Food or foster care? Places that say they never take children because of poverty get ready to take more children because of poverty

Pittsburgh, Pa. and the State of Georgia are prime examples

Georgia makes its child welfare priorities clear

Got time for a one-question pop quiz? 

With SNAP benefits cut off, poor families are under even more stress. Faced with a family going hungry and desperate to find food for the children, the stress causes a parent to “maltreat” the children. Do you: 

A) Put the family under investigation, interrogate everyone, rifle through cabinets, drawers, cupboards and refrigerators, stripsearch the children (often standard practice regardless of the investigation) and leave the entire family traumatized.

B) Do all of the above and tear the children from their parents, consigning them to the chaos of foster care, from which only one in five is likely to do well in later life: a system that leaves emotional scars so great it may make it more than four times more likely they’ll die by age 20, while putting them in places where there’s at least a one in four chance, and probably more, they will be abused.

C) Get the family some food.

The answer should be easy, of course. But in Allegheny County, Pa. (metropolitan Pittsburgh), they seem to prefer A or B.  Because this is how a story from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership Newsroom begins: 

Fewer families are stepping up to foster, just as experts warn a surge of children could soon flood the system if the state and federal budget standoffs drag on. 

Allegheny County is now preparing for an increase in referrals to the Office of Children, Youth, and Families. 

“Parental stress is a big predictor of child maltreatment,” said Julia Reuben, an administrator for Allegheny County’s Department of Human Services. “And so, when there’s not enough money to feed your children … I think we can surmise that that will lead to increased maltreatment.”

Well, it certainly will lead to increased maltreatment if more children are forced into foster care, which often is an act of maltreatment itself, and, as noted above, a place where independent studies keep finding high rates of abuse. 

It’s another indication of how much child welfare in Pittsburgh has deteriorated.  Once a model for reducing needless foster care, the county turned its back on its own success. Now it’s a leader in targeting families using an algorithm that its own co-designer described as “Big Brother,” an algorithm that reportedly was* investigated for bias by the Biden Justice Department.  

The county also is a leader in tearing apart families. The most recent comparative data for Pittsburgh are from 2022, but they show a rate of removal more than 50% higher than the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

Pittsburgh does continue to be a leader in using the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, but for how long? Kin are also likely to be poor and so also likely to face additional stress due to the cut-off of SNAP benefits. 

As it happens, Pennsylvania is in the midst of a state budget impasse as well. That threatens payments to foster parents.  So Allegheny County has been dipping into reserve funds to pay the foster parents.  Maybe they should try using more of those funds to get food to birth parents so their children aren’t “maltreated” due to all that extra stress. 

It’s not just Pittsburgh 

Notice how in Pittsburgh, they use a rhetorical fig leaf to cover the naked truth about taking children due to poverty.  Oh, no, it’s not the poverty, they say, it’s the maltreatment caused by the stress caused by the poverty. 

In Georgia, they’re not even pretending.   

Kate Blair, director of the Savannah Court-Appointed Special Advocates Program (which expanded into additional services and now calls itself “Brightside”), offered up exactly the sort of comments one would expect – if you know CASA. She told WTOC-TV: 

“For a lot of our parents working towards reunification, they need to have a safe place for their children to return to, as well as food in those cupboards,” Blair said. “And without SNAP benefits, they may not have both.” 

The organization is anticipating families needing to be separated longer, and even more children possibly entering the foster care system. 

When a child is removed, parents need to come up with a case plan for the court to determine that their home is safe. Those factors include having warm shelter and food. 

“We’re taking away one really important piece,” Blair said. “And in the end, who’s going to suffer the most are not the politicians, are not adults like myself. It’s the children.” 

It’s not that Blair wants this to happen, in fact, she was appealing to people to donate food. But there’s something else her agency could do: Those CASA volunteers could oppose delaying reunification because of poverty and demand that the Georgia family police agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency) find a way to put food in all those cupboards. 

DFCS makes it worse 

Instead, that agency is making things even worse. 

The Imprint reports that 

In emails sent late Friday to child welfare agencies in Georgia, state officials announced that the federal government shutdown has required them to suspend new services that protect children from entering foster care and ensure family reunification — unless approved in writing by the state. 

Under the directive, without that level of approval, caseworkers cannot initiate contracted services for child and family assessments, aides for parents, wraparound care, measures to prevent foster care, including “unnecessary out of home placement,” and “early intervention” services. [Emphasis added.] 

The only exceptions are “court-ordered or emergency services.” 

Local offices of the state Division of Family and Children’s Services remain free to shovel children into foster care and even ultra-expensive ultra-useless institutions,  with no new restrictions. 

Of course, this makes explicit that Georgia is willfully violating federal laws. One law – almost universally ignored – requires states to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together. Another requires states to make “active efforts” in cases involving Native American children. Neither law has an exception for government shutdowns. 

Yet now DFCS is explicitly cutting back on services to prevent “unnecessary out-of-home placement.” 

As for where Georgia might come up with the money to pay for all those services it’s cutting back, there’s actually an untapped gold mine.  

The most expensive form of “care” for foster youth is institutionalization. It can cost hundreds of dollars per day per child. It’s also the least effective – in fact, it’s not effective at all. As a U.S. Senate Committee then chaired by Georgia’s own Sen. John Ossoff recently reminded us, the entire model is a failure. 

And that’s before we get to the fact that institutions are the placements where children are most likely to be abused, as can be seen in scandals that have engulfed institutions in Arizona, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, Iowa, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Washington state , Arkansas, New York, Connecticut, Idaho -- and Georgia. 

Here’s what else is so significant about places that institutionalize children: They cost a fortune, often hundreds of dollars per day per child. 

Which brings us to the goldmine. 

Nationwide, two percent of foster children are institutionalized.  But in Georgia, it’s 12%. As of Sept. 30, 2024, Georgia was institutionalizing 1,331 children! And while Georgia institutionalizes children at what is probably one of the highest rates in the nation, it uses the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, at one of the lowest rates, 22% - barely over half the national average. 

So what DFCS should be doing is reexamining the case of every institutionalized child. Figure out which could go straight home (yeah, I know, these are supposedly the most difficult children, but that’s often according to those who run the institutions), which can go to the homes of extended families as kinship foster care placements, and which really do need more intensive help – the kind that can be provided far more effectively and at far less cost through the very wraparound services DFCS is now cutting back. 

The children would be far better off, and, though the federal government would reap some of the savings, Georgia still would have millions in additional funds to provide the help needed to keep children out of the system in the first place. 

*-If there was such an investigation, as the Associated Press reports, it may still be going on, but given who’s in charge of the Justice Department now, that seems less likely.

 Image designed with deepai.org

NCCPR in Georgia Recorder: Ossoff’s report could leave Georgia with the same lousy child welfare system – only bigger

As soon as Sen. Jon Ossoff released his report on massive failures at the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, DFCS fired back, accusing Ossoff of “political gamesmanship.” 

Actually, it’s worse.

There is every indication that Ossoff is sincere and genuinely wants to help vulnerable children. But that will only make it harder to persuade him that, because of a critical error in his analysis, his report may trigger a response that makes everything even worse. ...

Read the full commentary in the Georgia Recorder

AFCARS report is out at last: At first glance, the numbers are encouraging

At long last the federal government has released state and national foster care statistics for the year ending September 30, 2022.  Yes, 2022.  Instead of being a year behind, as usual, this time they’re nearly a year-and-a-half behind. 

But for what it’s worth, it appears that, slowly but surely, the pressure on systems to stop tearing apart families needlessly is starting to make a real difference – with one crucial caveat: We don’t know how much of the decline in the latest figures is real and how much represents “diversion” into hidden foster care; entries which states supposedly don’t have to report.  (It’s not clear if they’re violating regulations the federal government won’t enforce or if the states actually have found a loophole.) 

But with that caveat: 

Officially reported entries into foster care over the course of Federal Fiscal Year 2022 reached the lowest level since the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) started counting in 1999.  But children still were torn from their homes 187,000 times.  That’s down 20,000 from FFY 2021.  It's a nearly 40% decline from the worst year on record, 2005, when children were taken more than 307,000 times.

The snapshot number of children in foster care on any given day, also declined, from 392,000 on Sept. 30, 2021 to 369,000 one year later. 

The report also includes some new caveats about methodology.  But the in-care numbers are sufficiently close to data gathered by The Imprint to suggest that, aside from the hidden foster care issue, the figures may be close to the mark. 

A preliminary look at the state-by-state data indicate, as expected, that most states saw fewer children taken away (again, assuming they were not simply sent to hidden foster care).  But children in Georgia and Louisiana were victims of foster-care panic - sharp sudden spikes in removals of children after high-profile child abuse deaths.  

This was not the result of explicit scapegoating of family preservation in either state.  Unfortunately, the rush to take away children has become the knee-jerk response to such tragedies - and, because foster-care panics further overload systems, they only make it likely that there will be more such tragedies.  There also was a tragic spike in removals in Maine - and that is due to demagoguery by public officials.

Fortunately, more and more places are starting to understand that when we curb needless foster care, children get safer!  Let’s keep the momentum going.

How to fail up in child welfare: Bobby Cagle oversaw a foster-care panic when he ran child welfare in Georgia. Now he’s going to run child welfare in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors

            In November, 2016, when the federal government finally released state-by-state data on the number of children trapped in foster care the year before (yes, the feds release the data more than a year after they get it) the Associated Press reported on the grim news this way:

            The number of U.S. children in foster care is climbing after a sustained decline, but just five states account for nearly two-thirds of the recent increase.

            Among those states, the one with the worst record – the one in which the number of children in foster care increased at the highest rate – was Georgia.

According to the state’s own data, the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day skyrocketed 64 percent from 8,136 in September 2013 to 13,266 just three years later. As of March, 2017, the most recent month for which data are available, the figure had reached 13,348.

UPDATE, NOV. 30, 2017: The federal government has just released state-by-state figures for 2016. Once again, Georgia's performance was dismal. In fact, Georgia alone was responsible for more than 14 percent of the entire nationwide increase in the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day.

            There was a similar surge in entries into foster care – the number of children taken from their parents over a course of year. That figure increased more than 45 percent from 2013 to 2016.

            What’s been happening in Georgia since the end of 2013, the sharp, sudden surge in the number of children taken away and the number of children trapped in foster care, is a classic foster-care panic. And the man in charge of the Georgia child welfare system for almost this entire time was Bobby Cagle.

Now, Cagle has a new job. By a vote of 3 to 2, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors turned down a candidate who almost certainly would have been superior – JooYeun Chang – and decided to let Cagle bring his take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare to the largest locally-run public child welfare agency in the country, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

Los Angeles already tears apart families at a rate far above the average for America's biggest cities and their surrounding counties. Now the Supervisors are bringing in someone likely to make that record even worse.

Before Cagle, Georgia was making progress

            Before Cagle took over, Georgia had reduced its rates of foster care placement and removal to among the lowest in the country. So I’m sure Cagle’s defenders will rush to haul out the most tired cliché in child welfare and inform us that the “pendulum” had swung too far.

            But the evidence says otherwise. From 2006 through 2013, even as the number of Georgia children in foster care steadily declined, the key measure of child safety – the rate at which children who have been abused or neglected are maltreated again – also declined. In other words, child safety improved. In contrast, during the years of foster-care panic this measure has gotten worse.

            So why the foster-care panic?

Of course Georgia officials cited drug abuse, the all-purpose excuse for skyrocketing foster care. But many states have drug problems, they don’t all let their foster-care populations increase by more than 64 percent. And while the problem of drug abuse, like the problem of child abuse, is serious and real, it does not follow that the knee-jerk solution needs to be tearing apart families.

That is a lesson we should have learned from a previous “drug plague” – crack cocaine. University of Florida researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.  Typically, the children placed with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with hopelessly addicted parents.  But it does mean that in most cases, drug treatment for the mother is a better option than foster care for the child. 

No, it's not just drugs

But Georgia officials also cited two other reasons. Georgia is a state-run child welfare system, but individual county offices each had their own child abuse hotlines. In 2013, Georgia created a single, centralized hotline with one statewide number. Reports alleging child abuse increased sharply – presumably because of all the attendant publicity. Such publicity typically is accompanied by pleas to report anything and everything no matter how absurd.

People do just that. So there should have been greater skepticism about reports and more careful screening.  In Pennsylvania, for example, where as in California, individual counties run child welfare, after the legislature passed a series of feel-good laws in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, reports alleging child abuse soared.  In Philadelphia, which has weak leadership, entries into foster care soared, too. But not in Pittsburgh, where the head of the county human services agency understood that the increase was likely to consist largely of false reports and trivial cases.

There is no evidence that Cagle brought the same critical eye to the surge in reports in Georgia. That’s probably because of the third factor.

As AP put it “Another factor [in Georgia] has been public outrage over some highly publicized cases in which children died from severe abuse even though caseworkers had prior indications they were at risk.”

That is, of course, the classic trigger for foster-care panics. And that is where leadership makes all the difference. Instead of refusing to be stampeded into tearing apart more families needlessly, Cagle threw gasoline on the fire. He drastically curbed a program to divert what appeared to be less serious cases to voluntary help, instead of launching full-scale child abuse investigations.  True, not every study has found that this approach, commonly called “differential response” is safe.  Only 25 out of 26 did -- and many found that safety improved.

Cagle’s move further strained caseworkers, leaving them less time to give any case the careful attention it needs. That may explain why the key measure of child safety, reabuse of children known-to-the-system, actually has worsened during the foster-care panic.

The same lousy system, only bigger

Cagle’s response: a caseworker hiring binge. But if all you do is hire more workers, even as you undermine safeguards against needless removal, all you get is the same lousy system only bigger.

The foster-care panic also may have contributed to the death of a two-year-old foster child, Laila Marie Daniel. A foster-care panic creates an artificial “shortage” of foster homes, making caseworkers less likely to scrutinize those homes carefully. But while Cagle was quick to suggest that deaths of children at the hands of birth parents required systemic changes, such as curbing differential response, he dismissed the Daniel case as an aberration and fired the caseworker and supervisor handling the case.

So why would a track record like this appeal to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors?  Because Cagle is good at doing what a majority of Supervisors appear to cherish most: placating politicians and media.

Anything that smacks of “cracking down on child abuse” is popular with a press and public that reacts, rightly, with shock and horror at what a few sadistic brutes do to their children, but is largely unaware or uninterested in the enormous harm that needless foster care does in cases that are far more typical, such as cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” Two massive studies have found that in typical child welfare cases children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

So the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which fanned the flames of foster-care panic in Georgia much as Garrett Therolf did did when he covered that beat for the Los Angeles Times, gave Cagle a fond farewell when the L.A. appointment was announced. The quote from “Together Georgia,” a trade association for the state’s foster-care providers, is particularly gushy.

While placating the press, the pols, and the providers, Cagle made caseworkers happy by hiring more of them and by doing something genuinely constructive, giving them a raise.  But he also wasted money on a giant pay raise for foster parents – in some cases raising their pay by more than 60 percent.  That same money could have been used for child care and rent subsidies so parents didn’t lose their children in the first place because of poverty.

So it’s clear that Bobby Cagle knows how to make journalists, politicians and foster-care agencies happy. But the impoverished families of Los Angeles now have even more reason to be afraid of DCFS.

Child welfare and race: The not-so-shocking data that shocked Chapin Hall

            The Chapin Hall Center for Children, the onetime orphanage and residential treatment center that now often is home to regressive advocacy disguised as “scholarship” held a forum last month about “new findings” concerning child welfare and race. The findings seemed to  thoroughly flummox the Chapin Hall researchers.

            But there’s nothing perplexing about the findings.  In fact, they mirror what NCCPR has been finding for years, when we compare the propensity of states and counties to take away children.

            Chapin Hall compared the proportion of Black children taken from their homes and the rate of racial disparity – the extent to which Black children are in foster care at a rate above their rate in the general population – to levels of poverty and “social disadvantage” in various communities.

            They expected to find that proportionately more Black children would be removed and that disparity rates would be higher in counties with higher poverty rates and greater social disadvantage.  In fact, they found the opposite.

            But of course Chapin Hall expected this because Chapin Hall wants to believe certain things: First, they want to believe that poverty not only is confused with neglect but also contributes greatly to actual child abuse.  Since child abuse is linked to stress and poor people tend to be under more stress than rich people, it is reasonable that there would be some increase in actual child abuse in poor communities.  But that is likely to be dwarfed by the extent to which the poverty itself is confused with neglect. 

            Chapin Hall also wants to believe that child welfare systems are rational – that caseworkers go in with their checklists of “risk factors” and remove children based on the actual amount of harm or threat of harm. 

            If these hypotheses are true, then, of course, there would be not only a greater number of Black children removed in poor communities, but also a greater proportion of Black children removed in poorer communities.  

            Such findings also would help Chapin Hall it its ongoing efforts to downplay the role of racial bias in child welfare decision-making.

            But instead, they found the opposite.  They found that the proportion of Black children taken away and rates of disparity actually were greater in counties with less child poverty. 

            They can’t figure out why.  And as long as they’re “in denial” about the extent of racial bias in child welfare, they never will.

            In fact, this is something NCCPR has been tracking for years.  We’ve noticed, for example, that the rate of removal  - entries into care compared to the total number of impoverished children – tends to be lower in big cities than their surrounding states.  So New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, for example, all have lower rates of removal than New York State, Illinois and California.

            Several times, when comparing rates of removal within states, we’ve found astoundingly high rates in very affluent counties.

            Once you acknowledge that the racial bias that is part of the rest of American life does not, in fact, stop at the child welfare agency door, it’s not all that hard to figure out why. 

            Big cities often are poorer than their surrounding states.  In addition, the poverty in big cities is concentrated and very, very visible.  So child protective services caseworkers are used to it.  They see it all the time.  So they are less likely to confuse the poverty they see with neglect.

            In contrast, in a county filled with McMansions, the substandard housing in which poor people must live may well shock a caseworker, so she is more likely to take the child and run.

            Similarly, there is likely to be more racial bias in a community where few minorities live.  

            One can see how this all plays out by looking at one very, very affluent county in Georgia; Fayette County, near Atlanta.  Median household income in Fayette County is $79,000 per year, compared to $46,000 for the state as a whole.  When we first calculated the rate of removal in Georgia counties, in 2007, Fayette county had one of the highest rates of removal we’d ever seen in any jurisdiction anywhere in America to that point. 

            There were very, very few poor people in Fayette County – but the poor people who were there were prime targets for child protective services in a way that just didn’t happen in, say, Atlanta.

            In the intervening years three things happened:

            ● NCCPR’s findings prompted the Fayette County NAACP to increase its own, ongoing efforts to curb bias in child welfare in the county – they already had been active as a result of individual cases.

            ● Reform-minded leaders at the state child welfare agency replaced the leaders in the Fayette County office and began working to curb wrongful removal.

            ● But also, the demographics of the county changed.  The percentage of children living in poverty, though still low, nearly doubled, from 5.9 percent to ten percent.

            Total entries into care declined sharply, and today the rate of removal in Fayette County is roughly at the state average.

            A combination of aggressive action by local advocates and the state and the simple fact that Fayette County child welfare workers got more familiar with poor people and less prone to confuse their poverty with neglect – or their race with bad parenting – made a huge difference.

            So the Chapin Hall findings are a mystery only if, like the people at Chapin Hall, you are unwilling to accept that racial disparity in child welfare has a whole lot to do with – race.   

They can’t fix foster care – but they sure have mastered doublethink

           One of the most, uh, remarkable things about Marcia Lowry and her colleagues at the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) is their mastery of doublethink – the term George Orwell invented to describe “the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.”

            CR’s skill at doublethink is now on display in a series of reports and press releases about Oklahoma, where they’ve brought one of their class-action McLawsuits.

            In a previous post to this Blog, I noted that CR had issued a scathing report on the widespread abuse of children in Oklahoma foster care.  The problem, I said, was that CR isn’t lifting a finger to actually keep Oklahoma children out of foster care.

            Turns out I underestimated CR’s capacity for doublethink.  Now they’ve put out another press release about still another report.  Among the complaints this time: Oklahoma supposedly has gone too much to reduce the number of children in the very system CR itself says is a grave danger to those children.

            The report is written by Viola Miller, an odd choice given her mediocre record running child welfare systems in Kentucky and Tennessee.  Her report appears to be based in no small measure on reading other reports commissioned by CR.

            Miller agrees with what those other experts said about Oklahoma foster care.  She concludes that children are being harmed at an “alarmingly high rate” and until DHS cleans up its act, “the children in its care will continue to live in danger.”

            Then, in the very next paragraph, Miller launches into an attack on DHS for its success in getting more children out of this abysmal system.  Miller condemns DHS for using “differential response” an approach that now is used in many other states.  Every independent evaluation done of differential response shows it does not compromise safety; some have shown that child safety improves.

            And what evidence does Miller have that differential response is unsafe in Oklahoma?  The fact that it’s working.  Miller complains that the number of children in Oklahoma foster care is dropping too quickly.

            But that ignores one key fact: Oklahoma started out with, proportionately, vastly more children in foster care on any given day than the national average, and a vastly higher number of children taken away over the course of a year.  Even with the reductions in recent years – the very reductions Miller says have come too quickly – Oklahoma still tears apart families at a rate 40 percent above the national average and the number of children in foster care on any given day remains 50 percent above the national average.

            That means Oklahoma simply had vastly more cases that could suitably be diverted to differential response, and a sharp decline in the foster care population makes sense.

            Miller’s other “evidence” of a problem is that DHS offers voluntary safety plans to families who are assessed using differential response.  But that’s exactly what DHS is supposed to do.  That’s the whole point of differential response – in cases where the risk is believed to be low, you go out and offer voluntary help, not a coercive investigation.  What Miller appears to be arguing for is perverting differential response into child abuse investigations by another name.

ERRORS IN ALL DIRECTIONS

            There is, in fact, a case to be made for the possibility that DHS is not doing differential response as well as it should – but not based on the reasons Miller suggests.

People often point to horror stories about children dying in their own homes when they are “known to the system” as supposedly proving that the only error made by child welfare agencies is to leave the children in dangerous homes.  I usually reply by saying, among other things, that child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and cruel; they err in all directions.  Indeed, it makes no sense to think the errors go only way.

            But that also means a system that has screwed up foster care as royally as Oklahoma DHS has done is bound to be having problems getting alternatives right as well.  And, in fact, Miller found contradictions in various manuals for implementing differential response and responding to hotline calls.  That raises legitimate cause for concern.

            But nothing in Miller’s report suggests that the problems with differential response come anywhere near the scope and severity of the problems with foster care; nothing justifies any notion that there is equal danger.

            The credibility of Miller’s claims about differential response are further undermined because they are part of a pattern of CR seeking to undermine almost anything in almost any state that doesn’t involve subjecting every family to a full-scale child abuse investigation and traumatizing children with needless foster care.  CR also is going after differential response in Georgia, despite significant evidence that the Georgia program does not compromise safety.

            And back when Miller herself still was running the system in Tennessee, CR successfully bullied the Tennessee legislature into repealing a law that would have brought just a little bit of balance to the incentives judges face when making decisions about whether to remove children from their homes.

            A lot of this boils down to the whole bureaucratic mindset at CR.  Sure, foster care in Oklahoma is horrible for kids’ psyches and puts them in grave physical danger, but, they seem to believe, we’ll fix it – we’ll hire lots more workers and give them lots more bureaucratic forms and checklists and “training” and then everything will be fine.  And while we’re fixing foster care, we’ll just keep shoveling more kids into it and opposing efforts to divert kids to better options.

            Lowry likes to say that she doesn't know how to fix poverty, but she knows how to fix foster care. In fact, the results of her lawsuits suggest she doesn't know how to fix either one – and her efforts sometimes make the poverty worse.

            But even were it true, as Miller suggests, that the problems in Oklahoma foster care and Oklahoma’s efforts to avoid foster care are equivalent, that still raises a fundamental question: 

Miller writes that “children in Oklahoma are facing serious risk of harm both before and after they enter state custody.”

In that case, by tearing these children away from their families at a rate 40 percent above the national average, you accomplish exactly what?

Attn. CR: If you REALLY want to curb abuse in Georgia foster care, stop trying to shovel so many children into it

The group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights is now declaring itself officially outraged at an increase in abuse in foster care in metropolitan Atlanta, where CR has a consent decree.

They're even threatening to take the state back into court (in contrast to Michigan where CR meekly accepts that state's cuts in prevention and family preservation in order to fund more foster care workers and rate increases for institutions).

And even in Georgia itself, CR still doesn't get that you can't have it both ways: You can't whine about abuse in foster care in Georgia while trying to undermine every effort to keep more children out of foster care in Georgia. As noted in this previous post, CR is trying to undermine Georgia's differential response program, which has a proven record of reducing entries into foster care and improving child safety.

To CR, trying to shovel more children into the same system you condemn as rife with abuse makes perfect sense. No doubt they would argue that even as you overload the system with more children who don't need to be there, you supposedly prevent the abuse with more licensing paperwork, background checks, etc. etc. This is why I've said the people at CR are like the clerk you least want to see when you finally make it to the front of the line at the DMV. CR thinks every problem can be fixed with another form to fill out, another box to check off or some other bureaucratic answer.

More than 150 years of experience in child welfare tells us that, when it comes to foster care, this doesn't work. And the more you overload a foster care system with children who don't need to be there, as CR now seems hell-bent on doing in Georgia, the greater the risk of abuse in foster care.

The only way to fix foster care is to have less of it.

Meanwhile, CR's lousy consent decree in Michigan may have contributed to another tragedy in that state. That story Monday.

Worse than foster care: Bring back the orphanage? That’s a riot!

THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION PROVIDES TIMELY REMINDERS OF WHY INSTITUTIONALIZING CHILDREN IS, BY FAR, THE WORST OPTION

Whenever newspapers run big stories about the harm of foster care, particularly abuse in foster care, someone is almost certain to write a letter-to-the-editor in which gooey nostalgia trumps both common sense and at least 100 years of research. The letter suggests that, since foster care is so harmful, we should bring back the orphanage.

In fact, the orphanage never left. Mostly, they've rebranded themselves as "residential treatment centers." But whatever they're called, they remain, by far, the worst option for children.

You can't really blame the letter writers. No group is more demonized in American media than birth parents who lose their children to foster care. (Even the commonly-used term for such parents, "biological parents" was coined in the 1970s with the specific intent to be pejorative, and it is. It conjures up an image of someone no more important to a child than a test-tube.)

Sometimes the journalistic attacks on efforts to keep families together are deliberate, as in recent Cleveland Plain Dealer editorials and Los Angeles Times news stories. More often it's simply a function of news being the unusual. The parent who really is a sadist and a brute will be on the front page - right where she or he belongs - but the typical case won't. Even the excellent stories in the Journal-Constitution imply that birth families are not an option, referring to what happens to the institutionalized children as "additional" abuse. In fact, many children are not abused until they are placed in substitute care.

So with the best option, keeping families together, off the table, it's understandable that people would respond to revelations about foster care by assuming orphanages are all that's left.

The letters almost always come with what I've come to call the magic adjective. The writer almost always specifies that he or she wants "good" orphanages or "well-run" orphanages, as though providing this specification magically will make it so.

This week, two newspapers, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) and The Miami Herald cut through the treacle about institutionalizing children and provided important reminders of the reality of modern day orphanages – and why all the wishing in the world won't make them good. The Herald coverage, which I expect to get to in a future post, included a story that helps explain why these God-awful places are so hard to get rid of.

In the second part of a multi-part series that concludes this Sunday and Monday, the Journal-Constitution looked at one residential treatment center.

Like many such places it looks wonderful – set in beautiful countryside with nice buildings and even a stable full of horses. (There's something about horses that makes some journalists particularly prone to fall in love with orphanages that have them.) But reporter Alan Judd wasn't fooled. Here's how his story began:

Even before the riot, state regulators found plenty wrong at the Downing Clark Center.

They said the group home for foster children had detained a resident in a filthy isolation room as long as 24 hours at a time. They cited the facility because employees had been too distracted to notice suicide attempts, had stood by as one resident attacked another, and had propositioned teenagers placed there for protection.

By Jan. 4, residents had gone days without the medicines that helped control their behavior: antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs that had not been dispensed after the home's nurse quit.

That night, residents roamed free through Downing Clark's dormitories. They ripped fixtures from the walls. They smashed television screens. They beat others who were younger and smaller. It took three hours, more than two dozen sheriff's deputies and state troopers and 20 arrests to quell the disturbance.

The owners of the facility told the Journal-Constitution it was just a pajama party gone bad.

NO, IT'S NOT AN "ABERRATION"

Of course defenders of institutionalizing children love to dismiss such cases as aberrations – rotten apples in their lovely barrel. And, in fairness, so far the Journal-Constitution has found only one full-scale riot. They've also found only one exorcism. But when it comes to the problems that preceded the riot, the newspaper found that those kinds of problems "pervade" group homes, residential treatment centers and other latter-day orphanages in Georgia.

As Judd wrote in part one:

Fights. Sexual assaults. Consensual sex between young teens. Abuse by foster parents and group home employees. Escapes. Suicide attempts. All occur with regularity at many of Georgia's 336 private foster care agencies, the Journal-Constitution's examination found.

The stories make a compelling case for that assertion. So does common sense.

Whom do we institutionalize? The mentally ill, prisoners, juvenile delinquents, and foster children, but usually when the foster children are older and they've started to scare us. Take a population that is hated and/or feared, isolate them in closed compounds, and what do you expect? What politician is going to put up the big bucks needed to get serious about inspection and enforcement? And even if they were willing to spend the money, once they found out how lousy so many institutions are, where would they put all the kids?

No wonder Georgia officials make clear they're far more interested in protecting the institutions than protecting the children.

In explaining why Downing Clark was allowed to remain open until the full-scale riot, Keith Bostick, director of the state Office of Residential Child Care, declares: "We tried to use a nudge versus the big stick." In general, says Bostick: "It is not the goal to put people out of business. We want to do as much as we can to try to keep kids safe. But it is a balancing act."

What's really scary, though, is that one of the state's commonly-quoted "child advocates" told the AJC almost exactly the same thing:

"There's a big balancing act," said Karen Worthington, director of the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory University. "Do you close down a facility, or do you try to work it out and hope the worst doesn't happen?

It's not really a mystery why state officials would say there needs to be a balance between child safety and keeping private agencies in business. Such agencies often have blue-chip boards of directors, embedded in the business, political, and civic elite of their states and localities. While governors and public child welfare agency leaders come and go, the private agencies sometimes become, to use the late columnist Jack Newfield's memorable phrase, "the permanent government" of child welfare. Michigan is a prime example.

In Georgia, the regular reporter on the child welfare beat for the Journal-Constitution (not Mr. Judd) became increasingly dependent for quotes to bolster stories attacking Georgia's efforts to keep families together on Normer Adams, executive director of the Georgia Association of Homes and Services for Children, a trade association for private child welfare agencies. Adams became the reporter's Godsource, that one source who turns up in almost every story and whose words are treated as holy writ.

But there's another reason as well. As the Journal-Constitution put it:

Shutting down any facility further stresses a system already short of space and money.

But that's because Georgia still is placing too many children needlessly. The state child welfare agency is doing significantly better than it used to. After a foster-care panic several years ago, Georgia reversed course. Now, the child welfare agency is embracing efforts to keep families together and having some success – with no compromise of child safety. They've also been attacked for it by Normer Adams and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But children can be institutionalized through other agencies as well. In Florida, for example, the placement that led to the latest tragedy spotlighted by the Herald had nothing to do with the child welfare agency.

A BETTER WAY IN ILLINOIS

In contrast consider what happened in Illinois.

Back in 1995, when another Georgian, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, recommended warehousing poor people's children in orphanages, media flocked to Maryville, near Chicago – the state's showpiece private orphanage and the place that supposedly proved orphanages could work. Like Downing Clark, Maryville had gorgeous grounds – it made for great TV pictures. The director at the time had enormous political clout – and a giant statue of himself outside the main entrance.

Seven years after this publicity bonanza, Maryville's main campus was revealed to be rife with abuse. The director was forced out (peacefully, no troops were sent to pull down the statue) and, most important, the state was able to pull hundreds of children out of the place. The reason? Illinois has rebuilt its system to emphasize keeping families together. It takes away children at one of the lowest rates in the nation. So when the horrors of Maryville finally came to light, the state had better places to put the children.

But the focus on abuse in institutions should not blind us to the most important reason to steer clear of orphanages: They are inherently abusive. Even if no staff member ever beat or raped a child, even if no child ever was drugged into a stupor to keep her or him docile, orphanages would be the wrong answer. Because institutionalization itself does so much harm. That's one of the reasons why there is so much research showing that orphanages, both the original model and the modern kind – residential treatment centers – simply don't work.

In addition, when children really can't return to their own homes, the best option is adoption. But the overwhelming majority of foster children are adopted by people who first were their foster parents. Institutionalizing children takes away their best chance of adoption, leaving those children on their own at 18 with no one to love them.

Why can't we replace foster care with "good" orphanages? Because there is no such thing as a good orphanage.

IN A FUTURE POST: WHY CAN'T ORPHANAGES JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS?

CR tries to undermine foster care reform in Georgia

THEY'RE EVEN IGNORING THE FINDINGS OF THE MONITOR FOR THEIR OWN CONSENT DECREE – NEVERTHELESS, CR SHOULD GET THE INFORMATION IT IS SEEKING

Several years ago, the Georgia child welfare system, which never was very good, was plunged into chaos by a foster-care panic. It was the usual scenario: high-profile child abuse deaths and bad leadership at the child welfare agency, with one extra element: The state's first "Child Advocate," Dee Simms – who pushed long and hard for taking away more children – encouraged the panic at every turn. For details, see our report on Georgia child welfare, a report which may have contributed to Simms' departure.

Fortunately, state leaders wised up and the state Department of Family and Children's Services (DFCS) began a long, slow reform process.

The result: a reduction in entries into foster care accompanied by significant improvements in child safety, based on the standard measure used by the federal government: reabuse of children within a specified time frame.

One of the strategies: Differential response, a practice in use across the country, by which less serious allegations are diverted from the formal CPS system. Differential response (or alternative response, as it also sometimes is called) is best practice in child welfare. A recent report by the highly-respected Vera Institute of Justice found that study after study of differential response concluded that it does not compromise safety.

Earlier this year, even Florida's Child Abuse Death Review Committee, a group that is independent of the state child welfare agency and chaired by someone who, in the past, has been fanatical about pushing for child removal, concluded that Florida's pilot differential response program improved child safety.

Safer kids, less disruption of families. Who could be against that? The group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights," apparently. They've put out an inflammatory press release claiming that Georgia "may" be "endangering" thousands of children by using an approach to differential response, called "diversion" – instead of forcing the children into foster care.

CR's LATEST MOVE

CR has gone to court to begin a process that appears designed to shovel ever more children into foster care – even though the independent monitor overseeing CR's own consent decree in Atlanta says the big child safety problem is abuse in foster care itself.

Right now CR is simply seeking further information – information the monitors refuse to help them get. I fear CR will misuse whatever information they get. I think they'll hype it, sensationalize it and take it out of context.

They should get it anyway.

NCCPR believes that almost every record maintained by a child welfare agency should be a public record, and there can be no exceptions based on our, or anyone else's, belief that someone will take the information out of context. Rather, the solution is to provide the missing context, as loudly and vigorously as possible.

WHAT THE MONITORS FOUND

Just two months ago, the monitors for CR's Atlanta settlement issued their latest report. It was scathing in its assessment of abuse – not in diversion cases, but in foster care. Indeed, CR's Associate Director, Ira Lustbader declared that

We are extremely concerned that children in the Atlanta foster care system are simply not safe, and that DFCS is not doing enough to provide the necessary safety net for the vulnerable youth whose lives and well-being depend on it. If DFCS fails to address this problem quickly, we are prepared to take whatever action is necessary to protect these kids from further harm.

But now, less than two months later, the action CR is taking appears designed to force more children into the very system CR itself says is unsafe.

WHAT THE OCA FOUND

Ignoring the monitor for its own decree, CR has chosen to rely instead on a selective reading of a series of reports from OCA.

One of those reports, by far the most inflammatory, came from Simms. But the others come from her successor, former Juvenile Court Judge Tom Rawlings. And those reports, while flawed, deserve respect. There are some sound recommendations, and the tone is a huge break from Simms' hype and finger-wagging. Rawlings even acknowledged the foster care panic, and the harm it did.

But even Rawlings' reports rely heavily on horror stories – instances called to his attention in which a case should not have been diverted and tragedy followed. That doesn't tell us how prevalent the problem is, or how often the problem is the opposite: children in cases that should have been diverted instead subjected to traumatic investigations and needless foster care.

And only when pressed by DFCS did Rawlings fully acknowledge the very real improvements in child safety under the DCFS reforms. Not only is reabuse down in cases formally opened by DFCS, the reabuse rate is the same in diversion cases.

In addition, Georgia still "substantiates" child abuse cases at a rate roughly equal to the national average. So what this really tells us is that "diversion" actually is doing more to widen the net of intervention into families than to narrow it. The data suggest that far more of the diversion cases would have gotten nothing under the old system than would have gotten a full-scale investigation.

Nevertheless, Rawlings found real problems in the diversion process. Just because you call something "differential response" doesn't make it so. Rawlings found a lack of statewide standards. That's a common problem in Georgia child welfare. It's supposed to be state-run, but in fact it's less a statewide system than 159 county fiefdoms.

Georgia has contracted with an outside expert to design a statewide system based on best practice in other states. OCA should monitor the process and make sure it's implemented. That's a far better approach than the one taken by CR, where they seem intent on scaring Georgians away from a safe, proven alternative to needless foster care.

TURNING CR'S ARGUMENT AGAINST CR

As I said, I believe DFCS is wrong to fight the request for information. According to CR, DFCS is arguing that the issue is beyond the scope of the consent decree. I don't know their basis for that argument, but my guess is they're claiming that the consent decree covers only children already in foster care. If that is DCFS' claim, I think I know where they got the idea: From CR, which for years claimed it couldn't litigate on behalf of children not already in foster care (a view they only recently seem to have changed).

Of course CR only made that claim when the issue was fighting to keep children out of foster care. Apparently, it's just fine to litigate on behalf of children not yet in foster care when you're fighting to put them in.

Robbing poor people to appease “Children’s Rights”

In 1996, Congress ended "welfare as we know it" replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. TANF was much harder to get, not only because of work requirements and time limits, but also because states were free to set up all sorts of barriers to make it as hard as possible for poor people to get help. As welfare rolls plummeted in a booming economy, states were supposed to use surplus TANF funds to help poor people become self-sufficient. The funds were supposed to be used for things like job training and day care.

    Some states did that. Other states used TANF to plug all sorts of holes in their budgets, in particular child welfare budgets, turning TANF into a child welfare slush fund. In some cases, this led to poor people subsidizing the middle class – in particular middle class people who wanted to adopt poor people's children.

    So in Connecticut, for example, The Hartford Courant exposed how more than $100 million in TANF money that could have been used to provide day care for low income families instead had been diverted into child abuse investigations and foster care with strangers. So the money that could have helped a single mother find child care for her children while she worked instead goes into investigating her on a "lack of supervision" charge because she can't get child care. Texas also uses TANF for foster care and child abuse investigations.

    In preparing our forthcoming report on child welfare in Michigan we found that several years ago, Michigan pulled almost all state funds out of prevention and family preservation. Almost every dime now comes from the federal government and almost all of that is from TANF. Michigan's prevention and family preservation money is, in effect, stolen from other uses that could have helped the same families.

    But it gets worse.

    In Michigan, more than $41 million in TANF money is diverted each year into adoption subsidies and adoption support services. (Ohio does the same thing on a smaller scale.) Some of that money may go to impoverished grandparents adopting grandchildren. But there is no means test for adoptive families who want this help. Indeed, had Madonna chosen to adopt her child from the Michigan foster care system instead of Africa, she would have been eligible for a subsidy – taken out of money intended to be used to help poor people become self-sufficient.

There are good reasons to provide adoption subsidies without a means test. The issue is where that money should come from. It should shock the conscience that wealthy adoptive parents can be given children from poor families, and then get money that should have gone to keep those poor families together in the first place.

But for shocking the conscience, it would be hard to top Georgia. What that state has done to poor people trying to get help from TANF is documented in a searing story from Mother Jones that ought to be required reading in the White House and among those on the left who may have come to think that maybe welfare "reform" wasn't so bad after all.

Among the most notable findings in the story is something mentioned almost in passing:

It seems that Georgia "cut spending on child care and put the[TANF] money into child protective services in the wake of a lawsuit against the state over the mistreatment of children in foster care."

    That would be the lawsuit brought by the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights." No doubt they would say they never told Georgia to find the money to meet its demands by taking it out of the pockets of poor people. But apparently, they didn't tell Georgia not to do it either.

    CR's founder, Marcia Lowry, likes to say that she doesn't know how to fix poverty, but she knows how to fix foster care.

    In fact, the results of most of her lawsuits suggest she doesn't know how to fix foster care either. But Marcia, if you're going to keep trying, could you at least not make the poverty worse in the process?