NCCPR in Youth Today on federal legislation that would take the last brake off the foster care steamroller

...The bill would more than double the amount of money the federal government forks over to states for foster care reimbursement each year. Even worse, this bill would remove the only small brake from what is less a runaway train than a lumbering foster care steamroller that crushes better alternatives for children....

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in Youth Today on child welfare's "mouse that may roar"

It’s been hyped as “revolutionary,” a “landmark” and a law that “blows up the nation’s troubled foster care system.” But the so-called Family First Preservation Services Act is none of those things. Yes, the law allows some federal money formerly limited to foster care to be shifted into better alternatives. But the limits on what can be funded are so severe that the Congressional Budget Office  estimates that, out of the billions of federal dollars lavished on foster care, only $130 million per year will be moved into better options. ...

But while everybody was paying attention to Family First, the federal Administration for Children and Families (ACF) made a policy change that has the potential to do vastly more to help children and families. Indeed, if Family First is the lion that squeaked, this policy change is the mouse that may roar

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in Youth Today on a plan for real reform of child welfare finance – from an unlikely source

The so-called Family First Prevention Services Act has been hailed as a radical change in how child welfare is paid for by the federal government. It’s not.The changes will barely make a dent in a system that lavishes billions of federal dollars on foster care, and far less on efforts to keep children safely in their own homes.

But the Trump administration’s proposed budget, a document that is, in most ways, as dreadful as one might expect, appears to revive a much more far-reaching, and much better, approach to changing the way the federal government reimburses states and localities for child welfare

Read the full column in Youth Today.

You can’t fix child welfare spending with distorted data and doublethink

Listen closely. That giant sucking sound you hear is the foster care-industrial complex grasping for every dollar it can swipe from every possible “funding stream.”

George Orwell gave us the concept of  doublethink.
Foster care advocates perfected it.

 In 1984, George Orwell defined “doublethink” as holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting them both.

In child welfare, for example, we have been told for decades that child welfare systems don’t take away children because their families are poor. Elizabeth Bartholet, for example, in her book, Nobody’s Children, derides the notion that cases of neglect are “mere poverty” cases.

Sean Hughes sneered at the notion when he wrote that “if you look at the data, it’s hard to see any evidence of there being a pattern of foster care entry due solely to material deprivations of poverty.” (For the record, such data are, in fact, abundant.)

But now we also are told, in an opinion column by Hughes and Angie Schwartz that every single federal program designed to ease poverty – including housing assistance, food stamps, even the Supplemental Security Income program for the aged, blind and disabled – is a foster care prevention program, and every dime from every one of them should be counted as child welfare spending.

In other words, great gobs of money are going to prevent something – removal of children from their parents because they are poor – that child welfare agencies say they don’t do anyway.

Hughes and Schwartz use this doublethink to stand reality on its head, leaving both a written and visual impression of vast sums of money for prevention dwarfing a tiny amount for foster care. But by this same logic, the entire Social Security and Medicare budgets should be counted as foster care spending, because some of that money helps grandparents providing kinship foster care to grandchildren.

In fact, as advocates of taking away children themselves love to point out, a majority of poor families are never subject to a child abuse or neglect allegation. Well, at least if they’re white. So if torturing logic were a war crime, counting this spending as preventing foster care would be Exhibit A at an international tribunal.

Where the Money Really Goes

But even if you accept Hughes and Schwartz’s premise, the graphics accompanying the article misrepresent reality. They portray the amount available under the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) as equal to the amount available under the portion of the giant open-ended entitlement known as Title IV-E reserved exclusively for foster care. In fact, even if every dime allocated to the SSBG were spent exclusively on child welfare, it still wouldn’t equal the amount spent on IV-E foster care.

Even more egregious, the amount available under the one program that really is targeted, in part, at preventing needless foster care, Title IV-B, is presented as about half as much as the IV-E foster care entitlement.

In fact, total IV-B funding is less than one-fifth what is spent on IV-E foster care, and the portion of IV-B funds actually spent on family preservation and reunification is roughly one-eighth the amount spent on IV-E foster care. So if the graphic were accurate, you’d barely be able to see the box showing efforts targeted to keeping families together.

When Hughes and Schwartz finally get almost real – in a pie chart – we find that even counting all those other categories of spending, and even if we pretend all the money from all those other categories spent on child welfare goes to keeping families together, child welfare still spends more on foster care and adoption than on everything else combined.

But even that doesn’t tell the full story.

§  Hughes and Schwartz portray Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) as part of the cornucopia of funding available for prevention. But the real TANF scandal is how it’s been turned into a child welfare slush fund, with states siphoning off millions for adoption, foster care, child abuse investigations and even the worst form of “care” of all, institutionalizing children.

§  More than $750 million in SSBG funds similarly has been diverted to foster care and child protective services.

§  As for SSI payments: there, too, there’s a real scandal: Child welfare agencies snatching away money that rightfully belongs to individual foster children in order to fund their bureaucracies.

 Aid for the Vulnerable is Always Vulnerable

As I’ve noted before, this happens because of whom these different programs serve. Programs such as TANF serve poor people who are widely despised, so they’re easy targets for raids by a foster-care industrial complex that can pressure government to get what it wants. Foster care, on the other hand, separates the good children from the “bad” parents – making it far more popular. Because it is a middle-class constituency and because a whole industry has grown up around it – complete with high-powered lobbyists – it is far less vulnerable to cuts.

That’s why it’s so important that any reform to child welfare finance make foster care funding available for prevention and family preservation while protecting family preservation and general aid to poor people from being raided for foster care.

There’s another crucial difference between funding, say, food stamps and funding foster care. Food stamps don’t do harm. Often, foster care does. That’s why incentives should be geared to preventing the misuse and overuse of foster care.

As for the claim that child advocates won’t argue for more money, let’s put it to the test. Send out one of those ubiquitous “sign-on” letters with a call for simply spending more money on everything in child welfare and see what happens.  Shall we take bets?

No, what Hughes and Schwartz really are saying is that advocates should oppose anything that compromises the sacred status of foster care funding by allowing that money to be used for better alternatives.

That’s why the only way to promote their agenda is with doublethink.

New columns about racial bias in "predictive analytics" and the so-called Family First Act

ProPublica has done some outstanding reporting on racial bias in the use of algorithms - "predictive analytics" - in criminal justice.  Things may be even worse in child welfare

Read our column here

Although I oppose the so-called "Family First Act" which would make small changes in how the federal government pays for child welfare services, some of the arguments against the bill are so disingenuous that they tempt me to change my mind.

This column explains why

New columns on the latest CASA scandal and on child welfare finance legislation

There's another scandal at a program affiliated with the most sacred cow in child welfare, Court-Appointed Special Advocates.  No one should be surprised.  Bias is built into the CASA model.

Read about it here.

And here's my analysis of proposed child welfare finance reform legislation:

Family First Act Institutionalizes Institutions, Sets UpPrevention to Fail

Family First Act institutionalizes institutions, sets up prevention to fail

Now that there finally is a bill, it is clear who has the greatest reason to oppose the so-called Family First Prevention Services Act: environmentalists.

That’s because of how many forests will be destroyed to provide the paper for all the new plans, reports and assorted other documents that the bill mandates as a substitute for real change.

In some respects, discussed below, the bill is an improvement over previous versions, and I’m sure those who worked so hard to craft this legislation meant well. But mostly, the Family First Act proposes to solve the problems of child welfare by throwing paperwork at them.

Provide a plan for this, a certification for that, and a report on something else, and America’s foster-care-industrial complex can keep doing what it’s been doing for more than a century: failing vulnerable children.

The bill also enshrines in law the double standard that pervades American child welfare: services to keep families together must meet tests that are almost impossibly high before being deemed “evidence-based.” But to keep right on using the worst form of care, group homes and institutions, no evidence is required; just more paperwork.

So it’s no wonder most of the foster-care-industrial complex favors the bill, and those who don’t want to make it even weaker.

One major supporter of the bill is the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, a group that has little to do with either one. Rather, it is a trade association made up largely of private agencies that oversee foster homes and run group homes and institutions. These agencies typically are paid for each day they hold a child in foster care. They know a good deal when they see one.

Institutionalizing Institutionalization

In the earliest stages of developing what would become the Families First Act, there was an idea for dealing with the misuse and overuse of institutions that was simple and smart: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested simply refusing to fund such placements for any child under age 13. Other smart proposals over the years have included reducing federal aid for institutionalization month by month – the longer the placement the fewer the dollars.

But once the foster-care-industrial complex got through with it, what emerged was a muddled mess.

If the bill becomes law, the federal government would stop reimbursing states for part of the cost of group home and institutional placement after two weeks. But it creates a giant loophole: funding would continue for something called a “Qualified Residential Treatment Program.”

What does it take to become a QRTP?  Very little:

§  Write lots and lots of plans filled with appropriate buzzwords. (Drop the word “trauma-informed” into every third paragraph and you should be fine.)

§  Hire nurses during working hours and have them on call the rest of the time.

§  Get a rubber-stamp seal-of-approval from an accrediting agency. I say rubber-stamp because one of the groups a QRTP can choose is the so-called “Council on Accreditation.” COA is a creation of another agency trade association, the Child Welfare League of America. Its “site visits” are announced well in advance and “accreditors” interview people who can be hand-picked by the agency under examination. Everything else is based on the agency’s paperwork. COA doesn’t accredit agencies, it accredits file cabinets.

Perhaps that’s why, in the 1990s, COA accredited a private agency in Ohio in which, the Dayton Daily News found, children lived in squalid group homes and the agency director had a conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. More recently, COA accredited this agency.

Take these simple steps and voila! That cruddy old group home is now a “Qualified Residential Treatment Program”!

Similarly, the Family First Act goes on for paragraphs about how an independent “qualified individual” will determine if a child needs to be institutionalized; unless, that is, the public child welfare agency gives its solemn word that someone associated with the institution itself can do the evaluation and still be objective. Then, the independence requirement can be “waived” by the Department of Health and Human Services.

In short, the Family First Act institutionalizes the process of institutionalization.

Perhaps that’s why the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, were it to become law, the Family First Act would barely reduce the proportion of institutionalized foster children on any given day. It would decline from the current 14 percent to 11 percent, over ten years.

Yet even these minimal requirements apparently are too onerous for some providers of institutional care and their acolytes in government.

Whatever Happened to “Evidence-Based”?

What is missing in these requirements for becoming a “Qualified Residential Treatment Program” is anything forcing the “providers” to prove that what they provide actually helps children.

There’s a reason for that, namely

§  A review of the scholarly literature by the office of the U.S. Surgeon General found only “weak evidence” for the success of residential treatment.

§  A second review, by the University of North Carolina, found “when community-based services are available, they provide outcomes that are equivalent, at least [to residential treatment].”

§  Still another study, of children institutionalized for mental health problems, found that seven years after discharge from residential treatment, 75 percent of the children were back in the only settings they could understand: institutions. They were in psychiatric centers or jails.

§  Even former CWLA President Shay Bilchik admitted there is a lack of “good research” showing residential treatment’s effectiveness and “we find it hard to demonstrate success…” (though he claimed this was only because foundations don’t want to fund the research and children aren’t institutionalized soon enough.)

Some of those who think even the minimal restrictions in the Family First Act go too far don’t even pretend that institutionalization is good for children. Rather, they claim there’s no alternative because they can’t recruit enough foster homes.

But, as I’ve noted before, the real problem is not too few foster parents, it’s too many foster children. For example, Los Angeles seems to be the epicenter of the whining about the congregate care restrictions. But Los Angeles takes away children at triple the rate of Chicago, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. Yet it’s Illinois where independent court-appointed monitors have found that reforms emphasizing family preservation improved child safety.

No Real Help for Prevention

That brings me to the second set of failings in the bill: the increased support for prevention is minimal and largely misdirected.

For starters, while residential treatment programs need provide no evidence at all of effectiveness to be funded, 50 percent of all new prevention spending under the bill would have to go to programs that meet a standard, created for clinical trials in medicine, so high that almost nothing qualifies. (This is an improvement from previous drafts, where it was 100 percent.)

Lisbeth Schorr, senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, has several excellent articles on why this is an unwise approach in human services. And in child welfare, there is the additional problem of a profound bias among many of the “scholars.”

Even worse, the kinds of programs that can be funded are limited to three categories, two of which, mental health and parenting skills, are precisely the “public health approach” that has failed for more than a century. So after the reams of new paperwork required under this section are filed and it turns out that this failed approach failed again, it will become an excuse for the advocates of traumatizing children with needless foster care to run back to Congress and demand even more money to warehouse even more children in foster care. This bill doesn’t aid alternatives; it sets them up to fail.

In contrast, even though study after study finds that 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their families simply had decent housing, housing aid was eliminated from the bill early on. There is not even funding for the kinds of simple, sensible and very inexpensive approaches advocated by Joanne Samuel Goldblum in the Chroniclelast month.

So again, it’s no wonder the CBO thinks the new spending on prevention will be a drop in the bucket – an average of $130 million per year. Even with that new funding, the federal government still would spend vastly more on tearing families apart than on trying to keep them together.

What’s Good About the Bill

There is one thing the bill gets right: the third category of funds for which states could get reimbursement under the Families First Act is drug treatment. That almost certainly got into the bill, and probably has appeal to most members of Congress, because the latest “drug plague” – opioid addiction – has a whiter, more affluent face than the drug plagues that preceded it.

The other argument for the bill is that it’s better than nothing, and a floor on which one can build in the future.

But it’s not better than the waivers available to states now, which allow them to spend a lot more money on a much wider variety of alternatives to foster care. The waiver process, which is set to expire in 2019, also includes a vital incentive that Family First Act lacks: it caps the giant open-ended entitlement to foster-care funding.

This bill is more likely to be a ceiling than a floor. Once the bill becomes law, all the pressure for real reform would go away, and the ceiling will only get lower. Because from here, the bill can only get worse. Having come so far, the members of Congress behind this bill are likely to appease those who want to make the congregate-care restrictions even weaker, rather than see the whole thing fall apart.

Better Alternatives

I’ve written elsewhere about the best long-term alternative: end the foster-care entitlementand turn it into grants indexed to inflation that states can use for foster care and for better alternatives.

Short term, Congress should

§  Salvage the one part of the Family First Act everyone seems to agree on and provide $130 million per year in additional funding for drug treatment – targeted toward families at risk of losing their children to foster care.

§  Restore the federal government’s authority to grant child welfare waivers, which has expired, with current waivers scheduled to end in 2019.

As for whether we ever can really get major reform, there is one hope: the lookback. That’s the clumsy, bureaucratic detail that has the effect of reducing the number of children eligible for federal foster-care assistance by a tiny amount each year. If nothing at all is done, the federal government will be out of the foster-care funding business in about half a century or so.

The longer this persists, the greater the pressure on the foster-care-industrial complex to accept real reform, not a pale imitation like the Family First Act.

New columns on child welfare finance

In the Chronicle of Social Change, NCCPR looks at what really works in child abuse prevention:
To Prevent Child Abuse: Replace the “Public Health Approach” with a Social Justice Approach

And in Youth Today, a look at how Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a program meant to help poor people become self-sufficient became a child welfare slush fund.

Also, while in London earlier this month, I had the opportunity to meet the author of the excellent new study discussed here:
New Longitudinal Study Finds Epidemic of Fear, Not an Epidemic of Child Abuse

Child Abuse: The not-really-all-that-shocking truth

Imagine you read an article that began like this:

“A reckoning is coming in gerontology. New studies show that when a group of 95-year-olds is followed for five years, a greater proportion die than when they are followed for only one.”

You’d probably think it was a story from The Onion. You’d probably think the same if you read a story saying that people followed for five years, versus those followed for only one, are more likely to catch cold, fall in love, get in an auto accident, take a dream vacation, or discover the presence of gambling at a certain café in Casablanca.

And yet we are supposed to be shocked – shocked! – when a study that follows children for five years finds more of what authorities define as abuse and neglect than studies focusing on a single year.

Read the full post here.

Child welfare Finance: Beware of “The Triad”: The bill they’re backing has become a Trojan horse

Time to take a close look at the "Family First Act"

To read the rhetoric coming from the foster care-industrial complex lately, you’d think that the private child welfare agencies that need a steady supply of foster children to stay in business had undergone a conversion worthy of Saint Paul.

Suddenly they’re all talking about “more should be done to keep kids in families” and how the federal government should be spending more on “prevention.”  They’ve even created a website called Keeping Kids in Families, (run by a group that actually calls itself the “Triad” partnership)  with infographics implying that they want to change funding priorities.

Don’t believe it.

They’ve stolen the rhetoric of reform, while getting rid of almost all of the substance.

Indeed, you have to spend a long, long, time poking around the website to even find the specifics about the legislation they urge people to support.  There’s a reason for that.

What these groups really are supporting is a plan for legislation (it’s not even a bill yet) called the Family First Act.  (This analysis is based on this outline from Senate Finance Committee staff, and a similar memo circulating among some child welfare groups.  So instead of referring to “the bill” I’ll be referring to “the outline.”) 

Like so much in child welfare, the original proposal was born of good intentions – and it might have made a pretty good bill. But it was quickly watered down.  In its present form, it opens up funding only to very limited forms of prevention.  And it does nothing to curb the current huge, open-ended entitlement for foster care.

In its present form the Family First Act is a Trojan Horse.  It leaves the false impression that its passage would lead to fundamental child welfare finance reform – thereby removing the pressure to make real changes, and possibly setting the stage for efforts to funnel even more money into foster care.

Child welfare funding today

Foster care is funded through a large open-ended entitlement program known as “Title IV-E.”  For every eligible child, the state picks up a large share of the tab – the share varies from state to state.  Roughly 44 percent of foster care cases are eligible for this reimbursement, and that percentage declines ever so slightly every year.  That’s because of something called “The lookback,” which I’ll get to below.

In contrast, a much smaller pot of money, called Title IV-B, is available for services to help keep children out of foster care – and that money is not an entitlement.  (Details are in this NCCPR Issue Paper.)

What the Family First bill would do (as far as we can tell)

The Family First Act outline calls for allowing IV-E funding for some services to keep children out of foster care.  However:

--These could be almost exclusively “soft services” – the “counseling” and “parent education” that typically do nothing to actually keep children out of foster care, but make the helpers feel good.  The one exception: Some forms of services might be available for “substance abuse prevention” – whether that also includes drug treatment is not clear. In addition. when a child is placed with her or his parent in a residential substance abuse treatment program, federal foster care reimbursement could be used to pay for the child’s care.

Totally absent are what families so often really need: Aid for child care, housing, or simply basic cash assistance to ameliorate the worst aspects of the poverty that often is confused with “neglect.”  This reportedly was in earlier proposals but was negotiated away early in the process.

The outline calls for allowing very limited aid of this sort under Title IV-B – but that’s the one that has almost no money in it, and is not an entitlement, so this means almost nothing.

The outline does allow emergency cash assistance if the child is placed with a grandparent or other relative.  In other words: In a case where the allegation is “lack of supervision” the new federal money could not be used to help the child’s parents pay for day care.  But if the child were placed with grandparents, federal money could help them pay for day care.

The problem is compounded by the criteria any prevention program must meet to be eligible for funding.  By the time the provisions in the outline are fully in effect the standard of proof would be so absurdly high that almost nothing would qualify.

That’s because the outline continues the profound double-standard for what constitutes an “evidence-based” practice in child welfare: If it’s an alternative to foster care it must be able to dot every I and cross every t on the most rigorous form of evaluation. Lizbeth Schorr, Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, has several excellent articles on why this is an unwise approach in human services.  And in child welfare, there is the additional problem of a profound bias among many of the “scholars.” But the same standard does not apply to foster care – in fact, the outline contemplates continuing funding-as-usual for foster care despite the overwhelming evidence that, for most of the children placed there, it’s a far worse option than family preservation.

So state and local child welfare agencies would end up with the theoretical “right” to spend federal money on preventive services – but almost none of the services actually would qualify for funding.

A ceiling, not a floor

One could argue that the outline should be supported because at least it doesn’t make things worse – and there are some improvements around the edges.  And one could argue that this at least would set a precedent for using Title IV-E funds for prevention – it could be said to be a floor on which more reform could be built.

But it’s more likely that this bill would be a ceiling, not a floor.  Once the bill was passed, all the pressure for real reform – ending the foster-care entitlement - would go away.  Everyone could say: “See, we’ve now given child welfare agencies all the funding flexibility they need!” And if, by some chance, the number of children in foster care doesn’t drop, that will be cited as evidence that financial incentives were never the issue, and all those children really, truly need to be in foster care.

That’s when the foster care industrial complex will come charging back, seeking what they really want all along – an end to the “lookback.”

As I mentioned earlier, thanks to the lookback, the number of children eligible for federal foster care aid under Title IV-E decreases ever so slightly each year.  As a result, the foster-care industrial complex is finally feeling the heat – they know that if they don’t support some kind of change, federal foster care funding is going to dry up completely – though not for another 50 years or so.

So they want the fake reform of the Family First Act, followed by some form of end to the lookback.  (Details on how the lookback works and why we need it are here.)

And that’s exactly why those of us who want real reform should not settle for the Family First Act.  Rather we should let the heat keep rising on the foster-care industrial complex, until they’re willing to support the real reform.  That means ending the unlimited, open-ended entitlement for foster care and converting it into an inflation-indexed flat grant, that could be used both on foster care and on all kinds of prevention and family preservation programs.   

Similar problems with provisions on “congregate care”

The Family First Act also attempts to curb the use of the worst form of “care,” group homes and institutions, by putting some limits on when federal foster care money could be spent on such placements.  One could argue, again, that this is better than the status quo, since currently there are no limits, even on paper.

But the outline has so many ifs, ands, buts, and assorted other loopholes that the limit appears largely meaningless. And by actually creating a category of placement called a “Qualified Residential Treatment Programs” (or worse, one summary of the bill says these would have the oxymoronic name Quality Residential Treatment Programs) the bill runs the risk of “institutionalizing” the idea that there is something acceptable about institutionalizing children.

Now, about the Triad

The people behind that Orwellian Keeping Kids in Families website are a who’s who of the foster-care industrial complex.  The group is calling itself “The Triad for Results-Based Funding for Safe Children and Stronger Families” (you’d think they would have at least run a basic Google search for “Triad” before coming up with that name).

Leading the Triad is the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, a group that has little to so with either one.  Rather, it is a trade association made up largely of private agencies that oversee foster homes and run group homes and institutions.  These agencies typically are paid for each day they hold a child in foster care. The Alliance is led by Susan Dreyfus who came to the group after an undistinguished tenure running two child welfare systems. A good indication of where Dreyfus stands is the fact that, as a member of the so-called Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities she voted for the Commission’s awful recommendations.

Dereyfus’ group is joined by the National Organization for State Associations for Children, which actually is a collection of state federations dominated by foster care providers.  So two-thirds of the Triad has a vested interest in opposing any reform that actually would curb the huge open-ended entitlement for foster care funding. And there’s no downside for the third member of the Triad, the American Public Human Services Association, since the outline offers more money for limited forms of prevention without touching foster care.

The fact that these groups are supporting the Family First Act is not a reason to oppose it.  On the contrary, I’ve said repeatedly that child welfare is a field filled with good people who keep doing the wrong things for the right reasons.  If someone wants to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, I’ll take it.

But the Family First Act is not the right thing.

It’s also often said that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.  That’s true.  But the Family First Act is not good.  It is, at best, mediocre.  And the good should be the enemy of the mediocre.

The IV-E “lookback” is a bureaucratic nightmare. Here’s why we should keep it.

Suppose for a moment you’re on a runaway train. It’s out of control, the speed keeps increasing and there’s a sharp bend in the tracks ahead. But the only brake on the train is a clumsy, complicated contraption that only Rube Goldberg could love.

You’d probably try to use the brake anyway.

As I’ve argued in my previous two columns about child welfare finance for this project, there are profound personal, political and financial incentives to needlessly tear apart families and consign the children to the chaos of foster care. There are brave people who push back against these incentives, and sometimes they succeed.

But there are only two real brakes on this runaway train. One option is a waiver, allowing funds from Title IV-E, the giant open-ended entitlement program for foster care, to be spent on better alternatives as well.

Nationally, there’s something called “the look back.” Before a state can be reimbursed for much of the cost of a given placement under Title IV-E, the state has to “look back” and determine whether the birth parents from whom the child was taken would have qualified for Aid to Families with Dependent Children – based on income limits in effect when that program was abolished in 1996. Because eligibility is linked to this standard, getting rid of this approach is called “delinking.”

The look back is a clumsy, cumbersome, bureaucratic brake.

But it’s the only national brake we’ve got on a structure filled with incentives for foster care. And in recent years, it’s begun proving its value.

Just ask Sean Hughes. In one of his columns for this project, he wrote that “for the first time ever, proposals to create child welfare block grants are originating from within the advocacy community itself.”

That’s not because the foster-care industrial complex – full of private agencies living off of endless per diem payments for holding children in foster care, and their army of trade associations, high-powered lobbyists and consultants – suddenly saw the light.

No, to the extent that anyone in mainstream child welfare is showing any flexibility on this issue, it’s thanks to the look back. Because thanks to the look back, if nothing at all changes, the federal government will be out of the funding-for-foster-care business in about half a century or so.

“I Suspect” Is Not An Evidence-Based Practice

The look back is part of the reason states lost out on $5 billion between 2005 and 2010, when Congress refused to consider letting states volunteer to take their IV-E money as a flat grant. The other reason, of course, was that states succeeded in reducing the number of children in foster care.

Hughes argues that can’t possibly continue. He writes:

I suspect that we’ve pushed foster care caseloads as low as we can without compromising child safety, especially since there is no data suggesting that maltreatment rates themselves have decreased.

“I suspect” is not an evidence-based practice, suitable for decision-making. And there are several problems with Hughes’ “suspicion.”

First, there are data showing that maltreatment rates have declined. As I noted in my previous column, the federal government’s annual “child maltreatment” reports show that rates of known child abuse peaked in 1993, they’ve declined in most years since, and never returned to that level.

And it’s known child abuse that is relevant here, since a state can’t take away an allegedly maltreated child it doesn’t know about. In addition, the federal government’s most recent National Incidence Study shows that child abuse not reported to authorities also is declining.

Iowa: Cesspool of Depravity?

Furthermore, while many factors contribute to increases and decreases in the number of children taken from their homes, actual child abuse ranks low on the list.

I know of no evidence that people in one state are vastly more prone to abusing children than people in another. Yet rates of child removal vary enormously, and that’s true even when you factor in rates of child poverty.

For example, Iowa tears apart families at a rate four times higher than Illinois. But it’s Illinois where independent, court-appointed monitors found that rebuilding the system to emphasize family preservation improved child safety.

So either Iowa is a cesspool of depravity with four times as much child abuse as Illinois, or Iowa is taking away too many children.

There are similar wide differences among counties within a state and among big cities. Phoenix takes away children at four times the rate of New York City. Does anybody seriously believe children in Phoenix are four times safer from abuse than children in New York?

Not only do rates of removal vary from place to place, they can skyrocket for reasons unrelated to actual child abuse. There is no evidence that actual child abuse in Florida shot up 50 percent between 1998 and 1999, yet 50 percent more children were torn from their homes in that time. Because that’s how child welfare systems often respond when horror story cases make headlines.

A high rate of removal almost always indicates a bad child welfare system. But a low rate of removal doesn’t necessarily indicate a good one. One has to achieve it the right way, as in Illinois and Alabama, another state where independent monitors found that a family preservation approach improved child safety. (The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law brought the lawsuit that led to the Alabama reforms. The center's legal director is a member of NCCPR's volunteer Board of Directors.)

If every state took away children at the same rate as Alabama, instead of taking away 264,000 children in a single year, we would take fewer than 169,000. If every place in America took away children at the rate of Chicago, fewer than 79,000 children would be taken away nationwide.

So there is, in fact, plenty of room to do more, by following the lead of places that already have done it while improving child safety. But it is extremely difficult to change child welfare without changing financial incentives. And “de-linking” would move the incentives the wrong way.

If the look back simply ended, funding for the foster-care entitlement would more than double. No matter how many children a state took away, a large part of the expense would be covered for every single child. And while foster care costs more in total dollars, that kind of reimbursement can make it cheaper for a state or county than safe, proven alternatives for which the state must pick up the entire tab.

Add that to the existing personal and political incentives, and the foster care population would skyrocket.

Another option, presented as cost-neutral, is to end the look back but reduce the reimbursement rate per case. But that’s not really cost-neutral. With the one brake on removing more and more children gone, more and more children would be removed. So the cost to the federal government will go up.

Either way, de-linking equals unlimited feeding time for a foster care-industrial complex led by private agencies whose very survival depends on getting paid for taking in more children and holding them in care longer.

Right now, our largest single commitment of federal funds to our most vulnerable children comes only after we tear them from everyone they know and love. That’s not something to be proud of. That’s an obscenity.

Eliminating the look back would, at a minimum, perpetuate that obscenity.

This analysis originally appeared as part of a series in the Chronicle of Social Change series entitled: “Dollars and Priorities: The Financing of Child Welfare” where it can still be found - for the moment. Since the Chronicle, the Fox News of child welfare, has taken to suddenly moving much of my work behind a paywall, I'm reprinting it here, with some changes to the links.