonder if she has it programmed into a keyboard shortcut?)

In fact, Arizona law likely has nothing to do with lowering the state’s rate of substantiating maltreatment.  And the allegedly low substantiation rate has done nothing to curb the state’s ever-escalating rate of child removal.  The real answers can be found right in the same document from which Roberts got that misleading eight percent figure.

What Roberts either doesn’t understand or chooses to ignore is that screening child abuse reports is a two-stage process.  First, a hotline operator decides whether to accept a report for investigation, then the investigator decides whether or not it’s substantiated.

Nationwide, on average, 38.1 percent of reports were screened out in 2009, the most recent year for which data are available.  But in Arizona, only 2.8 percent of reports were screened out.  The other 97.2 percent cascade down on overwhelmed caseworkers, and every one of those allegations has to be investigated.  So Arizona caseworkers have to spin their wheels investigating proportionately more false reports and trivial cases than their counterparts in almost every other state.

If Arizona screened out initial referrals as the same rate as the national average, its substantiation rate would rise to 13.6 percent.

But aha! Roberts almost certainly would say, that’s still lower than the national average.  CPS must be coddling all those bad parents they love so much even as they care not a whit when innocent children die!

Nope.  Because in Arizona, probably to a greater degree than any other state, a decision that a child is a victim of “substantiated” child abuse is not necessary before the child is removed from the home.

ARIZONA TAKES THE “NON-VICTIMS” TOO

Still another set of tables in the same federal document lists the number of child abuse “victims” and “non-victims” removed from the home.   This voluntary survey is not as reliable as the figure for entries into care states are required to provide for this other report, but it is the only survey that draws a distinction between victims and non-victims.

As you would expect, the number of victims taken from their parents almost always far exceeds the number of non-victims.  In fact, in only two states providing relatively reliable data* were more non-victims taken.  One was California where the number of non-victims removed was slightly higher than the number of victims.  The other was Arizona, where the number of non-victims taken was nearly triple the number of victims.

In other words, whatever technical criteria Arizona uses to label a case substantiated are irrelevant to its haste in tearing apart families.

As for Roberts’ same-old same-old about the supposed triumph of parents’ rights in Arizona, another set of data show that her claim is absurd.  I’ve already noted the soaring rate of child removal in Arizona.  But there’s more.

Arizona has long taken away children at a rate well above the rate in systems widely-known as, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe; states such as Illinois and Alabama - the latter a state with particular lessons for Arizona.  But Arizona’s perennial panic now has reached the point where it takes away children at a rate above the national average – even when the state’s high rate of child poverty is factored in, which is the fairest way to compare.  (When you compare to total child population, Arizona looks even worse.)


Again, even when rates of child poverty are factored in, Arizona now takes away proportionately more children that big-spending states such as New Jersey, Ohio, and Maryland and even those liberal bulwarks California and New York.


That’s hardly what one would expect from a state where “parents rights” are triumphant.

But here’s something you would expect from a state in the midst of a foster-care panic: An increase in deaths of children previously known to the child welfare agency.   That’s exactly what has happened in Arizona.

That story tomorrow, along with the perils of “despair mongering,” the “can’t-do” spirit of the state’s opinion leaders, and how Laurie Roberts will respond to these posts, if at all.

*Kansas submitted data to the voluntary survey claiming that it removed 158 victims and 982 non-victims for a total of 1,140.  But in the separate report it’s required to submit to the federal government, Kansas said it removed a total of 3,163 children, suggesting that the voluntary survey data it submitted are way off.  (In no state do the data from these two surveys match, but most states, including Arizona, come much closer.) In addition, even in the mandatory reports, Kansas fudges its figures on entries into care, as is explained in detail in our report on Kansas child welfare.