Will truthiness triumph in Kansas?

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

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

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

Of course not, you say? 

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

Still no?  Are you sure? 

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

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

So what?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the real world … 

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

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

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

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

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

Public radio weighs in 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A preference for truthiness 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We won’t find a “new vision” for foster care by looking in the rear view mirror

Nearly seven years ago, when the northeast was hit with a snowstorm quickly dubbed “snowpocalypse” and “snowmageddon,” The Daily Show used the occasion to make fun of people who assume that their own personal experience has more validity than actual science.

Starting at about 4:50 in this story, one correspondent says global warming, as climate change used to be called, must be a myth because right where he was standing at that very moment it was very, very cold and it was snowing outside. Another correspondent says no, global warming must be real because it’s very, very hot where she is – in Australia.

I think of this clip whenever I read another column in which Marie Cohen says she just knows we should institutionalize more children, because of what she personally saw during five whole years as a caseworker –filtered, of course, through all her own biases – has more validity than actual research.

An Orphanage is an Orphanage is an Orphanage

In her most recent column, she uses all sorts of euphemisms, but a salaried foster parent is no different than a “house parent” in a group home. And a cluster of group homes is an institution.

Cohen calls this “a new vision,” but it’s about as new as a Dickens novel. They’re just orphanages with new names.

To promote this 19th century “new vision,” Cohen derides efforts to place children with caregivers in their own communities. Her “evidence”:

I have seen such caregivers dip into the [foster care] stipend to pay their own expenses, run out of gas by the end of the month, fail to get children to appointments, and lead chaotic lifestyles similar to those of the families their wards were removed from.

In contrast to Cohen’s personal experience, consider what actual research tells us: Kinship care is better for children’s well-being, and safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.” There’s this study.  And this one.  And the studies cited here. And here.

In addition, kinship care parents are far less likely to resort to doping up children on potent psychiatric medication when they become hard to handle. In Florida, when foster children are placed with strangers, whether in homes or institutions, nearly 19 percent of them are medicated. But when foster children are placed in kinship care, only about five percent are prescribed psychiatric meds.

Given that relatives are more likely to be poor than stranger-care parents it’s possible that, as Cohen suggests, they are more likely to run out of gas. But they are less likely to run out of love.

Of course, Cohen doesn’t rely only on her personal experience. As she has so often before, she promotes institutions by showing us what they say about themselves on their own websites. The perils of this approach should have been clear when Cohen gushed about Maryville, near Chicago, years after it had been exposed as a hellhole. Now, she’s done it again. This time she cites SOS Children’s Villages. She says that a “physical community” like SOS is “a way to have more eyes on each family to  make sure there’s no abuse and neglect.”

But that’s not what the South Florida Sun-Sentinel found in 2002 when the newspaper exposed what it called the “ugly realities” of the SOS facility there:

Records provided by the Broward County office of the Department of Children & Families show numerous incidents of child-on-child sexual activity; allegations of improper supervision of children; and frequent police involvement at SOS.

Of course defenders of SOS would say: “Well, that was then, now we’re new and improved!” The problem is that institutionalization in general has been proven – by that pesky research again – to be a failure. And as long as such places exist the cycle of descend into chaos – reform – repeat will never end.

Cohen goes on to tell us, again with only anecdotes for “evidence,” that “many” foster parents “do it for the pay.” Even if that were true, there is a problem with her solution: Pay foster parents much more money, she says, and fewer will do it for the money.

Uh, right.

Supply and Demand

But the biggest failure in Cohen’s logic is the assumption that America has too few foster parents. Rather, America has too many foster children.

Yes, foster care numbers are increasing. But two-thirds of the increase since 2013 occurred in five states. At least four of them – Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Minnesota – had foster-care panics, spikes in removals of children due not to an actual increase in maltreatment but due to intensive news coverage of deaths of children “known to the system.”

In 2015 and 2016, there as a similar spike in removals in Arkansas. But consultants hired by the state found that the cause of the increase was not a spike in child abuse, it was the culture of the child welfare agency and the courts.

The money Cohen wants to lavish on strangers to care for other people’s children could be far better spent on day care so birth parents aren’t charged with “lack of supervision,” and rent subsidies, so children aren’t taken because of poor housing conditions. It could even go to helping pay for gasoline so kinship caregivers can get children to those appointments Cohen is so worried about – because God forbid the caseworker ever has to drive the children herself.

If every state took away children at the rate of say Alabama or Illinois – two states where independent court monitors have found that an emphasis on family preservation improved child safety, between 72,000 and 135,000 fewer children would be taken away each year nationwide, and all vulnerable children would be safer.

Foster parent “shortage” solved.

Latest objection to Family First Act: You’re kidding, right?

Maybe the Family First Act has a better chance of passing than I thought.

I assumed passage was unlikely. But the latest argument from those who think the bill would go too far is so absurd that it sounds like an act of desperation. In fact, I wasn’t going to bother writing about it, until I saw that the Los Angeles Times cited it in an editorial as a reason to oppose the bill.

The argument goes like this: Under current law, under a collection of highly unlikely circumstances, a small subset of kinship foster care placements could, at some point, lead to a situation where a later placement that otherwise would be eligible for federal aid would not be eligible for such aid.

That’s because, under these narrow circumstances, the income of the former kinship caregivers would be used to determine if the subsequent placement is eligible for reimbursement. Normally, the income of the birth parents is used.  (Yes, we’re talking about that important, and very helpful, provision of current law known as the “lookback.”)

But if the Family First Act passes, then – oh, wait, this has nothing to do with the Family First Act.

And that’s the first problem with this lame excuse for opposing the Family First Act.  The problem isn’t in the Family First Act – it’s in existing law.

So, given the penchant of child welfare agencies to whine about anything that doesn’t bring in money, why haven’t we heard about it until now?  Probably because it affects so few cases.

How the Quirk Works

In order for a case to be ineligible for federal Title IV-E foster care funds because of this quirk in existing law, all of these things have to happen:

§  The child must be placed in a kinship foster home that is not licensed the way homes with strangers are licensed. That doesn’t mean the placement isn’t foster care, it just means the grandparents or other relatives were unwilling to go through licensing or, more likely, unable to meet hypertechnical licensing requirements geared more to middle-class creature comforts than to actual health and safety issues.

Some of these placements are reported when states tell the federal government how many children they’ve taken away, but many are not. It amounts to a foster-care Twilight Zone that allows states to understate how often they tear apart families.

The issue does not arise with licensed kinship foster parents since they are treated identically to all other foster parents.

§  The relative has to give up caring for the child after six months. That happens, of course, but one of the many benefits of kinship foster care is that it tends to be more stable than what should properly be called “stranger care.”

§  The next placement for this child has to be with a licensed relative or a stranger care home or an institution. (Otherwise it’s not eligible for federal reimbursement anyway.)

§  The grandparent’s (or other relatives’) income has to be higher than the level allowed for a case to receive federal reimbursement under the lookback. That’s not likely to happen, often because part of the reason many grandparents and other relatives are unlicensed is that they, like the parents, are poor – so they can’t meet those hypertechnical licensing requirements.

Many cases may meet one of these criteria, but how many are likely to meet all of them?

The feeble attempt to link this to the Family First Act goes like this: The bill would make more services available to help families stay together, and those services sometimes might be provided to those families while their children were placed with relatives, so more children will be placed with relatives, so this tiny little quirk will be ever so slightly less tiny.

But the services that can be reimbursed under the Family First Act are extremely limited – that’s one of the reasons I’m still against it.  And the top priority for use of those services is supposed to be birth families while their children stay with those birth families – avoiding any kind of disruption in the child’s life. So there should be only a very small increase in kinship placements due to the Family First Act.

Escape from the Twilight Zone

I would like to suggest, however, a modest proposal to fix this modest problem. Exempt any unlicensed kinship care placement from the quirk in current law, on one condition: The placement must be reported to the federal government as a foster-care placement. Actually, that’s already required under federal regulations defining an entry into care, but the requirement is not enforced.  In other words, no more hiding these placements in the foster care Twilight Zone.

Substantively, this changes nothing. It’s a truth-in-labeling clause. Twilight Zone placements were foster care placements all along. This suggestion simply would provide an incentive for child welfare agencies to be honest about what they’ve been doing all along.

Dredging up this obscure quirk in current law is a bizarre effort to kill a bill that already didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

That very desperation illustrates how deeply the foster-care industrial complex clings to the status quo.  And it illustrates why real reform requires much stronger medicine than the Family First Act.

New columns about a child welfare tragedy and the foster care "Twilight Zone"

In the Chronicle of Social Change: How Child Protective Services took an almost unimaginable tragedy - and made it almost unimaginably worse.

Read the column here.

And in Youth Today: How child welfare agencies hide the true number of children they take from their families.

Read the column 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.

Texas Hide ‘em: Nearly Two-thirds of state’s foster care placements are “off the books”

The repeated claims that Texas takes proportionately few children are false.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

The claim has been made over and over by Texans who want the state to take away more children: Texas, it is claimed, takes away children at a much lower rate than other states.

That claim always hid more than it revealed.  But now it turns out that the claim is flat-out false in every respect.  Because now we know that when Texas tells the federal government, and the public, how many children it placed in foster care in a given year, Texas simply leaves out nearly two-thirds of the placements.

Texas does this by slapping a different label onto these placements.  They’re called “parental child safety placements.”  They are a form of kinship care – that is, placement with extended family or friends of the family instead of with total strangers.  Kinship care almost always is a  better,  safer option than stranger care. But it is still foster care.

Here’s how it works. The state Department of Family and Protective Services decides to remove a child from the home.  In order to make the process easier – for the agency, not the family – they essentially blackmail the parent: Give us the child and let us place him “informally” with a relative, without involving the court, or we’ll go to court and your child might wind up with a stranger – or worse, in one of our wonderful Texas institutions.

And make no mistake – once the child is gone, the child welfare agency and maybe, at some point, a court, but not the parent decides when or if that child will ever come back. It is a foster-care placement in everything but name.

The federal government understands that these placements are, in fact, foster care and should be counted as such.  As we noted in a previous post to this blog:

Federal regulations define foster care as :

24 hour substitute care for all children placed away from their parents or guardians and for whom the State agency has placement and care responsibility. 

The regulations go on to say that

the State is required to count a placement that lasts more than 24 hours while the child is in foster care under the placement, care or supervision responsibility of the State agency” 

 Note that it does not say “custody” of the agency, only “placement, care or supervision responsibility.”

What we did not know when we put up that previous post, and the real shocker in all this, is how widespread the practice is. 

Officially, Texas took away children 17,357 times in 2014 – at least that’s what Texas reported to the federal government.  But according to a December,2015 report from a  “roundtable” of “stakeholders” convened by the Texas Supreme court Children’s Commission there also were 34,000 so-called parental child safety placements. 

According to the report, about 4,000 of those PCSPs later became officially-counted foster care placements, so counting those 4,000 would be double counting. But that still leaves 30,000 foster care placements in 2014 that Texas simply chose to call something else.

Or to put it another way, Texas has been hiding more than 63 percent of its foster care placements from the federal government – and from anyone else trying to compare the rate at which states take away children.

Put back those off-the-books placements and Texas is apparently taking away children at a rate more than 60 percent above the national average – even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

Of course, that assumes Texas is the only state that cheats this way.  That’s almost certainly not the case.  We’ve known for nearly a decade that Kansas has its own way of cheating.  And kinship care is particularly vulnerable to this kind of cheating. But I doubt that there are many states that cheat to the extent of hiding nearly two-thirds of their entries into foster care.  Maybe everything really is bigger than Texas.

The reason all this is coming out in the open is that PCSPs now are under attack by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who wants to crack down on these kinship care placements, not because they’re off-the-books, but because two of them were the scenes of headline-grabbing horror stories.  (And, of course, nothing ever goes wrong in other Texas placements.)

So now, caseworkers are afraid to use PCSPs, and traditional foster-care placements are skyrocketing.  Soon, we may finally see an official figure on entries into foster care that is closer to reality – but thousands of children will pay the price, by losing out on the chance to stay with relatives.

There are other revelations in the “roundtable” report:

The report notes that “PCSPs are not really voluntary when the alternative is removal of the child.”  The roundtable participants also noted that, since the state doesn’t have to go to court first, “the parent does not have a lawyer or understand the child welfare or legal system.”

There’s also a truly Orwellian twist:

In theory, federal law requires states to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together before resorting to foster care. In fact, this has never been enforced and the law is full of loopholes. But Texas actually claims that, if they put a child in foster care and call it a “parental child safety placement” they’ve met the “reasonable efforts” requirement – because, supposedly, that’s not foster care.

One other point about the Roundtable and its December, 2015 report: Scott McCown, the state’s leading champion of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, served on the roundtable.  So I don’t understand why, one month after the report came out, McCown, still was repeating his claim about Texas having an unusually low rate of removal.