Foster care in Los Angeles: Sunshine is good for children

DCFS, SUPERVISORS, TIMES EDITORIAL AGREE ON OPEN COURTS, BUT TIMES NEWS SIDE IGNORES IT.

            The Los Angeles Times editorial board has written another very good editorial on child welfare and, in the process, once again embarrassed Garrett Therolf, the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Times.

            It seems that one of the last things Trish Ploehn did before she was removed from her job was reverse DCFS’ former opposition to opening court hearings in abuse and neglect cases to press and public.  That’s something I’d first suggested to Plohen when we met nearly three years ago, long before the current controversy.  The Board of Supervisors agreed and voted to ask the California Legislature to change state law to open these hearings.

            The Legislature should listen.

            Since 1980, well over a dozen states have opened court hearings in these kinds of cases, and not one has closed them again.  That’s because all the fears of critics proved groundless – indeed in many states, one-time critics of openness now are among the biggest boosters of open courts. 

            While it is impossible to guarantee absolutely that no child ever will be embarrassed by an open court hearing, this much we know: When the system is fully open and accountable, and everyone knows that, if they cut corners, someone may be watching, more children are likely to live long enough to blush.  The former chief judge of New York’s highest court, Judith Kaye, who opened these hearings in New York put it best.  Said Judge Kaye: “Sunshine is good for children.”

           The reasons open courts are better for children are discussed in detail in our Due Process Agenda so I won’t elaborate on it here.  I do have one question for the Times editorial board, though: How did you guys find out about this?

            I ask because even though he’s spent months complaining about secrecy at DCFS (often with good reason) Garrett Therolf never bothered to report the agency’s reversal in its position or the Supervisors’ vote.  To find out about it, you had to either have been notified directly by DCFS and/or the supervisors, or you had to read it at WitnessLA, which had the story three weeks ago, or you had to read the memo I sent to NCCPR’s list of reporters and advocates in Los Angeles that included a link to the WitnessLA story.

            Presumably, Therolf didn’t report the story because he’s one of those with the most to lose if better reporters can walk into court at any time and see all sides of the story – particularly the sides Therolf keeps refusing to report.  (Once again, I am applying the David Lauter standard – the Times Assistant Managing Editor has made clear it’s perfectly o.k. to “presume” whatever you want about someone with whom you disagree.)

            The Times editorial argues that opening these hearings will help reporters find answers to questions like these:

            Does DCFS remove too many children from their homes when there are allegations of abuse? Does it leave too many in the hands of abusive parents or reunite them too quickly?

            In fact, what they will find is that the answer to both questions is: Yes.

            Like most child welfare agencies, DCFS is arbitrary, capricious and cruel. It errs in all directions at once. Wrongful removal overloads caseworkers so they have less time to find children in real danger. That’s one reason the foster-care panic started by Therolf’s reporting, has made everything worse, something illustrated in the previous post to this Blog.

Alliance for Children’s Rights responds to previous post

SAYS THEY’RE NOT AGAINST LA’S CHILD WELFARE WAIVER

The Alliance for Children’s Rights has asked to respond to the previous post to this Blog.   I’m glad to publish the response below.  In part this is in the hope, however unlikely, that by once again publishing a point of view with which I don’t entirely agree, this will set an example for Garrett Therolf, the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Los Angeles Times, who has systematically shut out of his stories strong advocates of family preservation and those, outside DCFS, who take issue with his “master narrative.” (I’m not optimistic.  Previously I’ve allowed Therolf himself to comment on this Blog when he felt treated unfairly, and he still shuts out meaningful dissent from his own stories).

In any event, below is the response, in full, from Janis Spire, Chief Executive Officer of the Alliance for Children’s Rights, followed by my response to the response:

STATEMENT OF JANIS SPIRE

In response to your recent blog on Foster Care in L.A., I would like the opportunity to clarify my statements on the KPCC Pat Morrison show and any inferences you have made in reference to The Alliance for Children's Rights position regarding L.A. County's Capped Allocation Waiver and childhood safety.

I was asked by Pat Morrison to identify any opportunities that may be presented by Trish Ploehn's departure as the CEO for Los Angeles' Department of Children and Family Services.  I suggested that Trish Ploehn may have lost her job because of all the attention the media paid

to child fatalities but there are a lot of things that no one is paying attention to that need improvement.  My statement about the waiver was to suggest that Ms. Ploehn inherited the Waiver and that waiver outcomes have never been adequately evaluated to determine whether or not the manner in which flexible dollars are being spent are achieving successful outcomes.  I further suggested that those dollars could also be spent better protecting the children who are in foster care and who need more services and support to keep them safe. 

The Alliance is not opposed to the Waiver and strongly supports any efforts that facilitate family stability including the provision of front-end services designed to keep children from entering foster care.  However, Waiver dollars are intended to address the needs of all youth

at risk, including those in foster care placement.  Because Waiver outcomes in participating states and counties could  influence the direction of  funding child welfare for decades to come, data should be gathered and measured  to ensure that the welfare of  all children at

risk are being sufficiently met.

Finally, The Alliance has not been interviewed by the L.A. Times on this issue, and would like to be taken off record as being a source for Mr. Therolf.

A RESPONSE TO THE RESPONSE

First, I should not have used the word “feeding” in the subhead for the previous post, since that could be read as implying something clandestine.  Rather, I meant that the Alliance’s public statements, like the ones on KPCC, may have prompted Therolf’s campaign against the waiver.

If, in fact, future evaluations for which Los Angeles County already has contracted do not address the issues Ms. Spire raises, as the first one, in fact, did not, then I agree that a more comprehensive evaluation is a good idea, if only to make it harder for “reporters” like Therolf to take a sentence out of context and distort the entire meaning of an evaluation, as he did with the first one.

But as long as foster care is reduced and the standard safety measures do not worsen (and the most recent data indicate that is the case) that is, in fact, a successful outcome.

As for the question of how waiver savings should be spent the larger issue is that the waiver never was ambitious enough, so there have not been enough savings.  The new DCFS leadership should be doing more to keep children out of foster care needlessly, and in particular, more to curb the misuse of the worst forms of care, group homes and institutions, (though to the agency’s credit they have made some real progress on that front).  Those savings then could be used both to keep more children safely in their own homes and better help those already in foster care.

But my biggest concern with Ms. Spire’s response is that she does not address the key statement I found objectionable in the first place – that statement, and my response, are in the previous post.

Foster care in LA: Therolf misleads again…

…BUT AT LEAST NOW WE MAY KNOW WHOSE STATEMENTS MAY HAVE INFLUENCED HIM BEEN FEEDING HIM THIS NONSENSE

            Garrett Therolf, the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Los Angeles Times, was among the guests yesterday on Patt Morrison’s program on KPCC Public radio.  Mostly he behaved himself, but he couldn’t resist one more inaccurate cheap shot.  He alleged that safety “indicators” for children whose cases are known to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services “moved in the wrong direction” during the tenure of now former-DCFS Director Trish Ploehn.

            There is no evidence for this claim.

            As has been discussed extensively on this Blog, one indicator may have moved in the wrong direction according to one report.  But more recent data show this indicator may be improving. 

            And even if one regards an alleged one-year increase in fatalities as another “indicator,” and it would be very difficult to find a serious expert in child welfare who does, it is not clear if even this change is real or simply the result of a more subjective definition of a fatality.

            But Garrett Therolf has never let facts get in the way of his “master narrative” at the Times, so there was no reason to think things would be any different at KPCC.  The real question is why two large public radio stations in the area, KPCC and KCRW, keep inviting back on their air a reporter who should (but almost certainly isn’t) facing an internal investigation at his own newspaper for allegedly putting words into people’s mouths that they say they never said.

            I have been wondering for some time where Therolf has been getting this nonsense, particularly the cheap shots about a waiver from restrictions on federal foster care financing.  Presumably, a lot of it is coming from private agencies that are paid for every day they hold children in foster care.  (Remember, pursuant to what might be called the David Lauter amendments to the Times Code of Ethics, such “presumption” is entirely permissible).

            But now it turns out Therolf may be getting some of his misinformation from Janis Spire, Chief Executive Officer of an L.A. group called the Alliance for Children’s Rights.  Spire claimed that the waiver “incentivizes policies that don’t necessarily keep children safe” and generally used her brief time on the program to get in “poonges” – little digs - at the waiver.

            If it were true that foster care equaled safely and keeping children in their homes equaled risk – which is precisely Therolf’s master narrative – then Spire would have a point.  But anyone who has read the research on the high rate of abuse in foster care itself, and the studies that show children kept in their own homes typically fare better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care, knows that the premise is false.  For the overwhelming majority of children keeping them in their own homes is the safer option.  And it makes sense to “incentivize” the option most likely to keep most children safe.       

            It is particularly disappointing to hear these kinds of comments from the CEO of this particular organization.  The Alliance for Children’s Rights came to prominence a decade ago, when it was run by Andrew Bridge, a former foster child who wrote a searing memoir about his experience, called Hope’s Boy.

            Bridge also is a strong advocate for doing more to keep families together – as can be seen in this passionate op ed column in The New York Times urging New York City not to succumb to foster-care panic.  How sad that one of his successors now is egging on such a panic in Los Angeles.

Step one for new LA DCFS leader: Learn from Florida

In a move that shocked absolutely no one, Trish Ploehn has been removed from her job running the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.  It was the right move.

A spokesman for the County Administrator says that Deputy County Administrator Antonia Jimenez, will be interim director until a permanent replacement can be chosen.  That may take awhile, given the difficulty of finding the right person for the job: someone who is a superb administrator, a visionary leader  - and actually wants the job.

In the meantime, Jimenez should learn from another huge child welfare system that brought in new leadership in a time of crisis: The State of Florida.

When Gov. Charlie Crist took office, almost exactly four years ago, Florida was the national symbol of child welfare failure.  The new Republican governor brought in one of the state’s leading Democrats, former attorney general Bob Butterworth, to run the state Department of Children and Families.  Butterworth’s first move set the stage for everything that would follow:

He pulled Florida DCF out of the bunker.

No more stonewalling.  No more no comment.  No more going to court to oppose release of documents whenever a case would make DCF look bad -  on the contrary, Butterworth sent his lawyers in to side with reporters seeking those documents.

And every ambiguity in law, rule and policy was interpreted in favor of openness.

That did not fix the problems in the child welfare system.  But it bought Butterworth and his exceptional leadership team time and instilled the trust he needed to start fixing those problems.  One member of that team, George Sheldon, succeeded Butterworth and built upon his change in direction.

As it happens, one of Ploehn’s last acts is a good start in that direction.  According to the excellent Blog WitnessLA, DCFS now supports asking the California Legislature to open court hearings in cases alleging abuse and neglect to the press and the public.  So does County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas who is urging the Board of Supervisors to include this in its list of requests of the Legislature.  And so do the current and former foster youth who write for LA Youth – the very young people advocates of secret hearings say they are “protecting” by keeping the press and the public out.

Although WitnessLA reported this on December 7, I haven’t been able to find a word about this in the Los Angeles Times.  Presumably this is because Garrett Therolf, the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Times, doesn’t really want openness, since he can write many more stories by bashing DCFS for the lack of it.  And, presumably, this is because if courts are open, better reporters will be able to see how DCFS errs in all directions – so Therolf won’t be able to impose his selective vision of DCFS mistakes on the public.

Of course, I don’t actually know that.  But pursuant to the journalistic standard set by Therolf’s editor, David Lauter, I don’t actually have to know – all I have to do is “presume.”

Jimenez also could learn from step two in Florida, which was to reverse the-take-the-child-and-run mentality that had dominated Florida DCF since 1999.  Butterworth and his leadership team understood that family preservation and child safety are not opposites that need to be “balanced” – rather, having seen the disaster wrought by the take-the-child-and-run approach, Butterworth and his team knew that Florida couldn’t have child safety without family preservation.

And they had the resources they needed to change direction – thanks to the same kind of waiver from federal funding restrictions that Therolf has been trashing in L.A.  Florida’s success with the same kind of waiver is well documented by The New York Times, and by independent evaluations showing that child safety improved.

So for Jimenez, step two needs to be to send a loud, clear message to the frontlines at DCFS.  She needs to send the message that Garrett Therolf will not be allowed to dictate child welfare policy in Los Angeles County.  His agenda of using fear and smear to stampede workers into tearing apart ever more families will not become the agenda at DCFS.

In short, she needs to send a message that the days of foster care panic in Los Angeles County are over.

Foster care in Los Angeles: A mature response from the L.A. Times editorial board

UPDATE, NOV. 22: Today brings another smart post from Celeste Freemon at WitnessLA and a story about the child welfare waiver debate from the Los Angeles Daily News that takes a refreshing approach: It reports both sides.

Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a smart sensible analysis of what’s gone wrong at the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services – from the Los Angeles Times.  It comes not from the news side, but rather the editorial page.

Today’s editorial zeros-in on the real problems: poor management and obsessive secrecy.  In fact, it bears some resemblance to this post on this Blog about why DCFS Director Trish Ploehn has to go and this one about a report highlighting some of the agency’s real problems.

After carefully sorting the wheat from the chaff, and the facts from the hype, in more than a year of Times news stories, and, apparently going beyond the stories to read some of the underlying documents, the Times editorial concludes:

Steady discipline, better deployment of personnel, clear directives, focused training and an unwavering commitment to public accountability are the methods by which DCFS will recover. The county owes that much to the children in its care.

The contrast is striking, both in tone and substance, with the immature response to critics of Times reporting from David Lauter, the Times’ assistant managing editor for state and local reporting.

REFUSING TO SCAPEGOAT THE WAIVER

Most notable is what the editorial does not say.

● The editorial does not target the county’s waiver from federal funding restrictions; in fact, it doesn’t mention the waiver at all, even though that’s become a favorite scapegoat of Garrett Therolf, the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Times.

● The editorial refuses to buy into Therolf’s hype about child abuse deaths.  The editorial reminds readers that over the past decade, staffing at DCFS has gone up and the number of children under the agency’s supervision has gone down, and then notes that

over that same period, even by DCFS' calculations, the number of children who have died as a result of abuse or neglect has remained steady, at about 20 a year, a discouraging trend that suggests an agency that, if not in crisis, is not making headway toward fulfilling its most fundamental responsibility.

In one respect that’s actually more credit than DCFS is going to get from me – I think, at the moment, the agency is in crisis, partly because of Ploehn’s mismanagement and penchant for secrecy and partly because of the foster-care panic set off by Therolf’s stories.

But looking at the big picture I think there actually has been headway.  For starters, fatalities are an extremely poor way to measure progress for a reason for which we all should be grateful: though each is the worst kind of tragedy, thank God that, in a county with more than 2.5 million residents under age 18, there are few enough of them for the number to rise or fall due to random chance.  That also helps explain why this report from a Texas think tank found that nothing agencies like DCFS do will change those numbers – but more prevention, more efforts to curb poverty and more efforts to curb teenage pregnancy will.  The report also has a good discussion of the limits of trying to measure changes in fatality numbers.

But better measures of safety, such as overall reabuse of children, also have improved over the past decade – Therolf simply hasn’t reported that fact.  (To see these data, click here and follow the instructions for creating a table.)

FEWER TOXIC SIDE EFFECTS

If a child welfare agency can significantly reduce foster care without safety getting worse that is, in fact, headway – because thousands of children have been spared the enormous harm of foster care itself. 

Think of it as like having two drugs to treat cancer. Both work, say, 80 percent of the time and fail the other 20 percent.  But one has terrible toxic side effects, the other doesn’t.  Which do you choose?

Los Angeles County is attaining at least the same level of safety it obtained a decade ago.  That’s not nearly good enough, but at least it’s getting those results while exposing fewer children to the toxic side effects of foster care.  

The real tragedy is that even that progress may be undone by the foster care panic.

The one place where I take issue with the editorial concerns part of the paragraph that follows the one about fatalities.  According to the editorial:

Moreover, though child deaths are the most tragic consequence of DCFS ineffectiveness, the county abounds with stories of children left in squalid conditions, inexplicably reunited with dangerous parents rather than remaining in the hands of caring foster parents, or otherwise mistreated. 

That’s true.  But the county also abounds with stories of children taken from safe homes, or homes that could be made safe with the right kinds of help, only to suffer terrible trauma in foster care.

The Times just refuses to tell those stories.

Covering foster care in Los Angeles: The Empire Strikes Back

Los Angeles Times Assistant Managing Editor David Lauter has written a response to criticism of Times child welfare coverage.

I posted a version of the comment below to the Times website:

How sad that in his desperate attempt to defend the indefensible, David Lauter misrepresents what my organization and others who have criticized the Times actually believe. 

Mr. Lauter falsely claims that “presumably” we don’t want news organizations to cover “mismanagement or poor execution of policies.”  In fact, NCCPR repeatedly has called for more coverage of all child welfare failings.  On our website, we have an entire section linking to examples of the finest such journalism and once or twice a week we send a child welfare news story we think more people should know about to more than 300 reporters around the country, including several at the Times.   Once, we even sent one written by Garrett Therolf.  (If you’d like to be added to the list Mr. Lauter, just send me an e-mail.)

And it should be obvious that, if we really wanted to ignore mismanagement or poor execution of policies, we wouldn’t be urging the Board of Supervisors to replace DCFS Director Trish Ploehn.

Rather, our objection is to what the Times distorts and what the Times leaves out entirely – such as almost never telling the stories of children wrongfully removed from their homes and the harm that does to children.  Indeed, the Times even has refused to report the actual data on the increase in entries into care, data NCCPR obtained using a California Public Records Act request and which we’ve made available here

Particularly instructive is Mr. Lauter’s use of the word “presumably.” When a journalist really wants to know what someone “says” or “wants” the usual approach is to call that person up (or send an e-mail) and ask.  This is commonly known as “reporting” and is generally considered a superior approach to “presuming.”

Mr. Lauter also evades the issue when he claims that:

Another assertion raised by Heimpel and others is that The Times has claimed that the county’s policy regarding when to take children away from parents, often referred to as the Title IV-E waiver, had “caused” an increase in re-abuse.  The Times has not made any such claim.

That’s true.  Instead, reporter Garrett Therolf has strongly implied cause-and-effect in at least three stories, while never once mentioning that the same document that includes the statistic on re-abuse specifically says it is impossible to draw any such conclusion.  Why is the Times afraid to tell readers that simple fact?  Nor does the Times discuss the profound financial incentive for misuse and overuse of foster care that existed before the waiver.

Mr. Lauter himself makes similar use of loaded language when he claims that some people “have a long-standing position in favor of keeping children out of foster care -- even if that means leaving them with abusive parents…”  That, of course, conjures up images of sending children to their doom.  In fact, what my organization favors is not taking away children from parents whose poverty has been confused with neglect, and not taking away children when they can remain safely in their own homes if the parents get the right kinds of help.  And the reason my organization favors this approach is because, for the overwhelming majority of children, it is *safer* than foster care.  The overwhelming evidence for this is documented at www.nccpr.org

●Concerning the fatality data, the broadening of the definition of fatalities also has made the determination of whether a fatality is the result of maltreatment or an accident far more subjective.  Therefore, even with the same definition, it is harder to know if the increase is real.

The Times also has failed to report that, if the increase is real, one possible cause is the foster-care panic which overloads workers, leaving them less time to find children in real danger.

●As for the rest, readers need simply compare Mr. Lauter’s comments to what Daniel Heimpel found when he re-reported the story for The Huffington Post  to see that Mr. Lauter has ignored many of the most serious problems with Therolf’s stories – such as the people who say the Times has been putting words in their mouths. 

Foster care in Los Angeles: Why Trish Ploehn must go (and who should replace her)

            It’s been obvious for some time that Trish Ploehn’s days as the embattled director of the beleaguered Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (or, if you prefer, the beleaguered director of the embattled … etc.) are numbered.

            If Ploehn is fired it increases the odds of L.A. Times reporter Garrett Therolf winning awards for his lousy journalism (it will be item one on the entry form under “What did the stories accomplish?”).  If Ploehn is fired it may well lead to a suck-up piece about the wonderful job Therolf and the Times have done by the Times’ media reporter James Rainey (notwithstanding Rainey’s own conflict of interest – more than a decade ago, he screwed up the child welfare beat in much the same way as Therolf).  If Ploehn is fired it’s going to take time to find a good replacement - the pool of available talent is thin. And if Ploehn is fired it will contribute to the reputation of the top child welfare job in L.A. as a revolving door.

In spite of all that, it’s essential that the Board of Supervisors replace Trish Ploehn. Because you can’t run one of the largest child welfare agencies in America from a bunker.

            A Therolf trademark is briefly opening the door to those holding other points of view when he thinks he’s writing what amounts to an obituary for what they stand for.  Thus, the one and only time the excellent grassroots group for families who have lost children to Ploehn’s agency, DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children, was allowed a word in edgewise in a Therolf story was when he was writing about Ploehn saying she was going to stop trying to reduce the number of children in foster care – which seems to be one of Therolf’s  biggest goals.

            Similarly, with Ploehn now plainly on the way out, Donna Myrow, who publishes a newspaper written by foster youth, was allowed to point out in a Therolf story that children known-to-the- system actually have died even while other people were running DCFS:

 [Myrow] said Ploehn has worked under a microscope in ways her predecessors did not because new disclosure laws have made it easier for the public to see the department's worst cases.  "The problems we are reading about are not new, they are just coming to the public's attention in ways they did not before," said Myrow.


THE LAW THAT STARTED IT ALL


            That law is, in fact, crucial to understanding everything that’s happened since.  By opening up records only in death or near death cases, it plays right into the hands of the Garrett Therolfs of journalism.  Since more children live in their own homes than in foster homes, more children are going to die in their own homes than in foster homes – even though the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than the rate in the general population.  And since everything else, all those poverty-confused-with-neglect cases and other needless removals of children, remains secret, the law reinforces the impression that child welfare systems err in only one direction – leaving children in dangerous homes.

            The fatality story also becomes the easiest story to do – child welfare’s equivalent of  low-hanging fruit.  For a reporter whose beat is crime, or government or human services, there may be no faster way to journalism awards and career advancement (or at least making sure you’re spared in the next round of layoffs) than to do “the fatality series.” And once you have the most compelling possible victim – a dead child – you need a simple villain.  So the easiest scapegoat is the one that is simple, obvious – and wrong: efforts to keep families together. 


            So it is true that no matter what Trish Ploehn did, no matter how open she was about her agency’s failings and no matter how much information she provided, Garrett Therolf would have distorted it and used it selectively to reinforce his own “master narrative.”

            There are several ways one can deal with that:

            ● Press the legislature to broaden the law so the agency can release information about all cases, not just the fatalities.

            ● Follow the lead of New York, Arizona, and at least two other states and pass legislation allowing DCFS and its counterparts around the state to comment on any case that becomes public in any way.

            ● Press the legislature to open all court hearings to the press and the public so better reporters than Garrett Therolf can walk in anytime and see how the system typically functions in typical cases.

            ● Release all information that existing law allows and interpret all ambiguity in favor of openness – and then seek out journalists who are not determined to slant every story to fit their master narrative. 

Yes, the Times remains by far the loudest media voice, but the Los Angeles Daily News consistently has provided context the Times leaves out, the smart Blog Witnessla.com also has added perspective  missing from the Times news pages, and LA Weekly pointed out that Therolf’s own editors had to dial back one of his recent stories. LA Observed, a Blog that closely follows media in the region hasn’t weighed in yet, but it’s another place where an alternative to Therolf’s “master narrative” might find a fair hearing.  All that media combined can provide some degree of check-and-balance on the Times – provided DCFS itself proves it can be trusted by being absolutely open and candid about its own failings.

DIVING INTO THE BUNKER


            Instead, Ploehn dived into the bunker.  For starters, she began trying to stop the release of information on the death cases – taking advantage of the fact that the law allowing their release is badly written and full of loopholes.  Of course that only led to the information being leaked.  Then Ploehn compounded the problem by launching an investigation into the leaks.  Nothing – nothing – makes a newspaper angrier than someone trying to find and punish their sources.  And the investigation itself took on a Keystone Kops flavor when DCFS workers allegedly conducted an illegal search of the purse of Darlene McDade-White, the agency’s own lead internal affairs investigator, apparently believing she might be the leaker.  They found no evidence of that.


            When Ploehn wasn’t stonewalling, she was dissembling.  Trish Ploehn has managed to answer the same basic question with responses that boil down to “yes” “no” and “maybe” – all in the same day.

            All of this is morally reprehensible.  The public has a right to know how a government agency charged with protecting its vulnerable citizens is functioning.  Period.  The fact that on rare occasions, a journalist will behave reprehensibly himself and distort the information does not repeal that right.

            It’s also remarkably stupid.   Every leak of a case file, or even part of a file, becomes another story.  Every attempt to suppress information becomes another story.  Every attempt to find out who is leaking information becomes another story.  If Garrett Therolf really does manage to win his Pulitzer Prize he ought to share the prize money with Trish Ploehn, who made it all possible.


            This also means that Ploehn’s replacement needs to send three clear messages from day one:

            ●We’re coming out of the bunker.  We will provide all the information we can as quickly and as accurately as we can, and we will interpret any ambiguity in law in favor of openness, even as we push to change laws to allow for more disclosure.

            ●Garrett Therolf will not be allowed to dictate child welfare policy in Los Angeles County.  We will not be intimidated by his distortion and misrepresentation of our efforts to keep children safely in their own homes.  Indeed, the data clearly show that these efforts have been inadequate – Los Angeles County still takes away too many children - and we will redouble those efforts.  We will do that because for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time, family preservation is the safer option.

            ● Frontline workers will be held accountable for laziness, incompetence and stupidity.  But they will not be scapegoated for honest error – and we will not respond to every new headline with a blizzard of pointless new policies, making their tough jobs even tougher.

BRING BACK SANDERS – FOR A FEW MONTHS


            As for who might be able to send such a message, there is one person who could come in on an interim basis and truly hit the ground running – and it’s someone who might be available on an interim basis at no charge.  I’ll repeat a suggestion I first made last February:

Bring back David Sanders.

Sanders was Ploehn's immediate predecessor. He is the only DCFS director in recent years to leave the job voluntarily, and the only one who could cope with the County Board of Supervisors. He initiated the waiver from federal child welfare financing limits that Therolf has been trying so hard to smear, so he has a strong interest in seeing that it works.

He also made some mistakes. Entries into care increased during his tenure, and he brought in an approach to deciding who to throw into foster care called Structured Decision Making which has backfired (See our material on Los Angeles County child welfare for details).

But the fact that he pushed for the waiver suggests he saw the problems and was moving to deal with them, when he left to become Executive Vice President of Systems Improvement at Casey Family Programs (CFP), the multi-billion dollar foundation that loves fancy titles and spent more than 51 hours on this Blog and NCCPR's website last year - and another three-and-a-half hours just yesterday.

A few years ago CFP essentially vacuumed up many of the best and the brightest in child welfare (like David Sanders) around the country (and when they ran out of good people who would accept their offers, they started scraping the middle of the barrel, too.) It's time that Casey gave something back, by "lending" Sanders to Los Angeles, while continuing to pay his salary, so Sanders can help fix the mess that Trish Ploehn did so much to create.

If you’re reading this Dr. Sanders (and, given how much time people at CFP spend on this Blog, the odds are pretty good) you should know there is one improvement over when you had the job before: The Board of Supervisors is behaving itself remarkably well.  In spite of all the pressure – and how easy it would be to get great press by pandering to Therolf - only one of the five Supervisors, Zev Yaroslavsky, has been doing that.  So, given that they already know and respect you, it just might be possible to clean up this mess.

Tomorrow: The real lessons from the waiver evaluation

Foster care in L.A.: What planet are they on?

            It’s been a standard feature of science fiction films and television series at least since The Twilight Zone: the plot involving the “parallel universe” – with the planet that looks just like Earth populated with counterparts to ourselves, but where things are just a little different.  There’s even a standard visual cue: Blimps as a common means of transportation.

            I mention this because I’m beginning to wonder about Los Angeles.  In the Los Angeles I’m used to, the big newspaper in town is serious and sober, and in recent decades at least, known for careful, in-depth reporting that elevated the profession of journalism.  The politicians on the other hand … Well, let’s just say there’s a reason I’ve been referring to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors as “the B.S.”

            And it’s not just me.  Throughout the child welfare community, the Board of Supervisors has such a bad reputation that it’s getting harder and harder to get anyone any good to take the job of running the county Department of Children and Family Services.  (That may explain why Trish Ploehn still has that particular job.)

            But lately things have gotten weird.  The Los Angeles Times has started to read like the New York Post, as reporter Garrett Therolf continues his reckless crusade to force the county to take away more children, systematically omitting facts and voices that contradict his point of view.  David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote The Wire has a great phrase for work like Therolf’s: “Pulitzer-sniffing.”

            And now, who should come forward with a smart, thoughtful op ed column, asking everyone to calm down and gather all the facts before jumping to conclusions?  Not one, but two of the five members of the Board of Supervisors.  They write:

Facts need to dictate how Los Angeles handles its most vulnerable children. Before we call for a major reversal in child welfare policy, one that could lead to a rush of children being taken from their parents prematurely, we need to honestly evaluate where we are today. Evidence, not emotion, needs to fuel the debate.

            One of the authors is Mark Ridley-Thomas.  He’s the newest member of the board, so his call for common sense and rationality could be chalked up to inexperience.  But he is joined by Michael Antonovich who, in the past, was one of the worst offenders.  They both deserve credit for taking an unpopular stand and risking the wrath of what still is the most powerful media voice in Southern California – assuming of course this is the real Los Angeles County.

            It probably is – but just in case, keep an eye out for blimps.

UPDATE: There's a smart, sensible post on all this from the blog Witnessla.com But, happily, there is nothing unusual about that.

Child welfare in LA: Of course children are sleeping in a conference room – that’s what foster care panic does

    Buried at the bottom of a Los Angeles Times story yesterday is the revelation that, since January 2009, at least 31 children taken from their parents have been housed for more than one night in a conference room converted into a makeshift "shelter."

    That shouldn't surprise anyone. When, all of a sudden, you're taking away 16 percent more children for no good reason, you're going to have trouble finding places for all of them, and some of them are going to wind up dumped in a converted office. It's been a standard feature of foster-care panics for decades. And if the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services doesn't get a grip, fast, it may get a whole lot worse.

This is from a Chicago Tribune story about what it was like during the foster-care panic that swept through Illinois starting in 1993:

A surly teenager with a bad attitude struts and shouts swear words a few yards away from the abused and neglected little ones, so young they can barely tell you their names ... 16-year-old Harry is boasting: 'I stole 50 cars this week!' A few yards away is 5-year-old Michael, so very scared and trying with all his might not to cry. 'I'm the big brother,' Michael explains, gently stroking the hair of Christopher, 4, who gulps heavy, sleepy breaths and sucks his thumb on a cot in a corner. ... When a visitor tried to shake the little boy's hand, he threw his arms around her,
starving for a hug ...
"I want my mom,' Michael said ...

    But, as I said, the information about the makeshift shelter in Los Angeles was way at the bottom of the story. Reporter Garrett Therolf was far more interested in the question of whether DCFS has been hiding the true number of child abuse deaths in the county. (The answer: almost certainly yes. A claim by DCFS Director Trish Ploehn that she was unaware of the problems leading to the failure to disclose some of the cases ranks right up there with Michael Brown, five years ago, saying he was unaware of how badly New Orleans had been hit by Hurricane Katrina.)

    It's a very important story – but so is the latest consequence of the foster-care panic that Therolf himself did so much to start. Yet by today, there was another story on the fatality numbers, while all mention of the children in the conference room had disappeared.

    And even on the matter of the fatality numbers, Therolf missed one of the most important points: The fact that it's so easy to manipulate the numbers is one more reason why you can't tell whether a child welfare system is getting better or worse based on the number of fatalities.

    Like the current panic in Los Angeles, the one in Illinois in 1993 was largely a newspaper-fueled panic. I wrote about it at the time for Chicago's alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader. At the time, I asked one of the state's leading child advocates, the lawyer who brought a major class-action lawsuit against the child welfare system, if the Tribune's coverage had left the Illinois system better or worse. His reply: "Unquestionably, worse."

    Fortunately, both the Illinois child welfare agency and the Chicago Tribune learned from their mistakes (and one of those two entities probably would even admit it). Today, Illinois takes away children at one of the lowest rates in the country, the rate-of-removal in greater Chicago is the lowest in America's large metropolitan areas, and independent court-appointed monitors, named as a result of that class-action lawsuit, say that the reforms in Illinois have made children safer.

There is no evidence yet of a similar learning curve in Los Angeles.

Foster care in Los Angeles: “The same dumb mistakes”

Here we go again. The death of a child "known to the system" is on the front page of the Los Angeles Times again today.

This time, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services had not yet decided if the child was at risk even though a case had been opened 57 days ago. Such determinations are supposed to be made within 30 days. But DCFS can't catch up because of a huge backlog of reports.

The agency director, Trish Ploehn, says she needs to hire lots more investigators. County Supervisor Gloria Molina doesn't agree, telling the Times: ""If you tell me we need more people to make the same dumb mistakes without proper supervision, I disagree."

Molina happens to be right about the fact that hiring more investigators won't help, something I'll get to below.

But the irony of any member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors complaining about anyone else making "the same dumb mistakes" in child welfare is, I trust, obvious.

And yet, Molina doesn't win the irony derby.

That honor goes to the Times itself, since when it comes to making "the same dumb mistakes" it's hard to top how the Times has been covering child welfare since Garrett Therolf took over the beat.

The kind of tragedy in today's story will happen over and over until the Times owns up to its own role – and changes its approach.

The lack of context in Times coverage of fatalities set off a foster-care panic – a sudden spike in children taken from their parents. In addition to causing enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, it also further overloaded the system – making the backlog even worse.

So even as more children are separated from everyone they know and love, more children in real danger are missed because workers are too busy to get to them in time.

None of this is hindsight. What was revealed in today's story is what we predicted would happen. When the Times refused to check into the panic we filed our own California Public Records Act request to obtain the data: Full details on the foster care panic, and the rest of what the Times declines to report are available on our website here. And this Orange County Register story, based in part on NCCPR's California Rate-of-Removal Index, discusses how Orange County has a far better grip on the problem.

As for hiring: DCFS should indeed be hiring. But if all they do is hire more workers, even as the Times fans the flames of foster-care panic, those new workers will just spin their wheels investigating more false reports and trivial cases and taking away more children needlessly. All you'll get is the same lousy system only bigger – as is clear from what's happened in the past few years in Texas and, most recently, Indiana. In contrast, New Jersey hired more workers, but did it as part of a comprehensive reform plan that emphasized doing more to keep families together. The results are documented in the previous post to this Blog.

So instead of investigators, DCFS should be hiring family preservation workers to bring the right kinds of help into the homes of troubled families. That really will cut caseloads and give investigators more time to find children in real danger.

LA Times foster care coverage: The case of the misleading lead

Talk about blowing the lead. The first 12 words in yesterday's feeble attempt by the Los Angeles Times to add some context to its child welfare coverage are grossly misleading, and possibly flat wrong. Those 12 words are: "As deaths among abused and neglected children have mounted in recent months…"

But the story offers no evidence of any such thing.

Rather, once again, the Los Angeles Times is repeating the New York Times fallacy: confusing an increase in media attention to child abuse deaths with an actual increase in deaths. And, amazingly, given the misleading lead, later in the story, the Times essentially admits as much.

According to yesterday's story, there have been about 35 deaths of children "known to the system" since January, 2008. That would be an average of one such tragedy every 23 days. There may have been an increase of three deaths in 2009 compared with 2008 – but the figures for both years are below the figure for 1998, when more children were taken from their homes, and vastly more were in foster care on any given day.

If there is any evidence that this rate has increased "in recent months" – whatever "recent months" means, the story does not provide it. Indeed, if the two such deaths that have been the subject of Times stories in 2010 are the only such cases, then the rate has declined. And either way, it tells us absolutely nothing about whether the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services is doing a better or a worse job of keeping children safe.

When you are talking about an average of roughly 18 deaths a year among children "known to the system" in a city with 3.2 million children and a child welfare agency with thousands of workers, it should be obvious that the fatality number alone can rise and fall due to random chance, and trying to judge whether an agency is getting better or worse based on that number is idiotic. (It also helps explain that major new study which found that investigating more cases and taking more children does nothing to curb fatalities, while focusing on prevention and ameliorating poverty does.)

LEVELING WITH READERS – AT LAST

Indeed, much farther down in the story the Times finally hints at the real story – and contradicts the lead. According to this part of the story:

Under [DCFS Director Trish] Ploehn, a 30-year department veteran, the agency's failings have come to light more readily than in the past, largely because of a state law that opened previously confidential records. Before the law took effect in 2008, virtually all information about children's deaths from abuse or neglect was kept from public view, ostensibly to protect the privacy of victims and their families. Reports about horrific cases leaked out sporadically.

In other words, as far as anyone can tall, the deaths haven't mounted, the Los Angeles Times has simply decided to pay attention.

Still absent from Times coverage are two salient facts: Even people with no love of family preservation, like Deanne Tilton Durfee, probably America's most quoted "expert" on child abuse fatalities, who, according to the competing Los Angeles Daily News "agreed the increase in deaths [in 2009 compared to 2008] is not a 'significant increase in the larger spectrum of things.'" And, for those who absolutely insist on using this measure, as noted above, such deaths actually are down from 1998 decade ago – a time when DCFS was taking away more children.

Garrett Therolf, the lead reporter on the Times stories, claims that the way deaths are measured has changed since 1998. But he actually made that claim not in the Times but in the excellent Blog Witnessla.com, which he apparently contacted to object to something they'd written. He's done the same with this Blog – utterly oblivious to the irony in his constant demands that everyone else tell his side of the story, even as he systematically omits those who favor family preservation from his own reporting. Why hasn't he raised the issue of comparing rates of child abuse deaths in the Times itself? Perhaps because then he'd have to mention the fact that, by at least one measure, deaths have declined. And then he'd have to deal with whole issue of whether you can evaluate DCFS based on fatalities. And then the whole house of cards on which the Times coverage has been built collapses.

FAMILY PRESERVATION ADVOCATES STILL SHUT OUT

That blackout of family preservation advocates continued yesterday, as the story, apparently meant to be some kind of overall assessment of DCFS Director Trish Ploehn's performance, left out anyone from DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children, the grassroots group arguing that DCFS isn't doing enough to keep families together. (That group turned up only when Therolf apparently thought he was writing family preservation's obituary in Los Angeles.)

Yesterday's whole story reads like tokenism – the story to point to when people say the Times coverage lacked any context. Do it once, get it out of the way, and then back to business as usual.

And even as tokenism, it's not very good. Because totally absent is any guidance for readers to allow them to determine if, in fact the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services has made children safer over the past decade and whether it is likely to do so in the future. How are readers supposed to know? The implication is that you know by counting the number of deaths. But what if that number rises this year, just because the EMTs who might have saved lives in a couple of cases went to the wrong house or got stuck in traffic? What if it falls because someone shot at a child – and missed? What if it changes because deaths that one year are considered accidental the next year are considered "neglect" – or vice versa? That gives some idea of how absurd it is to try to use deaths of children known-to-the-system as a measure. Better measures exist – the Times simply hasn't discussed them, much less committed, in advance, to actually using them.

Still, the story did serve one useful purpose: It included a lot about how the county Board of Supervisors loves to preen and posture about these cases, and pronounce itself shocked – shocked! – by things it had every reason to know about all along.

TOMORROW: THE CASE OF THE SELECTIVE SIDEBAR

Foster care in Los Angeles: An inconvenient death

Did Viola Vanclief pay the price of panic?
If all one knew about child welfare was what one read on the news pages of the Los Angeles Times, one would think that only birth parents or other relatives kill children, and it's all because the county Department of Children and Family Services supposedly has been bending over backwards to keep families together.

That's been the "master narrative" – to use the late St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor William Woo's wonderful phrase – that guided Times coverage for most of last year and into this year. A master narrative it not something handed down from above. It's not some kind of media conspiracy. (As a former editor of mine liked to say, "there are no media conspiracies; we're not that well organized.")
Rather, the master narrative is simply the preconceived notions reporters bring with them to a story.

 The best reporters guard against being trapped by a master narrative. They constantly question their own assumptions.

One might think that if anything finally might have prompted Times reporters to question their master narrative it would be the tragic death of two-year-old Viola Vanclief. She died in a foster home overseen by a private agency with a long history of problems. The foster parents are under investigation. The foster mother says it was an accident. The police say it was a homicide. And in a story about the death on Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times says the equivalent of "move along, move along. Nothin' to see here." A follow-up story today displayed the standard double-standard in child welfare coverage based on where the child dies. I'll get to that below. But let's start with Tuesday's story.

It was written in a way that seems intended to mislead people into thinking that in no way does this case call into question the Times' master narrative, and it's still really birth parents we need to fear. According to the story:

The death comes as [DCFS Director Trish] Ploehn's department is facing scrutiny in the deaths of children under its watch. All but two of the more than 30 cases to come to light in the last two years have involved children killed while in the custody of their own parents

The identical paragraph appears in the follow-up story. Odds are it will become cut-and-paste boilerplate in almost every Times story about this case.

But the reason for that ratio of fatalities is not because foster care is safer, but simply because far fewer children live in foster care than in their own homes.

One could just as easily have said that the rate of child abuse deaths in Los Angeles foster care is nearly ten times the rate in the general population. That would have been equally misleading – for a reason for which we all should be grateful: the number of child abuse fatalities and, especially, fatalities in foster care, is low enough to fluctuate enormously due to random chance. For example, had Viola Vanclief escaped with her life – or if it turns out the death really was an accident – the rate of child abuse deaths in foster care over the past two years suddenly is cut in half.

It is entirely fair to point out, however, that several studies have found the overall rate of abuse in foster care to be alarmingly high, far higher than in the general population, with abuse in at least one in four or one in three foster homes - and probably more. The rate of abuse in institutions is even worse. (For details and citations, see NCCPR Issue Paper #1).

THE STANDARD DOUBLE-STANDARD

But the Times chose to spin the story in a way that swings the focus back to dangerous birth parents, setting up a follow-up story which focuses only on the need for better screening and background checks and tougher licensing standards.

It's the standard double-standard in typical child welfare coverage: Deaths at the hands of birth parents are blamed on a systemic bias toward family preservation, deaths in foster care are written off as aberrations, fixable with some changes in regulations. When newspapers break this pattern, as they did in Maine after the death of Logan Marr and in Missouri after the death of Dominic James, a funny thing happens: child welfare systems actually improve.

But unlike the newspapers in Maine and Missouri, the Times makes no mention of the possibility that the misuse and overuse of foster care itself could have contributed to this death.

The Times coverage also ignores an even more disturbing question: Was Viola Vanclief a victim of a foster care panic set off, in part, by the response to earlier Times stories?

We don't know. But that's never stopped a newspaper from making the points it wants to make by using some variation of "raises questions," so I see no reason for it to stop this Blog.

The first question is whether Viola Vanclief ever needed to be placed in foster care.

The follow-up story reports a series of allegations about Vanclief's birth mother and a series of claims about everything DCFS did to help. If all those allegations and claims are true, than the placement was justified. The problem is, the Times doesn't make clear that these are only allegations and claims – rather the Times uses the phrase "investigators determined," which gives the information in the case files obtained by the Times more credibility than it deserves.

In fact, it is possible that intensive mental health services might have allowed Viola's mother to care for her safely – we don't know that, but it's possible. It's also unlikely that DCFS ever offered that kind of help.

But framing the issue without even considering that the case file might be wrong is crucial to maintaining the standard double-standard; in the public mind, it takes the issue of family preservation off the table, because the issue is framed in terms of, as the Times story puts it "one high-risk home to another."

The follow-up story also mentions that Viola had an adult sister living in Ohio. The story does not explore whether DCFS considered placing Viola with her sister before turning to strangers.

IS THERE A PANIC?

The second question is whether there is, in fact, a foster-care panic. Although the number of children in foster care in Los Angeles County each month is available on the public DCFS website, the number of entries into care – that is, the number of children actually taken away from their parents over the course of a month – is available only on a private, internal site. Ploehn promised to provide me with these figures when she contacted NCCPR on Feb. 5. But she never did. The Times apparently doesn't want to know. So on Tuesday, NCCPR filed a California Public Records Act request in an attempt to obtain these data.

But let's assume, for the moment, that DCFS was absolutely right to take Viola Vanclief from her birth parents. Let's further assume that, unlike just about everyplace else in the country, Los Angeles County really did resist a foster-care panic – and that's not out of the question, thanks to their child welfare funding waiver.

That doesn't change the fact that, even before the Times turned up the heat, Los Angeles County was taking away children at a higher rate than most big cities. And it doesn't change the fact that in most years since 2004, entries into care increased.

For all their faults, child welfare agencies don't like placing children in substandard foster care. And California counties generally don't like subcontracting to private agencies, (known in that state as Foster Family Agencies,or FFAs) at all – because it costs more than when the county does the job itself.

So why does it keep happening?

BEGGARS CAN'T BE CHOOSERS

When you take away too many children, you wind up begging for places to put them. Beggars can't be choosers. So even if the removal was justified and there is no foster care panic, DCFS' failure to curb wrongful removal probably played a role in this tragedy. Even if Viola really should have been taken away, the good foster home she deserved probably was being used by some other child who could have remained safely in his or her own home.

States and counties that don't take too many children don't have to lower standards for foster parents.
Similarly, the Times treats as a mystery the fact that there were so many investigations of alleged abuse by the foster mother of her foster children that never were substantiated (while an earlier allegation, involving one of the foster mother's own children was). In fact, the reason is probably the same reason why official figures for abuse in foster care are so much lower than the numbers found by independent studies: Overloaded agencies don't want to lose foster homes, and they don't want to look bad; after all, when they investigate abuse in foster care they are, in effect, investigating themselves. So there is a strong incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file.

BOYCOTTING REUNIFICATION CELEBRATIONS

The coverage of Viola Vanclief's death is not the only indication of the Times' master narrative at work. Another is how the Times covered events throughout the county earlier this month designed to celebrate successful family reunification: It didn't.

The Los Angeles Daily News did a story. So did KPCC Public radio. So did the Long Beach Press Telegram. But at the Los Angeles Times, family reunification is only news when it goes wrong.

One could argue of course that, precisely because successful family reunification is the norm, it's not newsworthy – like all those planes that don't crash. But people know that air travel is the safest form of transportation. They don't know that keeping families together is the safest answer in child welfare for the overwhelming majority of children. Since they don't know it, that makes stories about the success of family reunification newsworthy.

Just not at the L.A. Times.

NEXT STOP, THE ORPHANAGE?

So what comes next? Watch the letters to the editor column. Inevitably, there'll be a letter concluding that the only answer is to go back to the orphanage. After all, if you spend a year smearing efforts to keep families together, and then a child dies in foster care, what's left? Indeed, the one "expert" whose voice lead reporter Garrett Therolf regularly allows into his stories, precisely because she won't challenge his master narrative, seems to have some nostalgia for them.

In fact, this is, by far, the worst option. And nowhere is that more obvious than Los Angeles, once home to one of the most hideous child warehouses in America, the notorious MacLaren Children's Center.

The book I wrote about child welfare 20 years ago, Wounded Innocents, begins at MacLaren. This was a place so awful it actually has a self-help group for survivors. Say whatever you want about former DCFS Director David Sanders, but if the only thing he accomplished was closing that hellhole, that alone makes his tenure a success.

The letter writer will specify that she or he doesn't mean places like that, rather she or he wants good orphanages – as though wishing for this magically will make it so. But, of course, any orphanages will be regulated by the same agency that licensed Viola Vanclief's foster parents.

More important, institutionalization is inherently so harmful that there is no such thing as a good orphanage. And orphanages make almost impossible the best alternative for children who truly are not safe in their own homes: adoption. For details, see our Issue Paper on orphanages and our review of the research on residential treatment centers, which is what orphanages generally call themselves today.

If people had a chance to read about what really works in child welfare, they wouldn't even be considering orphanages. Maybe someday, the Los Angeles Times will give them that chance.