Will truthiness triumph in Kansas?

It will if some lawmakers attacking kinship foster care get their way

A few months ago on this blog, I posed a hypothetical question to some folks in Oregon.  Now I’d like to pose the same question to some politicians – and some journalists – in Kansas: 

Suppose a couple of strangers kidnapped your child at birth and fled to Mexico.  Suppose they took really good care of your child.  Suppose a year, or two years, or three years later they came back.  Should they be allowed to keep your child? 

Of course not, you say? 

But wait.  The kidnappers took great care of your child.  They just figured they’d do a better job than you.  And now your child has bonded with them.  After all, the kidnappers are the only family your child has ever known!  

Still no?  Are you sure? 

Then why are Kansas lawmakers and their media allies backing a bill that would do essentially the same thing in foster care cases? 

Oh but this is different, you say.  When foster parents (especially white, middle-class foster parents) play the bonding card against birth parents or their extended family (who are more likely to be neither middle class nor white) the foster parents didn’t do anything illegal – in fact, the placement was authorized by a government agency, and the foster parents probably have the best of intentions. 

So what?  

If alleged bonding is superior to every other consideration and this child supposedly would be terribly harmed if moved from “the only family he’s ever known;” if such a move would be contrary to his “best interests,” why should that alleged harm be inflicted on a child just because, in the case of a kidnapping, the initial removal was illegal? 

I ask because, right now, in Kansas, the bonding card is being played do denigrate everything from sibling connections to choosing relatives over strangers when placing a foster child for adoption.

In fact, the research is overwhelming that when children really have to be placed in foster care or adopted, kinship foster care – placement with extended family or close family friends – is more stable and better for children’s well-being than what should properly be called “stranger care.”  Kinship placements also are safer, and kin are less likely to dope up foster children on potent psychiatric medication. 

That’s why federal law has a preference, albeit far too minimal a preference, for placing children with relatives. To receive federal foster care funds, states must 

consider giving preference to an adult relative over a nonrelated caregiver when determining a placement for a child, provided that the relative caregiver meets all relevant State child protection standards. 

In Kansas, when the state has terminated parental rights and the state is looking for an adoptive home, state law also has an extremely mild preference for kin.  Under current state law: 

the court shall give preference, to the extent that the court finds it is in the best interests of the child, first to granting such custody for adoption to a relative of the child and second to granting such custody to a person with whom the child has close emotional ties. [Emphasis added.] 

Even this mild preference has the all-purpose loophole “best interests of the child” – the most dangerous phrase in the child welfare lexicon since “best interests” is subject to the whims – and prejudices – of those making the decisions. 

But even this is more than some Kansas lawmakers can stomach. 

Notwithstanding the mass of research showing kinship placements are far more likely to be in “the best interests of the child,” they’re proposing to specifically downgrade kin, and give preference to stranger-care parents if the child has been in their physical custody  for more than two years, or for more than half the child’s lifetime -- or any other time the political employee in charge of the state family policing agency unilaterally decides this would be “in the best interests of the child.” 

Oh, and if, by some chance, the family police still dare to prefer a relative, the foster parents would be given power to go to court and demand they get the child instead.  If the court dared to say no, they’d have the right to appeal – thereby prolonging impermanence for the child while also making it easier to cite their own stalling as a reason not to take a child from “the only family he’s ever known.” 

In the real world … 

Here’s how this would play out in real life: Middle-class caseworkers take away poor people’s children and throw them into the homes of middle-class strangers – people the caseworkers can identify with.  They make little or no effort to find relatives.  If relatives do turn up, they find all sorts of excuses not to license them as foster parents (licensing requirements often involve middle-class creature comforts; relatives tend to be poor). The relatives spend months trying to meet those requirements.  Or the agency finds all sorts of other excuses to find the relatives unsuitable.  Or it’s months before relatives even find out the child is in foster care. 

Meanwhile, the agency, perhaps with the aid of the middle-class stranger-care parents, stalls and stalls and stalls.  So by the time the relatives meet the requirements and jump through any other hoops thrown in their way, so much time has passed that, well, you know how it is, right? The middle-class stranger-care parents are “the only family the children have ever known.”  So, under the proposed law, they would get to step right up and keep a poor person’s child for their very own. 

In fact, the law goes even further.  It would eliminate even the extremely mild preference for relatives in existing law at any point in the adoption process - even if the relatives are available and meet all agency criteria from the start.  If this bill becomes law, the slight preference that serves to make the playing field a little less unequal for impoverished kin when facing off against affluent strangers is wiped out from day one.  (This raises a question: Would this put Kansas in violation of the federal law cited above?) 

All of this would be bad enough in any state.  But this law is being proposed in Kansas, which, year
after year, tears apart families at one of the highest rates in America – well over double the national average.  (It may be far worse; Kansas either violates federal regulations or exploits a loophole in federal regulations, depending on how you interpret the regs, to avoid counting a large number of placements.) 

In a state where the entire child welfare establishment has shown such profound hatred for overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite families who lose their children to foster care, “best interests” is little more than a euphemism for middle-class white privilege. 

Public radio weighs in 

And yet, here’s how KCUR Public Radio framed the story:  

The current law giving relatives a priority can mean taking a young child away from the foster parents who raised them, even when those foster parents want to adopt. 

Kansas lawmakers could change that. They worry that the current system may sometimes run counter to the child’s best interests and possibly traumatize children. 

In fact, the law would repeal any preference for relatives when they, too, want to adopt – and that framing assumes that adoption should be preferred over, for example, guardianship, which often is a better way to achieve permanence for children with relatives.  The law would privilege paper permanence over relational permanence. 

Oh, and if Kansas lawmakers really cared about not traumatizing children, they’d stop letting the family police take them away at such an obscene rate in the first place.  

As for that pesky research, the research that shows kinship placements almost always are the less traumatic option, KCUR gives it a quick mention, toward the very end of the story, in what journalists call the “To be sure…” grafs – as in, “To be sure, there is another side of the story that we don’t agree with so we’ll shove a couple of token sentences about it in here.” 

And, indeed, the to-be-sure grafs are quickly followed by 

Lawmakers and supporters of the proposed law acknowledge these facts, but they say each case is different and common sense needs to be applied. 

A preference for truthiness 

Common sense?  How is acknowledging research and ignoring its findings common sense?  In fact, it’s more like substituting for truth what Stephen Colbert famously called “truthiness” -- the belief that something is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.  In this case, backers of this bill are saying, in effect: I like white middle-class strangers better than impoverished relatives so my gut says it’s “common sense” to give them preference.  The truth is in the research, but truthiness says giving strangers preference is in children’s “best interest” – research be damned. 

And, of course, existing law already leaves judges ample flexibility to invoke the all-purpose mantra “best interests of the child” to ignore any preference for relatives. 

If the backers of this bill really believed that judges should simply be free to use their “common sense” then they would have proposed a law with no preference of any kind.  Instead, they privilege the privileged, equate common sense with their own middle-class sensibilities and tilt the balance away from what research says is truly in children’s best interests. 

Further indicating how desperate proponents are to flee from reality is the fact that the high-profile case that started this frenzy doesn’t even involve relatives seeking to care for a child.  It involves two competing sets of stranger-care parents.  One set of stranger-care parents is willing to keep four siblings together – which is what research suggests usually is best.  The other wants to keep a three-year-old, even if it means she won't  be united with siblings because these stranger-care parents are “the only family she’s ever known.”

Not only did Kansas politicians rush to take the side of the foster parents who would keep the siblings separate, somehow the politicians extrapolated from this case to support a bill that attacks any kinship preference for adult relatives who want to adopt! 

In Kansas, they’ve taken truthiness to a whole new level. 

To see just how much harm the white, middle-class version of “best interests of the child”  “common sense” and trying to play the bonding card can do to children of color – and why, for Native American families, it took a federal law to curb that harm, check out this outstanding story from Julia Lurie in Mother Jones.

Foster care and family preservation: The waiver that may yet save Los Angeles

A KEY CHANGE IN FINANCIAL INCENTIVES MAY CURB A FOSTER-CARE PANIC. BUT WE WON'T KNOW UNTIL THE THE LA TIMES AND THE COUNTY CHILD WELFARE AGENCY STOP PLAYING "DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL," WITH A KEY STATISTIC

There is a key number that determines how serious a state or locality is about keeping families together. It's the same number that lets us know if a community is experiencing a foster-care panic. – a spike in removals of children that usually follows poorly-reported news coverage of child abuse deaths.

It's not the most important number in child welfare – the most important are those numbers that attempt to measure child safety. But if you're trying to figure out if a child welfare system really is working to keep families together, then you need to know the number of "entries into care" - children taken from their parents over the course of given time period.

For measuring family preservation this number is far more important than the "snapshot number" which tells you only how many children are in foster care on any given day. That number can rise or fall for all sorts of reasons unrelated to efforts to keep children from being taken away in the first place.

Not only do you need the entries figure for the time when you suspect there may be a panic going on, you also need the figure for the same time period the year before, and, ideally, several years before, in order to do a fair comparison.

But when it comes to telling the people of Los Angeles this number, the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services seem to be playing a game of "don't ask, don't tell."

Journalists at the Times don't want to focus on wrongful removal in the midst of what has become a campaign against family preservation, albeit a non-ideologically motivated one, so they don't ask. (The Times reporters will deny this, to which I say: Prove it. Report on any panic that may be out there, tell the stories you've been ignoring for all these months, and add the context that is missing from the horror stories your editors have been putting on the front page. Do that on a regular basis and I'll gladly revise my opinion and apologize.)

DCFS doesn't want to acknowledge any foster-care panic, so they don't tell.

Although DCFS Director Trish Ploehn said she would provide me with those data when she called NCCPR last week, I haven't received them yet. Ploehn claimed, however, that any panic was largely confined to the month of August, 2009, after which, she says, entries gradually settled back to their previous level.

That level still is too high – well above the rate in other large metropolitan areas. But that still would be a considerable achievement. It's not unusual for panics to last for a year or more. The foster- care panic in Florida lasted seven years. The one in Arizona started in 2003, and there's no end in sight.

A CHANGE IN INCENTIVES

What makes Los Angeles different? Simple. There is a huge change in incentives.

In most cases, when stories like those the Times have been running appear month after month, all of the incentives encourage panic.

There are personal incentives for the workers – they're more likely to keep their jobs, and stay off the front page, if they adopt a take-the-child-and-run approach. There are political incentives for the agency and elected officials, who look like they're "cracking down on child abuse" if they take more children. And there are financial incentives from the federal government, which will reimburse the states anywhere from 56 to 83 cents on the dollar for every eligible child they place in foster care – and roughly half of all foster care cases are eligible.

In Los Angeles, the personal and political incentives are still there. But the financial incentives are pushing against panic instead of in favor. If there is a foster-care panic in Los Angeles, the federal government won't help pay for it. And that's the first time that's ever happened anywhere in America.

That's because Los Angeles has a waiver, much like the one that has helped Florida transform what once was one of the nation's worst child welfare systems.

Under the waiver, Los Angeles agreed to accept its foster care money as a flat grant, in exchange for the flexibility to use the funds on safe, proven alternatives to foster care, instead of just foster care. That also means, however, that if DCFS caves into the Times crusade, takes even more children needlessly, and the foster care population soars, Los Angeles County will have to pick up the tab itself. (Details on how all this works are in NCCPR's Briefing Paper on child welfare finance.)

And that's one of the major reasons this form of funding is such an improvement over the open-ended entitlement for foster care.

By creating a system in which the various incentives come closer to cancelling each other out, rather than all pushing toward a take-the-child-and-run approach, the waiver makes it more likely that decisions will be made based on what is safest for each child, and not based on the fact that taking away the child lets everyone cover their asses and avoid being pilloried in the local newspaper, while the federal government helps pick up the tab.

Los Angeles has not done as well as Florida. The county got a later start and was not as bold in moving the money. The county also was hampered by moves at the state level, a problem the state-run system in Florida doesn't have. Because of the late start, there is no independent evaluation of the Los Angeles waiver available yet, unlike Florida where two such evaluations have found that the waiver improved child safety. But such an evaluation is due in a few months, and there are some promising signs of success.

If the waiver can curb a foster care panic, that will be huge evidence of its value. It would mean that the waiver helped to:

• reduce the number of children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love leaving them at severe risk of lifelong emotional scars.
  
• reduce the number of children placed at risk of abuse in foster care itself.
  
• reduce the number of cases of wrongful removal overwhelming caseworkers, so they have more time to spot children in real danger who really should be taken from their homes.
  

WAIVER? WHAT WAIVER?

If you live in Los Angeles and you never even knew this waiver existed, much less its potential benefits, you must be getting all your child welfare news from The Los Angeles Times. While the competing Los Angeles Daily News has been all over the waiver story, the Times barely mentioned the waiver until recently, and then only to attack it.

The waiver turns up in stories in December which portray family reunification as a terrible gamble with children's lives – complete with horror stories of children who died after reunification. Over and over reunification (made possible in part by the waiver) is described as "risky."

And the cheap shots are continuing. Recent stories describe the waiver as a "wager" – in keeping with a theme in Times coverage of child welfare: the false assumption that family preservation equals risky, while foster care supposedly equals safe.

But for the overwhelming majority of children, the ones whose stories somehow don't get into the Times, it's the other way around. Foster care almost always is the riskier choice, both in terms of emotional trauma, and even the risk of actual abuse.

It's child welfare systems in most of the rest of the country that wager with children's lives – and they keep betting against the children.

• They bet against children when they put protecting themselves ahead of protecting children, by tearing apart families in order to avoid winding up on the front page of the local paper.
  
• They bet against children when they take them from parents whose only crime is poverty.
  
• They bet against children when they put children at a one in three – or greater – risk of abuse whenever they place a child in a foster home.
  
• They bet against children when they throw children into a system that, according to one landmark study, churns out walking wounded four times out of five.
  

What Florida, and Los Angeles, have done with their waivers is try to shift the odds in favor of children.

In that regard the only wager Los Angeles has lost so far is when officials tried to beat a very different set of odds.

GAMBLING ON TRUTH OVER "TRUTHINESS"

In some ways, what the Times reporters have been doing is understandable. A new law gave them access to a huge amount of information about fatality cases and near-fatality cases, while DCFS still can hide all its other mistakes behind "confidentiality."

So Times reporters have spent months steeped in the details of the most horrible cases. No one who has spent week after week reading autopsy reports and other files about innocent children who died at the hands of their brutal, sadistic parents could turn around and approach this new effort to keep families together without a profound visceral distaste and an enormous sense of foreboding. The fact that these cases bear no resemblance to what caseworkers typically see is truth – you know it in your head. The immersion in horror that the Times reporters have undergone replaces truth with what Stephen Colbert calls Truthiness – you know that in your gut.

That helps explain the errors in Times stories, and the refusal to provide readers the information they need to make up their own minds, but it doesn't excuse those mistakes, not when the one thing we know about foster-care panics is that they usually are followed by increases in child abuse deaths.

Those who supported the Los Angeles waiver bet that truth would win out over truthiness. So far, they're losing that wager.

UPDATE: When real children become human teddy bears

Last week, there was a sudden cluster of news stories about "shelters" those parking places for children when they're first removed from their parents that are among the worst forms of placement for a child. There were hand-wringing stories in Virginia and Florida about shelters having to close – because, in fact, they weren't needed, and a celebratory story about the impending opening of one of the most barbaric types of shelters imaginable – one specifically for long-term care of infants and toddlers.

  So this seemed like a good time to repeat, with just a little bit of updating, two earlier posts to this Blog about shelters:

     AUGUST 14, 2006: WHEN REAL CHILDREN BECOME HUMAN TEDDY BEARS -- They may be the second most sacred cow in all of child welfare, and no wonder. Donors love them. They can get a plaque on the wall for giving money or furniture or, if they're really rich, donating a whole building. The volunteers love them. They can turn real flesh-and-blood human beings into human teddy bears who exist for the volunteers' gratification and convenience, even as they convince themselves they're helping children. Whey they get bored with their human teddy bears, they simply hand them back to the shift staff.

     In short, they're good for everyone but the children. 


    They are "shelters" - those first-stop parking place institutions in many communities where children are deposited for a few days or a week or a month or, often, longer, to be examined and "assessed" by "trained staff" in order to prepare them for exactly what they would have gotten without the shelters – usually a succession of foster homes.

    Shelters are exercises in adult self-indulgence and adult self-delusion. As with any form of orphanage, and that's really what shelters are, a whole rationalization industry has grown up around them.

    "How can you call us an institution?" the people who work at the local shelter say. "We have 'cottages' and they're so pretty. We even have a cutesy name. We're so homelike."

    Whenever somebody says his or her institution is homelike, I think of the stuff I sometimes put on bread when I'm trying to lose weight. It may be called "buttery spread" or "buttery light" but it always tastes like liquid plastic. I can tell the difference between buttery light and butter. And children know the difference between "homelike" and home.

    "Our shelter provides 'stability'" the operators will say, so children don't move from foster home to foster home. But it's the people in a child's life that create stability, not the bricks and mortar. A child in a shelter endures a multiple placement whenever the shift changes. She endures multiple placement when the weekend workers replace the weekday workers. And she endures multiple placement when the volunteer who seemed so interested in her last week has something better to do to this week and doesn't show up.

    "We must be doing good work," the volunteers say. "Look how the children come running up to us to hug us."

    Consider what one staffer at one of the shelters said. He works at Child Haven, a giant complex in Las Vegas that warehouses more than 150 children, including infants -- now, even stacking them up like cordwood in the gym. [UPDATE: Conditions reportedly have improved somewhat since this post was written.] The staffer told a local television station that he loves coming to work at Child Haven because babies and toddlers "grab my leg. They call me Mr. Lou. They tell me they love me."

    But when a young child grabs the legs of anyone who will pay him a little attention and tells him "I love you" he's not getting better – he's getting worse. He is losing his ability to truly love at all, because every time he tries to love someone, that person goes away. It's even worse than the well-known problem of children bouncing from foster home to foster home. We are setting some of these children up to become adults unable to love or trust anyone.

    The parking place industry will come back with claims that they can "assess" children and "stabilize" them, so that they can find the right foster home for the child when he or she leaves.

     That was the theory in Connecticut, when they set up a network of such shelters in 1995, in the wake of a foster-care panic that led to a huge increase in the number of children taken from their parents.

    But a comprehensive study of the shelters by Yale University and the Connecticut child welfare agency itself found that wasn't true either.

    On the contrary, the children who went through the shelters tended to have worse outcomes than those who didn't. The only thing she shelters were good at was wasting huge sums of money. (As usual, in child welfare, the worse the option for children, the more it costs).

    Of course, as soon as the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF) saw the results of the study they commissioned they shut the shelters down.

    Just kidding.

    In child welfare, research is no match for political clout and adult self-indulgence. Take away our human teddy bears? Never! As the Hartford Courant put it in this story, available in the paper's paid archive:

 "Three years after a study that showed short-term group homes for first-time foster children are a costly failure, the state Department of Children and Families is still funneling hundreds of children through the facilities each year."

But that doesn't mean DCF didn't take action. The agency used to have the study up on its own website. But after the Courant story came out, DCF removed the link. (I have a copy of the study, which I'd be glad to send to anyone who wants it.) [UPDATE: Eventually, a reform-minded leader of the state family policing agency did shut them down.]

     The final rationalization is the one in which the shelter operators admit shelters are a lousy option but, you see, there simply is no alternative. There just aren't enough foster homes, they say.

    That's the constant claim in Arizona, where a foster-care panic increased the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year by 40 percent in just two years. That created an artificial "shortage" of foster homes -- and a baby boom at the shelters.

     And all through the panic, who could be counted on for an inflammatory quote encouraging the needless removal of children? The executive director of the East Valley Crisis Center, the same shelter operator who kept insisting that it was a shame to have to rely on shelters – but there was no other alternative.

    And even with the panic, that shelter had room for some dubious cases. A Christmas-themed puff piece about the shelter in an Arizona newspaper in 2004 focused on two cases:
    In case #1, a mother has to give up her child because she is homeless.

    In case #2, a grandmother has to surrender her children because she "couldn't take the kids herself because of health problems." Then, after the children are separated from their grandmother, they are torn away from each other. The shelter insists it's for their own good. In fact, it was almost certainly for the shelter's convenience. The shelter's own website reveals that children are segregated by age. That's understandable. It's dangerous to mix age groups in an institution.

With everything we know about what works and what doesn't work for children in the 21^st Century, there is only one word for institutionalizing a child because his mother is homeless or his grandmother is ill: Barbaric.

When I mentioned this in an op ed column in that same newspaper, a shelter supporter replied by citing another reason she felt the shelter was essential: To warehouse children taken from battered mothers solely because those mothers had been beaten.

Fortunately a reform-minded head of the state human services agency [UPDATE: Make that former head of the state human services agency] and the threat of a lawsuit from the Youth Law Center have combined to reduce the use of shelters in Arizona. There's a long way to go, but it's a start.

    One hundred years of research is nearly unanimous: Institutionalization is inherently harmful. And the younger the child, the greater the harm. No one who writes puff pieces about shelters would argue that shift workers and volunteers dispensing indiscriminate pseudo-love to any child who walks in the door are a substitute for their love for their own children. It's no substitute for somebody else's child either – and the children know it. That's why institutionalization does them so much harm.

    And better child welfare systems know it as well.

    In Alabama, the system has been rebuilt to emphasize keeping children out of foster care in the first place. It happened as a result of a suit brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law (co-counsel for plaintiffs is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors).

    The lawsuit led to a consent decree that puts strict limits on shelters. The following is from Making Child Welfare Work, The Bazelon Center's book about the consent decree:


Because it is so traumatic to uproot a child, an important goal of [the Consent Decree] is to have the child's first placement be the only placement … To minimize moves, the decree outlaws the use of shelter care except under unusual circumstances. Workers are not permitted to park a child in a shelter while they look for a more permanent placement, unless the child can receive the full range of necessary services while in the shelter and 'it is likely that the [child's] stay in foster care will not extend beyond his/her stay in the shelter.' [Emphasis in original]. What this meant was that counties had to develop a sufficiently large and flexible array of [placements] so they could place children directly…to the setting determined as most appropriate for meeting the child's needs.


     There are two key indicators that the "no alternative" argument is just one more rationalization.

    The first is who the shelters take in and who they leave out.

    Everyone in child welfare knows the group for whom it is hardest to find a foster home: Teenagers, especially teenagers with behavior problems. To the extent that there is ever a "need" for a shelter or some other form of "congregate care" it would be for teens. Younger children are easy to place and babies easiest of all.

    So of course, these shelters are for teenagers, since that's where the need is.

    Just kidding again.

    Most of these shelters are only for children age 12 and younger.    There is no better indication that shelters really exist to serve the adults who work and volunteer there. After all, a teenager who's been through removal from his or her home is as likely to spit in your face as to throw his arms around you. They make lousy human teddy bears.
    So the shelters stick to children 12 and younger, including what the head of that Arizona shelter so cloyingly calls "the itty bitty ones."
    The second indicator is what happened when a reform-minded child welfare agency [UPDATE: Make that formerly reform-minded child welfare agency] called the shelter operators' bluff.
    In Michigan, after a decade of careening full-speed backwards, the state's Department of Human Services has been working to curb needless removal of children. Its innovations are beginning to pay off. As a result, in the Lansing area, DHS has become so good at finding homes for children who really had to be taken from their parents, that a brand new shelter stands almost empty.


     Of course, the community celebrated.
    Yep. Just kidding again.


     The Lansing State Journal treated this cause for joy as a tragedy. So did local politicians. And the local judge stepped forward and promised to overrule DHS and start filling the shelter with babies, even when DHS had homes available - - even though, under state law, the county would then have to pay the full $170-per-day cost of the placement instead of only half. Said the judge: "I guarantee you that place will be full."
    So much for the "we have to have shelters because there's no other alternative" argument.
    Prof. Victor Groza of Case Western Reserve University, which happens to be in Ohio, wrote an op ed column for the State Journal carefully explaining all the research on the harm of shelters. Yesterday, the head of the agency that runs the shelter replied, essentially as follows: Prof. Groza's not from here so he can't know anything; nyah, nyah, nyah. (This time, I'm not kidding). The agency chief nevertheless cited one out-of-state source that supports shelters - the trade association for shelter operators, the Child Welfare League of America.


     But then, the institutions lobby is particularly powerful in Michigan. In an earlier post to this Blog, I described how a trade association for some Michigan private child welfare agencies trooped up to the State Capitol to oppose the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Family to Family program, which keeps children in their own homes or with their extended families. (The Casey Foundation helps to fund NCCPR). They opposed it, because, they said, it's better for these disproportionately minority children to be torn from everyone loving and familiar and thrown in with affluent strangers in the suburbs because the strangers live in better neighborhoods. Another post pointed out that the private agencies' position may well be illegal.
  


AUGUST 17, 2006 TRUTH VS. TRUTHINESS IN LANSING - I had just posted the previous Blog entry about parking-place shelters when I saw the 60 Minutes story about The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert's nightly parody of certain cable news programs.
    I was reminded of that word he coined: Truthiness. It means believing something is true because you want it to be true.     As Colbert puts it: "You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut. … I don't trust books. They're all fact and no heart."


     Turns out, that debate over a parking-place "shelter" in Lansing, Michigan, discussed at the end of the previous post to this Blog, offered up a perfect example of the difference between truth and truthiness. The Lansing shelter is the one standing almost empty because the state child welfare agency doesn't need it – they're able to place almost all children in the area directly with families. Instead of celebrating, some Lansing politicians are treating this as a tragedy.
    As noted in Monday's Blog, on August 6, the Lansing State Journal published an op ed column by Prof. Victor Groza of Case Western Reserve University, in which he offers some hard truths: He notes that "for more than 60 years, studies have shown the damage of institutional care" and he carefully explains why shelters harm the emotional development of children.


 He discusses a rigorous recent study of shelters like the one in Lansing. The study found that the claims on behalf of such places don't hold up. After actually following the children who'd been through the shelters and a comparable group that had not, this study found that the children who started their foster-care odyssey in shelters did no better, and often did worse than those who were placed directly with families.
    The following week, the director of the shelter's parent agency offered up a response. It's classic truthiness.
    "Children have entered traumatized and exhausted," he declares. "They have left with a sense of stability, direction, normalcy, and love." And how does he know this? The children are too young for exit interviews. The shelter is brand new and the article doesn't even claim to have actually followed the children, much less compared them to those not placed in shelters. No, it's true because they want it to be true. They looked it up in their guts. Or, as the agency director put it: "Our early experiences at Angel House have confirmed what we expected" [emphasis added].
    As for all that research, well, the agency director has no more use for it and those darned "out of state academicians" than Colbert has for books, declaring: "We believe the people of mid-Michigan have more faith in the wisdom of local child advocates than the distorted views from academia…"


     Or, as Colbert put it the other night: "The world of illusion is wonderful. Join me in it."
     But when children's lives are at stake, we can't afford to live in a word of illusion. And we can't afford to make our decisions based on truthiness.
    [UPDATE: The reformer who tried to move the state Department of Human Services away from parking place shelters is gone. Angel House remains, albeit on a smaller scale. Details in a future post. And on Wednesday, in Detroit, NCCPR will release the first of two reports on Michigan child welfare.]