Child welfare and race: Did the past meet the future at Chapin Hall’s forum?

Video of the presentations discussed below is available, in full, here.  The section discussed below begins about 30 minutes in.

            About two weeks ago, I wrote about some of the new findings on child welfare and race discussed at a forum convened by the Chapin Hall Center for Children last month.  But the forum itself was as interesting as the findings.

            During the forum, I got a glimpse of child welfare’s promising future, and a reminder of its failed past.  At least I hope that’s what was reflected in two competing visions.

            The future (I hope) was represented by Eric Fenner, who recently retired from a job running the child welfare system in metropolitan Columbus, Ohio.  Fenner took over from a longtime agency chief, John Saros.  Though Fenner was too polite to say so, Saros was the quintessence of all that is mediocre in child welfare.  Year after year, whenever I would read a John Saros quote in the Columbus Dispatch, I would envision a man shrugging his shoulders.

            Saros finally was eased out of Columbus (and promptly landed the same job in nearby Akron).  He left a huge mess behind.  In 2005 the rate of child removal in Columbus was so high that, were it a state it would be the worst in the entire nation.

That changed when Fenner, the first African American ever to run the agency, took over.  Before he ran the agency, Fenner said, there were 6,382 children on its caseloads, of whom 47 percent were African American, 43 percent were white and the rest were other races.  By 2010, the total caseload was cut by nearly one-third, to 4,435, of whom 44 percent were white and 41 percent were African American.

How did things change?  For starters, Fenner’s agency faced up to the problem, something many in child welfare – including, it seems, the very next speaker at the Chapin Hall panel - still refuse to do.  Said Fenner:

Racial bias specific to decision making as a case progresses through the child welfare system is a critically-important consideration in trying to explain [the overrepresentation of Black children in foster care].  If you don’t address racial bias in your organizational practices, I don’t think it really matters what else you do.  You will continue to experience overrepresentation and disparities when it comes to treatment and approaches.

But that does not mean bringing in someone to wag a finger in the face of all the white people in the agency and tell them what racists they are.  They’d actually tried that 25 years earlier, Fenner said, and it took decades for the agency to recover. Instead, Fenner drew a crucial distinction. 

            We began with the premise that individuals could not be racist.  They could be biased – and they probably held preconceived notions, but could not be racists – because [as individuals] they lacked one fundamental element: power.

Individuals can hold beliefs, but they can’t hold you in a repressive state of existence.  If I don’t like you I can move away from you, but if I don’t like how you investigate me  I can’t ignore you, you have authority to investigate me, you have the authority to tell me how I should raise my children, and you have the authority to terminate my parental rights. 

That’s power.  As a representative of that institution - that’s where the racism existed.

(Note how Fenner doesn’t hide behind the b.s. about “we don’t have any power only the courts can take children away” – he knows where the power really lies.)

REDISCOVERING A RESOURCE

Once the agency faced up to the problem, people realized they’d been overlooking a vital resource that had been part of poor communities in Columbus for a century: settlement houses.  “We had never connected with them and they had been there for 100 years,” Fenner said.

We started to put more money into settlement houses. … Many of those settlement houses were within walking distance of the kids we were serving.  It’s so much easier to go to an after school program two blocks away, than to see a therapist on the other end of town once a week.  … Most of those kids really had issues and problems that could be addressed on a voluntary basis.

And Fenner had a way to make voluntary help work: Franklin County became one of a number of Ohio counties piloting “differential response,” an approach embraced by progressive child welfare leaders across the country.  Under differential response, low-risk cases are referred for an assessment instead of a full-scale investigation.  Twenty-three separate evaluations of differential response have found no compromise of child safety.  Every evaluation found lower rates of subsequent reports alleging abuse for families diverted to a differential response assessment.

In part, this new approach was rooted in Eric Fenner’s own life experience:

I grew up in inner-city Washington DC, in a poor neighborhood.  …  If you didn’t have a chance to meet me and know me, or come to the neighborhood I grew up in, just saw it on a datamap, you’d walk away with one perspective. But if you came to the neighborhood and you if you spent a few days with children and families you would walk away with very different perspective.  It’s more than the data and the research, it’s really about the people and who they are and where they came from.

THE BLAST FROM THE PAST

If the very next speaker was listening to any of this, it had no apparent impact on his presentation.  That speaker; the one who, I hope, is the blast from the past, was John Mattingly, now back at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which he’d left in 2004 to run the New York City Administration for Children’s Services.

As I’ve noted before, NCCPR would not exist if not for John Mattingly – he recommended that Casey fund us back in 1998.  So whenever the topic is John Mattingly I have to choose between being a hypocrite - ignoring statements and decisions I would criticize had they come from anyone else - or an ingrate.  Once again, I choose ingrate.

Mattingly’s presentation was defensive and, at times, disturbingly arrogant.  Just moments after Fenner’s clarion call to face up to the fact that racial bias is “a critically important factor” in the overrepresentation of Black children in foster care, Mattingly said, in effect: Well, the jury’s still out – much the way tobacco companies spent all those years saying we still don’t really know if smoking causes cancer.

But here’s the statement that should make jaws drop.  Apparently John Mattingly is a strong believer in the Myth of Child Welfare Exceptionalism; the notion that people who work in child welfare are just plain better than the rest of us mere mortals, and have developed an immunity to prejudice.  Or, as Mattingly put it:

While rigorous research has demonstrated that racial bias and discrimination exists in key public systems, including financial lending, employment, education, juvenile justice and housing. I personally know of no studies that can accurately claim the same for child welfare systems.  Certainly the doubt must be there that racial bias and discrimination also exist in our nation’s child welfare systems, yet we have no reason to believe that racial bias is the only or even the primary cause of disparities. 

Right.  It’s only all those other places – financial lending, employment, education, juvenile justice, and housing where it’s a problem. Child welfare?  Well, maybe a little, but we’re oh, so special. (By the way, there is in fact, plenty of evidence for bias in child welfare.)

Mattingly’s big, overarching fear is that somehow, somewhere in America there is a Black child who has been denied the benefits of having a child protective services agency barge into her or his family’s life, because of his race.  The fact that there is only one state in America where Black children are in foster care at a lower rate than in the general population  has not quelled his fears.

And by intervention, Mattingly does not mean something smart like “differential response.”  On the contrary, he’s opposed it for at least a decade, and blocked its implementation in New York City.  No, a typical case when Mattingly ran ACS was more like the appalling example discussed in this previous post.

Yes, Black children are overrepresented in foster care, Mattingly says, but that’s just because Black parents are more likely to be child abusers.  Or, as Mattingly put it:

Recent evidence shows significant difference in the need for child welfare intervention by race. African American children are, in fact, at greater risk of child maltreatment than white children across the entire society. That should be no surprise given the correlation between child maltreatment and poverty and the higher rates of poverty and social disorganization facing African American families.

But that is not, in fact, what “recent evidence” reveals.  Rather, a great deal of this so- called “greater risk of maltreatment” is a consequence of labeling.  Poverty itself often is labeled neglect.  Since Black families are more likely to be poor, their children are more likely to be labeled “neglected.”  This example from Houston is a classic case in point.

So what the recent evidence shows is a need not for intervention by child protective services but rather for intervention to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty – the kind of thing done through options like differential response, which John Mattingly opposes.

One can only hope that this really is the past, and that Eric Fenner really does represent the future.  The reverse is too depressing to contemplate.

New federal report: child abuse is down – again

Most of what the child welfare community calls “child abuse” is, in fact the confusion of family poverty with “neglect.”  This remains the single biggest problem in American child welfare, destroying thousands of families needlessly.

But, as the Associated Press is reporting today,  a new report suggests that child welfare agencies have gotten a little better at distinguishing poverty from neglect and devising smarter interventions – such as “differential response.”  As a result, even as the recession increases poverty, we are not seeing the predicted increase in “child abuse” because states are smarter about not confusing poverty itself with neglect.

The report also shows that nearly four out of five children alleged to be victims of child abuse actually are victims of false allegations.  So the last thing we need is a law forcing every American to report her or his slightest suspicion of maltreatment or risk going to jail.

            Every year since the beginning of the recession, America’s “child savers” – to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts proudly gave themselves – have made ever more dire predictions about how the recession will mean more “child abuse.”  Those predictions, of course, are followed by demands to hire more caseworkers to investigate more families and throw more children into foster care.

            This week, they’ve been proven wrong again.

The federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment report was released over the weekend.  It covers the year 2010 (they always run a year behind). But once again the report reveals that there was less child abuse in America than there was the year before.

            The decrease is slight.   But the decrease is in all categories except one (about 2,900 more children, nationwide, were deemed to have suffered “emotional maltreatment.”)  So notwithstanding the hype about what the recession would do, there has been no increase in physical abuse.  And notwithstanding post-Penn State paranoia suggesting there is a child molester under every bed, there was no increase in sexual abuse either.

The recession doesn’t seem to be prompting more parents to kill their children either.  In fact, child abuse deaths went down - to the lowest level since 2006.  There are so many problems with how such deaths are reported, that I would not read too much into any change in this figure.  But it certainly doesn’t support the notion that the recession is leading to an increase in brutality.

The reason for the small decline in total child “maltreatment” is fascinating. It appears that America’s child welfare systems have gotten a little better at dealing with the biggest single problem in American child welfare: the confusion of poverty with “neglect.”

FALSE REPORTS ARE A HUGE PROBLEM

            A few things stayed the same in the 2010 report:

● For starters, the percentage of false reports remains staggering.  Seventy-nine percent of the children investigated by child protective services workers were not abused or neglected.  They were victims of false reports.  (Child savers love to claim false reports aren’t really false – but in fact, they are really false, and there’s a full discussion of that here.)  That means overloaded CPS workers spent nearly four-fifths of their time spinning their wheels – and harming families with traumatic investigations. 

Needless to say, few things could be dumber than making that even worse by turning everyone into a mandated reporter, required to tell CPS their slightest suspicions of child abuse, as some are suggesting in response to post-Penn State paranoia.

            ● Among the reports that are “substantiated” (which typically means only that a caseworker thinks there is slightly more evidence than not that the child was “abused”) well over three-quarters of the “abuse” cases are not abuse – they’re neglect.

            Because definitions of neglect are so broad, and so vague, neglect can include some extremely serious harm – like deliberately starving a child or locking him in a closest for weeks at a time.  But since the typical definition of neglect – lack of adequate food, clothing, shelter or supervision – also is a perfect definition of poverty, the typical neglect case is usually more like this one from Houston – in which the children were taken solely because the parents lacked adequate housing.

            So of course, if you define poverty itself as “child abuse” then child abuse will go up during a recession.  Fortunately, the Child Maltreatment report suggests that child welfare agencies aren’t doing that quite so often.

THE SUCCESS OF “DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE”

            The report attributes the decline largely to the growth in “differential response” (also known as “alternative response”) something discussed often on this blog.  It’s an option with a proven track record for reducing trauma for families and improving child safety.

            Differential response gives agencies an option in between “all” – a full-scale traumatic investigation of a family – and “nothing” – deciding the report doesn’t rise to the level of abuse and not looking into it at all.  As a result, it both narrows and widens the net of intervention into families.

            Under differential response, when a case is believed to be low risk, a specialized team of workers is sent out to do an “assessment” and offer voluntary help to the family instead of a coercive investigation.  In some states and localities, the child protective services agency does this, in others the cases are assigned to a private agency.

            Child savers hate differential response.  After all, they say, how can you be absolutely, positively, 110 percent certain it’s really a low risk case?

You can’t.  But differential response does not preclude a finding of abuse.  If the caseworker offering help discovers things are worse than expected and there really is abuse or neglect she still substantiates it.  (Where differential response cases are handled by private agency workers, they report any actual abuse they find back to child protective services.)

In addition, if you send out overloaded caseworkers to “investigate” anything and everything they won’t have time to do the job well, and they’ll miss many more cases of children in real danger – even as they traumatize many more innocent families.

DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE IS EVIDENCE-BASED

            And unlike foster care, and mandatory reporting, differential response is evidence-based.  A new review of the literature, released last month found that 23 separate evaluations of differential response found no compromise of child safety.  Every evaluation found lower rates of subsequent reports alleging abuse for families diverted to a differential response assessment.

            The Child Maltreatment report found that a lot of the decrease in “child abuse” cases probably is attributable to the fact that more and more child welfare systems are using differential response for low-risk cases – which often are the very cases in which poverty is confused with neglect.

            So while the recession definitely is causing more poverty, differential response is helping some child welfare agencies avoid confusing poverty with neglect as often. 

            Of course, there is still at least one notable exception: New York City where, under the regressive leadership of John Mattingly, when he ran the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, the city refused even to pilot differential response.  At one point Mattingly promised to do it, then reneged.  The tragedy of his broken promise is aptly illustrated by this case. Perhaps his successor, Robert Richter, will be more moved by evidence than ideology and give differential response a try.

            It’s needed now more than ever – after all, we’re in a recession.

Child Welfare in New York: Everyday Horrors

An abridged version of this post is available on the website of the trade journal Youth Today.          


UPDATE, OCTOBER 6: At the end of this post see why the organizers of today's webinar will NOT be answering the questions raised in this post


  I read about a horror story last month.

            It wasn’t one of those cases where a child died even though the case file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade.  Nor was it one of those cases where a child was taken from parents who could have been mother- and father-of-the-year only to die in foster care.

            Those horrors are the extremes and they are very rare.

            What made this case so horrible is the fact that it’s so typical.  It’s also the kind of case child protective services (CPS) agencies almost always hide behind confidentiality rules.

            This one became public – minus identifying information and with all names changed – thanks to a webinar about ChildStat, the pride and joy of John Mattingly, former commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS).  At ChildStat meetings, ACS officials go over data from one region and pour over one case, chosen at random.

            It’s the 12-page narrative of that one case that provides this rare x-ray of the soul of a CPS agency.   They never got to it during the webinar, but they might during a follow-up webinar tomorrow.  They asked for questions in advance.  I've put mine at the end of this post.

To really get the picture, the entire narrative needs to be read, because, in every sense of the term, the devil is in the details.  I hope readers will take the time to go through it, and then compare this example of typical practice to an example of best practice from the latest newsletter of one of the smartest groups helping child welfare agencies improve, the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group.  Readers also might want to consider these questions:

●How would your own family rate under the kind of scrutiny the family in the New York City case was forced to endure? 

●Can you imagine a government agency trying to micromanage a white, middle-class family the way ACS did in this case?

            Meanwhile, I’ll try to summarize.

            For starters, in half the states, this case never would have brought a CPS agency to the family’s door at all.  The allegation was “educational neglect,” something discussed often on this Blog.  According to a comprehensive study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a study commissioned by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, half the states wisely leave such cases to the schools to sort out.

            The allegation was that the older child, age 8, missed 25 days of school between September and early April, and was late 44 times.  The parents had gotten lots of warnings and they allegedly were too lenient when the child said she was sick. 

            That’s it.  No allegations of beating, torture, or starvation.  Nothing about sexual abuse or parental drug abuse.

            The parents are Hispanic, their income is about 140 percent of the national poverty line – and remember, this is New York City.  They sleep on a queen size bed.  (I have no idea why that is relevant to anything, but it’s included in the narrative.)

Clearly the family has plenty of reason for stress to begin with.  Nevertheless, the picture that emerges, in spite of the narrative, is of parents who love their children, have been trying their best and are guilty of, at worst, human fallibility.  They also had tried, without success, to get the school to help with the children’s problems – possibly engendering the hostility of the teacher who, by the mother’s account, treated her like dirt – and then reported her to ACS.

LIVES TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN

            But this one allegation against this admirable family was enough to turn their lives upside down for at least a month (the case was still open when the narrative was written).  There was one inspection visit after another.  Over and over the children were questioned about the most intimate aspects of their lives.  Had anyone touched them inappropriately? (No.) Did their parents ever hit them? (Yes, they got spankings.) Did the parents ever hit each other? (No.)  Do they argue? (Yes – imagine that.)   Because of the spankings the caseworker was ordered to be sure she “assessed the children for marks and bruises each time she visited.”  I wonder what the children had to endure to meet that requirement?

           

            The parents underwent a similar grilling.  When ACS wasn’t at the door at all hours, ACS was dragging them down to the borough office.

            Though best practice in child welfare says you assess a family’s strengths as well as their weaknesses, from day one these parents were treated only as suspects.  Every alleged failing was documented in the most minute detail, creating a 12-page litany of finger-wagging. 

            “The parents denied any domestic violence substance abuse or problems with physical and mental health,” the narrative says.  Denied?  They’d never been accused of anything like that in the first place. Yet throughout the narrative that word, - denied - is used over and over to describe the parents’ responses.  The same information could have been conveyed to the ChildStat meeting by writing “the parents said they did not…” 

            And the denials were never enough.  When asked, the younger child, age 6, says Dad sometimes drinks alcohol.  So the caseworker is instructed to go back and grill the child about “what he drank and his behavior.”  The children repeatedly say there’s no domestic violence.   But a supervisor says “domestic violence assistance was also a possibility.” Another supervisor tells the worker to “inquire more about Joy’s [the older child’s] exposure to her parents’ arguments and how it might affect her.” 

            The Child Protective Manager (CPM), the highest-ranking official to look at the case,  

noted that her concern was that Joy held herself responsible for getting her mother into trouble because she did not want to go to school. The CPM added that the mother should have provided Joy with more structure regarding her school attendance.  … She added that [the mother] should take full responsibility for having not provided structure for her children.

            The caseworker concluded that the parents did not “demonstrate developmentally appropriate expectations of all children” and did not “attend to the needs of all children and prioritizes [sic] the children’s needs above his/her own desires.”  Apparently this was based on the fact that when the bus was late, they didn’t find another way to get the children to school.

            It wasn’t just the parents put through the wringer.  The amount of time put into the case by the caseworker boggles the mind.  At one point, the caseworker came out of a meeting with her supervisor with “a list of at least 22 follow-ups … to complete” including “counseling the parents about inappropriate uses of corporal punishment” though there was no allegation or evidence that this was a problem.  No wonder caseworkers are drowning in the demands placed upon them and may well miss a child in real danger, as is well documented in an excellent New York Magazine story.  According to the Vera Institute study, fully 19 percent of the cases investigated by ACS are allegations of “educational neglect.”

THE PRICE OF “SUCCESS”

            At no time were the children taken from the home.  What happened to this family was probably the minimum amount of trauma a CPS investigation can inflict. In the end, the intervention by ACS may have improved the children’s attendance and prompted the school to get them some help the parents couldn’t get on their own. 

            But the family paid way too high a price for this “success” - and it was entirely unnecessary.

            In one of the seminal works of the 20^th Century about child welfare, the late Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert J. Solnit write that:

Children react even to temporary infringement of parental autonomy with anxiety, diminishing trust, loosening of emotional ties, or an increasing tendency to be out of control. The younger the child, and the greater his own helplessness and dependence, the stronger is his need to experience his parents as his lawgivers, safe, reliable, all-powerful, and independent.

            And that’s even without all those assessments looking for bruises from spankings.

            In this case mom is faulted for being too lenient, too willing to accept it when her daughter said she was too sick to go to school.  But what happens now, when she tries to be more assertive, after ACS has spent a month badgering the family and undermining mom’s authority?

            And then there’s the incident with the lamp.

            Sometime after the investigation began, the older child explained that Danny, the six-year-old, “burned himself on a lamp when he attempted to fix a light bulb that blew out. She said that Danny’s teacher told him that he needed to help his mother more and so her brother wanted to fix the light bulb. Joy said that the lamp hit Danny in his face, but he did not cry. Joy denied that her parents have been arguing.”

            Yes, Danny explained the incident the same way, a pediatrician confirmed that this was a credible explanation and, fortunately, the caseworker accepted it.  But try to imagine the fear this family endured when it happened, knowing they were in the middle of a CPS investigation.


            The rationale for doing all this to a family, of course, boils down to “you never know.”  Like the fanatical drug warriors who see marijuana as a “gateway drug” today’s “child savers” to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts gave themselves, see educational neglect as a gateway allegation. The child missed school.  So maybe mom’s a drunk and dad’s a pervert – you never know, right?


            But there is no evidence that children suffer more abuse in the states that don’t require their CPS agencies to investigate “educational neglect.”  And after doing a comprehensive reading of a random sample of cases, the Vera Institute researchers found that the notion that educational neglect is the "tip of the iceberg," is nonsense. The study found that generally, "educational neglect" is the tip of nothing except some kind of school problem, often one that is not the parent's fault.  Sending a CPS worker to the door only makes the family defensive and makes it harder to solve whatever problem may be causing absenteeism.

            As regular readers of this Blog know, the study authors recommended that if New York must keep investigating “educational neglect” it should be done through “differential response” in which either the CPS agency or a private contractor sends out a worker to offer a helping hand instead of a wagging finger.   Had that been done here, the same potential positive results would have been achieved with no cross-examination of young children, no comprehensive visual inspections for bruises and no documentation in the case file of the size bed on which the parents sleep.

            State after state has adopted this approach.  Every study finds no compromise of child safety and some find that safety improves. 

            But for at least a decade, since before he ever got to ACS, John Mattingly has opposed differential response.  Finally, late in 2009, he agreed to pilot it in some educational neglect cases.  Several months later, and without announcing it publicly, he put the pilot on hold indefinitely, something uncovered by some enterprising journalism students.

            So right now, some other New York City family is enduring the same trauma as the one in this narrative.  It happens all the time.  That’s why it’s a horror story.

                    Some questions for the webinar 
                   (and why they won't be answered)                               

Tomorrow, the same people who held the original webinar will conduct a follow up webinar.  They asked for questions in advance.  Here are mine:

●The narrative repeatedly uses the word “denied” to characterize comments by the parents and the children, as in “denied any domestic violence” “denied use of any drugs” etc.  In the absence of any evidence contradicting the “denials,” why wasn’t neutral wording such as “said he did not use any drugs” used in this narrative – and what does this say about the mindset of ACS workers and the author of this narrative?

●There is repeated discussion of alleged deficits in this family, and no explicit discussion of strengths.  Why not?

●On page 12 it states that “The supervisor told the CPS that she needed to “document that she assessed the children for marks and bruises each time she visited.”  How, precisely, are such “assessments” done?

●What did these children gain from this process that outweighed their being repeatedly questioned about the most intimate aspects of their lives and “assessed” on every visit for marks and bruises? 

●What did the family gain that outweighs the stress of a full-scale child abuse investigation?

●What did they gain that couldn’t have been accomplished, without the collateral damage, through a family assessment (differential response) instead of an investigation?

●Was all of the time and effort expended on this case the highest, best use of the time of the caseworker and the supervisor?

●According to a study by the Vera Institute of Justice in roughly half the states a case like this would not be subject to the jurisdiction of the child protective services agency at all.  What evidence do you have that children who miss a lot of school in those states are less safe or more poorly served by other interventions short of CPS involvement than children in New York City?

●The Vera study recommended that cases like this one be handled through “differential response.”  Every evaluation of differential response across the country shows that it does not compromise safety and some show safety improvements. Why did ACS at first agree to try differential response in some educational neglect cases and then renege on that promise?

UPDATE: And here is the response I got from the organizer of the webinar concerning why these questions will not be answered:

Thank you for sharing your blog posting with us. You have raised some very important case practice issues that merit further dialogue and debate. The focus of our webinar/learning lab is on the implementation of ChildStat, not on ACS case practice or policy decisions. Of course, many of the issues you outline are the very ones that the ChildStat initiative itself was designed to address - by providing time for managers and administrators to review and critique case narratives such as this one, to "get on the balcony" and observe what is actually happening on the frontlines, the agency can really examine "the devil in the details," as you put it, and have an open, honest dialogue about what happened, why it happened, and what needs to happen going forward to better reflect best or promising approaches.


Our national webinar series, including learning labs like this one, provides information about what it takes to implement specific workforce and leadership improvements - helping states, tribes and counties learn about promising macro-level approaches from one another, not analyzing case practice on the frontlines in a particular jurisdiction. This case narrative was provided as a learning tool, to illustrate the information provided to ChildStat session participants, and was not intended to be discussed in detail during the session. That said, we can certainly ask what might have happened in a session when presented with a case such as this one. I also hope you will raise any questions you may have about ChildStat as a tool for improving case practice and systems functioning on the call today.


Thanks, Sara

Sara T. Munson, MSW

National Dissemination Coordinator
National Child Welfare Workforce Institute
University at Albany School of Social Welfare

Foster care in New York: Legacy of a failed commissioner

Two very good stories this week offer rare insight into how child welfare agencies really work, the dynamics of foster-care panic, and the price paid by children for poor leadership.  In a future post, I’ll discuss a Washington Post column about the legacy of former-Mayor Adrian Fenty’s dreadful response to a high-profile tragedy.

First, though, to New York City and its Administration for Children’s Services.

New York Magazine has a very good story  by reporter Jennifer Gonnerman about a caseworker and supervisor indicted on charges of criminally negligent homicide after a child on their caseload, Marchella Pierce, died.  (Gonnerman was interviewed about the story this evening on NPR's All Things Considered)

The portrait of caseworker Damon Adams and supervisor Chereece Bell painted by a grandstanding Brooklyn District Attorney is of two workers who didn’t give a damn and one who allegedly falsified records to cover incompetence.

The New York Magazine story paints a very different picture.  Adams fell behind on his paperwork because he was so extraordinarily dedicated that he kept helping parents, and former foster children, who called him even after their cases were closed.  Bell took on the unit that handles all the toughest cases – and she was denied the help other supervisors got because she was so good at her job that others supposedly needed the help more.  She even received an award – “a wooden plaque commending her for her ‘extraordinary efforts to protect children.’” from then-ACS Commissioner John Mattingly.

We’ll probably never know for sure if they’re really that good, anymore than we’ll ever know if they were as bad as the District Attorney claims.  I suspect New York Magazine came closer to the mark, though there are some comments Bell makes in the article itself (which I’ll get to below) which raise concerns.

But the fundamental reason we won’t know for sure is that incompetent workers hide in incompetent systems.  When it is impossible for even the best worker to do the job, it’s hard to tell the best from the worst.

A CULTURE OF FEAR

The New York Magazine story captures brilliantly how the system sets up everyone to fail – and the culture of fear created as a result.

The story documents how everyone is mindful of what happened to workers after Nixzmary Brown died in 2006 – not least Bell herself who would tell the caseworkers she oversaw to make those extra calls and visits because

 “You’re not going to make me lose my job; you’re not going to have my face on the front page of the news”

Obviously, such a culture of fear is going to lead to a lot of children being taken away from their parents needlessly.

There was a time when John Mattingly understood that.

More than a decade ago, several New York City Family Court judges said almost exactly the same thing to a commission advising ACS – explaining that this was why they would rubber-stamp ACS removals even when they thought the agency had no case.  John Mattingly served on that panel.   At the time he was appalled.

But after Nixzmary Brown died, Mattingly brought exactly the same culture into ACS – with the same dreadful consequences.  He took a series of actions that all sent the same message to the frontlines: Take away all the children you want and, while the children may suffer terribly, your jobs are safe.  Leave one child in her of his own home and let something go wrong, and I’ll hang you out to dry.

That’s what happened in the Pierce case. 

If, in fact, either Adams or Bell falsified records then they deserve to be fired.  There might even be a case for some kind of criminal charge specific to falsifying records.  But criminally-negligent homicide?  No way.

Mattingly should have been the first to condemn the D.A. for grandstanding at his caseworkers’ expense.  Instead, he remained silent right up until his recent resignation.

FUDGING THE FIGURES ON CASELOADS

But the revelations don’t end with the culture of fear.  The New York story got past Mattingly’s spin on another key point, his claims about worker caseloads.  According to the story:

Mayor Bloomberg, with ACS’s then-commissioner John Mattingly by his side, was telling reporters that the workers’ average caseload was only ten families—less than the national average. This enraged the workers even more, since they all knew this calculation didn’t reflect their entire workload. It includes only active investigations, but not court cases. After an investigation goes to court—often because ACS is trying to get custody of a kid—the case can still stay on a worker’s plate for months, requiring the worker to trek to Family Court, do more paperwork, and sometimes visit the home.

And, as everyone knows, anytime you have to go to Family Court, you’re at the mercy of a notoriously inefficient system. Compared with his co-workers, Adams had “a really bad draw,” as Rae Phillips, a caseworker in the Hospital Unit, puts it. Co-workers recall Adams was in court three or four days a week, sometimes more than once a day. “That’s where all your time goes,” Phillips says. Bell estimates that at the end, Adams had fourteen open investigations and at least twenty court cases. When he was interrogated after Marchella’s death, Adams said his caseload totaled about 40.

The fact that Adams makes this claim doesn’t make it so.  But the entire New York press corps, which normally prides itself on its skepticism, simply took Bloomberg and Mattingly at their word concerning caseloads – unlike decades past when newspapers exposed a shell game behind similar claims during the administration of former Mayor Ed Koch.

GOOD IDEAS UNDERMINED

The article also illustrates how the culture of fear can undermine even the few progressive moves Mattingly retained even after Nixzmary Brown died, such as Child Safety Conferences.

They’re supposed to work this way: When a caseworker is about to remove children from the home she or he convenes a meeting involving everyone who cares about those children (and if they’re old enough, sometimes the children) in an effort to find a better option.

But the New York article describes a process that has become a sham, in which workers either are too closed-minded, or simply too afraid, to consider any other options:

In practice, caseworkers say, the decision about whether to remove a kid is almost always made ahead of time, rendering these meetings virtually useless. “A fantastic idea, terrible in actuality,” says [a] … former caseworker. “A monumental suck of time.”

Bell often had two of these conferences a day, maybe three, each lasting one and a half to two hours, sometimes even longer. All the while, phone calls are flooding into her voice-mail … and the paperwork was piling up. To a friend in the office, she’d say: “How am I supposed to get anything done with all these f------ conferences?”

These meetings not only consumed much of her time but also left her emotionally drained.

If Ms. Bell finds actually coming face-to-face with the families whose lives she is about to turn upside-down too draining, then maybe the job has become too much for her, and it calls into question some of the portrait in this article.

So does the way she responded to some of Adams’ efforts to go the extra mile for families:

 “Get off the phone!” Bell would holler when she heard him counseling yet another parent whose case had been closed. “We don’t have time for that!” Sometimes she would rip the phone right out of his hand and slam it onto the receiver.

(As that comment indicated, Bell argues this isn’t what she wanted to do, it’s what she had to do in order to keep up with the workload.)

But while it’s hard to blame workers trapped in a culture of fear for refusing to take the conferences seriously, the fact is in other parts of the city, workers have risen above that culture.

Michael Arsham, executive director of an outstanding grassroots family advocacy group, the Child Welfare Organizing Project,* discussed this in a comment on the New York website:

CWOP has partnered with the Manhattan Borough Office of ACS and the Center for Family Representation [which provides high quality legal representation for families caught in the ACS net], training life-experienced Community Representatives to staff CSCs in East Harlem. CWOP parents have staffed over 700 of these conferences, and have helped avert non-relative placement of children in about two-thirds of them. In the over four years that we've been involved in this initiative, we have never heard any of our ACS partners deride CSCs as a distraction from their duties. In fact, there is nothing more fundamental to good child protective work than talking in a direct, straightforward way with parents about child safety concerns, and how best to address them through use of extended family supports and community services.

Because of the unit in which Bell and Adams worked, the article also risked leaving a mistaken impression of typical cases.  As Arsham pointed out:

ACS is repeatedly characterized as the agency that investigates "abusive" parents. It would be much more accurate to say "allegedly neglectful" parents. The large majority of parents called to the attention of ACS - 85 - 90% - are accused not of abuse but of neglect, usually related to poverty: substandard housing, lack of health insurance or daycare, children resistant to attending failing schools, etc.

TREATING CASEWORKERS AS SOME CASEWORKERS TREAT FAMILIES

The article concludes with the final irony:

These days, the fears that keep Bell up at night concern her own children, her 12-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter. It seems the ultimate irony: the possibility that this whole saga might end with her being removed from her home, taken away from her two kids. For Bell, it’s the most terrifying part of this whole ordeal. In the courtroom, in front of the prosecutors and the reporters, she tries to conceal her fears, but to a former co-worker she admitted the truth. “I’m scared,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Do you know I could go to jail for four years? Do you know how old my son will be when I come home?”

That prompted a question, posed on the NCCPR Facebook Page, by Melanie Williams Smotherman, the director of another outstanding grassroots organization, the Family Advocacy Movement in Nebraska:  She wonders if Adams and Bell realize how similar their treatment is to the way many caseworkers treat families?

*NCCPR receives funding to assist CWOP with media work.

Foster care in New York City: Reefer madness at ACS!

In case anyone still is wondering why caseworkers at the New York City Administration for Children’s Services sometimes don’t have time to do thorough investigations of cases where children are in real danger, an explanation turned up on the front page of The New York Times last week.

According to the Times:

Hundreds of New Yorkers who have been caught with small amounts of marijuana, or who have simply admitted to using it, have become ensnared in civil child neglect cases in recent years, though they did not face even the least of criminal charges, according to city records and defense lawyers. A small number of parents in these cases have even lost custody of their children.

For these parents, the child welfare system has become an alternate system of justice, with legal standards on marijuana that appear to be tougher than those of criminal courts or, to some extent, of society at large. In interviews, lawyers from the three legal services groups that the city hires to defend parents said they saw hundreds of marijuana cases each year, most involving recreational users.

A spokesman for ACS, Michael Fagan offered up a sleazy response that lumps together use of marijuana with cocaine and heroin. (I’ll bet he was really proud of that.)  Fagan argues, in effect, that marijuana use is a gateway allegation.  According to the Times:

“Drug use itself is not child abuse or neglect, but it can put children in danger of neglect or abuse,” Mr. Fagan said. “We think the argument that use of cocaine, heroin or marijuana by a parent of young children should not be looked into or should simply be ignored is just plain wrong.”…

But lawyers for parents countered that the agency often brought neglect charges based solely on recreational marijuana use, then searched later for other grounds to bolster cases.

The handling of these cases in New York City also is one more example of the racial bias that permeates child welfare.  From the Times story:

Over all, the rate of marijuana use among whites is twice as high as among blacks and Hispanics in the city, the data show, but defense lawyers said these cases were rarely if ever filed against white parents.

And it contrasts with other jurisdictions.  Again from the Times story:

California, where the medical marijuana movement has flourished, now requires that child welfare officials demonstrate actual harm to a child from marijuana use in order to bring neglect cases, and defense lawyers there say the authorities are now bringing fewer of them.

 The harm should be obvious: Children traumatized by needless investigations, courts overloaded with ridiculous cases and, in some cases, children even forced into foster care.  There’s also the time, money and effort wasted on these cases that is stolen from finding children in real danger.

THE MATTINGLY LEGACY

The reefer madness at ACS is just the latest example to come to light of the unfortunate legacy of  John Mattingly, the ACS commissioner who presided over huge increases in children taken from their homes and opposed one progressive initiative after another.

Ironies abound.

For one thing, one of the organizations making a point of calling attention to the story and, in particular, to a highly-critical commentary about the ACS policy on a Time Magazine blog, is Casey Family Services -  the direct service arm of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, where Mattingly worked before becoming ACS Commissioner (and where he recommended funding NCCPR) and where Mattingly now has returned.

For another, this story might never have come to light if not for one reform on which Mattingly did not renege – his support for strong institutional providers of legal representation for families caught in the ACS net.  Much of the information in the Times story comes from those providers, The Center for Family Representation, The Bronx Defenders and the Brooklyn Family Defense Project.

The story illustrates not only the enormous value of such high-quality legal assistance, but also why it’s important for these organizations to speak out publicly about the families they represent.

And finally, this story is the first test for the new ACS Commissioner Robert Richter. A change in the ACS pot policy would send a good signal to the frontlines at ACS, and spare a lot of children a lot of grief.

Foster care in New York: A fresh start for New York City child welfare?

The resignation of John Mattingly as commissioner of New York’s Administration for Children’s Services gives New York a chance to catch up to best practice in child welfare.

                                           

Whenever the topic is John Mattingly, the commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, I have to choose between being an ingrate or a hypocrite.

Only an ingrate would criticize one of those most responsible for your own organization’s existence.  When John Mattingly was at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, he recommended that they fund NCCPR.  The foundation did so for a decade.

But I’ve criticized many other child welfare leaders for doing the kinds of things Mattingly has done. Only a hypocrite would set a different standard for someone who, in a former job, had gotten one’s own organization funded.

I choose ingrate.

Mattingly resigned this afternoon – to return to the Casey Foundation.  There is no doubt he was among the most dedicated child welfare professionals in America.  Like most people in the field he meant well; unlike many he worked tirelessly to make it better.  The issue is how John Mattingly’s vision of making it better changed for the worse.

The John Mattingly who took the job was a visionary, a national leader in pioneering best practices.  But the John Mattingly who leaves the job now let best practice pass him by.  He  became one of the most regressive forces in American child welfare, and New York’s vulnerable children have suffered for it.

The record is depressing:

● While state after state has adopted “differential response” which both narrows and widens the net of intervention into families while making that intervention more humane, Mattingly opposed it; agreeing to pilot it in some “educational neglect” cases and then reneging.

● While state after state embraced subsidized guardianship as an alternative means to permanency for children placed with relatives, Mattingly opposed the bill that allows it in New York.

● Mattingly even opposed a law that does no more than encourage caseworkers to think twice before automatically rushing to terminate the parental rights of mothers who are in prison or drug treatment.

On all three of these issues, the real reformer was New York State Office of Children and Families Commissioner Gladys Carrion, who favored these initiatives when Mattingly opposed them. 

● Mattingly initiated a sibling confiscation-at-birth policy, ordering caseworkers to automatically take away the newborn siblings of any child already in foster care, with only rare, difficult-to-obtain exceptions.

● But worst of all, Mattingly presided over a 50 percent surge in removals of children from their homes in the wake of the death of Nixzmary Brown.  But, as is documented in detail in our report on New York City child welfare (see especially the statistics on Page 20) key child safety indicators worsened.

And just as the surge seemed to be easing at last, the indictment of caseworkers in the wake of the death of Marchella Pierce almost certainly sent them soaring again. (We don’t know because ACS seems to have stopped posting monthly data on entries into care.) There is no indication Mattingly has done anything to try to curb such a surge.

TELLING PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR

Mattingly’s record includes some genuine progressive accomplishments that were not undone in his later years, including significantly reducing the use of group homes and institutions, and supporting the creation of strong institutional providers of defense counsel for families.

But Mattingly also has a skilled politician’s knack for making everyone feel listened to and included – and then doing what he wanted to do anyway.  And he chose his words with great care, to make everyone feel he was at least in general agreement with them.

The impression was reinforced by the fact that Mattingly sometimes made his harshest statements about reform when he’s not in New York City. 

At a conference in Massachusetts he denigrated differential response and Intensive Family Preservation Services, even though both probably have stronger “evidence bases” than some of the ideas he has pushed.

At a conference in Washington he minimized the problem of racial bias in child welfare and even suggested efforts to stop the removal of children from battered mothers just because the mothers have been beaten may have gone too far.

What accounts for the change?  I don’t know, but I’ll venture a guess: too many fatality reviews.

Anyone who runs a system the size of New York City’s constantly will be immersed in the hideous details of the worst cases.  And because John Mattingly really does care, and really does take every case to heart, my guess is he immerses himself in those details more than most.  That means he may be looking at autopsy photos and reading about unspeakable acts committed against children for hours or days at a time an average of once every ten days or so – because that’s about how often a child “known to the system” dies in New York City.

Spend enough time doing that and I’m sure it’s easy to start thinking of every parent as a sadist or a brute.  It must be easy to forget, in one’s heart if not one’s head, that the overwhelming majority of families caught in the ACS net are nothing like that.  They’re more likely to be like Lillian Lucas Dixon, whose seven-year-old son was taken because he was home alone for an hour so she could make it to her shift at a subway token booth, or the families traumatized by phony “educational neglect” allegations – the kinds differential response could do so much to ease.

I think it was loss of perspective that turned John Mattingly from reformer to obstacle to reform.

Of course I say all this well aware that, depending on who replaces Mattingly, reformers might well wind up looking back on the Mattingly years, even the later Mattingly years, as “the good old days.” [UPDATE, JULY 27: Mayor Michael Bloomberg has named Queens Family Court Judge Ronald Richter, a former deputy commissioner of ACS, to replace Mattingly.] 

But when Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose John Mattingly it was a wise choice.  If he makes another wise choice, he can return New York City to the forefront of child welfare reform.