The “liberal” whose scheme was more evil than Project 2025

Self-proclaimed liberal Elizabeth Bartholet wanted to force every pregnant woman to admit a spy into her living room from pregnancy until the child was preschool age. 

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Last month I wrote a post about how what was once the Next Big Thing in “child welfare” – “predictive analytics” increasingly is being seen for what it really is: an Orwellian nightmare of computerized racial profiling that bears an uncanny resemblance to some of the worst aspects of Project 2025 – the right-wing vision for a second Trump presidency.

I included this video from The Lincoln Project dramatizing what one aspect of Project 2025, omnipresent surveillance of pregnant women, really would mean:

 

I noted that unlike Project 2025, using predictive analytics once was embraced by many on the left. It was the subject of gushy stories in mainstream media – even though one of the designers of one of the most prominent algorithms actually said “Yes, it’s Big Brother…”

But while preparing my recent presentation for the Kempe Center’s virtual conference, I was reminded that there was an old-fashioned analog scheme for mass surveillance that was even worse.  It, too, was embraced by many on the Left at the time. In fact, the creator of this scheme never tires of beginning her presentations by reminding everyone that, at least in her own eyes, she’s a liberal.

The scheme comes from Harvard Law School Professor-Emeritus Elizabeth Bartholet.  She long has been one of America’s most extreme devotees of taking away children.  For decades she led what should be called child welfare’s “caucus of denial” – that group which insists practitioners of “child welfare” somehow are so much better than everyone else that they have created the one and only field in American life magically immune from racism.

Nothing in my description of Bartholet’s scheme that follows constitutes inference on my part.  It is all laid out in depressing detail in her 1999 book Nobody’s Children – see especially pages 164 to 171.  It is a plan so extreme it would make the authors of Project 2025 blush:

She called for a spy in every living room. 

The plan is a bizarre extrapolation from something that has gained wide favor among advocates for traditional child abuse “prevention” – home visiting.  The idea is that a professional (in the most promising of these programs, a nurse) would offer to come to the home of pregnant women and new parents, perhaps once a week, to offer advice, support and, at its best, concrete help.

The key words there are support and offer.  The purpose of the visits is help – though anyone choosing to let them in would have to consider the fact that the visitors probably would be mandatory reporters of “child abuse.”  (This is a classic example of how mandatory reporting backfires.)

But the visits would be strictly voluntary.  Parents would be free to just say no.

When these programs first were proposed the only real opposition came from some on the extreme right.  They charged that the plan was really just a subterfuge by liberals to put an agent from Big Government into every American home. It was easy to dismiss that as a paranoid delusion – until Elizabeth Bartholet, (who wants to be sure you know she’s a liberal) came along and proposed almost exactly that.

She called for a home visiting program that would be mandatory, not voluntary.  The starting line would be even earlier than predictive analytics algorithms. As with Project 2025, the spying would begin with pregnancy.  (Bartholet doesn’t say if women would have to self-report their pregnancies or if their doctors or maybe their neighbors would turn them in.)

But however it would be done, once your pregnancy became known, government agents (presumably from private “helping” agencies, but contracted by government) would be sent into your home and every other such home in America - from pregnancy until your child was old enough for preschool (at which point, presumably, teachers could take over the spying).

Under Bartholet’s plan, the visitors can demand entry at any time, and you must let them in. Yes, they’ll try to help.  But their primary job is to conduct – this is Bartholet’s term - “surveillance” of your pregnancy, your child-rearing practices and environment. If they believe any of those practices, or anything else, endangers your child’s “well-being” they must turn you in to the family police who can -- and Bartholet maintains, should -- whisk away your children and set in motion the process for taking them away forever.

That brings us to Bartholet’s definition of “well-being.”

Bartholet says having those spies in the living room watch out only for things that threaten children’s health or safety is not enough. She said the system should be willing to remove children “even if physical safety is not an issue,” [p.204, emphasis in original]. Indeed, Bartholet says, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, which blew huge holes in earlier federal law theoretically requiring “reasonable efforts” to keep families together, should have gone further.  ASFA should have declared reasonable efforts null and void whenever they might jeopardize a child’s “well-being.” [p.27].

Bartholet said this is essential because, in large numbers of neglect cases, a child’s physical safety really isn’t in danger.

And we should stop right there for a moment.  Bartholet and her disciples, then and now, invoke the worst horror stories to justify the massive over-policing of families and over-removal of children.  But in her own book, Bartholet effectively admits she knows better.

In large numbers of “neglect” cases, she admits, children are not in danger at all – except materially.  One needs a “well-being” standard only if the real target is any case in which a parent’s poverty is preventing a child from having all the same opportunities rich

children have. In short, you need a spy in every living room to police “well-being” only if the goal is to accomplish a massive reallocation of children from the poor to the rich.

Repeatedly in her book, Bartholet equates “well-being” with “well-off.” She indicates her strong preference for adoption by strangers is based in part on the fact that prospective adoptive parents “are generally relatively privileged in socioeconomic terms … and live in neighborhoods with better schools and community facilities, which are relatively free from drugs, crime and violence” [p.89]. She complains about kinship foster care in part because relatives “live on the economic margins” [p.157].

She quotes with approval a researcher who says entire poor communities often are “almost unsalvageable” and the system should look for placements that provide “physical … and environmental advantages … even if they require some discontinuities to achieve them”[p.185].

Fortunately, both on the Left and the Right, people are catching on to the enormous harm of child surveillance and child confiscation schemes, whether it was former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s proposal to shovel poor people’s children into orphanages or Bartholet’s spy-in-every-living room scheme.

But still, there are too many of my fellow liberals who forget everything they claim to believe about civil rights and civil liberties as soon as someone whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears.

NCCPR at the Kempe Center Conference: Attn: Family Police: Children's "well-being" is none of your damn business!

 This is the text of the NCCPR’s presentation at the 2024 Kempe Center International Virtual Conference: A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare

            

What the cover says 

How many times have we heard it or read it? “Safety, permanency, well-being.”  It’s practically the slogan of everyone in the family policing establishment, from the federal government’s Administration for Children and Families to the smallest county family police agency.

We hear family police agencies even claiming they want a “child and family well-being system.” In a truly Orwellian touch, San Diego County California even makes its family police part of its new “Department of Child and Family Well-being.”

            And yet, when it comes to safety, permanency and well-being the family police have managed to screw up all three.

            Family police is a term I will use throughout this presentation, since it’s when it comes to an agency with the power to march into any home in America, search it top to bottom, stripsearch children, walk right out with them and consign them to the chaos of foster care, that is a vastly more accurate term than “child protection” or “child welfare” agency.

            And it’s important to draw a distinction between that one element of government – the family police – and government as a whole.

            I am a lifelong tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. I’m old enough to have cast my first vote in a presidential election for George McGovern and my last vote in a contested presidential primary – 2020 -- for Elizabeth Warren.  I think government can play a huge, constructive role in promoting the well-being of children.

            But the family police cannot.

            After all, they’ve screwed up stuff that’s a lot easier to define.

Guess which child welfare “scholars” are in the group defending a “race realist” law professor beloved by Tucker Carlson

Self-proclaimed "race realist" law professor Amy Wax having a friendly chat with election denier Tucker Carlson

Prof. Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania Law School is quite a piece of work.  The school’s Dean, Theodore Ruger, has written a letter urging the University to consider imposing a “major sanction” against the self-proclaimed “race realist.” 

I’ll go into some of what Wax is accused of saying – and some of what she has unquestionably said – in a moment.  But I should explain at the top why this commentary is on a blog about the “child welfare” system. 

Wax’s most strident defenders include a group called the Academic Freedom Alliance.  AFA’s members include some of the most strident supporters of tearing apart more families and some of those deepest in denial about racism in child welfare.  

AFA members include Emily Putnam-Hornstein, America’s foremost evangelist for the use of predictive analytics in family policing (a more accurate term than “child welfare”) and someone who has gone out of her way to ridicule the work of a Black activist in the field. They also include Prof. Sarah Font, who issued a publication with a graphic labeling anyone accused of child abuse a “perpetrator” – even after they’re found innocent.  She also condemned the Indian Child Welfare Act.  

Font and Putnam-Hornstein have been brought in by that other bastion of the child welfare establishment, Chapin Hall, to advise them on a study that amounts to a whitewash of abuse in foster care. 

A founding member of AFA, Elizabeth Bartholet, is also the leader of child welfare’s caucus of denial concerning racism in child welfare. 

All three signed a paper (with Font as the lead author) calling for a massive increase in surveillance of poor families by family police even when they are not accused of abuse or neglect. 

As The New York Times reports, AFA sent a letter to University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill denouncing the call to investigate Wax and demanding that any and all attempts to discipline her cease.  Indeed, they are demanding the issuance and publicizing of “a complete exoneration of Amy Wax for her multiple exercises of academic freedom both in her teaching and public statements.” (There are links to Ruger’s letter and the AFA letter in the Times story.) 

Amy Wax’s “race realist” vision 

So now, some highlights from the work of Amy Wax: 

The Times cites comments the self-proclaimed “race realist” made while appearing on Tucker Carlson’s program on Fox Nation (which is like Fox News but without its subtlety and nuance). According to the Times, Wax 

said “American Blacks” and people from non-Western countries feel shame for the “outsized achievements and contributions” of Western people.

Wax appeared with Carlson in 2022, well after Carlson began spreading lies about the 2020 election and lies about the Jan. 6 insurrection that followed.  None of that deterred Wax.  The Times story continues: 

On a recent podcast, she said, “I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”… 

Here, from Ruger’s letter, are some more examples: 

• Stating, based on misleading citation of other sources, that “women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men,” women are “less intellectual than men” and there is “some evidence” for the proposition that “men and women differ in cognitive ability.” 

• Stating that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” 

• Stating that Blacks have “different average IQs” than non-Blacks, could “not be evenly distributed through all occupations,” and that such a phenomenon would not be “due to racism.” 

• Stating that Asians have an “indifference to liberty,” lack “thoughtful and audaciousindividualism” and that “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.” 

• Stating that immigrants with “Brown faces, Asian faces . . . feel anger, envy, and shame,”and expressing her disbelief that they would criticize the United States when “on some level, their country is a s---hole.” 

• Stating that “there were some very smart Jews” among her past students but that Ashkenazi Jews are “diluting [their] brand like crazy because [they are] intermarrying.”

 • Stating that low-income students may cause “reverse contagion,” infecting more “capable and sophisticated” students with their “delinquency and rule-breaking.” 

• Stating that “if you go into medical schools, you’ll see that Indians, South Asians are now rising stars. . . . [T]hese diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment now.” 

The Times discussion of academic freedom does not discuss a concomitant responsibility: academic.  But according to Ruger, Wax 

relies on outdated science, makes statements grounded in insufficiently supported generalizations, and trades on the University’s reputation to amplify her baseless disdain for many members of the University community. … When challenged regarding her unsupported and uncited claim that communities that are “more diverse” litter more, she responded that “[s]ociologists don’t study this stuff,” when in fact there are multiple studies on the topic. … Wax proclaimed that “there is essentially no science being done in a place like Malaysia. No science, no technology coming out.” This is patently false.

What Wax allegedly said to her students

 AFA and Wax’s other defenders say that, as a tenured professor, she should be free to go on whatever “race realist” rants she chooses without fear of consequences concerning her employment. 

But Wax also allegedly has made belittling, racist comments to her students.  From the Times: 

[A] Black law student who had attended UPenn and Yale said that the professor told her she “had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” according to the administration. 

The complaint filed by Ruger lists more allegations: 

● Emailing a Black student, that “[i]f blacks really and sincerely wanted to be equal, they would make a lot of changes in their own conduct and communities.” 

• Stating in class that people of color needed to stop acting entitled to remedies, to stop getting pregnant, to get better jobs, and to be more focused on reciprocity. 

• Stating in class that Mexican men are more likely to assault women and remarking such a stereotype was accurate in the same way as “Germans are punctual.” 

• Commenting in class that gay couples are not fit to raise children …  

• Commenting after a series of students with foreign-sounding names introduced themselves that one student was “finally, an American” adding, “it’s a good thing, trust me.” 

Wax denies saying anything belittling or racist to students. But the Times reports that even another group that supports her suggested hers was a borderline case: 

Professor Wax is a test case of academic freedom, “right up on the line,” said Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE]. But, she said, “We have not seen any evidence that it crosses the line.” 

But is the line always bright and clear?  When a professor says Black people are cognitively inferior, nonwhite immigrants come from “s---holes” and that they are only in her classroom because of affirmative action, how can she be trusted to treat all students fairly and equally?  If even some of her defenders concede it would be wrong for her to tell her own students to their faces that they are cognitively inferior, come from “s---holes” and are only in her classroom because of affirmative action, why is it ok retain a tenured professorship after saying the same things about them using someone like Tucker Carlson has an intermediary? 

While FIRE might concede that a line might exist, even if they don’t think Wax crossed it, the letter
from AFA expresses no qualms about Wax’s statements at all.  It doesn’t even offer up the Voltaire defense:  You know, the quote attributed (probably wrongly) to Voltaire which goes: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  

So one might expect AFA’s letter to begin with something like: “Make no mistake. We are appalled by Prof. Wax’s repugnant views and her actions, and we want to make clear in the strongest possible terms that we do not share them.  Nevertheless …” 

But no such statement appears.  The AFA letter contains not one word disapproving of what Amy Wax says amid the 1,109 words defending her right to say it.  And, as noted earlier, AFA is demanding “a complete exoneration” of Wax for what she has said “both in her teaching and public statements.” 

The letter is signed by the co-chairs of AFA’s Academic Committee.  There is nothing to indicate that Bartholet, Font or Putnam-Hornstein were involved in drafting it or even read it.  But it speaks volumes about all three that they are part of a group that would rush to defend the right of a self-proclaimed “race realist” to spew venom without one word of criticism concerning the venom she spews. 

It’s also unsurprising. 

Putnam-Hornstein’s most celebrated predictive analytics algorithm, the one in Pittsburgh was launched after stacking the deck on evaluations and ethics reviews.  When, finally, independent researchers got to evaluate it they found racial bias.  That same algorithm now is reportedly under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for possible discrimination against disabled families.  A just-published Associated Press story and an analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union make clear just how much havoc the Pittsburgh algorithm can cause. 

As for taking away children, Putnam-Hornstein has said "it is possible we don’t place enough children in foster care or early enough.”  And, taking an approach I suspect Wax would like, Putnam-Hornstein has gone out of her way to ridicule the work of a Black activist. 

As noted above, Sarah Font has condemned the Indian Child Welfare Act and claimed that families have too much due process when faced with the vast power of child protective services. 

Bartholet has made a career out of denying that there is racial bias in child welfare, proposing mandatory family police surveillance of every family with young children and calling for changes that would require taking millions of children from their families.  (But apparently, she’ll compromise. The document she signed with Putnam-Hornstein and Font only suggests requiring that people reapplying for public benefits be forced to produce their children for family police inspection if they are not otherwise seen by a mandated reporter of child abuse.) 

So it’s no wonder Putnam-Hornstein, Font and Bartholet joined – in Bartholet’s case co-founded -- a group that felt one of its highest priorities should be to rush to the defense of Amy Wax. 

Yet Chapin Hall has turned to Font and Putnam-Hornstein to advise them on that stacked-deck study of abuse in foster care – a study whose methodology guarantees that such abuse will be minimized. 

Chapin Hall should have the decency to dismiss Font and Putnam-Hornstein from their advisory board immediately – and to tell another advisory board for their “study,” a board made up of young people with lived experience in foster care -- why Font and Putnam-Hornstein were such a bad choice in the first place.

UPDATED: Another child welfare scholar with an agenda

 

The co-designer of Pittsburgh's notorious "scarlet number" predictive analytics
algorithm has some ideas that are even worse.

The same scholar who claims predictive analytics in child welfare isn’t biased also signs on to an extremist agenda calling for an automatic, mandatory extra level of family police surveillance of thousands of impoverished families.  They are disproportionately nonwhite families who have not so much as been accused of abuse or neglect.     

She also misunderstands abolition, mocks the words of a Black child welfare activist and doubled-down on the mockery after this post first was published.

Yet somehow, she’s been invited to speak on predictive analytics in New York City “child welfare” in November, but one of the foremost critics of that effort has not. [UPDATE, OCT. 30: After this post was published, she was added to the panel.]

Emily Putnam-Hornstein is probably America’s foremost proponent of using “predictive analytics” in child welfare – that is, mining vast quantities of data surrendered disproportionately by poor people and people of color and using it, without their informed consent, to determine if they are supposedly likely to be child abusers. 

Putnam-Hornstein co-designed the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, which stamps a risk score on every “neglect” case screened by the county’s child protective hotline, and the even more Orwellian – in both name and substance – “Hello, Baby,” which seeks to stamp the same sort of invisible “scarlet number” on every child in the county – at birth. 

Putnam-Hornstein says she is, in effect, just someone who just goes where the data lead.  She combines this with rhetoric about how her efforts are just ways to bolster prevention – and I think, in her own mind, she believes it. 

But every once in awhile we see something else: an ugly, extremist agenda. 

Earlier this year, Hornstein co-authored or “co-signed” (it’s described both ways on different pages), a paper with several of the most extreme proponents of tearing apart more families and/or denying that child welfare has a racism problem.  

The group was pulled together by Naomi Schaefer Riley of the American Enterprise Institute, someone who proudly compares her book attacking family preservation to the work of Charles Murray. Riley was kicked off a blog run by the Chronicle of Higher Education after one of her columns was widely condemned as racist.  More about her here.  

Other co-authors/co-signers include Elizabeth Bartholet, leader of child welfare’s “caucus of denial” – the group that says child welfare is magically immune from racial bias, Cassie Statuto Bevan, who co-authored the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act – and maintains the law didn’t do enough to tear apart families, and Penn State Professor Sarah Font who, in a now-deleted tweet (thank you Wayback Machine) declares that an alleged failure to prioritize children’s health, safety or existing relationships is a “feature” of the Indian Child Welfare Act.  She neglects to mention that a feature of Indian child welfare before ICWA was, uh, genocide.  

Prof. Font, the undisputed lead author of the paper, also is the lead author of the paper discussed here which includes a graphic in which everyone accused of child abuse and neglect is labeled a perpetrator – even after they’re exonerated. 

Of course, working with people who differ with you ideologically and finding common ground can be entirely reasonable.  I come at this from the political Left.  I’m glad to work with like-minded conservatives with whom I disagree on almost every issue except child welfare.  But Putnam-Hornstein authored/signed a document that is as extremist as you would expect from the authors.  It’s what they all agree on about child welfare itself that’s the problem. 

Consider this recommendation: 

…reauthorization appointments for public benefits provided to children who are not attending school and have not been recently seen by a medical professional could require (in-person) verification of the children’s well-being. [Parentheses in original.] 

Putnam-Hornstein and her coauthors make clear exactly who they are targeting: 

Children in poverty are estimated to experience maltreatment at a rate five times that of other children, and the overwhelming majority of impoverished children receive at least one public benefit. 

Well, yes. If laws effectively define poverty itself as neglect, and they do, then of course more poor children will be “estimated to experience maltreatment.” 

This also, of course, is a form of racial profiling, since nonwhite children are proportionately more likely to be poor and, therefore, proportionately more likely to apply for “public benefits.”  As for the whole surveillance-state problem, don’t worry, say Putnan-Hornstein & Co.: 

Although concerns that [child welfare services] already entails “state surveillance” of poor and minority families make such proposals controversial, there is historical precedent for requiring home visits as a condition of receiving public assistance. 

Once again, well, yes. There also is historical precedent for things like “whites only” signs at lunch counters bus terminals and other public accommodations. That doesn’t make them a good idea.  And when it comes to “home visits as a condition of receiving public assistance” the first “precedent” I could think of was blatantly racist. 

In short, the document Putnam-Hornstein authored/signed calls for requiring every impoverished family in America whose children have not been seen lately by a “mandated reporter” of child abuse to produce the children for a child abuse inspection in order to, say, quality for TANF benefits or SNAP benefits.  These child abuse inspections would be triggered by nothing except the fact that the family is poor. 

The selling of the algorithms 

All this is on top of the track record of Putnam-Hornstein and her allies when it comes to selling the predictive analytics model in Pittsburgh. 

● There’s the so-called independent ethics review of the first Allegheny County algorithm –done by a faculty colleague who wrote papers with Putnam-Hornstein’s co-designer of that very algorithm. 

● There was the county’s reassurance that the “Hello Baby” algorithm wouldn’t be biased because it doesn’t use databases that involve exclusively poor people.  (Unless, that is, you count juvenile justice system involvement and homelessness databases which are, de facto, limited almost exclusively to poor people.) 

● There’s the claim that “Hello Baby” is purely voluntary – except that you’re in it unless you remember to take advantage of just one opportunity to opt out. 

Misrepresenting abolition 

Then there’s the matter of how Putnam-Hornstein concluded one of her presentations promoting predictive analytics, dismissing the work of Black scholars and Black activists. 

In her concluding slide, she writes: “We are not going to ‘abolish’ the child protection system. And calling people ‘mandatory supporters’ is not a policy change.” She then reprints something she’d apparently said previously: “…the best abolitionists can come up with is ‘expand your role as a helper’ and ‘what are you going to do today to build another conversation’. Seriously?” 

No, calling people mandatory supporters is not a policy change.  But abolishing mandatory reporting, a demonstrably failed approach that endangers children, and providing the tools to allow teachers, doctors and others who now have to call the family police to instead give families actual help – i.e. support – is a policy change – and a damn smart one, well-summarized by one the field’s best activists, Joyce McMillan. She first coined the phrase “turn mandated reporters into mandated supporters.” 

That’s what the phrase means. I’m surprised Putnam-Hornstein, who holds a named professorship at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, didn’t seem to know it.

UPDATE, NOV. 6, 2021: In an email shortly after this post was published Putnam-Hornstein doubled down on her statement, writing:

I definitely don’t feel badly for finding “mandatory supporters” a totally laughable concept and language. Frankly, I would have thought you would also get why that is absurd and would be a bit more intellectually honest about that. That is not how the system is designed. 

 No, it's not how the system is designed, Prof. Putnam-Hornstein.  That's why there's an abolition movement.

As for abolition, it’s a new concept, and different people who use the term may mean different things by it.  But you don’t have to agree with all of it or any of it to know that there is already a wealth of information about specific abolitionist alternatives – and even a real world example -  that goes well beyond the demeaning summary Putnam-Hornstein offered.  

Nor should abolitionists be required to have immediately at-the-ready a some kind of 75-point master plan for exactly how to get rid of the current family policing system in order to be treated with respect instead of ridiculed. 

There also are abolitionist critiques specific to predictive analytics.  While J. Khadijah Abdurahman’s critique was just published, Prof. Dorothy Roberts’ critique was published well before Putnam-Hornstein offered up her demeaning caricature of the abolitionist perspective. 

And yet, somehow, next month when two academic institutions stage an online “examination” of predictive analytics in child welfare, with a special focus on New York City, Putnam-Hornstein will be there to give another sales pitch.  (After all, she’s a member of the city family policing agency’s "Predictive Analytics Advisory Group.”) And though some excellent critics from the American Civil Liberties Union are included, Abdurahman, whose critique is centered on New York City, is not.  [UPDATE: She is now!]

One more thing about the whole abolition debate: All of the alternatives proposed by abolitionists beat stamping a “scarlet number” risk score on every child at birth and forcing poor families to produce their children for inspection before receiving public benefits. 

Seriously.

An epiphany at Chapin Hall? That depends on whether the noble words in a commentary by its director are backed-up by action

          At first the commentary in The Imprint by Bryan Samuels, executive director of Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago since 2013, might seem like just another in a long line of “well, what do you know? There is racism in child welfare!” commentaries from organizations that understand it’s the right p.r. move at the moment. 

             After all, it begins like pretty much all the others:             

Inequities have shaped our country since its founding. Centuries of discrimination have inflicted deep wounds, with disparate rates of COVID-19 infection and brutal policing being current symptoms of that troubled history. Outrage over these symptoms has sparked an examination of bias in our criminal justice, health care, education and financial systems. To that list I would add one other: the child welfare system.

             But here’s what makes this one intriguing.  Less than a decade ago, Chapin Hall did examine bias in the child welfare system – and found that there was none!  Now, not only do we have Samuels’ commentary, it also appears that the 2011 document denying the role of racial bias in child welfare has disappeared from Chapin Hall’s website.

             So is Bryan Samuels about to lead Chapin Hall in a new, better direction? The signals are mixed.

             For decades, Chapin Hall has been a bastion of 19^th Century-style “child saver” ideology and advocacy dressed up as “scholarship.”  You can read some examples of their track record here and here.

             But Chapin Hall has probably been at its worst concerning the whole issue of race.  They worked hand-in-glove with Elizabeth Bartholet, one of America’s most extreme advocates of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, to discredit the whole idea that there is racial bias in the child welfare system.  Two years before Samuels arrived there, Chapin Hall co-sponsored the stacked-deck conference discussed here.   Then one of their “scholars” co-authored an Issue Brief, issued in the name of Chapin Hall, whose thrust is 180 degrees from Samuels’ recent column.

             Let’s compare:

            In his recent commentary Samuels declares:

 [J]ust as we are overdue in revamping our criminal justice system, we are delinquent in addressing the institutionalized racism and bias that pervades our family and child well-being systems.

             But in the Issue Brief, Chapin Hall suggests there is no such bias. The Issue Brief ignores or misrepresents the abundant evidence of racial bias in the child welfare system. Here’s a summary of what Chapin Hall left out.

              In his recent commentary Samuels says:

             The systematic separation of children of color from their parents – without regard for the lasting trauma it entails –is a thread that runs through our nation’s history from slavery to Native American boarding schools to present day child welfare practice.

            This has been perpetuated by the misconception that we are nobly “rescuing” children from dangerous situations. On the contrary, research suggests that many children who spend time in foster care are more likely to experience negative outcomes than their counterparts who were not removed from their families.

             But in the Issue Brief, Chapin Hall suggests there hasn’t been enough of that “noble rescuing.”

             According to the Issue Brief, Black parents are “significantly” more likely to abuse and neglect their children – and, if anything, even more Black children should be taken away.  As the Issue Brief notes with approval:

 One speaker summarized: “African American children are at least as likely to be underserved as overserved” by current removal rates.

             In his current op-ed Samuels writes:            

Bold policy and legislation are needed to create and sustain a vastly different system that coordinates among multiple agencies to prevent trauma rather than create it, and to strengthen family and community capacity to ensure children are safe and thriving. This will require that we de-scale existing infrastructure and dismantle racist practices in favor of a new way to work.

             But the Issue Brief dismisses the notion of radical change and denies that there are “racist practices” to dismantle.

             So, will the real Chapin Hall please stand up?

             The good news is that when I went looking for the Issue Brief I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Chapin Hall website.  Perhaps my search was insufficient, or perhaps it was an accidental oversight the last time the site was updated.  But other documents from 2011 and earlier still are there.  (It’s readily available elsewhere for those who want to search for it; I prefer not to link to documents permeated with racial bias when it can be avoided.)

             The bad news is that the old Chapin Hall, blind to racial and class bias and blind to the harm of needless removal, was very much on display just two years ago.  Shortly after the high-profile death of a child “known to the system” Chapin Hall was commissioned to do a review.  A foster-care panic already had begun – and the slipshod quick-and-dirty review threw gasoline on the fire.

             Now, we’re seeing the results.  Between fiscal years 2018 and 2020 the number of children torn from their homes in Illinois has skyrocketed 30%.  The 17% increase in 2019 alone was the second highest increase in the country that year.  In fact, even as the number of children taken over the course of a year nationwide approaches a 21-year low, the number taken in Illinois has hit a 21-year high.

             Of course Chapin Hall wasn’t solely or even primarily responsible for that. But they had a chance to be a genuine scholarly voice of reason, and instead made everything worse. 

             All of the noble sentiments in Samuels' column are contradicted by what those who work for him have done in the past – and still are doing.

             So which is it going to be?

             If Samuels really means what he says, there are two things he could do right now:

             ● Formally and publicly apologize for co-sponsoring Betsy Bartholet’s whitewash – in every sense of the term – of racial bias in child welfare and formally withdraw the Issue Brief.

             ● Withdraw the poorly done, ill-though-out Illinois “review” and start over – this time with a review built around enacting the very reforms Samuels himself calls for.

Here’s the thing about Elizabeth Bartholet’s attack on homeschooling: It’s not about homeschooling

It’s just another attempt to expand the child welfare surveillance state and take away far more children.

            Fresh from suggesting that thousands of Americans who choose to homeschool their children are, at best, Bible-thumping ignoramuses and at worst might be secret torturers of children, Prof. Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard Law School and several co-authors have written a column for the Chronicle of Social Change complaining that their feelings have been hurt.

           

            The only examples they cite are a couple of tweets from prominent conservative public officials.  They do not actually link to them, as I have done above – perhaps because they are considerably less vicious than the authors of the Chronicle column suggest. 

The tweets criticize a law review article Bartholet wrote condemning homeschooling, and a subsequent story in Harvard Magazine.  They were not personal attacks. By the standards of Twitter, they are almost genteel.  Yes, Mike Pompeo, in his personal Twitter account, called Bartholet a “radical leftist scholar.” But the only people who should be offended by that are we real leftists who know Bartholet has not earned such an accolade.

            Contrary to the claim by Bartholet and her coauthors, I can find no call to “shut down” the debate over homeschooling. Rather, they have joined it.          

          Bartholet et. al. claim that this “bullying” is why they’ve had no success pushing an agenda so extreme it includes a near total ban on homeschooling. Their only evidence for this is a link to a Chronicle story in which a then new (and now former) director of the Iowa Department of Human Services respectfully disagrees with the idea that homeschooling was at the root of some horror story cases in that state.  (He singled out a different scapegoat: adoption. That, also, is wrong.)  Presumably, Bartholet and her co-authors deem their approach so pristine in its perfection that it could not possibly be failing on its merits.

In fact the bulk of the criticism Bartholet has received has come from other scholars and from happy, successful graduates of homeschools – including some who went on to Harvard.   Some of them are hurt that their families have been subjected to Bartholet’s broad-brush insults.

            They are right to be offended.  Yes, Bartholet & Co. offer the usual token disclaimers: many homeschoolers do a great job, “none of us advocate [sic] an absolute ban on homeschooling,” etc.  But that is belied by Bartholet’s own recommendation in the law review article.  It comes under the heading: “General Presumption Against Homeschooling with Burden on Parents to Justify Exceptions.” And even when parents are granted an exception, Bartholet writes, their children “should still be required to attend some courses and other programs at school…”

An extreme agenda

            The list of publications on Bartholet’s Harvard website include no previous work I can find on education policy, and she does not claim it as an “area of interest” in her biography. So why the sudden interest in homeschooling?  I think it’s because Bartholet’s critique of homeschooling isn’t really about homeschooling, or education in general. It’s about surveillance.  Because that's how she sincerely, and wrongly, thinks children are best protected.

            That’s not just my word – it’s hers. In her book, Nobody’s Children (pp. 170,171), Bartholet proposes that every family in America with a young child be required to let in a government-approved “home visitor” to inspect their home at regular intervals from the child’s birth until school age. The visitors would be required to report to authorities anything they considered a threat to a child’s safety or “well-being.”  Bartholet is explicit in recommending this for purposes of “surveillance.”

            As for the number of children Bartholet wants torn from their families, in her book she writes that they should be removed in cases of “serious” abuse and neglect.  And she writes that “Estimates indicate that more than three million children a year are subjected to serious forms of abuse and neglect.” (p. 61).

Bartholet’s critique of homeschooling is just the latest target-of-convenience in a long line of attacks on anything that might undermine creation of a massive child welfare surveillance state and the mass confiscation of children from their parents.  She has exploited horror stories to attack Intensive Family Preservation Services, kinship foster care and an alternative to full-scale child abuse investigations known as differential response. She ignores a mass of research showing that, in typical child welfare cases, all of these options (and sometimes even doing far less) are better for children’s well-being – and safer -- than foster care. Bartholet also is a leader of the movement that denies the existence of racial bias in child welfare.

An even more extreme agenda

            One of her Chronicle co-authors, James Dwyer, is even more extreme, so extreme that at times it blinds him to the real dangers facing children – even COVID-19.

            In 2011, he called for the massive forced relocation of poor families. The penalty for not uprooting themselves and their children from “terrible” inner city neighborhoods and exiling themselves – if necessary to small towns and rural areas: government confiscation of the children.

Dwyer blithely declares that most poor parents who live in “terrible place[s]” so do by choice, not because it’s all they can afford.  Most of the rest, he says, made the irresponsible choice to have children – “or to risk creating a child by having sex, despite knowing the child would live in a terrible place…” And besides, he writes, “a relatively high percentage of adults who live in the worst neighborhoods are marginal to begin with…”

            More recently, Dwyer suggested that child abuse in the home is so rampant that schools should not have closed to avoid the spread of coronavirus.  He says “the shutdown decision arguably amounted to a prioritizing of the welfare of certain adults over the welfare of children."  By this he means that children appear less likely to get coronavirus or, he claims, to transmit it.

            What is unclear is which adults he means.  We do know that the research on the extent to which children transmit coronavirus is mixed.  We also know that in New York City alone 63 public school employees died of coronavirus before schools there were shut down.  Presumably some of them left children behind – some of them might even have been good parents.  And Dwyer makes no reference to a COVID-related disease that does, indeed, attack children – and might have attacked many more had schools not been closed.

A failed model

            The problem with the surveillance state model is that it devastates the psychological well-being of millions of children subjected to traumatic child abuse investigations (more than half of African-American children will endure such an investigation), it increases the risk that children will be consigned needlessly to the chaos of foster care – and it doesn’t curb child abuse.  That’s because the horror stories in which Bartholet revels are a tiny fraction of the millions of reports alleging child abuse or neglect.

            As I’ve noted before, 91 percent of calls to state child abuse hotlines are either so absurd they’re screened out or they turn out to be false. Another six percent involve neglect, which often means poverty.  And that’s why the surveillance state model doesn’t work.

            Bartholet et. al. want all children under the constant gaze of “mandated reporters” of child abuse. But the mandatory reporting regime was put in place with no studies beforehand to see if it would work.  Recent research confirms that, in fact, it backfires, driving families away from seeking help and overloading child protective services agencies so they have less time to find children in real danger.

            Still another problem with the child welfare surveillance state was highlighted by Bartholet herself – well, sort of.

From the moment a child protective services investigator shows up at the door, families are almost entirely at their mercy.  In most of the country, there is no meaningful due process. There is no federally guaranteed right to counsel, and in most places no effective counsel.  The standard of proof is almost non-existent, judges are under enormous pressure to rubber-stamp CPS agencies and most court hearings and records are secret. 

            Why is that a problem?  As Elizabeth Bartholet so aptly put it: “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.” 

Oh, wait, never mind. Bartholet was speaking of parents, not the government.

Toward a real dialogue

          

          Dwyer and Bartholet have something else in common: convening gatherings that are limited almost exclusively to the like-minded.  When Bartholet planned her latest, an invitation-only "summit" on homeschooling (now postponed), the speakers were a who's-who of homeschooling opponents. It was less a summit than a “safe space” where they could all get together and bemoan their shared belief that homeschoolers are closed-minded.

            But perhaps she’s changed her mind. I was happy to read that what Bartholet and her coauthors really want is “a civil, data-driven discussion about the advantages and pitfalls of homeschooling and how best to ensure the safe education of all children.” 

            I assume this means Bartholet will use the pandemic-induced pause to change her plans and convene a conference with equal representation and equal time for all sides, and neutral moderators to guide a constructive dialogue.  And I assume she wants all sides to share equally in the planning process.

            Perhaps she can even get the Home School Legal Defense Association to co-chair it.