When Children Must Be Saved from Their Saviors

Back when cases involving missing children – many of them runaways from foster care – were making headlines in Washington, D.C., Marie Cohen rushed to try to shift responsibility from a failing foster care system. She told us to be sure to remember that a majority of missing children in the District of Columbia “are fleeing their own homes, not foster care.”

That’s a testament not to the success of foster care but rather to the immutable laws of mathematics. Despite the best efforts of those pushing endlessly for a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, a majority of children still live in their own homes, so those will be the homes from which a majority of runaways run.

To get a sense of the extent to which foster care is a horror show for District children, one needs to look at the proportion of runaways from their own homes and from foster care. Foster children represent less than one percent of all D.C. residents under age 18.  Yet they represent ten percent of the missing children.

This is not exactly a testament to the success of foster care.

In fact, in another column Cohen herself recites a litany of what she deems horror stories about D.C. foster parents she encountered.  Well, not quite a litany – she cites three examples. From there she tells us “many” foster parents “siphon off” money meant for their foster children and that she had to “parent most of the youth in my caseload because their foster parents did not do so …” [emphasis added].

But sweeping generalizations based on horror stories are no more valid when aimed at foster parents than at birth parents. And even if, in fact, systematic research reveals a widespread problem of D.C. foster parents in it for the money, the likely cause would be an anomaly. Unlike most the country, D.C. has a history of paying foster parents way too much.

The Real Horrors are Revealed by Data

The real reasons to worry about needless foster care are the studies showing abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes – a problem illustrated in tragic detail this week by the Arizona Republic – and the studies showing that the inherent trauma of foster care placement is so great that, in typical cases, children do better when left in their own homes. (If anyone conducted a betting pool to predict the paragraph in which I would cite those studies this week, congratulations to those who chose #7.)

Oddly, having spent most of this particular column trashing many foster parents, Cohen suggests that, somehow, if you put foster parents together in one place and call it a “foster care community” everything will be fine. She does not explain how these communities will have only the good foster parents she wants, and not the bad ones she condemns.

Or we could just do what Cohen always recommends: Institutionalize the children! Because if an institution’s own website says it’s wonderful, who cares about the research proving this is the worst possible option – or about all those scandals over the tendency of institutions to turn into hellholes – the most recent examples exposed in Philadelphia in April and in California in May.

Of course, institutions do have one big advantage: All the children are in one place. That is not an advantage for the children; on the contrary, the problems with putting a whole lot of young people who may have serious emotional problems in the same place right at the age when they are most vulnerable to peer pressure should be obvious.

But it’s a great advantage for caseworkers who might be upset about what an imposition it is upon them to have to spend time in a motor vehicle with the children one is supposedly helping, or even, declares Cohen, saving.

As she has before, Cohen complains about driving foster children. In the course of listing some of the things that prompted her to quit her job as a caseworker she writes:

Things that I did that the foster parents were supposed to do included: take my clients to the doctor, the dentist, and the therapist. Talk to their teachers. Pick them up from school when they were sick. Wait with them for hours at the emergency room.

I’m sure that, as she sat beside frightened, vulnerable foster children she’d taken to the E.R., Cohen tried to hide how much she resented having to be there. I hope she succeeded.

Extra time spent with foster children, wherever it may take place, could be viewed as a gift, not a burden. It’s a chance to talk to a foster child without interruptions, truly get to know her or him and, maybe, discover new ways to help. The same is true of chances to talk to foster children’s teachers.

There are times when parents really are horrible and children really need to be saved from those parents. There are times when foster care really is the least detrimental alternative. But everything from the mass of research to the foster children who vote with their feet tells us that, sometimes, what children really need is to be saved from their saviors.

You can’t fix child welfare spending with distorted data and doublethink

Listen closely. That giant sucking sound you hear is the foster care-industrial complex grasping for every dollar it can swipe from every possible “funding stream.”

George Orwell gave us the concept of  doublethink.
Foster care advocates perfected it.

 In 1984, George Orwell defined “doublethink” as holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting them both.

In child welfare, for example, we have been told for decades that child welfare systems don’t take away children because their families are poor. Elizabeth Bartholet, for example, in her book, Nobody’s Children, derides the notion that cases of neglect are “mere poverty” cases.

Sean Hughes sneered at the notion when he wrote that “if you look at the data, it’s hard to see any evidence of there being a pattern of foster care entry due solely to material deprivations of poverty.” (For the record, such data are, in fact, abundant.)

But now we also are told, in an opinion column by Hughes and Angie Schwartz that every single federal program designed to ease poverty – including housing assistance, food stamps, even the Supplemental Security Income program for the aged, blind and disabled – is a foster care prevention program, and every dime from every one of them should be counted as child welfare spending.

In other words, great gobs of money are going to prevent something – removal of children from their parents because they are poor – that child welfare agencies say they don’t do anyway.

Hughes and Schwartz use this doublethink to stand reality on its head, leaving both a written and visual impression of vast sums of money for prevention dwarfing a tiny amount for foster care. But by this same logic, the entire Social Security and Medicare budgets should be counted as foster care spending, because some of that money helps grandparents providing kinship foster care to grandchildren.

In fact, as advocates of taking away children themselves love to point out, a majority of poor families are never subject to a child abuse or neglect allegation. Well, at least if they’re white. So if torturing logic were a war crime, counting this spending as preventing foster care would be Exhibit A at an international tribunal.

Where the Money Really Goes

But even if you accept Hughes and Schwartz’s premise, the graphics accompanying the article misrepresent reality. They portray the amount available under the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) as equal to the amount available under the portion of the giant open-ended entitlement known as Title IV-E reserved exclusively for foster care. In fact, even if every dime allocated to the SSBG were spent exclusively on child welfare, it still wouldn’t equal the amount spent on IV-E foster care.

Even more egregious, the amount available under the one program that really is targeted, in part, at preventing needless foster care, Title IV-B, is presented as about half as much as the IV-E foster care entitlement.

In fact, total IV-B funding is less than one-fifth what is spent on IV-E foster care, and the portion of IV-B funds actually spent on family preservation and reunification is roughly one-eighth the amount spent on IV-E foster care. So if the graphic were accurate, you’d barely be able to see the box showing efforts targeted to keeping families together.

When Hughes and Schwartz finally get almost real – in a pie chart – we find that even counting all those other categories of spending, and even if we pretend all the money from all those other categories spent on child welfare goes to keeping families together, child welfare still spends more on foster care and adoption than on everything else combined.

But even that doesn’t tell the full story.

§  Hughes and Schwartz portray Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) as part of the cornucopia of funding available for prevention. But the real TANF scandal is how it’s been turned into a child welfare slush fund, with states siphoning off millions for adoption, foster care, child abuse investigations and even the worst form of “care” of all, institutionalizing children.

§  More than $750 million in SSBG funds similarly has been diverted to foster care and child protective services.

§  As for SSI payments: there, too, there’s a real scandal: Child welfare agencies snatching away money that rightfully belongs to individual foster children in order to fund their bureaucracies.

 Aid for the Vulnerable is Always Vulnerable

As I’ve noted before, this happens because of whom these different programs serve. Programs such as TANF serve poor people who are widely despised, so they’re easy targets for raids by a foster-care industrial complex that can pressure government to get what it wants. Foster care, on the other hand, separates the good children from the “bad” parents – making it far more popular. Because it is a middle-class constituency and because a whole industry has grown up around it – complete with high-powered lobbyists – it is far less vulnerable to cuts.

That’s why it’s so important that any reform to child welfare finance make foster care funding available for prevention and family preservation while protecting family preservation and general aid to poor people from being raided for foster care.

There’s another crucial difference between funding, say, food stamps and funding foster care. Food stamps don’t do harm. Often, foster care does. That’s why incentives should be geared to preventing the misuse and overuse of foster care.

As for the claim that child advocates won’t argue for more money, let’s put it to the test. Send out one of those ubiquitous “sign-on” letters with a call for simply spending more money on everything in child welfare and see what happens.  Shall we take bets?

No, what Hughes and Schwartz really are saying is that advocates should oppose anything that compromises the sacred status of foster care funding by allowing that money to be used for better alternatives.

That’s why the only way to promote their agenda is with doublethink.

From denial to desperation: Misrepresentations on child welfare and race

In a column in The Chronicle of Social Change earlier this month, Marie Cohen includes the following statement. Almost everything in it is untrue:

Starting in the early 2000s, a group of wealthy foundations and allies called the Alliance for Racial Equity in Child Welfare promoted the notion that a racist child welfare system is behind the disproportionate representation of African-American families in the child welfare system.  As evidence has accumulated that contradicts this view, the alliance has quietly suspended its work, and has not published anything since March 2015.

The statement is about as accurate as a Donald Trump tweet storm. I’m devoting an entire column to it because it illustrates how a series of small misrepresentations piled one on top of the other can create a narrative entirely divorced from fact.

There really is an Alliance for Racial Equity in Child Welfare. It is run by the Center for the Study of Social Policy.

But that is the only part of the entire paragraph that is entirely true.

I am aware of no occasion on which the Alliance has said the entire system is racist. If Cohen knows of such a statement, let her come forward and present it. The Alliance has, however, put out superb reports, such as the Michigan Race Equity Review, which document how biases play a role in the needless removal of children of color from their homes.

The other misrepresentations are more serious. Cohen claims that the Alliance hasn’t published anything since March 2015. This false claim is the only evidence she offers for her further false claim that the Alliance “quietly suspended its work.”

“Publish Or Perish” Does Not Apply

There are two problems with this:

1.       Even were the claim about publishing true, it would be irrelevant. An Alliance is not the same thing as an untenured college professor. It does not perish if it does not publish as often as Cohen wants it to.

2. The claim is false. This publication was issued a full year later. And there has been more recent work; unless, of course, you cling to a quaint 20th century definition of “published.” The Alliance organized and conducted a webinar on September 28, 2016.  The Alliance conducted another webinar on November 17, 2016. And another on February 22, 2017.  (Surprisingly, none seems to have gotten attention in The Chronicle, even though they dealt with one of this publication’s favorite topics: predictive analytics in child welfare.)  The Alliance also is sponsoring an Accelerating Change awards competition. The call for entries was issued on March 28, 2017.

All of this is available on the Alliance website.

Alliance Director Tashira Halyard told me about a few of the other events the Alliance has planned, including a conference this fall. Among the topics: this memo from the  Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services concerning the need to “ensure that child welfare agencies and state court systems are aware of their responsibilities to protect the civil rights of children and families in the child welfare system.”

Inference Peddling

Then, having falsely claimed that the Alliance wasn’t publishing and then falsely claiming that the Alliance suspended its work, Cohen said these things-that-did-not-really-happen happened “[a]s evidence has accumulated that contradicts” the view that child welfare has a racial bias problem.

This is a classic example of what can best be called inference peddling.  Cohen wants us to infer that there is now so much evidence that racial bias is no problem in child welfare that people who once said there was such a problem have given up and gone away.

In fact, Cohen’s exercise in inference peddling suggests that those clinging to the fiction that child welfare is magically exempt from the biases that permeate every other aspect of American life are getting desperate.

That’s understandable. The denial movement demands that we deny one study after another which finds that even when poverty is taken into account, there is racial bias over and above the class bias that permeates child welfare.

It also demands that we deny common sense.

In Florida, for example, the Tampa Bay Times just completed an exhaustive examination of police shootings. The newspaper found that many were justified. But it also found strong evidence of racial bias.

In six Florida counties, including four large ones, law enforcement also does child abuse investigations and makes the initial call on removing children.  So, as I noted last week, if the denial movement is correct, here’s what it means: If a sheriff’s deputy in these six counties confronts a black man and shoots him, there might be bias. If a sheriff’s deputy confronts a black man and takes away his children, there is no bias.

One recent study suggests that a majority of black children will have to endure a child abuse investigation at some point during their childhood. It is horrifying to think that, in some cases, those black children and their parents will be investigated by people so arrogant they actually believe that all bias magically stops at their office doors.

Race, journalism and child welfare: The double standards run deep

The Tampa Bay Times is earning well-deserved praise for a package of stories called Why Cops Shoot.

Since no government agency was keeping track of police shootings in Florida, the Times took on the task. The newspaper tracked 827 police shootings in Florida over six years and analyzed each one.

“Most of the shootings seem justified,” the Times concluded.  But, the newspaper said, there also are

“systemic problems that lead to questionable shootings: police operations that target minority neighborhoods; dubious traffic stops and nervous cops who rush to judgment; bad decisions by police that put them in harm’s way so they feel forced to shoot.

 In the worst cases, officers lie. They change their stories, tamper with evidence. They can kill an unarmed man lying on his back.”

And the Times found something else: “Police are more likely to shoot if you’re black.”  A series of graphics lead to a conclusion as obvious as it is inescapable: Racial bias plays a role in police shootings.

To which many no doubt would respond: Tell me something I don’t know.

The idea that there is racial bias in policing is now so accepted that the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued a public apology.

And policing is not alone. As I’ve noted before, if a black man and a white man enter a store or hail a taxi, few would doubt who is more likely to be followed around the store and less likely to get the cab. Even in the hard sciences, where objectivity theoretically is at a premium, black scholars have more trouble getting research grants.

A Blindspot in Child Welfare …

Everyone – or at least everyone on the political left – would agree: Racial bias is part of every aspect of American life. Everyone, that is, except those liberals who keep insisting that one field is magically exempt: child welfare.

Those who are, to use one of child welfare’s favorite phrases, “in denial,” tell us the grossly disproportionate rate at which black families are investigated as alleged child abusers and have their children taken away has nothing to do with race – it’s because of poverty. (This is actually an improvement; I’m old enough to remember when the child welfare establishment insisted they never took children because of poverty either.)

In fact, it’s both. Broad neglect laws make it easy to confuse poverty with “neglect.”  But even when you factor in poverty, study after study finds racial bias over and above the class bias.

… And in Newsrooms

This willful blindness among some of my fellow liberals also can be seen in certain newsrooms – such as the Tampa Bay Times.

In an editorial last year, the Times acknowledged that Hillsborough County (metropolitan Tampa) took away children at the highest rate in the state. The newspaper even noted that the rate of removal in Hillsborough was far higher than Miami-Dade County, which has nearly double Hillsborough’s population.

But bias? No way! And, opines the Times, anyone who thinks there’s a problem can’t possibly be a good liberal. As the editorial put it:

“The figures are sure to give ammunition to antigovernment conservatives, many of whom like to frame the child protection process as antifamily. But that overlooks the facts and misses the point.” 

And what are those facts?

 “Hillsborough’s rangy size and high poverty levels help create especially troublesome home environments.”

There’s just one problem with that: The rate of child poverty is higher in Miami-Dade where, the Times acknowledges, far fewer children are taken.

Another of the Times’ facts: In the majority of cases, children are not removed from their homes.

Well, yes. But in the majority of cases where police confront citizens, they don’t shoot them. That doesn’t mean no one is ever wrongfully shot, as the Times has just illustrated.

But most striking was this argument:

“In more than 4,000 cases since 2011, a judge has found that investigators got it wrong only 66 times.”

The Times series on police shootings produced a strikingly similar statistic, but a vastly different conclusion:

 “No matter what [police officers have] done, they almost certainly won’t be charged with a crime, the Times found. Only once in the six years and 827 shootings analyzed was an on-duty cop charged with a crime for shooting someone. It got thrown out of court.”

So to review: When judges rubber-stamp removals of children from their homes, it means the removals must be justified. When prosecutors won’t prosecute police it means police are not being held accountable.

Of course, one can see why some liberals would cling to the notion that child protection workers are somehow immune from bias. After all, they’re caseworkers, not hard-nosed cops. Right?

Not so in six Florida counties, including some large ones. In those counties, sheriffs’ departments investigate child abuse allegations and remove children.  The counties include four in the Times circulation area: Pinellas, Pasco, Manatee and Hillsborough.

Once again, to review: In the considered opinion of the Tampa Bay Times, if a sheriff’s deputy confronts a black man and shoots him, there may be bias. If a sheriff’s deputy confronts a black man and takes away his children, there can’t be bias.

Because, as far as the Tampa Bay Times is concerned, those who take away children are always right.

Big Data’s latest brainstorm: Target poor people and make parents suspects if they ask for help

Remember the good old days when the one thing almost everyone interested in child welfare could agree on was “home visiting”? Assign a trained worker to help “at-risk” new parents, sometimes even before the child’s birth. Then follow up with regular visits to the home.

When such programs follow a particular model, the Nurse Family Partnership, this kind of help actually is helpful.

Those whose top priority really is taking away more children find this acceptable since it widens, rather than narrows, the net of intervention into families. Advocates of family preservation find it acceptable because it’s strictly voluntary for the families.

About the only people to object, initially, were right-wingers with their paranoid ideas that this was a sneaky backdoor way for “big gummint” to spy on families.

Just because you’re paranoid…

But then along came self-proclaimed liberal Elizabeth Bartholet, who proved the adage “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” Based on the criteria she sets out in her book, “Nobody’s Children,” her agenda is so extreme that I estimate it would require taking at least one million children from their parents every year.

That would be even before implementing a linchpin of her strategy, which I discussed last month: a very different version of home visiting. The Bartholet version is the right-wing nightmare come true: It would be universal and mandatory. In other words, a government-mandated spy in every living room. Bartholet specifies that the visitors would be mandatory child abuse reporters, and that the purpose of those visits includes “surveillance.” Indeed, that seems to be their primary purpose.

Of course that’s not going to happen – not because it’s Orwellian, but because it would be so expensive. But now, it turns out, Bartholet’s vision also was hopelessly low-tech. In the age of the latest fad in child welfare, predictive analytics, it no longer matters what the spy in the living room actually sees. Just making use of a home visiting program ratchets up the level of suspicion.

At least that seems to be the latest plan from software vendor SAS, according to a recent story from predictive analytics evangelist and Bartholet disciple Daniel Heimpel, publisher of The Chronicle of Social Change.

SAS is the company which used past cases to test a secret, proprietary predictive analytics algorithm in Los Angeles. SAS proclaimed it a rousing success even though 95 percent of the time when the algorithm predicted severe harm to a child the algorithm was wrong.

Now SAS is developing a new approach in Florida. This one targets poor people. It compares birth records to three other databases: child welfare system involvement, public assistance and “mothers who had been involved in the state’s home visiting program.”

So listen up “at-risk” new mothers: In the world of predictive analytics, the fact that you reached out for help when you needed it and accepted assistance on how to be better parents isn’t a sign of strength – it’s a reason to consider you suspect, and make it more likely that your children will be taken away.

So the conclusion is obvious: Mothers will have to turn down the help in order to protect their children from the risk of having to face the horrors of foster care. Oh, wait, that probably won’t work. Big Data entrepreneurs would simply respond by finding a database listing mothers who refuse home visiting, and count that against them too.

The only way to escape Big Data is to hide the pregnancy, avoid prenatal care and give birth at home. Yes, child welfare has found one more way to endanger children in the name of protecting them.

A dilemma for predictive analytics defenders

SAS’ approach also should create a dilemma for some defenders of predictive analytics, such as Heimpel, who can’t see why anyone would object to using it for targeting which families should get help, in particular home visiting. SAS is standing that on its head. Their new approach winds up using home visiting to target investigations.

SAS’ evidence that its new approach works consists of pointing out that a lot of those it targeted had repeat reports of child abuse. But the reasoning is circular. Part of the rationale for predictive analytics is that decisions now are too subjective and prone to bias. Logically, then, you can’t turn around and cite those same subjective, biased decisions as proof your approach works.

Indeed, reliance on prior reports as proof of accuracy was a key flaw in evaluations of New Zealand’s experiment with predictive analytics.

And you’re certainly not going to make the system less biased by tracking only poor people. That only magnifies the existing “surveillance bias” that makes poor people targets because they’re more visible to government agencies.

But hey, the news isn’t bad for everyone. Middle class child abusers are in luck! If child welfare systems adopt this latest Big Data brainstorm, middle class child abusers are likely to be a lower priority for investigations – and likely to have lower risk scores when a caseworker shows up at the door.

As for poor people who need help with child-rearing, I guess they’ll just have to hire nannies.

Child welfare’s 163-year addiction to bad science

Today’s child welfare system has its roots not in benevolence, but in bigotry.

Foster care began more than 150 years ago with a Protestant minister by the name of Charles Loring Brace. Brace founded an organization that still exists, New York City’s Children’s Aid Society.

Brace had seen the revolutions in Europe of 1848, and they terrified him. In particular, he was terrified of poor immigrant Catholics, whom he branded a “stupid, foreign criminal class” and the “scum and refuse of ill-formed civilizations.” He worried that “some demagogue might arouse their passions and fuse all the elements for a Parisian scene of riot and blood.”

And, of course, Brace explained, these Catholic immigrant parents were genetically inferior, passing bad “gemmules” on to their children. Fortunately, these ill effects could be reversed – by taking away the children and shipping them out to middle class Protestant farmers in the countryside.

Brace did just that. Between 1854 and 1929, his “orphan trains” took at least 100,000 such children. But the name notwithstanding, many of the children were not orphans. And many were taken without the knowledge or consent of their parents.

In 1990, I discussed some of this history in a letter to The New York Times. That prompted a touching and wonderfully ironic testament to the importance of family: a response defending Brace from his own great-grandson, Charles Loring Brace IV.

Bigotry? Heavens, no, Brace IV said. Those remarks about “scum and refuse” reflected merely a “somewhat genteel sense of superiority.” And you can’t blame great-grandpa for the whole “gemmules” idea – he got it from Charles Darwin!

The headline the Times put on this letter is: “Brace Took Up Bad Science in Good Faith.”

Bad Science in Arizona

Flash forward 163 years. The place is Arizona, scene of the nation’s longest sustained foster care panic. The sharp, sudden increase in children removed from their homes began in 2003. It might – might – have finally stopped in 2016. Arizona tears apart families at a rate 60 percent above the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in. Metropolitan Phoenix takes children at the highest rate among America’s big cities when poverty is considered.

And the state is remarkably creative about figuring out new ways to do it.

The latest plan: secretly tape interviews with those suspected of abusing and neglecting their children. Then run the recordings through a “Computer Voice Stress Analyzer” (CVSA) to see if the suspect is telling the truth.

But as the Arizona Republic reported:

Academics who have studied the technology … have dismissed it as ineffective. Kelly Damphousse, the dean of the University of Oklahoma’s College of Arts and Sciences, led a 2007 study for the Department of Justice. … “The software isn’t capable of distinguishing who is telling the truth,” Damphousse said …

“It’s a sham. … There is no scientific validity to the results,” said John J. Palmatier, a former police officer and criminal justice professor who has studied such technologies for 34 years. …  “They’re actually using it? I hope Arizona has deep pockets, because if the right attorney finds out, they’re going to pay big bucks,” Palmatier said.

In fact, the right attorney did find out. When family defender Gregg Woodnick blew the whistle, the Arizona child protective services agency decided it would not make clandestine use of CVSA after all. So that part of the plan never got off the ground. But the agency still uses it with the “permission” of the suspect.

The Ultimate in Bad Science

But of course, the classic example of child welfare’s never-ending love affair with bad science is “predictive analytics” in which computer software supposedly tells caseworkers which families are at high risk for abusing their children.

I have yet to encounter anyone who favors predictive analytics who is both an advocate of family preservation and does not run a child welfare system. But some reformers who do run such systems say, in effect:

§  Yes, we know that the Los Angeles experiment with predictive analytics produced a false positive rate of 95 percent.

§  Yes, we know about how predictive analytics reinforces racial bias in criminal justice, with a disturbing tendency to overestimate the dangerousness of the accused if they’re black and underestimate the danger if they’re white.

§  Yes, we know about the research in New Zealand that suggests similar problems in child welfare.

But, they say, we will avoid all these pitfalls. We will only use predictive analytics the right way.

I trust them to try their very best to do just that. But I don’t trust their successors, whoever they may be. And I don’t trust the successors to those successors. Because the typical child welfare agency is like the one in Arizona – chaotic, dysfunctional and ready to grasp at any straw that might get it off the hook the next time a child “known to the system” becomes front page news.

That’s why child welfare keeps taking up bad science in good faith.