You get what you pay for: How Florida shifted funding priorities to foster care

Child welfare’s foremost data nerd has weighed in on the mess in central Florida child welfare caused by – well caused by a lot of things, including the dreadful performance of Eckerd Connects.  Eckerd is the “lead agency” in the region (though not for long) under Florida’s largely privatized system of family policing.  (Florida calls it a “Community-Based Care” (CBC) system of “child welfare,” but both those terms are euphemisms.) 

We wrote a detailed blog post about what went wrong last week.  Now there is a much more detailed post from Prof. Robert Latham, associate director of the University of Miami School of Law Children and Youth Law Clinic. He also has a degree in computer science and a talent for data visualization.  That makes him unafraid to go as deep into the weeds as necessary to determine whether a claim is true. 

In his most recent blog post, he documents, in chart after chart, why the claim by Eckerd that its failures are due to the agency not getting enough money is b.s.  As the headline for the post puts it “CBC Funding Doesn’t Make Children Live in Offices.” 

But there are some other significant observations.  Much as we did last week, Latham notes that 

None of the problems are new, and every player in the saga had some hand in creating the mess. The [Pinellas County] sheriff, who is now saying Eckerd could be criminally liable, is the child protective investigator in Pinellas county and has been removing children (at higher than statewide average rates) and handing them to Eckerd for years despite all the known problems. 

But he also explains how the Florida Legislature, the current administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis and the administration of former Governor Rick Scott skewed financial incentives for the “CBCs” toward holding more children in foster care and against trying to keep families together. 

In other words, in addition to all the other ways Florida government caved-in to the Miami Herald and reporter Carol Marbin Miller’s crusade to tear apart more families, the governors and the Legislature also rewarded agencies like Eckerd for holding children in foster care and penalized them for working to keep them safely at home. 

How the incentives work 

In 2010, back when Charlie Crist was still governor and the Florida Department of Children and Families had a visionary leader in George Sheldon, a small proportion of the complex formula for allocating funds to agencies such as Eckerd rewarded them if they reduced the number of children they trapped in foster care.  But by 2015, the year after Miller’s Innocents Lost series started a foster-care panic, that was gone.  Not only that, the proportion of the formula based on the number of children held in foster care doubled – from 30% of the formula to 60%.  It declined to 55% in 2018 – but it’s still, by far, the largest single driver of how much money Eckerd and its counterparts get. 

That isn’t even the worst of it.  The formula for how much these agencies get is based in part on what the other CBCs are doing – apparently, it’s a little like grading on a curve.  But in this case, the better you do the worse the grade. 

Writes Latham: 

[I]f an agency holds its numbers steady while every other CBC increases theirs, that agency will lose money in the formula. There is no incentive to be the first agency to lower the numbers … There is, however, an incentive to be the first to raise your numbers in a given category and capture a higher proportion before the other agencies catch up. This could be a good or bad thing depending on the category and the cost of care for that group. [Emphasis in original] 

In other words, if, say, a county sheriff is tearing apart families needlessly, a lead agency has no financial incentive to complain about it.  And they have no incentive to get children home as quickly and safely as possible.  In fact, if they do the right thing before anyone else, it’s great for the kids, but bad for the agency’s bottom line. 

Double standards and bad incentives 

Any discussion of financial incentives is plagued with the same sorts of double standards that afflict any discussion in child welfare: tearing apart families is automatically considered the good, “safe” option, while avoiding the horrific trauma needless removal inflicts on children, and avoiding the high risk of abuse in foster care itself, is somehow deemed risky. 

So you may be sure that were the legislature ever to restore even a slight incentive not to hold children needlessly in foster care, the Herald or the Tampa Bay Times would find the first available horror story and blame it on a supposedly dangerous incentive to return children home. 

Of course, neither newspaper has expressed any concern about the current incentive to
prolong foster care, with all of the well-documented emotional harm this inflicts on children (think Mexican Border because it’s the same kind of harm), the well-documented rotten outcomes this causes in later life,  the well-documented high rate of abuse in foster care – and, of course, the well-documented harm to children who fall into the clutches of outfits such as Eckerd. 

There are also huge incentives to prolong foster care beyond the financial: No caseworker wants to be on the front page of the Herald or the Tampa Bay Times, accused of “allowing” a child to die.  They need have no fear of being on the front page for tearing apart families needlessly.  The same dynamic applies to judges and agency administrators. 

The bad financial incentives compound all that. Changing them would be a very small step toward redressing the imbalance and allowing the system to handle each case on its merits. 

That this can be done in Florida is illustrated by what happened when Sheldon and before him Bob Butterworth ran DCF.  During their tenure a waiver from federal funding rules allowed more money to be used to keep families together.  Entries into foster care declined and independent monitors found no compromise of child safety. 

Then the Miami Herald came along and blew the whole thing up. 

Everything from the series of outstanding stories from the USA Today Florida Network, and the accounts of youth left to the tender mercies of Eckerd make clear the consequences.

Group home industry admits what we’ve always known: It’s $ first, kids second

● Their public face is all about how they don’t even think about money (except that they wish they had more of it to help those poor, helpless children, of course.) But when they think we’re not listening the talk is all about “capital” “revenue” and “equity portfolios.”

● And when they think we’re not listening they admit that tens of thousands of children warehoused in institutions don’t need to be institutionalized.

No, the people who run residential treatment
centers are not like Montgomery Burns
on The Simpsons. But financial incentives for
needlessly institutionalizing children are very real.

 Discussions about financial incentives in child welfare usually revolve around incentives for governments.  Sometimes that discussion is oversimplified with claims that governments “make money on foster care.”

Actually they don’t.  But the reality is almost as bad. A series of perverse incentives lead to a situation in which governments sometimes lose more money by helping a family than they lose by just consigning the children to foster care – even though the help for the family costs less in total dollars.  So even though governments don’t literally make money on foster care, there are financial incentives to misuse it and overuse it.

Another set of perverse incentives encourages quick-and-dirty slipshod adoptive placements, by paying bounties for every finalized adoption over a baseline number.  Even when the adoptions fail, the states still get to keep their bounties.  There is no similar incentive for reunifying a family.

Incentives for private agencies

But there is another set of even worse incentives that gets far less attention: incentives for private agencies. Such agencies typically provide most of the worst, and most expensive forms of “care” – group homes and institutions. In some states and localities they also oversee foster homes. 

These agencies typically are paid for each day they hold a child in their care.  So of course, they have a profound incentive to encourage needless removal of children and then hold them in foster care for a long, long time. 

This does not mean that your typical private agency leader is like Montgomery Burns on The Simpsons, gleefully rubbing his hands each time another child is placed in his group home or institution.  Rationalization is powerful. So the group home industry, (a term that encompasses all forms of “congregate care” from your basic group home to your “residential treatment center,”) convinces itself that, contrary to a massive amount of evidence, the children really, truly benefit from being institutionalized and really, truly have to be in their care for a long, long time.

(The term group home industry itself was coined by the director of a residential treatment center who had a crisis of conscience and had to fight the industry when he sought to vastly reduce institutionalization and emphasize services to children in their homes or foster homes.)

Nonprofits can be greedy, too

The various components of the group home industry are typically, though not always, nonprofit organizations.  That’s a big blind spot for journalists.  Reporters are trained to be skeptical of government and of big corporations. But there is surprising naiveté about the so-called “independent sector.”  But the will to survive can induce in nonprofits a form of greed that is as corrosive of common decency as the worst corporate behavior.

And that brings me to a column written by Jennifer Jones and Theresa Covington, two leaders of the so-called Alliance for Strong Families and Communities.  That’s one of those Orwellian names so-beloved in child welfare. It’s actually a trade association for human services agencies, including many that run group homes and residential treatment centers.

Writing in what they apparently consider their safe space, the Chronicle of Social Change, they effectively admitted that what really concerns many of their members is: Money, money, money.

The column deals with the so called Family First Prevention Services Act. They claim that “One of the areas that will be most impacted [sic] by the bill is residential care.” (In fact, that part of the law is so strewn with loopholes that, unfortunately, the “residential care” industry is unlikely to be impacted – or even affected – much at all.) They go on to write about how they’re conducting “a series of cohort initiatives to help inform and advance a transformational shift …”

True confessions, part 1:

But two elements of the column are striking. First, this trade association that includes so many residential treatment providers admits, in writing, that a huge proportion of the children their members have institutionalized don’t need to be in institutions.

They write:

“Therapeutic Residential Care,” as it is known, focuses specifically on providing treatment for youth who have a mental health diagnosis or have experienced trauma and need help regulating their emotions. … However, according to recent data, more than 4 in 10 children who are currently in residential care have no mental health diagnosis, medical disability or behavioral problem that would warrant such a setting. [Emphasis added.]

… Recent research suggests that young children living in residential programs are at a higher risk for developing physical, emotional and behavioral problems. These young children are also less likely to be placed in a permanent home than those who live in foster care.

The “recent research” comes on top of the vast store of research that has told us as much for a long, long time. Back in 2005, Shay Bilchik, who then was running another trade association for agencies that has an Orwellian name, the Child Welfare League of America, admitted that they lack “good research” showing residential treatment’s effectiveness and “we find it hard to demonstrate success...”

What’s new is that now the so-called “Alliance” is admitting it as well, and suggesting that tens of thousands of institutionalized children should not, in fact, be institutionalized. (The 4 in 10 number is an underestimate. There is no evidence that residential treatment is successful for any population – but, hey, it’s a start.)

True confessions, Part 2:

So, what is it that is stopping the Alliance’s member agencies from abandoning this largely worthless endeavor?  After all, these agencies tell us over and over that their only concern is the best interests of the children, and they don’t even think about what the agencies themselves need. 

But now Jones and Covington tell a different story:

This shift requires residential providers to make significant changes in policy, practice, budget, historical programming and organizational culture. The growing evidence base continues to point to this change movement as being in children’s best interests and necessary, yet providers continue to seek out clearer and more efficient pathways to understand this new reality and make this transformation a reality.

Translation: We might be willing to do this, but only if we don’t lose any money, or, God forbid, go out of business.  Money first, kids second. 

Jones and Covington cite figures from one of their member agencies indicating that residential treatment brings in a disproportionate share of its revenue. And, they write,

Many child welfare providers and operators of residential treatment facilities have a tremendous amount of equity and capital in their physical structures and campuses and a large portion of their organizational identity is encompassed in their role as residential providers.

Translation: If we do what’s best for the kids, where will we get our money?  We’ve got all that equity and capital to think about! 

Jones and Covington continue:

It can be challenging for leaders and board members of these organizations to still deliver on their stated mission when such a large part of that mission is being transformed.

But if the stated mission is institutionalizing children, then the mission is crap and it should be scrapped. 

Jones and Covington again:

Child welfare providers are among the oldest community-based nonprofits in the country, with a significant number of them owning and operating facilities that began as orphanages more than a century ago.

Actually, they’re still orphanages.  “Residential treatment” is largely an exercise in rebranding. 

And finally, Jones and Covington tell us:

These physical campuses make up a large part of their equity portfolio and many organizations are hesitant to make the leap to repurpose or divest these resources.

But why?

If all they care about is what’s best for the children, as they keep telling us, they should be thrilled to follow pioneers such as Children’s Village, EMQ Child and Family Services and Youth Villages which all have dramatically altered their mission to put far more emphasis on services in children’s own homes, in foster homes.

Unless of course, what they really care about is self-preservation.

Meanwhile, back at the whine cellar …

And, of course, no column by a trade association of providers would be complete without whining about how they don’t get enough money for whatever it is they provide. So, Jones and Covington write:

The theory of change represented within the [Family First] bill requires a robust array of home- and community-based services, yet there was no federal funding put in the bill to help states build up that part of the system. So, state legislatures and local governments are going to need to make further investments into developing this part of the system in order to keep children in the least restrictive, most family-like settings. 

Actually, that’s not quite true. As the authors note in the same column, Family First does include some funding for reforms. It allows money once limited to substitute care to be spent on better options – though the options are severely limited, so very little money actually is likely to be available.

But more important, you get the money for alternatives to institutionalizing children by not institutionalizing children. 

Institutions are not just the worst form of care, they’re also the most expensive.  So pretty much anything else you do for a particular child will cost less than institutionalizing the child. So all you need to do to “make further investments” in better alternatives is to take the state and local money you would have spent to institutionalize children and spend it on those better alternatives. 

That is, if all those concerns from agencies about “capital” “revenue” and “equity portfolios” don’t get in the way.

New Columns on the stop-and-frisk of child welfare, lessons from Wells Fargo, caseworkers who assert a right to lie and reforming the system in Connecticut

My fellow liberals are rightly upset about stop-and-frisk policing. They should be equally upset about
Predictive Analytics: The Stop-and-Frisk of Child Welfare

Speaking of parallels between criminal justice and child welfare: At least in criminal justice, a police officer sued after allegedly perjuring himself probably wouldn’t say, “Gee, I had no idea that was unconstitutional.”  But in child welfare, it actually happened. Read about

Lessons for Child Welfare from the California "Right to Lie" Case

There also are Lessons for Child Welfare from the Tales of Wells Fargo. Lesson #1: financial incentives matter.

There's been a child welfare tragedy in Connecticut. So of course, reforms that have made children safer are under attack. Here's NCCPR's take:

From the online news site, Connecticut Mirror.

From the Chronicle of Social Change.

Child welfare in Minnesota: Investigate more cases, get more $

The previous post to this Blog discusses an impressive report from the auditing arm of the Minnesota Legislature.  The report documented the extent to which child welfare in that state is arbitrary, capricious and cruel.

The report’s authors gave ten hypothetical “vignettes” to workers who decide whether or not to accept a report alleging child abuse or neglect for investigation.  There was no unanimity on any of them and relative consensus on only three.

But the real bombshell in the report concerns an idiotic decision by the Minnesota Legislature concerning financial incentives.

I’ve written often about how financial incentives at the federal level encourage the misuse and overuse of foster care.  But in Minnesota, where child welfare systems are run by individual counties, the legislature has compounded the problem.

That’s because of the formula the legislature came up with for how the state Department of Human Services will distribute both state social services funds and federal social services aid under a program called Title 20.

Here’s how the audit report explains it:

The 2011 Legislature created the Vulnerable Children and Adults Act.   Among other things, the act specifies how DHS should distribute state and federal Title XX funds to county agencies.  Increasingly, the funds are to be distributed based on the number of vulnerable children and adults in each county.

The number to be used in the formula is the number of children who were the subject of screened-in maltreatment referrals.  Thus, agencies that cast wider nets for screening in child protection referrals could receive more funding, even if their caseloads reflect less-serious child protection cases than agencies that more selectively screen their referrals. [Emphasis added.]

So in Minnesota, if you subject children to the considerable trauma of a needless child abuse investigation, and waste the time of workers that could be better spent finding children in real danger, you get more money.

THE BIZARRE PRACTICE OF “CHILD WELFARE CHECKS”

There is another oddity in Minnesota worth noting: a practice known as a “child welfare check.”  Again, from the report:

[L]aw enforcement officers may conduct “child welfare checks” on their own initiative or at the request of a child protection agency. As its name suggests, a child welfare check involves going to a family’s home and asking about or observing the welfare of a child.  A child welfare check may result in a referral to a child protection agency if the officer sees conditions or actions that constitute child maltreatment. Finally, law enforcement officers may take a child into custody for emergency placement if the child is found in conditions that endanger or could endanger his or her health or welfare.

So what, exactly, is the difference between a “child welfare check,” which “involves going to a family’s home and asking about or observing the welfare of a child”  and a child abuse investigation, which, of course involves to a family’s home and asking about or observing the welfare of a child?

Now here’s where it gets weird: Workers at county child welfare agencies in Minnesota said they typically requested such checks on cases they screened out as not rising to the level where they needed an investigation.  In still other cases, the child welfare agency itself may do a “child welfare check” on a case that was screened out as not worthy of an “investigation.”

So in parts of Minnesota, if a case does not meet even the minimal standards to be screened in, it still may well be investigated.

The report cites some examples:

Staff at one agency stated that their city police make child welfare checks on every screened-out child protection referral. Staff at another agency stated that workers go out on almost every call that is screened out in order to do preventive work. However, other agencies do not perform child welfare checks or ask law enforcement to perform these checks.

While an initial child protection referral may be screened out, follow up from the agency or the police could result in an additional referral, which may be screened in for child protection. As a result, families in similar situations ultimately may be screened in to child protection by agencies that use child welfare checks, whereas families in the jurisdiction of agencies who do not use child welfare checks regularly may remain screened out.

Several respondents to the vignette portion of our screeners survey commented that a screened-out vignette could become a screened-in child protection referral after more information was learned through child welfare checks. … Another agency stated that they would screen out a vignette involving a teenager who had allegedly been punched by her dad, but added: "We would make a ‘strong’ Child Welfare visit. … If physical discipline continues we would very likely do a child protection family assessment in the future."

Making all this even weirder is the fact that Minnesota has pioneered the use of “differential response” for less serious cases that are screened in.  Under differential response families are not investigated or “checked.”  Rather they are offered an “assessment” and voluntary help.

So to sum up, in parts of Minnesota the system works like this:

● Reports deemed most serious: child abuse investigation.

● Reports deemed less serious but still “screened in:” voluntary assessment.

● Reports that are even less serious and so are screened out entirely: “child welfare check” – which is another term for a child abuse investigation.

Foster care finance reform: NAPCWA offers a plan that fears the future

While we don't know if Bryan Samuels, the Commissioner of the Administration for Children Youth and Families really will turn out to be a champion of genuine child welfare finance reform, we know who is chickening out, big-time: the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators, the trade association for the people who run state and local government child protective services agencies.

NAPCWA has made public its plan for child welfare finance "reform." And while the reasons may be different, my guess is a lot of people in Congress are going to react to the plan the same way I did: They can't be serious. Indeed, they may not be serious. The plan is so unrealistic and so likely to be Dead on Arrival on Capitol Hill that I have to wonder if a lot of people in NAPCWA simply want to show they tried before pushing for straight "delinking" – something I'll explain below - and nothing more.

The only good news in the document is that NAPCWA calls for restoring the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services to issue waivers like the one that has done so much to improve child welfare in Florida. Other than that, the plan is worthless.

But it's not the fact that this plan is bad policy, with the potential to actually make incentives worse, that is likely to kill it. It's the fact that it is not cost-neutral; not even close. And if I can figure that out, so can the Congressional Budget Office.

In reading this plan, I was struck by how distant it is from a vision President Obama articulated when he signed the health care law. At that time, he said: "We do not fear the future, we shape the future."
In contrast, the plan for child welfare finance reform released by NAPCWA is a plan that suggests NAPCWA is so fearful of the future that it won't even try to shape it. In the process it puts at risk the futures of thousands of vulnerable children.

STILL ADDICTED TO FOSTER CARE
As with so much in child welfare practice, this plan belies the rhetoric about keeping families together being the first goal of the system. What the plan really says is: We will continue to do business as usual, and, if we get lucky and save a little by reducing foster care, we'll put some of that spare change into keeping families together. And because we so fear the future, because we don't really believe our own rhetoric about the success and the value of prevention, we insist on maintaining our addiction to the open-ended entitlement of foster care.
Not only would this plan do little or nothing to change the incentives that promote foster care, if this change is accompanied by "delinking," it actually could make things worse.

And what is this grand plan? Essentially it all boils down to this:

• Keep the open-ended entitlement under which states are reimbursed for a large share of the cost of holding children in foster care – with no comparable entitlement for better alternatives.
  
• If a state nevertheless manages to reduce foster care, let the state, in effect, pretend it's still taking away just as many children as ever and use the savings for alternatives, including prevention, family preservation and adoption. It's even possible, though not clear from the plan, that some of the savings could be plowed right back into foster care.
  
• But if foster care goes up, states would continue to receive reimbursement for every child taken away. And it would be every child, not just every "eligible child" because the other key component of the plan is --
  
• 
  
  "delinking," the Holy Grail of the foster care-industrial complex. Under delinking the proportion of children whose cases are eligible for federal aid would roughly double, and the gradual erosion of the proportion of cases eligible for aid – the one tiny financial incentive that runs against shoveling ever more children into foster care – would end. (This is not what makes the plan so costly – NAPCWA admits that to get delinking it would have to cut the amount reimbursed per child. It's the part about keeping the entitlement that risks big cost increases, as is discussed below).
  
  
  ALL CARROT, NO STICK
  
  
  
  In every possible way, the incentives in child welfare favor foster care: The personal incentives for everyone from the frontline caseworker to the child welfare agency chief, favor it, the political incentives favor it and the financial incentives favor it. Even if one argues that this plan neutralizes the financial incentives – and I don't think it does - it doesn't change the other incentives. So there will be no serious push to reduce foster care. More important, when the going gets tough – when the local newspaper suddenly discovers that a state or county has a child welfare agency and sometimes children known to that agency die - there is no incentive to resist foster-care panic – because, under this plan, the state or county still gets a huge share of foster care costs reimbursed.
  
  Los Angeles County is a good example. As has been noted often on this Blog, the Los Angeles Times has been running lots of stories about deaths of children known-to-the-system and, initially, scapegoating efforts to keep families together. (There's been a change in direction on the spin lately, but it's too little, too late.) The Los Angeles County child welfare agency director claimed there was no foster-care panic. But when she reneged on a promise to provide the actual numbers, NCCPR filed a California Public Records Act to get them.
  
  The data show there is a foster-care panic in Los Angeles County. However, the panic is not nearly as bad as other places have endured under nearly-identical circumstances. That almost certainly is because Los Angeles County accepted a Florida-style waiver limiting its foster care funding from the federal government. So, to the extent that there is a foster-care panic in Los Angeles County, Los Angeles County actually has to pay for it.
  
  In contrast, under the NAPCWA plan, Los Angeles wouldn't have to pay more than under the status quo for the rest of the nation and, for reasons I'll get to below, might actually pay a little less.
  
  A ceiling on foster care expenditures is essential to stiffen the spines of many child welfare leaders and most elected officials, in the face of newspaper crusades and other pressure to "take the child and run."
  
  DELINKING MAY MAKE THINGS WORSE
              Even more frightening is the possibility that, were this plan enacted in it's entirely, the incentives in a time of foster-care panic could get worse.
  
  Again, consider the Los Angeles example:
  
  ●Because of the waiver, Los Angeles County has to pay the full cost of its current foster-care panic.
  ●If Los Angeles County were like most of America today, in contrast, it would be reimbursed for a sizable share of the cost of additional placements caused by foster care panic (or any other cause) – but only for "eligible" children.
  ●Under the NAPCWA plan, Los Angeles actually would be reimbursed for part of the cost of every child wrongfully placed in foster care because of a foster-care panic. (Although the proportion of federal aid per case would be lower, the fine print about something called "claiming rates" appears to mean that, in fact, Los Angeles, and everyplace else, actually would get more. And, of course the gradual reduction in the proportion of cases eligible for reimbursement would end).
  Thus, the NAPCWA plan actually encourages foster-care panic even more than the status quo.
  
  THE PLAN IS NOT COST NEUTRAL – AND CONGRESS WILL NOTICE
  
  Although NAPCWA says this plan is cost neutral, it isn't. As noted above, I am not referring to delinking – I understand that the idea is to make delinking itself close to cost-neutral, by lowering the reimbursement per case. The increased costs come about in a different way:
  
  ●Under the status quo, the federal government pays more when foster care entries go up, but saves money when they come down.
  ●Under waivers like Florida's the federal government doesn't pay less when foster care entries go down, but it doesn't pay more either, aside from a small annual increase negotiated with the state to account for inflation. And, of course, it doesn't pay more when entries rise.
  
  The federal government, and all taxpayers, also reap huge savings in other areas, like running criminal justice systems (especially jails), paying unemployment compensation and public assistance, and maintaining adult psychiatric centers, since reducing needless foster care also reduces the terrible outcomes that plague so many former foster children.
  ● But under the NAPCWA plan, the federal government would continue to pay more when entries increase but achieve no direct savings when numbers go down.
  
  Consider two hypothetical states. Each state had 100,000 "foster care days" for eligible children last year (number of children in foster care at any point in the year multiplied by the number of days they were there), for a total of 200,000 days in all. Let's also assume that, in each of these hypothetical states, the federal government pays an average of $100 per foster care day. Total cost to the federal government: $10 million per state, $20 million in all.
  
  Now, let's suppose in the following year, one state cuts 10,000 foster care days while the other adds 10,000 foster care days. The total cost remains the same, because what the federal government loses in one state it saves in the other.
  
  But under the NAPCWA plan, the federal government has to pay for those 10,000 extra days in one state, but saves nothing from the reduction in the other state. It winds up paying for the equivalent of 210,000 days – an increase in cost to the federal government of $1million.
  
  Why would a federal government that is drowning in debt do something like that?
  
  NAPCWA's document is more of a wish than a plan. It suggests an organization that views prevention as a luxury that would be nice to have, rather than an organization that is "fired up, ready to go" and reform child welfare.
  
  

Foster care finance reform: The charge of the “Yes, but…” brigade

During his opening statement at a Congressional subcommittee hearing on child welfare finance reform this morning, the Secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families spoke about a meeting he had with fifteen former foster children. He said it was those former foster children who convinced him of the need for Florida's current reforms:

Child after child after child told me I would have rather stayed at home and dealt with the issues in that home than gone into a foster care system where I was moved from home to home and school to school.

Today, children are far more likely to be able to stay in their own homes in Florida because of its highlysuccessful waiver from federal funding rules. The waiver lets Florida spend about $140 million a year in federal funds normally reserved for foster care on better options as well. The result has been a significant reduction in entries into care and, according to independent evaluations, improved safety outcomes

But for the rest of the 90 minute hearing, almost everyone else who spoke forgot about those young people, as they sought to "yes, but…" to death any plan to let other states do what Florida has done. The Florida wavier itself expires in 2011 if it's not extended by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Among those joining the "Yes, but…" brigade was the chairman of the subcommittee holding the hearings, Rep. Jim McDermott, (D-Washington).

At the start of the hearing, McDermott announced he would introduce legislation to restore HHS' authority to grant a limited number of new waivers. He spent the rest of the hearing wringing his hands over his own bill. Over and over he expressed the classic fear of the foster care-industrial complex: Somehow or other this means we don't get as much money. He obsessed over the possibility that states might use the waivers to cut child welfare spending and use savings from putting fewer children into foster care on other government services.

Suppose, he argued, a state was spending $100 to keep a child in foster care and could spend only $40 to keep that child safely in his own home. What's to stop a state from diverting the other $60 to highway construction or something else besides child welfare. (This is my recollection of the hypothetical, his figures and examples of other spending may have been a little different).

Even assuming that were possible (and for reasons discussed below, it is not) that still would be an improvement over the status quo. That's because the $40 intervention – keeping the child safely in his own home – almost always would produce better results for the child than the $100 intervention: foster care. Yet this is virtually incomprehensible to McDermott and other of my fellow liberals who can't conceive of something being better if it doesn't involve spending more money.

Part of the problem is that too many of us on the left are stuck in a 1960s mindset, in which letting states make decisions meant segregation forever and enlightened policy – from the New Deal to the civil rights laws to the Great Society – came only from the federal government. The irony is that now this mindset is perpetuating one of the worst civil rights violations of the 21^st Century, the needless confiscation of poor, minority children from their parents. And we're thwarting states who want to do better. We're never going to win the war of ideas with the right until we get it through our heads that it's no longer 1968.

But in any event, what McDermott fears can't happen under child welfare waivers like the one in Florida. Indeed, over and over, Sheldon and another witness – one from McDermott's home state – tried to explain that in the real world of child welfare, the opposite was the case.

MAINTENANCE OF EFFORT

Sheldon explained how the Florida waiver had a strong "maintenance of effort" provision which required that the state maintain its own level of funding for child welfare. He talked about how DCF had, indeed, taken hits in other areas, but not child welfare, because the waiver would not allow it. So any savings from reducing foster care in Florida had to go into further improvements in child welfare services.

In contrast, State Rep. Ruth Kagi (D-Washington) expressed her enormous frustration at the fact that, now that Washington State finally was reducing its foster care numbers, that state was being penalized for it financially. Since Washington State gets its foster care money the old fashioned way, as an open-ended entitlement, it can't keep the savings from reducing foster care – the money never even gets to Washington State. As a result, they're having enormous problems trying to spend on services to keep children out of care.

She cited an example:

I was with a caseworker in Vancouver a few months ago, who had been with a young mom with a baby, and the risk, she felt, was high, but she wanted to get a public health nurse in there to support the mom, and felt that would make the difference. She was unable to get a public health nurse. So she took the child, and placed the child in foster care.

So to sum up:

● Florida: Has waiver – CAN'T cut child welfare

●Washington State: No waiver – CAN cut child welfare.

Somehow, this didn't seem to sink in.

And no wonder, given the comments from some of the other witnesses.

For starters there was Fred Wulczyn, from the home of advocacy "scholarship" the Chapin Hall Center for Children. He hemmed and hawed about what evaluations showed, suggesting that only the evaluations of waivers involving subsidized guardianship really produced outstanding results. He dismissed the comprehensive evaluations of Florida's waiver because they're not yet "final."

THE DOUBLE STANDARDS ARE SHOWING AGAIN

This is a perfect example of the double standards that plague child welfare scholarship: We've known about the dreadful failure of foster care and institutions for a century – that should be "final" enough. Yet these interventions are allowed to scarf up almost all the money because alternatives haven't dotted every i and crossed every t on their "final" evaluations.

Even more galling, of course, are Chapin Hall's own double standards. Wulczyn's "Yes, butting…" of prevention waivers comes only weeks after his colleague Deborah Daro co-authored a letter passionately urging President Obama to fund certain "home visiting" programs that have a lot less evidence of success than the Florida waiver. And Daro failed to disclose in the letter that one of these programs, Healthy Families America, is a program she helped to develop when she was at Prevent Child Abuse America.

In the same vein, one of the programs Rep. Kagi rightly praised, and wants to expand is the original Intensive Family Preservation Services program, Homebuilders, a program which has an outstanding evidence base proving effectiveness, but which probably would be dead by now had some of the advocacy-scholars at Chapin Hall had their way. (In fairness to Wulczyn, while I believe he applies the wrong standard when comparing innovation to the status-quo, he's been consistent and honorable in his own evaluation work.)

But the leader of the Charge of the "Yes, but…" Brigade was Rutledge Q. Hutson, who has ping-ponged between the Center for Law and Social Policy, where she works now, and the Children's Defense Fund, a group whose slogan should be "no dollar left behind."

●For starters, Hutson offered up a favorite scare number from those whose 19^th Century counterparts proudly called themselves "child savers" – the one about how, in 40 percent of cases in which investigators "substantiate" maltreatment, the family received no "services." This, of course, conjures up images of parents beating, raping and torturing their children as caseworkers check the "substantiated" box on a form and walk away.

Far more likely, the overwhelming majority of these cases are situations in which no "help" from the government was required. They may be cases in which the worker only checked the "substantiated" box because she was afraid to do otherwise if something later went wrong – in some states you're supposed to check this box even when there is more evidence of innocence. Or they may be situations in which a mother rushed to a toddler twin crying in one room, and the other twin hurt himself while unattended for those few minutes. Or a young child unlatches the back door and wanders away for a few minutes – and by the time the child protective services worker arrives to "investigate" the parents have put a better lock on the door, etc. etc.

●In a classic example of the narrow range of ideas that characterizes the child savers, Hutson insisted that waivers can't possibly work until an entire array of alternative services is in place and ready to go before even one child is kept out of foster care. She suggested this even as Florida's experience proves this simply isn't so. It doesn't take that long to bolster basic prevention and family preservation. And Hutson's thesis assumes that every child in foster care needed to be there in the absence of "services." In fact, there are foster children who never should have been taken away at all – and the savings from keeping them out of foster care can be used immediately to bolster prevention and family preservation.

●Hutson also erred in claiming we don't know what happens to children not taken into the system under waivers. On the contrary, Florida's waiver evaluation measures the proportion of children with substantiated allegations of maltreatment who are maltreated again within six months – and that figure has improved under the waiver.

But the fact that Rutledge Q. Hutson ignores the research of others is not nearly as disturbing as the fact that she's ignored the research of – Rutledge Q. Hutson. In 2003, Hutson wrote a report on the dramatic improvements in the county-run child welfare system in El Paso County, Colorado. Absolutely vital to making that work was the fact that a visionary leader of that system, David Berns, took full advantage of the flexibility in state aid provided by Colorado to the counties – in fact, he pushed the envelope as far as it would go in mixing and matching those funds, adopting a "better to apologize afterwards than ask permission beforehand" approach.

But today, Hutson spent most of her time effectively seeking to put obstacles in the way of the next Dave Berns to come along and try to transform child welfare in a county or a state.

All of those in the "Yes, but…" brigade kept saying that waivers are no substitute for comprehensive reform of child welfare finance in general. That's true – but the vision of reform the "Yes, but…" brigade is pushing would add a lot of new spending and do almost nothing to encourage shifting that spending from foster care to better alternatives. Indeed, under some scenarios, things could get even worse. Details are in our report on child welfare financing.

And, as Rep. Kagi pointed out toward the end of the hearing, in a tone that suggested some exasperation: There is no consensus on what "comprehensive reform" should look like – so at least states that want to move ahead should get a chance through waivers.

Reporting to Congress on the foster care waiver that saved Florida

PUBLIC HEARING ON CHILD WELFARE WAIVERS WILL BE AVAILABLE LIVE ON THE WEB

A subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee is scheduled to hold a public hearing starting at 10:00am today on waivers from rules that limit the use of huge amounts of federal money only to warehousing children in foster care. Witnesses include the Secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families, George Sheldon, who will testify about the enormous success Florida has had with its waiver, which allows the state to use up to about $140 million per year that otherwise would be restricted to foster care on better alternatives as well.

The waivers will be expiring soon – extending them is vital to the continued success of Florida in transforming its child welfare system from one of the nation's worst into an emerging national leader.

The home page for the hearing includes a link to live coverage on the web. But I doubt the cameras will be focusing much on the audience. Too bad. Virtually every organization wedded to the child welfare status quo will have someone in the room, and they'll all be thinking about how to kill the waivers without actually saying that's what they're doing. Expect a lot of written statements for the record filled with comments about how "we favor flexibility but…" "the waivers are promising, however…," or "we strongly support alternatives to foster care, as long as…"

That's how the nation's foster care-industrial complex always tries to kill reform. Never say "no." Just, "yes, but…" it to death.

In fact, extending the waivers isn't nearly enough. Congress should authorize HHS to make Florida-style waivers quickly and easily available to any state or county that wants one. Even then, relatively few child welfare leaders are likely to have the courage – the classic profile in cowardice being Michigan, which actually accepted a Florida-style waiver and then turned it down at the last minute. But at least if such waivers were readily available those with the vision to transform their child welfare systems will have the financial incentives from the federal government on their side, instead of getting in the way.

For details on child welfare financing and the full context for today's hearing, see NCCPR's report, You Get What You Pay For.

UPDATED, MARCH 24: CR wins: More children will be shoveled into foster care in Tennessee

See update at the end of this post

It's no less disappointing for the fact that it's no surprise: The group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" is crowing about having bullied the Tennessee Legislature into repealing a law that would have ever-so-slightly counterbalanced the enormous incentives for needless foster care. Details on the law, and CR's crusade to get rid of it, are in this previous post to this blog.

CR moved against this law even though the group's own Executive Director, Marcia Lowry, recently told the Philadelphia Daily News:

"I've been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not."

Now, thanks to Marcia and her colleagues, the odds of that happening to even more children in Tennessee have just gone up. And so have the odds of another case like this. That is how the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights defines "children's rights."

UPDATE: MARCH 24: CR’s double standards are showing again. Now they’re out with a press release using the horrors endured by two foster children as leverage in their lawsuit in Oklahoma. Two days ago, they gloated about using the settlement they won in Tennessee as leverage to win repeal of a law that would reduce the odds of children enduring such horrors in that state.

Desperately seeking delinking: How CWLA wants to scarf up more money for foster care

IF THE ONLY BRAKE ON A RUNAWAY TRAIN IS A CLUMSY CONTRAPTION THAT ONLY RUBE GOLDBERG COULD LOVE, IT'S STILL BETTER THAN NO BRAKE AT ALL.

As people from child welfare agencies swarm over Capitol Hill today, odds are a lot of them will be talking about delinking. As I said yesterday, the Child Welfare League of America, and the rest of what I have come to call the "foster care-industrial complex" craves delinking the way Homer Simpson craves donuts, and both are bad for children. It's one of the issues discussed in NCCPR's new briefing paper on child welfare finance. The full paper is available on our website. Here's an excerpt:

So, what is delinking?

It all goes back to when a foster child's case is eligible for federal reimbursement under a program called Title IV-E. That reimbursement runs anywhere from 56 cents to 83 cents on the dollar, a huge federal subsidy for foster care. The same subsidy is available for adoption. As a result, in 2010 the federal government is expected to spend $4.7 billion on foster care and another $2.46 billion on adoption – more than ten times what it will spend on prevention and family preservation. The only brake on this fast-flowing open-spigot of foster care and adoption money involves the determination of eligibility.

Before 1996, eligibility was linked to whether the birth parents were eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). But in 1996, Congress ended AFDC. The link, however, remained. So today, for a child's case to be eligible for federal reimbursement, the child's birth parents need to be so poor that they would have qualified for AFDC by the standards in place in 1996.

It says an enormous amount about the extent to which child welfare systems target the poor that, in spite of the fact that the income limits have not been adjusted for inflation since 1996, about half of all foster care cases are eligible for this very generous federal reimbursement.

But because of that inflation, in theory, the proportion of cases eligible for federal reimbursement should decline ever so slightly every year, to the point where, in somewhere between 50 and 100 years, the federal government would be out of the foster care financing business. (In fact, as states get more aggressive about verifying eligibility, that may offset some of this decline).

Dealing with this "eligibility lookback" is time consuming, and it is cumbersome. It's a bizarre way to put a brake on the otherwise unlimited "entitlement" to foster care funding. But it's the only brake we've got.

If the only brake on a runaway train is a clumsy contraption that only Rube Goldberg could love, it's still better than no brake at all.

Removing the brake is known as "delinking" – since the link between foster care eligibility and AFDC would be broken.

Of course the foster care-industrial complex wants the brake removed. For them, it would be a bonanza. Suddenly, federal aid for foster care would double. Indeed, they crave delinking so much that they would be willing to settle for an alternative: Eliminate the link but cut the amount reimbursed for each case. That way, the change initially would be cost-neutral, though in future years it would cost far more than leaving the link in place.

The propaganda for delinking has been disheartening even by foster care industrial complex standards. CWLA repeatedly presents the issue this way:

The impact of this lack of support is felt by tens of thousands of children who have experienced abuse and neglect but do not qualify for federal assistance because of this outdated eligibility requirement.

The implication, of course, is that if a case is not eligible for federal reimbursement somehow the specific children in that case are getting less help than other children. Who knows - there might even be people from CWLA member agencies on Capitol Hill right now either misleading people on purpose with this line, or who actually believe the implication themselves.

Any such implication is flat wrong.

All foster children placed in licensed foster homes receive exactly the same benefits and services regardless of the case's eligibility for federal reimbursement. Those benefits and services may not be very good, but they are equal. And all licensed foster parents receive the same reimbursement for a IV-E-eligible child as for a non-eligible child. Such equal treatment is required for the state to get its IV-E money.

The camel's nose already is in the tent

At one time, I thought straight delinking, with its huge price tag couldn't happen. But tragically for children, it's already begun.

Just as Title IV-E provides a huge open-ended entitlement for foster care, it also includes another huge, (though not as huge) open-ended entitlement for adoption.

As noted previously on this blog, In 2008, the foster care-industrial complex managed to get a clause into new legislation, the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, that phases out the "link" for adoption subsidies.

In another words, they shoved into this law what ultimately will be at least a $2.46 billion annual windfall for adoption, and the public and private agencies that place children in adoptive homes. The law includes absolutely nothing for prevention or family preservation.

Given the state of the federal budget, every dollar spent elsewhere is one dollar less that can be used for prevention or family preservation. And this provision of the fostering connections act creates still another financial incentive for child welfare agencies to prefer adoption of foster children to reuniting them with birth parents.

So there is a very real, very frightening prospect that all the talk of reforming child welfare financing not only won't increase funding for prevention and family preservation, it could result in nothing more than delinking – in other words, nothing more than another $4.7 billion per year, at least, for the foster care-industrial complex, and a greater incentive than ever for agencies to take the child and run.

Foster care or family preservation: You get what you pay for

Today NCCPR releases its briefing paper on financing child welfare. That way, if anyone planning to go to Capitol Hill on behalf of the Child Welfare League of America tomorrow wants to know the side of the story CWLA will never tell, it's readily available on our website here. And if anyone in government or elsewhere who's only heard CWLA's spin on these issues wants to know the rest of the story, it's available to them as well.

Here's an excerpt:

Understanding the issue requires a journey into a wonkish world filled with terms like "delinking" and "eligibility lookback." It's worth the trip, because the stakes are so high.

To understand those stakes, consider what a single mother in the Bronx named Rose Mary Grant had to do every week for months, just to see her then-11-year-old son, Issa, as described in a keenly-observed story in the Westchester County, N.Y. Journal-News (which, unfortunately is not available on the Journal-News website):

"Starting from her brick apartment tower, Rose walks a block to Gun Hill Road, takes the 28 bus to the subway station, catches the 5 train to Harlem, makes her way down 125th Street, boards the Metro-North train to Dobbs Ferry, and rides a shuttle … At each step, she places two metal crutches ahead of her and swings forward on two prosthetic legs."

The journey would have been worth it, had there been something worthwhile for Issa at the end of the line. But there wasn't. Issa was trapped in a "residential treatment center" a form of "care" that does little or no good, and was utterly unnecessary for Issa.

Issa was not paranoid, he was not schizophrenic, and he was not delusional. The only label pinned on him was Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Sometimes, at home, he was seriously out-of-control. But his handicapped, impoverished single mother couldn't do what middle-class and wealthy families do: find a good psychiatrist and hire home health aides.

She couldn't do that because the federal government does almost nothing to help pay for such alternatives. But, in many cases, the federal government will gladly reimburse states between 56 and 83 cents for every one of the 86,000-or-more dollars per year it costs to keep children like Issa in an "RTC."

Issa finally did get home, and the RTC where he was housed is reforming its own practices to help more children in their home communities.

But the reason Issa couldn't be cared for in his own home by his own mother for so long is rooted in the way the federal government helps states and localities finance child welfare.

Foster care is funded by the federal government as an open-ended entitlement. It's known as Title IV-E. For every eligible child (and I'll get back to eligibility in tomorrow's post to this Blog) the states are reimbursed for anywhere from 56 percent to 83 percent of the cost of warehousing that child in a foster home, a group home, or an institution. (The percentage for each state is the same as whatever that state gets for Medicaid, which, in turn, is linked to the average income of state residents.) Aid for adoption subsidies also is an entitlement under the same program.

The only funding stream even partially reserved for prevention and family preservation, known as Title IV-B, is not an entitlement; and it is strictly limited.

The result, in Federal Fiscal Year 2010 the federal government is expected to spend, via Title IV-E, $4.7 billion to hold children in foster care and another $2.46 billion to subsidize adoptions. It will spend, at most, $660 million to help to keep children out of foster care through Title IV-B. The real figure is even lower because some money in the "prevention" funding stream can be spent on foster care and adoption.

This means that while safe proven alternatives to foster care cost less in total dollars, it sometimes can cost a state or locality less to throw a child into foster care.

So while this does not mean, as some have alleged that "government makes money on foster care" it does mean that there is a huge, perverse incentive to use foster care instead of better alternatives.

TOMORROW: CWLA CRAVES "DELINKING" THE WAY HOMER SIMPSON CRAVES DONUTS. BOTH ARE BAD FOR CHILDREN

Congress takes on the bad financial incentives in foster care – and makes them worse

It is well known that, thanks to decades of poor policy at the federal level, the financial incentives in child welfare are atrocious. For every eligible child a state or local government throws into foster care, (and the cases of about half of America's foster children are eligible) the federal government will pay more than half the tab – sometimes way more than half the tab. The same is true for adoption subsidies. There is nothing close for safe, proven programs to keep children out of foster care.

As a result, this year, for every dollar the federal government spends on prevention and family preservation, it will spend more than $10 on foster care and adoption – and that's a conservative estimate.

As a result, while it is not true, as some have claimed, that government makes money on foster care, it is true that though family preservation costs less in total dollars, it sometimes costs less for a state or local government to throw a child into foster care.

All of which means one should always worry about what will happen to children on days like this coming Tuesday, when "child savers" – to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts gave themselves – swarm over the U.S. Capitol as part of the annual "advocacy day" for the giant trade association for child welfare agencies, the Child Welfare League of America. The "advocacy day" is part of CWLA's Annual Conference, highlights of which include a presentation on why supposedly there is too much accountability to the public in child welfare and an entire "track" of panels on how the people who run residential treatment centers, which are largely worthless, can save their dying industry.

CWLA has led the opposition to real reform of child welfare finance, and if CWLA gets what it wants most, those incentives will become far, far worse.

NCCPR will discuss all of this in detail in a new briefing paper on child welfare finance. We'll be releasing it on our website, www.nccpr.org, Monday.

For now, though, I want to highlight what Congress already has done lately to make things worse. It's happened twice since 2008.

One change may have happened almost by accident. States are reimbursed for foster care at the same rate they receive for Medicaid. When the economic stimulus bill raised reimbursement for Medicaid, reimbursement for foster care automatically went up as well – so the incentive to use foster care instead of alternatives actually got worse. Before the stimulus, the federal government reimbursed from 50 cents to 77 cents of every dollar spent to hold an eligible child in foster care. Now, thanks to the stimulus bill, its 56 to 83 cents on the dollar. The same is true of adoption subsidies.

THE CAMEL'S NOSE GETS IN THE TENT

But the other change was intentional. In 2008, Congress passed the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act. CWLA and the rest of what I have come to call the "foster care -industrial complex" hasn't been able to stop gushing about this for the past year. And no wonder: it increases money in all sorts of categories, without providing so much as one additional penny for efforts to keep children out of foster care.

Some of the provisions of this law actually do some good, and only one does real harm. But the harm is huge. It's in a provision that's gone by almost unnoticed:

One way the "Increasing Adoptions Act" may increase adoptions is by providing still another huge incentive to pursue them at the expense of reunifying families.

The incentives to push adoption over reunification, financial and otherwise, already are enormous. Everyone in child welfare, from the frontline worker to the agency chief, knows that the only time a child welfare agency gets good press is when it gets those adoption numbers up – and no one looks too closely at how it was done. It also is the principal means of psychic satisfaction for people in the field – witness the fact that while everyone claims the system's primary goal for children is reunification, the only option that is celebrated each year in most of the country is adoption. That is clear from all those annual "Adoption Day" events, each of which generates another favorable story in the local paper.

There's also a significant financial incentive. Since 1998, under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, child welfare agencies receive a bounty; now $4,000 to $12,000, and sometimes more, for every foster child adoption over a baseline number. There is, of course, no such payment when a child is returned to her or his own parents.

DESPERATELY SEEKING "DELINKING"

In 2008, Congress further stacked the deck. Remember how I said that all that money for foster care and adoption is given for every case in which a child is eligible, and about half the cases are eligible? In cases involving adoption, the Fostering Connections Act phases in the other half. it eliminates a link to an old funding formula that was the one and only brake on this open-ended entitlement.

That's known as "delinking." Perhaps you've heard about it. It's hard to be anywhere near anyone from CWLA and not hear about it. CWLA is desperate for delinking, not just for adoption, but also for foster care. CWLA craves delinking the way Homer Simpson craves donuts.

But while the current link (discussed in detail in our briefing paper Monday) is a cumbersome and clumsy brake on the current open-ended entitlement for foster care, it's the only brake we've got. It would be crazy to remove this brake from the runaway train of unlimited foster care funding without something better to replace it.

Unfortunately, the brake already is coming off for adoption funds.

The implications are profound.

For starters, this change ultimately will funnel at least an extra $2.46 billion per year into adoption. That money is going to have to come from somewhere, and given the current state of the federal deficit, every new dollar for foster care and adoption is one less potential dollar for prevention and family preservation.

Though the law requires that the savings states gain from this new federal aid be spent on child welfare, that doesn't mean it has to go to prevention and family preservation. So those savings are far more likely to be plowed into hiring more child abuse investigators, more foster care, and big raises in rates for group homes and institutions – further worsening the imbalance in child welfare funding.

But that isn't even the worst of it. Because this new money for adoption also creates a terrible new incentive:

Consider the hypothetical case of Tommy, an eight-year-old who's been in foster care for a year because a caseworker didn't like the conditions in the tiny apartment where Tommy was living with his parents. Tommy's case did not meet the eligibility requirements for federal aid.

That means the state or local child welfare agency is picking up the entire tab for foster care. (Don't feel too sorry for the agency. Remember, they're already getting a huge subsidy for half their cases, and, contrary to what CWLA likes to imply, those funds are spread equally among all cases, including Tommy's.)

Similarly, if the agency returns Tommy home, the federal government will provide almost no help paying for any services Tommy and his parents might need to remain together.

But, once the new law is fully in effect, the federal government will pay between 56 and 83 cents out of every dollar spent on an adoption subsidy for Tommy's adoptive parents.

So while reunification may be in Tommy's best interests, the caseworker's need for psychic satisfaction, her boss' need for good press and, most important, the lure of more money for the child welfare agency, all push the decision toward adoption.

But that's just the start. The real prize for CWLA is attaining delinking for foster care – that would pour at least another $4.7 billion per year into foster care, and make the incentive to use foster care instead of family preservation even worse. (CWLA is willing to settle for reducing the payment per case in exchange for this delinking – but that's almost as bad.)

So there is every reason to fear for the fate of vulnerable, impoverished children while people from CWLA's member agencies are swarming Capitol Hill. Because when it comes to real reform of child welfare finance, the track record of Congress in recent years is frightening.

FOR FULL DETAILS AND BETTER ALTERNATIVES, SEE NCCPR'S REPORT ON CHILD WELFARE FINANCE, COMING MONDAY.

Foster care, family preservation and financial incentives: The waiver that’s STILL saving Florida

A previous post to this Blog discusses the latest report from the Florida Child Abuse Death Review Committee. The post notes that even this group has come to see how a pilot project for "differential response," which involves increasing screening of reports to the state's child abuse hotline, has made children safer.

But there's another new report out about Florida which tells far more about how children are faring. It's the latest independent evaluation of Florida's "Child First" waiver. As is discussed in detail in this previous post, the waiver allows Florida to take more than $140 million in federal money that, in other states, can be spent only on foster care and use it for safe, proven alternatives as well. The waiver played a key role in turning around what was once one of the nation's worst child welfare systems, a transformation that caught the attention of The New York Times.

Like the previous evaluation, the latest concludes that, as the waiver has helped Florida reduce entries into foster care, children have gotten safer.

But while child welfare continues to change for the better in Florida, there's been no improvement in the politics, in the state or nationally. Nationally, the odds that other states will get the same chance to do what Florida did remain slim, because the nation's foster care-industrial complex, the powerful private child welfare agencies paid for every day they hold children in foster care, remains opposed. They are led by the trade association for such groups, and public agencies as well, the group with the Orwellian name, Child Welfare League of America. Details are in our previous post about the Florida waiver.

And in Florida, progress is hampered by the desire of some pols to play to their right-wing base, as illustrated by the case of Rifqa Bary, and the state's cruel – and stupid – refusal to let potential parents adopt if they are gay.

The report on the waiver also is one more reminder to people in Michigan of the kind of dismal leadership that has characterized their child welfare agency for so long. Michigan initially accepted the same waiver as Florida, then chickened out at the last minute. That happened on the watch of the former head of the state Department of Human Services, Marianne Udow. She had the right principles, but lacked the courage to back them up. Her successor, Ismael Ahmed, hasn't shown that he even has the principles. His behavior suggests that he believes his job is to pander to the state's powerful private agencies – the "permanent government" of Michigan child welfare.

So while the waiver helped Florida cushion the blow of recession, in Michigan, as is discussed in detail in our reports on Michigan child welfare, Ahmed imposed slash-and-burn budget cuts to prevention and family preservation in order to fund rate increases for largely worthless residential treatment centers and a foster care worker hiring binge.