“Child welfare” and the moral bankruptcy of social work

Are the failures of social work really just a matter of degree?
(Image from Depositphotos)

This post was revised and updated in January, 2024

Call it The Perennial Whine of the Licensed Social Worker.  It crops up over and over when there’s any story about what family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) do to families.  Most recently I saw it repeatedly in comments on the Washington Post story I discuss here, about a family traumatized by a midnight raid by the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families.  Multiple commenters offered some version of: Well, they couldn’t have been social workers! Social workers would never do something like that!  As one such commenter put it: 

As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, I wish news organizations such as Wapo would be more clear with using terms such as “social worker.” I suspect the person who visited the mother in the child’s hospital room was not truly a Social Worker, but a case manager of some sort with probably only a bachelor’s degree. 

The same sort of comment appears after publication of any story exposing racial bias in family policing.  Because we all know that genuine social workers – especially well-trained social workers could never be biased. 

The main reason the it-would-all-be-fixed-if-they-were-social-workers argument comes up so often is that it is one more way for supremely arrogant all-powerful family policing systems to avoid accountability.  Why have actual due process protections, why have real checks and balances if everything can be solved with a piece of parchment and a licensing exam?  It’s similar to the way family police agencies and their apologists seek to cling to their near-absolute power by claiming the solution to any problem in the system is more “training.” 

So with that in mind, consider three vignettes from the world of social work. 

Vignette #1 

In Kentucky, a boy is found dead in the “residential treatment center” where he had been institutionalized.  The coroner rules it a homicide.  The boy was 7 years old.  NBC News found that the center has an ugly history.   The mother of a second young child is suing, alleging abuse at the same institution. 

Meanwhile, another boy runs away from another residential treatment center in Kentucky and drowns.  He was institutionalized because he had autism, ran away a lot, and his grandparents couldn’t afford therapy and someone to watch him.  But at least he was older.  He was 9. 

All this in a state that routinely tears apart families at a rate 50% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in – creating an artificial shortage of placements that is used as an excuse to institutionalize young children. 

Now, let’s see what Stephanie Saulnier has to say about all this.  She’s not just some caseworker.  She’s a bona fide social worker.  She’s an M.S.W. and a C.S.W. She’s a professor of social work.  She even chairs the Department of Social Work and directs the B.S.W. program at Eastern Kentucky University.  So what kind of insights did all those credentials produce?  Saulnier told NBC News: 

“One of the problems that we run into is if we shut down a problematic facility, where do those kids go? That leaves kiddos that are in need of residential treatment with no place to go. There aren’t enough beds for little guys that need this level of care, and the child welfare system has to kind of figure out ‘how can we do the best with what we have?’” 

In fact, no “little guy” or “kiddo” needs a residential treatment facility of any kind, much less one that’s “problematic.”  Prof. Saulnier, M.S.W., C.S.W., seems to have overlooked the research on that one. 

Vignette #2 

Whenever there’s a big news story pointing out that yes, there is racism in child welfare, there’s a good chance that somewhere in the comments will be an objection from someone calling herself “Jane Addams.”  The comments are all pretty much the same: There is enormous accountability in child welfare, she says, we certainly don’t need more!  Courts have to approve everything we do (a stunningly misleading claim I address here, here, here, here, here and here).  And anyway, says “Jane Addams,” if you’re not a bona fide social worker working in a “child welfare” agency, how could you possibly know what you’re talking about?  This is usually followed by a recitation of horror stories that are strikingly similar from comment to comment.  

She did it -- three times -- when The New York Times exposed foster care as “the new ‘Jane Crow’.” She was back in November when the Times wrote about a study in which the New York City family police agency’s own caseworkers condemned racism in the agency.  Among those the Times quoted to add context to the story: Joyce McMillan of JMAC for Families whose own children had been needlessly taken, and family defenders.  (They also quoted a statement from the agency, after the agency refused to comment on the actual report). 

All this made “Jane Addams” very upset.  She wrote: 

I’m a licensed clinical social worker who spent my career in public child welfare, primarily providing foster care services. A peculiarity of child welfare is those given voice as experts are people like Joyce McMillan who have lack [sic] experience in this complicated work, while the knowledge & expertise of those who dedicated careers [sic] is regarded with suspicion. As a result we have a nation of armchair critics, sanctimonious public defenders among them, with no child welfare service experience who believe they know what’s best.  

There followed Adams’ standard litany of horror story cases, which are as rare as they are horrible, all leading up to: 

Understandably nobody wants to get their brain around the gravity of maltreatment.   

Oh, and, of course, she also wrote this: 

We throw around the term "social worker" when in fact few have those credentials. 

Again, this comment was about a report in which the agency’s own caseworkers condemned racism in the agency.  Presumably, Addams believes, if only they all had the appropriate "credentials" they’d know better. 

But here’s why I bring up “Jane Addams”: Her real name is Judith Schagrin, L.C.S.W-C. For decades she was Assistant Director of the Baltimore County family police agency.  And she’s not just any L.C.S.W.-C.  In 2004, the National Association of Social Workers named her “social worker of the year.” 

She's far from alone.  You can find similarly arrogant denials of racial bias in the field from oh-so-distinguished academicians such as Richard Barth, MSW, PhD, former dean of the University of Maryland School of Social Work Sarah Font, MSW, PhD, at Penn State, and Emily Putnam-Hornstein, MSW, PhD of the University of North Carolina.

Vignette #3 

A group of social work students developed this excellent guide for colleagues in Illinois concerning alternatives to calling the family police.  But as is explained in this excellent story in In These Times, this is what the social work establishment tried to do to the student who led the development of the guide, Elena Gormley:

Gormley’s group project got an A, and the guide was disseminated far and wide. It’s even being taught in other social work programs. But when Gormley emailed the guide to her school’s listserv, the university initiated disciplinary proceedings, charging that ​“the content of the email encouraged students to commit a crime, which could lead to harm or the death of a child if the suggestion were followed.” The official complaint calls Gormley’s actions unprofessional and unethical and claims Gormley’s​“behavior indicates that she is unsuitable for the profession.”

Gormley spent five weeks defending herself against a litany of conduct violations, the threat of expulsion looming over her. She successfully fought the proceedings and graduated in 2021, but the experience was harrowing.

M.S.W.s in the real world 

Now, let’s see how the “if only they were social workers” argument plays out in real life. 

We are not privy to the resumes of the workers in the Massachusetts case or the workers in New York City who condemned racism in their own agency. We don’t know which workers have the minimum credentials required in these jurisdictions and which have more. 

We do know that qualifications vary from state to state and, in locally-run systems, county to county.  Washington, D.C., for example, requires all of its family police workers to have master’s degrees in social work.  As a matter of fact, the author of the column that prompted this apology from The Imprint for trafficking in what the publication called “a crude and often racist stereotype” was one such D.C. social worker – and she never tired of reminding readers of her M.S.W. degree.  The agency “Jane Addams” helped to lead in Maryland also has an M.S.W. requirement. 

I’m aware of no objective observer who says the best child welfare casework in America is performed by workers for the family police in either of these places.  Nor are they too keen on the largest locally run family policing system in America, the one in Los Angeles County. 

True, you don’t absolutely have to have an M.S.W. there in order to investigate families.  You could get by with a master’s in marriage and family counseling, psychological counseling, psychology, or clinical psychology.  But that still means there probably are a whole lot of M.S.Ws out there tearing apart Los Angeles families at the second-highest rate among America’s biggest cities.  And a lot of M.S.Ws are responsible for the fact that 58% of Black children in Los Angeles will have to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation, almost always as a result of a false report. 

As for the holy grail of licensure – that often requires passing an exam created by a group called the Association of Social Work Boards.  Turns out there’s quite a problem with that, a problem involving racial bias.  

Yes, we need degrees and credentials 

But there’s a dilemma.  Simply declaring any and all credentials and training meaningless doesn’t work either. We know this because we’ve tried sending untrained overwhelmingly white middle-class amateurs into the homes of families who are overwhelmingly neither to pass judgment upon them – it’s called Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), and it’s vastly worse than anything even the worst social work school has come up with. 

We also know that there are places where social workers do enormous good.  One reason high-quality interdisciplinary family defense is so effective is the work of social workers demonstrating the profession at its best – helping keep families together by helping to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” dished out by family policing agencies.   

There are students like Elena Gormley and her classmates - and  the many social work professionals and students from across the country to rallied to Ms. Gormley's defense.  And yes, there are social workers trying to genuinely change family policing from within. 

In short, the field is full of outstanding individuals who could help social work emerge from moral bankruptcy.  But its leaders are desperate to make sure that doesn’t happen. 

Child welfare and civil liberties: When we betray our principles, we betray our children

First of two parts

Late last year, The New York Times published a story about the frightening amount of power, and the frightening lack of accountability, among some of America’s county sheriffs. It included this example:

This year, the sheriff in Worth County, Ga., ordered his deputies to enter the local high school in search of drugs. They lined up 850 students with legs spread and hands against the hallway walls. Deputies inserted fingers into girls’ bras, and touched their underwear and genital areas while searching in their waistbands or reaching up their dresses, according to the Southern Center [for Human Rights], which sued the sheriff.

The deputies had no warrant or other authority to conduct the search, the suit charged. No drugs were found. … The Georgia sheriff was recently indicted in connection with the mass search and has pleaded not guilty. The lawsuit resulted in a $3 million settlement.

Wow. A $3 million settlement and criminal charges – charges that included a misdemeanor count of “sexual battery.”  Just goes to show what happens when advocates of civil liberties mobilize.  Even authorities with all that power can be held accountable.

A random sample of the nearly 200 comments on the story found unanimous condemnation of the abuses outlined in the story (of which the example above was only one) – not to mention a rush to blame it on political conservatives.

Now, consider a far more common infringement on civil liberties, as described by The New Yorker:

You will hear a knock on the door, often late at night. You don’t have to open it, but if you don’t the caseworker outside may come back with the police. The caseworker will tell you you’re being investigated for abusing or neglecting your children. She will tell you to wake them up and tell them to take clothes off so she can check their bodies for bruises and marks.

Even though this story described the rule, not the exception, there were no cries of outrage from civil libertarians. And the letters to The New Yorker in response to the story defended the people inflicting this infringement on civil liberties on defenseless children.

Because, of course, the people doing this to children were not sheriff’s deputies, they were – and are

– child protective services workers.  The differing responses illustrate, once again, that the quickest way to get many liberals to renounce everything they claim to believe about civil liberties is to whisper in their ears those two magic words “child abuse.” (The Left has no monopoly on hypocrisy – it was that great “family values conservative” Newt Gingrich who proposed confiscating the children of the poor and throwing them into orphanages.)

Just say the magic words

But for many on the left, call it a child abuse investigation and suddenly, behavior which in any other context would be sexual abuse is deemed acceptable. Behavior like this concerning a six-year-old:

The caseworker says that she needs to take pictures of Jackie’s body. Her mother, visibly shaken, again expresses discomfort, but the caseworker tells her “Oh, don’t worry. It’s more stressful for the parent than it is the child.”

And so Jackie’s mother helps Jackie to take off her clothes. The caseworker asks Jackie to lie down on the bed and spread her legs. Despite having no training in this specialized work, she then “[takes] pictures of Jackie’s vagina and buttocks in a closed position, and then instruct[s] [her mother] to spread Jackie’s labia and buttocks, so that she [can] take pictures of the genital and anal areas.” For months afterwards, both Jackie and her mother suffer from nightmares, anxiety, and depression.

Finding no basis to substantiate its concern that the child may have been abused, the state closes its case file.

Or consider the case in which these questions ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court (which ducked the issue) – a case in which NCCPR’s Vice President served as pro-bono counsel for the family:

Nine-year-old Sharon [not her real name] was removed from her classroom by school officials and escorted to another room in the school where she was met by two men, one of them a uniformed deputy sheriff carrying a gun.  They had no permission from any court; no neutral arbiter had decided first if what these men were about to do really was necessary.

For two hours Sharon was interrogated.  She was badgered relentlessly when she did not give the men the answers they wanted to hear.  She was too scared to leave the room, too scared even to ask for a glass of water.   She realized that the only way out was to lie.

Needlessly to say, Sharon was not a criminal.  On the contrary, the two men thought that maybe Sharon had been abused, and this seemed to them the most convenient way to find out.

But the botched interrogation led only to lies and confusion.  And it set off a cascade of error that caused even more trauma to Sharon including a stripsearch, a highly traumatic medical examination and several weeks consigned to America’s chaotic system of foster care.

Should “speculation and hearsay” really be enough?

In their own brief to the Supreme Court authorities in Oregon, where the case arose, actually said they should have the right to do this to a child based on – their words – “speculation and hearsay.”

Not everyone on the Left turned a blind eye. On the contrary, the case was notable for the fact that groups on the left, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Center for Youth Law, the Juvenile Law Center and many groups that represent children in child welfare cases as well as groups on the right such as the Family Research Council and the Eagle Forum filed “friend of the court” briefs supporting the family.

But there were some notable absences. The American Civil Liberties Union remained silent. (That’s not unusual. At the national level, when it comes to the notion of applying civil liberties to child welfare, the ACLU tends to be AWOL.)  The group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” does not seem to think those rights should include the ones covered by the Fourth Amendment. And the National Association of Social Workers actually submitted a brief supporting the nearly unlimited power to subject children to this kind of trauma.  (The Clinical Social Work Association, in contrast, stood up for the children.)

Meanwhile, in still another appalling case, in which girls were stripsearched in front of a male police officer, a lawsuit has been brought for the family by a conservative group, the Home School Legal Defense Association.

The intrusion doesn’t have to rise to the level of a stripsearch to be traumatic.  The questioning alone can traumatize a child, particularly a young child.  As three of the leading child welfare scholars of the 20th century, Anna Freud, Joseph Goldstein and Albert J. Solnit wrote, in calling for far higher standards before ever intervening in families:

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 Baltimore Sun recognized this in an editorial cautioning against toughening “mandatory reporting” laws – even at a time when the pressure to toughen those laws was greatest, right after the crimes of former Penn State coach – and foster parent - Jerry Sandusky were exposed. As the Sun wrote:

Moreover, abuse investigations are inherently traumatic for children. They often involvehours of intensive questioning about sensitive issues of sexuality, shame and guilt as well as intrusive physical examinations that frighten and humiliate suspected victims. The stress brought on by such procedures can leave lasting emotional and psychological scars even on children who turn out not to have suffered abuse.

The new normal

That kind of intrusion is the new normal for Black families. Arecent study found that 53 percent of African American children will endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. 

Indeed, the very fact that the child welfare system targets almost exclusively poor families and disproportionately families of color helps explain the lack of outrage, especially in the media and among politicians. One can see that in Massachusetts when all of a sudden media and politicians did get outraged – when it happened to people of their race and their class: middle-class foster parents.

But that doesn’t explain all of it.  Stop-and-frisk targets the poor and it targets people of color. Liberals can be relied upon to be outraged by it. Yet many of the same liberals who will rise up in righteous wrath against infringements of the civil liberties of adults by law enforcement stand silent or, worse, defend the routine violations of children’s civil liberties in the name of “child protection.”

Similarly, some liberals who would never think it’s o.k. to throw a passenger off a plane just for speaking Arabic will gladly seek to instill paranoia in our children – and even promote the extremely dangerous practice of defensive driving – again, in the name of “child protection.”

After all, they will say, a child abuse investigation is different – it’s done to protect the child.  But infringements against civil liberties almost always are justified by invoking noble goals – that’s why defending civil liberties often is unpopular.  That sheriff in Georgia could argue that he, too, was simply trying to protect children – from the scourge of drug abuse.

All this explains why the due process protections we take for granted in most areas of law are largely absent in child welfare.  But whenever we on the Left betray our principles, we also betray our children.

Read Part Two here

Child welfare and race: The smoking transcript

The director of Every Child Matters tells Congress that the states that do best at preventing child abuse have “smaller, whiter populations.”

I’ve written before about the hype and hysteria spread by the group that calls itself “Every Child Matters” in its effort to stampede child welfare systems into diverting $3 billion to $5 billion into hiring more child protective services workers to take away more children.

I’ve noted how their executive director, Michael Petit, spent 45 minutes comparing rates of child abuse deaths among the states – and maligning states that allegedly rated high – only to admit that it was, in fact, impossible to make such a comparison.

Over the past couple of years, Petit spent an enormous amount of time and effort  trying to get Congress to hold a hearing on the issue where he could be in the spotlight as a witness.  If any nonprofit has gone through so much just to give its director five minutes of this kind of fame (you don’t even get 15 for your statement) I’m not aware of it.

On July 12, Petit got his hearing, before a House subcommittee, complete with the obligatory celebrity witness, a second-tier cast member from Law and Order: SVU, to guarantee a crowd.  But I’ve said nothing about Petit’s remarks until now because one thing he said was so disturbing I decided to wait until the transcript came out to be sure I’d heard it correctly. 

Unfortunately, I did, in fact, hear what I thought I heard.  It happened when Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Washington) asked Petit “what states have had the best system in place to predict and deal with and prevent [child abuse]?”

Petit said it was a complicated question, and he explained some of the complexity.  And then he said:

But I will tell you the states that do the best overall are the ones that have smaller, whiter populations. 

Petit immediately realized that might not have been the best thing to say, and rushed to clarify:

So where ‑‑ which translates into less poverty and less complicated issues around domestic violence, around imprisonment issues, around substance abuse."

But then he couldn’t resist raising the issue of race again:

If you take a look at the overall distribution of these issues, they are concentrated especially most severely in the states with large minority populations.  And I say that, saying that that correlates, in turn, with high rates of poverty in those communities.

MYTHS ABOUT SUBSTANCE ABUSE

Notice how Petit repeats the common canard about minorities and substance abuse.  In fact, as the Annie E. Casey Foundation notes in this report:

Despite being more likely to be poor, black and Hispanic Americans use drugs at levels comparable to, and in some instances, lower than white Americans.

So if Petit is really referring to the impact of substance abuse on child maltreatment, why would he claim that “whiter” states do better at curbing the child abuse that stems from substance abuse?  Perhaps he got his misimpression the way so many Americans do – by looking at who gets punished for substance abuse.

As that same Casey study notes:

Despite having drug use rates comparable to whites, black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to experience negative consequences from drug use, including being involved in the child welfare system and in the criminal justice system          

And as The New York Times reported in this recent story about children being taken from their parents because of those parents’ marijuana use:

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.

So first, child welfare systems apply racially-biased double standards when it comes to dealing with substance-abusing parents, and then Michael Petit runs to Congress to perpetuate stereotypes resulting from those very double standards.

A little later in the hearing Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia) a hero of the civil rights movement, demonstrated grace equal to his well-known courage and gave Petit a chance to walk back his remarks.  But Petit only dug himself in deeper with comments veering disturbingly close to the stereotypes about Black women debunked in this excellent article from Colorlines.  Petit’s comments can be found by going to the transcript and doing a search for “Mr. Lewis.”

There is no evidence that there is more child maltreatment (or more of what we label child maltreatment) in poor Black communities than in poor white communities.  Even those who are “in denial” about the racial bias that permeates decisions to take away children claim that Blacks are overrepresented in child welfare systems only because of the pressures of poverty.  (In fact, the overrepresentation of African American children in foster care is due to both poverty and racism, as is discussed in detail in our Issue Paper on child welfare and race.)

So all Michael Petit needed to say was that the states doing better have smaller, richer populations.  When it comes to solving the problems, he’d still probably be wrong -  there is strong evidence, for example, that one of America’s most successful child welfare systems is the one in Alabama - but at least he wouldn’t have taken any gratuitous swipes at an entire race. 

Michael Petit is not a racist.  Like most people in child welfare, he cares deeply about helping vulnerable children, of all races, and sincerely believes his approach will help do just that.   But his comments reveal the extent to which our feelings about race bias our policy choices more than we realize - until something slips out, as it did at the hearing.  And what do such comments from Petit, who once ran an entire child welfare system and who had been a top official in the Child Welfare League of America, tell us about the unconscious biases of frontline workers and others when they decide to remove children from their homes?

AN UNSEEMLY ALLIANCE WITH NASW

Petit’s comments raise another question that is at least as troubling:

Why have none among Petit’s small group of allies, the groups supporting his crusade to divert funds to hiring more CPS workers, called him out on this?  Particularly disturbing is the silence from the National Association of Social Workers, which remains a part of the alliance Petit formed to push his agenda and continues to promote it.

Sadly, this isn’t all that puzzling. 

NASW is a trade association for social workers.  So of course, NASW would be pushing Petit’s agenda.  Three billion dollars can buy a lot of social work jobs.

But I would have hoped Petit’s linking child abuse to race would have prompted an end to an unseemly alliance.

The naked emperors of social work

Yesterday's post to this blog about still another study, from Prof. Joseph Doyle of MIT, showing that children left in their own homes generally fare better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care, prompted a question to a listserv from a lawyer, which I will paraphrase this way: Why aren't more people paying attention? In other words, with all that solid research pointing to the harm of foster care, why do our laws and policies still encourage a take-the-child-and-run approach?

There are a couple of reasons. For starters, lawmakers are far more likely to base legislation on the latest horror story in the news than on actual research. It's hard to imagine legislators reading Prof. Doyle's study and then rushing off to pass "Joseph's Law" to make it harder to tear apart families.

But also, there is a profound bias in the social work community – a bias favoring child removal. (Prof. Doyle is not a social worker, and his studies have not appeared in social work journals.) Indeed, in child welfare, the more a researcher pompously proclaims his neutrality, the more he insists he is a paragon of objectivity who merely goes "where the research leads," the more he looks down his nose at mere mortals and, to paraphrase an old Chevy Chase routine, says "I'm a scholar – and you're not!" – the more you'd better look very, very closely at the "methodology" section in the actual research. There are some outstanding scholars in the field of social work – but there are others for whom "scholar" is just a euphemism for ideologue-with-a-Ph-D.

I can't prove that empirically, of course. But I can show evidence of a profound bias in social work scholarship, thanks to some wonderful research done more than 20 years ago by, yes, a professor of social work.

His name is William Epstein, and this is what he did: He submitted to various journals a study concerning the efficacy of taking children from their parents when the children had asthma. But the study was a fake. The real research subjects were the editors of scholarly journals. Half of the editors got studies "concluding" that taking away the children helped with their asthma. The other half got studies concluding that taking away the children didn't work.

The results: 53 percent of the journals that got the study with the positive outcome accepted it for publication. Only 14 percent of the journals who got the version with the negative finding accepted it.

One would hope that the social work profession would have taken the findings to heart and cleaned up its act. But alas, no. On the contrary. The Royal Court of Social Work was not pleased when Prof. Epstein pointed out that the emperor had no clothes.

A group of angry journal editors filed an ethics complaint with the National Association of Social Workers. They said it was unethical of Prof. Epstein to fail to get their informed consent before trying to fool them! It could have led to Epstein being drummed out of the NASW. The furious "scholars" were led by one John Schuerman, who was, at the time, editor of the Social Service Review, and a professor at the University of Chicago. As The New York Times explained:

[Schuerman's] journal was not fooled by Dr. Epstein's paper because an alert editor noticed that part of it was copied from an earlier article. … While Dr. Schuerman acknowledges that there are some circumstances in social science research where it is accepted procedure not to obtain informed consent, he said, ''You have to weigh the benefits of the research against the risk of harm to the subjects.'' He added, ''Here the harm was the cost and time to busy professionals, the large numbers of reviewers and staff involved.''

Another cost, Dr. Schuerman noted, was emotional: ''The chagrin and embarrassment of those editors who accepted the article.''

Ultimately NASW decided it was not unethical to point out a naked emperor. But the social work profession wasn't through with Dr. Epstein. NASW threatened to bring him up on new charges – for talking to the press about the old charges!

When I went back to that New York Times story yesterday, it was the first time I'd looked at it in more than 20 years – I'd first seen it when I was researching my book, Wounded Innocents, which first was published in 1990.

Back then, the name John Schuerman meant nothing to me. But in the following years he would join the Chapin Hall Center for Children, an organization prone to that "Chevy Chase" attitude I mentioned above. There, he would lead a team that would produce a series of studies claiming that Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) didn't work. I think the researchers firmly believed it. And I think that Schuerman, like most people in child welfare, really wants to help children. But each study had the same fatal flaw – they failed to study IFPS programs that actually followed the model of the original such program, Homebuilders, in Washington State.

To me, admittedly a mere advocate, it appeared that each study was a more strident attempt to justify the one before. And to one of the leading honest-to-God scholars in the field, Prof. Ray Kirk of the University of North Carolina, the results of Schuerman's biggest study were "a non finding from a failed study."

Several more rigorous evaluations have found that IFPS is successful. Details are in NCCPR Issue Paper 11. But because the Schuerman group said what the child welfare establishment wanted to hear, his work has gotten far more amplification in the social work echo chamber - the very echo chamber Schuerman himself was so desperate to defend in 1988.

None of this means we should be free to retreat into the cop-out of saying, in effect, "since the studies disagree, I'll just believe what I want." Rather, it means that all research must be subjected to rigorous critique and fair competition in the marketplace of ideas. As it happens, Epstein himself has written things with which I strongly disagree (but at least he has a really good sense of humor). But What Epstein's study reveals is that there is no free market of ideas in social work scholarship. Rather, the modern successors to those who, in the 19^th Century, proudly called themselves "child savers" have a near-monopoly in that market; to the detriment of vulnerable children.

We all have biases. Epstein's study reminds us that a Ph-D does not inoculate us against them.