Can we help a leader of the “child welfare” establishment master one of the grand challenges for social work?

Yesterday, in a post about “child welfare” and the moral bankruptcy of social work, I noted that Alan Detlaff of the University of Houston, who has dedicated his career to fighting racism in family policing (a more accurate term than “child welfare”) had been ousted as the Dean of the university’s Graduate College of Social Work. 

I wrote that 

I have no doubt he could have kept that deanship if he’d simply used the playbook perfected by another social work dean, Richard Barth at the University of Maryland: proclaim social work so inherently superior to every other profession that it has eradicated all racism from decision making in child welfare.  Think I’m kidding?  Take a look.  

I didn’t quite get that right.  Barth also is no longer a dean.  But he wasn’t ousted – he went on to another exalted position: Chair of the Executive Committee of something called “Grand Challenges for Social Work.” 

But it hasn’t all been rosy for Barth.  The life’s work of Barth and other well-meaning social workers who have done so much to build, maintain and expand the child welfare surveillance state has come under increasing scrutiny for the enormous harm it’s done to children.  As that has happened, Barth has become increasingly frantic on Twitter, most recently resorting to fearmongering and taking study findings out of context.  Here’s something he tweeted on Dec. 17: 

Schneiderman's 2021 paper found Infants reported for alleged [child maltreatment] had a 2Xs higher risk of death from medical causes, in 1 year! [Foster care] cut risk by 1/2 

As you read on, note that this is a study not of child abuse deaths, but of deaths due to diseases. 

Barth does not link to the study, (which is available in full here) so it would be understandable if people thought “Oh my God!  We have to rush more infants into foster care – it’s the only way to save them from getting fatal diseases!”  But even the authors of the study itself don’t say anything like that.  And the real lessons from the study are very different. 

So let’s look at the things about this study that Barth doesn’t mention: 

● The study compares death rates due to disease in an overwhelmingly poor population – children reported to family police agencies -- to the general population.  So what the study really tells us is that poor infants are more at risk of death due to medical causes than children who are not poor.  No kidding. 

● As for the improvement among children in foster care – they are now in homes with wealthier parents and better access to medical care.  You don’t suppose … ? 

● Barth’s summary uses a common fearmongering tactic: High ratios without mentioning the raw numbers.  

Barth leaves the impression of massive risk of death for infants reported to the family police if they’re not rushed into foster care.  In fact, the study found that among the general population during the study period 99.97% did not die.  Among the infants reported as maltreated 98.97% did not die.  

That makes such deaths no less tragic, but it does change how we should go about trying to stop them.  If anything, the study finding is one more indication that there’s a whole lot of false reporting and needless investigating going on, traumatizing families and overwhelming workers.  If you didn’t do that, workers might actually have a better chance of finding the 0.13% of children at greatest risk in time.  

● Implying that it’s a good idea to throw even more children into foster care puts them at high risk of another harm: abuse in foster care. 

● The authors of the study themselves explicitly reject the implication that their findings call for more use of foster care. (If you missed that, Prof. Barth, it’s on page 6, column 3 of the .pdf version.) 

So I would like to thank the study authors for bolstering the case against mandatory reporting, needless foster care and confusing poverty with neglect, and bolstering the case for making sure poor families can get the same high-quality health care as middle-class and wealthy families. 

Oh, and here’s a truly grand challenge for social work: helping Prof. Barth better understand the studies he cites.

“Child welfare” and the moral bankruptcy of social work

Are the failures of social work really just a matter of degree?
(Image from Depositphotos)

This post was revised and updated in January, 2024

Call it The Perennial Whine of the Licensed Social Worker.  It crops up over and over when there’s any story about what family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) do to families.  Most recently I saw it repeatedly in comments on the Washington Post story I discuss here, about a family traumatized by a midnight raid by the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families.  Multiple commenters offered some version of: Well, they couldn’t have been social workers! Social workers would never do something like that!  As one such commenter put it: 

As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, I wish news organizations such as Wapo would be more clear with using terms such as “social worker.” I suspect the person who visited the mother in the child’s hospital room was not truly a Social Worker, but a case manager of some sort with probably only a bachelor’s degree. 

The same sort of comment appears after publication of any story exposing racial bias in family policing.  Because we all know that genuine social workers – especially well-trained social workers could never be biased. 

The main reason the it-would-all-be-fixed-if-they-were-social-workers argument comes up so often is that it is one more way for supremely arrogant all-powerful family policing systems to avoid accountability.  Why have actual due process protections, why have real checks and balances if everything can be solved with a piece of parchment and a licensing exam?  It’s similar to the way family police agencies and their apologists seek to cling to their near-absolute power by claiming the solution to any problem in the system is more “training.” 

So with that in mind, consider three vignettes from the world of social work. 

Vignette #1 

In Kentucky, a boy is found dead in the “residential treatment center” where he had been institutionalized.  The coroner rules it a homicide.  The boy was 7 years old.  NBC News found that the center has an ugly history.   The mother of a second young child is suing, alleging abuse at the same institution. 

Meanwhile, another boy runs away from another residential treatment center in Kentucky and drowns.  He was institutionalized because he had autism, ran away a lot, and his grandparents couldn’t afford therapy and someone to watch him.  But at least he was older.  He was 9. 

All this in a state that routinely tears apart families at a rate 50% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in – creating an artificial shortage of placements that is used as an excuse to institutionalize young children. 

Now, let’s see what Stephanie Saulnier has to say about all this.  She’s not just some caseworker.  She’s a bona fide social worker.  She’s an M.S.W. and a C.S.W. She’s a professor of social work.  She even chairs the Department of Social Work and directs the B.S.W. program at Eastern Kentucky University.  So what kind of insights did all those credentials produce?  Saulnier told NBC News: 

“One of the problems that we run into is if we shut down a problematic facility, where do those kids go? That leaves kiddos that are in need of residential treatment with no place to go. There aren’t enough beds for little guys that need this level of care, and the child welfare system has to kind of figure out ‘how can we do the best with what we have?’” 

In fact, no “little guy” or “kiddo” needs a residential treatment facility of any kind, much less one that’s “problematic.”  Prof. Saulnier, M.S.W., C.S.W., seems to have overlooked the research on that one. 

Vignette #2 

Whenever there’s a big news story pointing out that yes, there is racism in child welfare, there’s a good chance that somewhere in the comments will be an objection from someone calling herself “Jane Addams.”  The comments are all pretty much the same: There is enormous accountability in child welfare, she says, we certainly don’t need more!  Courts have to approve everything we do (a stunningly misleading claim I address here, here, here, here, here and here).  And anyway, says “Jane Addams,” if you’re not a bona fide social worker working in a “child welfare” agency, how could you possibly know what you’re talking about?  This is usually followed by a recitation of horror stories that are strikingly similar from comment to comment.  

She did it -- three times -- when The New York Times exposed foster care as “the new ‘Jane Crow’.” She was back in November when the Times wrote about a study in which the New York City family police agency’s own caseworkers condemned racism in the agency.  Among those the Times quoted to add context to the story: Joyce McMillan of JMAC for Families whose own children had been needlessly taken, and family defenders.  (They also quoted a statement from the agency, after the agency refused to comment on the actual report). 

All this made “Jane Addams” very upset.  She wrote: 

I’m a licensed clinical social worker who spent my career in public child welfare, primarily providing foster care services. A peculiarity of child welfare is those given voice as experts are people like Joyce McMillan who have lack [sic] experience in this complicated work, while the knowledge & expertise of those who dedicated careers [sic] is regarded with suspicion. As a result we have a nation of armchair critics, sanctimonious public defenders among them, with no child welfare service experience who believe they know what’s best.  

There followed Adams’ standard litany of horror story cases, which are as rare as they are horrible, all leading up to: 

Understandably nobody wants to get their brain around the gravity of maltreatment.   

Oh, and, of course, she also wrote this: 

We throw around the term "social worker" when in fact few have those credentials. 

Again, this comment was about a report in which the agency’s own caseworkers condemned racism in the agency.  Presumably, Addams believes, if only they all had the appropriate "credentials" they’d know better. 

But here’s why I bring up “Jane Addams”: Her real name is Judith Schagrin, L.C.S.W-C. For decades she was Assistant Director of the Baltimore County family police agency.  And she’s not just any L.C.S.W.-C.  In 2004, the National Association of Social Workers named her “social worker of the year.” 

She's far from alone.  You can find similarly arrogant denials of racial bias in the field from oh-so-distinguished academicians such as Richard Barth, MSW, PhD, former dean of the University of Maryland School of Social Work Sarah Font, MSW, PhD, at Penn State, and Emily Putnam-Hornstein, MSW, PhD of the University of North Carolina.

Vignette #3 

A group of social work students developed this excellent guide for colleagues in Illinois concerning alternatives to calling the family police.  But as is explained in this excellent story in In These Times, this is what the social work establishment tried to do to the student who led the development of the guide, Elena Gormley:

Gormley’s group project got an A, and the guide was disseminated far and wide. It’s even being taught in other social work programs. But when Gormley emailed the guide to her school’s listserv, the university initiated disciplinary proceedings, charging that ​“the content of the email encouraged students to commit a crime, which could lead to harm or the death of a child if the suggestion were followed.” The official complaint calls Gormley’s actions unprofessional and unethical and claims Gormley’s​“behavior indicates that she is unsuitable for the profession.”

Gormley spent five weeks defending herself against a litany of conduct violations, the threat of expulsion looming over her. She successfully fought the proceedings and graduated in 2021, but the experience was harrowing.

M.S.W.s in the real world 

Now, let’s see how the “if only they were social workers” argument plays out in real life. 

We are not privy to the resumes of the workers in the Massachusetts case or the workers in New York City who condemned racism in their own agency. We don’t know which workers have the minimum credentials required in these jurisdictions and which have more. 

We do know that qualifications vary from state to state and, in locally-run systems, county to county.  Washington, D.C., for example, requires all of its family police workers to have master’s degrees in social work.  As a matter of fact, the author of the column that prompted this apology from The Imprint for trafficking in what the publication called “a crude and often racist stereotype” was one such D.C. social worker – and she never tired of reminding readers of her M.S.W. degree.  The agency “Jane Addams” helped to lead in Maryland also has an M.S.W. requirement. 

I’m aware of no objective observer who says the best child welfare casework in America is performed by workers for the family police in either of these places.  Nor are they too keen on the largest locally run family policing system in America, the one in Los Angeles County. 

True, you don’t absolutely have to have an M.S.W. there in order to investigate families.  You could get by with a master’s in marriage and family counseling, psychological counseling, psychology, or clinical psychology.  But that still means there probably are a whole lot of M.S.Ws out there tearing apart Los Angeles families at the second-highest rate among America’s biggest cities.  And a lot of M.S.Ws are responsible for the fact that 58% of Black children in Los Angeles will have to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation, almost always as a result of a false report. 

As for the holy grail of licensure – that often requires passing an exam created by a group called the Association of Social Work Boards.  Turns out there’s quite a problem with that, a problem involving racial bias.  

Yes, we need degrees and credentials 

But there’s a dilemma.  Simply declaring any and all credentials and training meaningless doesn’t work either. We know this because we’ve tried sending untrained overwhelmingly white middle-class amateurs into the homes of families who are overwhelmingly neither to pass judgment upon them – it’s called Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), and it’s vastly worse than anything even the worst social work school has come up with. 

We also know that there are places where social workers do enormous good.  One reason high-quality interdisciplinary family defense is so effective is the work of social workers demonstrating the profession at its best – helping keep families together by helping to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” dished out by family policing agencies.   

There are students like Elena Gormley and her classmates - and  the many social work professionals and students from across the country to rallied to Ms. Gormley's defense.  And yes, there are social workers trying to genuinely change family policing from within. 

In short, the field is full of outstanding individuals who could help social work emerge from moral bankruptcy.  But its leaders are desperate to make sure that doesn’t happen. 

It’s official! Racism is over in child welfare! (We know because a social work school dean says so)

via GIPHY

                Great news, everyone! It’s now official: Unlike every other aspect of American life, the child welfare system has eradicated racism!  Like the parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch when it comes to child welfare, racism is gone!  It is no more!  It has ceased to be! 

            How do we know? Because the dean of an actual school of social work says so.  Toward the conclusion of a power-point presentation aimed at social work students planning to work in child welfare, Richard Barth, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland, sums things up this way:

We can celebrate our success in developing a CWS [child welfare system]* that does not result in evidence of biased outcomes. This has long been an aspiration of CWS and it appears that it is, largely, realized. 

            Let us now pause, sip some celebratory champagne and contemplate the sheer magnitude of this achievement. 

            After all, no one denies there is racism in the police. In fact, the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police has admitted it and apologized. I’ll bet child welfare practitioners are really proud that they don’t have to admit any such thing!  And it’s not just police. 

            ● We know there is racism in medicine.

         ● We know there is racism in science.

            ● We know there is racism in journalism

            ● We know there is racism in academic publishing.

            ● We know there is racism in everything else in academia.

            ● We know there is racism in housing.

            ● We know there is racism in hiring.

● We know there is racism in who gets followed around by store security.

            ● We know there is racism in who can hail a cab.

           ● UPDATE: And sometimes, the racism is - literally - at our fingertips.

             But if Barth is right, when it comes to the pandemic of American racism, child welfare, and only child welfare has achieved herd immunity! 

The caucus of denial

            Of course, there has long been a de facto “caucus of denial” in child welfare, a group that says the enormous disparities in who gets reported for child abuse, who gets substantiated, who gets taken away from their families and who does or does not get reunified are solely due to Black people supposedly being worse parents who are more prone to endangering their children to the point where systems dominated by a white power structure must rush in and save them.  

Not that that’s racist, you understand.  No, no.  They claim it’s just that all that historic racism and oppression made Black people more likely to be bad parents.  (In the world of the caucus of denial, the word “racism” almost always is preceded by the modifier historic – because, remember, it’s all in the past.) 

Those who hold such views have good intentions; they really want to help children and families.  But it’s no wonder the system they have helped to build and now defend in order to do that has backfired.  The existence of this caucus of denial does, indeed, distinguish child welfare from other professional fields, but not in a good way. 

            How, then, does Barth get around the study after studyafter study that control for all other variables and still find that, even when all else is equal, children are more likely to be declared abused or neglected, and more likely to be torn from their families, if they are not white? Simple, he ignores them. As another slide explains: 

We did not address the usual questions of (1) the reasons for disproportionality in foster care or (2) whether [child protective services] delivers equitable decision-making regarding substantiation and placement—we believe that those have been well addressed in prior research. 

            So how do you conclude that racism has been eradicated in child welfare and ignore all those studies about biased decision-making?  By looking at much narrower questions, and extrapolating way beyond the evidence.  Thus, in the presentation and in a paper on which it is based,  Barth and his co-authors claim: 

            ● “Current research with adequate comparisons provides no robust evidence to support the idea that children have worse outcomes from CWS involvement.” [Emphasis added.] 

            ● The outcomes for Black children are no worse than the outcomes for white children, although “few studies focused on Black children.” 

            Could they possibly have set the bar any lower? 

            The first thing to understand here is that Barth & Co. are talking about “child welfare services,” a category that includes both foster care and services to families in their own homes.  Although child welfare services often exist largely to make the helpers feel good, some such services are genuinely helpful, such as the Homebuilders Intensive Family Preservation Services program and, where genuinely needed, the right kinds of drug treatment.  And a few, innovative systems actually provide concrete help to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty. 

            Far fewer studies compare the outcomes for children placed in foster care to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes.  But the findings from many of them are alarming.  Barth and his co-authors get around this by minimizing or ignoring studies that don’t come out the way they want them to. 

Even with all that, the best they can claim is: Well, after disrupting all these families lives, tearing the children from their loved ones, forcing them into foster care, and wasting billions of dollars that could have been used to help alleviate family poverty, you critics can’t prove that we actually made things worse! 

So let’s consider what that means. Consider a study of what is widely considered one of the finest, most elite foster care programs in America, run by Casey Family Programs.  That study found that among alumni of the program: 

● They had twice the level of PTSD of veterans of the first Gulf War.

● Only one in five was doing well in later life.

● The former foster children were three times more likely to be living in poverty –

and fifteen times less likely to have finished college.

● At least one-third were abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. 

All of which raises one more question: If, in fact, the system really doesn’t do any harm anyway, are Barth and his coauthors equally sanguine about the children torn from their parents at the Mexican border by the Trump Administration?  

The leap of logic about race 

Barth’s next great leap concerns race.  As noted above, Barth and his coauthors found few studies that directly compared outcomes for children placed in foster care to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes – and, also as noted above, they sidestepped the massive studies showing that in typical cases the outcomes for the foster children were worse.  But among those few studies of outcomes for all children, even fewer actually tried to disaggregate the results based on race.  Yet based on these few studies, Barth and Co. conclude that the outcomes are no different for Black children. 

There are plenty of studies (not discussed by Barth) that show that Black children are
likely to stay in the system longer and are less likely to be reunited with their parents.  So what Barth really seems to be saying is that in spite of the fact that the system inflicts more foster care and longer foster care on Black children, they are so resilient that their outcomes are no worse than those for white kids. 

I am willing to stipulate that the outcomes for youth in foster care tend to be rotten for all races.  So the fact that Black children are: 

● more likely to be placed in a system

● more likely to spend more time in a system

● and less likely to be reunified from a system that, best case, may not make things worse means we need to put the champagne away; there really is racial bias in child welfare after all. 

Equally revealing are the reasons Barth offers in his slide presentation for child welfare’s supposed amazing success. 

For starters, he appears to be in denial about the idea that the system is anything but helpful.  Consider this slide outlining an argument he seeks to challenge - in which, by the way, he dismisses the arguments of those who think there is a racism problem in child welfare as mere "assumptions": 

First, of course, the slide refers to “abused” children when, in fact, most of the time the accusation is neglect and that often means poverty.  But also notice how “coercive” is in quotation marks.  

That’s because the self-image of the child welfare field, cultivated by social work schools, is of friendly helpers who are merely bringing “services” to those in need.  In fact, child protective services is about as coercive as a system can get.  It is a police force that has more power than the police. Police can stop a Black child on the street, throw him against a wall and frisk him. Child protective services can march right into the home, stripsearch a Black child and walk out with him, consigning the child to the chaos of foster care. 

No, CPS workers don’t always do that; but neither do the cops. 

Perhaps we should pause for a moment to consider the implications of giving this vast, unchecked power to the same profession that includes so many who believe that profession has eradicated racism. 

Barth makes a similar error in another slide when he seeks to imply that Black children are taken away more often because they are more often victims of “confirmed” child “maltreatment.”  This claim is built on two weasel-words. 

“Confirmed” is not a legal term; it’s a term coined originally by those who have spent decades fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse to make subjective guesses by caseworkers sound more definitive.  “Confirmed” does not mean a court found anyone guilty.  It doesn’t mean a neutral factfinder heard both sides.  “Confirmed” means only that a caseworker checked a box on a form stating s/he thinks it is at least slightly more likely than not that “maltreatment” occurred. 

The second weasel word is “maltreatment.”  Overwhelmingly “maltreatment” means neglect, which, as noted above, often means poverty.  Since Black people are more likely to be poor, if you confuse poverty with neglect and then call the neglect “maltreatment,” of course you’ll get the result cited by Barth. 

What Barth really is offering here is the ultimate in circular reasoning: The results of subjective, biased caseworker guesses about “maltreatment” are used to “prove” there is no bias! 

Of course, having performed the miracle of eradicating racism from child welfare, Barth knows we mere mortals will want to know how they did it.  He offers two explanations. The first is the equivalent of the old “some of my best friends are …” line. Says Barth: 

“CWS has a diverse workforce.” 

That’s certainly true at the lowest levels – frontline caseworkers – in big cities.  But that’s also true of the police.  In Philadelphia 43% of police officers are nonwhite. In New York City 49% of police are nonwhite. In Chicago it’s 52%  and in Los Angeles it’s 55%  So by Barth’s logic, there’s no racism on big-city police forces either. 

Academic social work is notably less diverse.  In 2016, fewer than one-third of full-time social work professors were from “historically underrepresented groups” according to the Council on Social Work education.  And those who seem most prominent in child welfare’s caucus of denial have long been almost exclusively white.  So either Black professionals and academicians in the field don’t understand the research, or they know something Prof. Barth does not. 

Talk, talk talk 

Barth’s other explanation for child welfare’s astounding success is that “CWS has been in conversation about race equity for 50 years.”  There are several problems with this:  

● Talking about a problem doesn’t solve it – particularly when racism is the reason the system in question was created in the first place. 

● Though the first effort to start the conversation dates back to 1972, little attention was paid until 30 years later, with the publication of Prof. Dorothy Roberts’ landmark book, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.  Even then, as another social work school dean, Alan Detlaff, and his co-authors explain in the very article that got Barth so upset, talking about racism in child welfare made the field so uncomfortable that the caucus of denial managed to sidetrack the issue until demands for racial justice became impossible to ignore in 2020. 

If Barth really does believe that 50 years of endless social work conferences have solved the racism problem, presumably he can pinpoint exactly when that happened.  Presumably, it wasn’t 49 years ago – even child welfare couldn’t have wiped out racism in a single year!  But the “caucus of denial” has been around for awhile, so apparently it didn’t just happen yesterday, either. 

So, Prof. Barth: When did it happen?  When was the last vestige of racism eradicated from child welfare?  December 20, 1987?  March 11, 1992?  November 10, 2004?  February 25, 2014?  Tell us the date so we can make it a national holiday and use it as an example for all those other, less enlightened professions! 

While he doesn’t say exactly when it happened, Barth does go on to say that child welfare has been so successful that “Additional diversity training of the CWS workforce may not be needed.” 

Though there is debate over the effectiveness of such training, the evidence of the need is overwhelming.  But don’t wait until the caseworkers are on the job. 

Clearly, it needs to begin in the social work schools. 

*-In the presentation CWS seems to be used interchangeably to stand for Child Welfare System and Child Welfare Services

New study suggests two key steps to curbing needless foster care:

1. Add housing
2. Subtract social workers

Stop the presses!  Study finds solution to homelessness is--
HOUSING!

I’ve often noted the multiple studies which find that 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their families just had decent housing.

But a massive 2015 study that recently has been rediscovered (I’ll get to who rediscovered it below) shows the figure actually might be much higher.  And the study has a new twist: Just providing the housing works far better than also inflicting all sorts of “services” on families who don’t want them and don’t need them.

In the study, conducted for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Obama administration, families living homeless shelters were assigned to one of four groups.  One group got nothing except whatever the homeless shelter had to offer.  The other groups got either priority access to long-term housing vouchers, commonly known as “Section 8” vouchers, or two versions of programs in which the housing vouchers were shorter term but the families also got various social work services.

Outcomes were measured using all sorts of variables including whether children wound up placed in foster care.

Since this is the NCCPR Blog you know where this is going.  Yep.  The families that got just the housing vouchers did best.  They did best on all sorts of variables – but especially notable is the finding on foster care.

For the control group, those who got no special help, five percent had lost at least one child to foster care at the end of the study period.  For the group that got plain old housing vouchers it was only 1.9 percent. 

In other words, the functional equivalent of cash and cash alone cut foster care placement by well over half.

Keep the caseworkers out of it

But surely if we provided vouchers and social workers that would be even better, right?  Nope.  The groups upon whom various social work -oriented forms of “help” were inflicted did no better than the control group.  The best results came when government added housing and subtracted social workers.

As I’ve noted previously on this blog, other studies have produced similar results.  One study found that for every dollar states raise the minimum wage “substantiated” cases of what states call “child neglect” declines by ten percent.  In other words: child welfare systems routinely confuse poverty with “neglect” so if you reduce poverty, you reduce “neglect.”  At least three other studies found that similar small increases in income significantly reduced what systems deem to be child maltreatment.

Still another study documented dramatic improvement in child well-being for Native American families when casino revenue increased their income by an average of $4,000 per person per year. [UPDATE, JUNE 17, 2019: And now there's yet another study. This one shows that expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act reduces what child welfare agencies call "neglect."]

But what sets the housing study apart is that, as noted above, it also compared getting nothing to getting housing for a shorter time but all sorts of “social services.”  This proved vastly less effective at reducing foster care – or improving the lives of families in any other way – than the cash equivalent alone.

In fairness, the study doesn’t prove that providing the services actually caused the worse outcomes. The outcomes might have been worse simply because the programs with all that social work also providing the housing help for a limited time. The housing-voucher-only approach allowed families to keep the vouchers for as long as their income kept them eligible.

But the study does show that “soft services” – the kind child welfare agencies love to inflict on every family caught in their net – are no substitute for concrete help to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty.  And that means a lot of money wasted on all those social workers and their unhelpful help would be better spent on things like expanding the availability of housing vouchers.

That too should not be surprising.  It’s not that it’s wrong to provide any kind of services.  There are times when “soft services” can be helpful – generally when they are provided by, say, a therapist who’s also helping a parent clean the house. (I’m not kidding about that; it’s how Intensive Family Preservation Services work.)

Try helping families instead of the helpers

But the mantra of the social work profession could be “I don’t do windows.”  The services provided by child welfare systems aren’t designed to help the families. They’re designed to help the helpers.  

So we get endless counseling sessions and parent education classes which not only often do no good but can actually do harm, because they wind up stealing time that could be devoted to things like finding better employment – and better housing.  And, of course, the families have to engage in all these pointless classes and therapy sessions to check off all the boxes on their “case plan” so it all adds further stress for the family.

But boy is it great for the “helping” professions!

Decades ago, in his book, Families in Distress, Malcolm Bush explained how it happens:

“The recognition that the troubled family inhabits a context that is relevant to its problems suggests the possibility that the solution involves some humble tasks … This possibility is at odds with professional status. Professional status is not necessary for humble tasks … Changing the psyche was a grand task, and while the elaboration of theories past their practical benefit would not help families in trouble, it would allow social workers to hold up their heads in the professional meeting or the academic seminar.”

So we get housing assistance programs that concentrate on changing the psyche when they should really be focused on, uh, housing.

And it’s why it is not only wrong, but dangerous to take a “public health” approach to preventing child abuse.  What’s needed is a social justice approach.

But this challenges shibboleths of both the left and the right.

It challenges the self-indulgence of those on the left who prefer the “grand task” of changing the psyche and who want the psychic rewards of “healing” people they see as not evil, but definitely sick.

For the right, it challenges the notion that poverty is a moral failing and that any financial aid must be stingy on the cash and generous in bureaucratic requirements and general humiliation. 

Early on, for example, the vastly overhyped Family First Prevention Services Act would have allowed federal reimbursement for concrete help to families – like emergency cash and, yes, housing assistance.  That was taken out of early versions of the bill after Republicans balked.

When homelessness itself exploded during the 1980s, conservatives insisted it had nothing to do with Ronald Reagan’s assault on anything that helped poor people. Instead, it was all supposedly a mental health problem, and if only we hadn’t shut down all those hellhole mental institutions everything would be fine.  In fact, as Ann Braden Johnson points out in her book Out of Bedlam, of anything, it’s the other way around: Prolonged homelessness can cause mental illness.

(Among those who continue to circulate this myth that homelessness was caused by shutting down institutions: Advocates of institutionalizing foster children, who cite it to scare governments out of shutting down their failed “group homes” “residential treatment centers” and other rebranded orphanages.)

This study once again shows either that the homelessness-is-all-a-mental-health-problem theory was self-serving nonsense – or housing has heretofore undiscovered therapeutic benefits.

Spinning the findings for right-wing consumption

So perhaps it’s not surprising that when Brent Orrell, a “resident fellow” of the American Enterprise Institute rediscovered the study he also felt the need to spin it for right-wing consumption.  In an essay entitled “When Nothing Beats Something” he writes:

In Washington’s policy battles, the time-tested adage says, “you can’t beat something with nothing.” The idea is that social ills require solutions and doing nothing is never the right thing to do — bad policy beats no policy every time. … But what if the facts on the ground say otherwise? What if “nothing,” on some issues, does beat “something”?

He then cites the fact that housing subsidies alone beat housing subsidies and social work as evidence of the benefits of doing “nothing.”

But since when is a housing voucher, provided directly by “big gummint” itself, nothing?

The control group in this study is the one that got nothing.  The group that gained the most did indeed get something: Housing vouchers -- the equivalent of cash assistance with few strings attached. 

But the fact that just giving poor people money makes things better removes the keystone from the entire arch of modern conservative ideology: The idea that poverty is a moral failing and actually providing concrete help only encourages laziness and “dependency” collapses. 

So I look forward to AEI endorsing a guaranteed annual income – with no degradation and no time limits.  And I can’t wait to see AEI support federal living wage legislation.

But if that’s too heavy a lift, how about just persuading your fellow conservatives to amend the Family First Act to allow the same sort of reimbursement now permitted only for an extremely narrow range of mostly “soft” services to go to concrete help to families, such as housing assistance, so their children aren’t consigned to the chaos of foster care.

Now that would really be something.

Child welfare’s version of accountability in foster care: Give us more money and go away!

It's been nearly two decades since a notorious case in which a child protective services caseworker allegedly told several families: "I have the power of God."

It's frightening if he said it. What's more frightening is: It's true. CPS workers do have the power of God. Their powers are the envy of law enforcement – witness the recent case in Florida in which Sheriff's deputies who wanted to trample on the Fourth Amendment pretended to be CPS workers. They can enter any home based on no more than an anonymous phone call. (Even in states that technically require a warrant, the workers are never turned down when they ask for one.) They can remove children entirely on their own authority, and hold them in foster care indefinitely.

Yes, judges eventually must approve, but generally that happens at hearings where families have no effective legal representation and the standard of proof is no higher than that used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender. So it's no wonder judges in these cases are far more likely to wield rubber-stamps than gavels.

In most states it all happens at secret trials. All the records are secret too. And ask anyone in CPS to account for any of this and the answer almost always is the same: It's all confidential, but trust us, we know best, and it's all in the best interests of the child.

Child welfare agencies may be more secret than the CIA. As a result, none of the checks and balances that are traditional in American democracy really applies.

ACCOUNTABLE TO NO ONE

But we're not alone in raising the issue of accountability in CPS. It turns out the Child Welfare League of America, the giant trade association for public and private child welfare agencies, also has deep concerns about accountability in child welfare: They think there's just too darn much of it! That was the theme of a presentation at their recent conference. Here's the program description in its entirety:

The Many Watch the Few Serve the Many: An Examination of Oversight and Review in the Child Welfare System. This workshop will examine five groups of watchers who oversee child welfare services and will suggest that they should be able to demonstrate that their activities contribute directly to the achievement of system goals. The repetitive reviews of individual cases by court appointed special advocates, guardians ad litem, foster care administrative case reviewers, citizen review boards, internal reviewers, and ad hoc committees, in addition to the press and courts, consume scarce agency and worker time and dollars. Except for the court, reviewers are not routinely measured on the level of permanency, safety, or well-being their actions directly ensure. The concern is not that public agencies spending public dollars and discharging a public mandate do not warrant oversights- the issue is the number, intensity, duplication, method, and intent of each review process.

One of the presenters is a social work professor. The other was formerly with CWLA and now is with Casey Family Programs, a multi-billion dollar foundation that projects an image of being a lot more progressive than this presentation would suggest. (Someone from CFP may well be reading this right now – they spent more than 51 hours on this Blog and www.nccpr.org in 2009; so at least they know where to look for good ideas).

Apparently the presenters have been taking the child welfare community on a tour of their whine cellar for some time. There's a power-point presentation that dates to 2008 and a journal article from 2007. (I can't link to it, since it's not available online unless you buy the entire issue of the publication in which it appears – the distribution of the article is as arrogant as its point of view – but here's a link to the abstract.)

The journal article and what amounts to the authors' roadshow is worth analyzing at length because I believe their attitude typifies the mentality that permeates most of America's child welfare agencies. One indication of that is how popular it seems to be in the field. It appears that the power point has been forwarded in the child welfare community like a chain letter, to enthusiastic reviews. And, of course, it was showcased at CWLA's conference. So I'm going to take a lot of space in this post to take a close look at the article and its implications.

THE GENERAL COMPLAINT

The authors' complaint essentially boils down to the same one you'd hear from a filmmaker whose alleged masterpiece debuted to lousy reviews: It's soooooo much easier to be a critic than an artist like me! I'll bet those damn critics could never write a 10-second commercial, much less an entire film!

Both the filmmakers and the CPS workers have a point. Being a CPS worker is one of the most difficult jobs imaginable, and so is running a child welfare agency. It is indeed a far harder job than critiquing their work. That's why, though I've often opposed hiring more CPS workers (preferring to see the money go into programs to keep children out of the system) I usually favor giving the workers already on the job pay raises and better working conditions – and strongly support their right to bargain for both collectively (unlike some child welfare agency administrators who praise workers in the abstract but can't go ten minutes without complaining about "the unions.")

But that fact that the job is so difficult will never turn the child welfare equivalent of Plan 9 From Outer Space into Citizen Kane. The fact that critics have easier jobs doesn't mean they're wrong when they suggest that the entire script should be rewritten. And it doesn't mean the answer is to make a supremely unaccountable system even less accountable to anyone.

THE SPECIFIC COMPLAINTS

One irony here is that, in some respects, the authors have a point. They criticize Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA). Well, I'll take second place to no one in criticizing this well-intended outfit that does enormous harm to children. They criticize guardians ad litem – lawyers appointed to advocate for what the lawyer thinks is in the child's best interests. I've argued that this is the wrong role for GALs. The authors criticize foster care review boards. Last month, I compared a report from one such board to the Borg on Star Trek. They're upset about news coverage of child welfare. That's a common theme on this blog. And, though it's not mentioned in the article and power point presentation, they've been used to rally opposition to creating child welfare ombudsman offices – and I don't think much of most such offices either.

So we're agreed, right? Uh, no.

CASAs and GALs are not, in fact, "watchers" – to use the authors' obnoxious, patronizing term, at all. They don't critique the CPS investigation. Rather, in theory at least, they do their own and tell the judge what they think she or he should do. My big problem with both is their tendency to rubber-stamp CPS when CPS recommends removal or holding children in foster care. They seem to save the fighting for when CPS wants to return a child home.

And my problem with the media usually isn't their unwillingness to report "the good news." Yes, that can be a problem in those rare cases where a system really has improved and reporters don't want to write about it for fear of looking stupid the next time something goes wrong. But the bigger problems are reporting good news that isn't necessarily good – like all those treacly adoption day stories, or those day-in-the-life-of-a-caseworker stories (child welfare's equivalent of the National Model Worker stories one would find in newspapers in Mao's China), and worse, the tendency to fail to report the bad news about wrongful removal and misuse and overuse of foster care.

And it says a lot about the authors that they fail to say even a word about how it might be hard to report accurately about an agency when the agency itself keeps everything secret.

"WATCHING" THAT WORKS

The authors go on to attack forms of accountability that, in fact, have better track records. One of them is what I have come to call OBRCs or Obligatory Blue-Ribbon Commissions. They're usually formed after some high-profile child welfare tragedy. Yes, many of them are worthless – though, ironically, the ones that are worth the least are those that echo the arrogance of the authors of this study, and suggest that everything would be fine if the agency just hired lots more caseworkers. In other cases, the recommendations are good but they are ignored by the people who have the actual power – the child welfare agencies themselves. And in still other cases they do some good.

An OBRC in Philadelphia has helped a little bit in a place with one of the highest rates of removal of any big city. And while the journal article specifically criticizes all the OBRCs that have come and gone in New York City, one of them, created as a result of a class-action lawsuit settlement, was hugely successful.

The members of the Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel for New York City, as it was called, persuaded the head of the child welfare agency to reverse course, embrace family preservation and end a foster-care panic he'd helped to start. The sad irony is that a member of that panel now runs the New York City system and has led a retreat from reform, but the New York City system still is far better than it would have been had the panel not been created.

The authors also appear unhappy with another form of accountability that has a mixed track record - class-action lawsuits. These are not mentioned in the article, but they do show up as a bullet point in the power point presentation.

Some such lawsuits do indeed go on forever and accomplish nothing. Generally that means the suit was brought by the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" (CR) with no one else stepping in to help them craft their settlements. But Illinois and Alabama have been transformed into, relatively speaking, national models, in part, thanks to these lawsuits. (A member of NCCPR's Board of Directors was co-counsel for plaintiffs in the Alabama suit, brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.)

In New Jersey and, as noted above, New York City, even CR's suits have contributed to real improvement, thanks to a helping hand from the Annie E. Casey Foundation (which should not be confused with Casey Family Programs).

IF WE DON'T TAKE YOUR ADVICE IT'S YOUR FAULT!

The entire exercise drips with condescension. In the power point that even extends to the illustrations, in which the general public is displayed by a furious, and apparently quite irrational, man, literally tearing his hair out. And the dominant tone of the journal article is one of whininess, as illustrated by the question the authors pose over and over: Why aren't the "watchers" held accountable when people don't pay attention to them?

I would have thought that would be obvious. With the exception of the courts, whom the authors grudgingly concede have an oversight role, thanks to that pesky U.S. Constitution, pretty much the only thing the real watchers can do is give advice.

The same arrogance that pervades the article itself helps explain why OBRC recommendations are ignored and class-action lawsuit settlements can drag on forever as plaintiffs try to get child welfare agencies to abide by them. For example, in the mid-1990s, the head of the Alabama human services agency set about systematically trying to undermine the Alabama consent decree. If the authors' theory is to be taken seriously, somehow this was the fault of the people who brought and won the lawsuit.

But it gets worse. The authors actually encourage the smug, sanguine attitude that permeates some child welfare agencies – and frustrates many good frontline workers. Consider this truly appalling passage:

While administrative reviewers may offer useful amendments to the case plan, the reviewer is not held accountable for recommending that the worker secure housing when it is not readily available in the community or for ordering drug treatment when there is a long waiting list. Only the worker must attempt to secure scare resources, not only for this family, but also for every family and child in his/her caseload.

First of all, this quote comes in a section on administrative review – meaning a review almost entirely within the child welfare agency itself, not those darned outside "watchers." But even if it did come from the outside, so what? Fighting to get families what they need is supposed to be the very heart and soul of social work. The good social worker (or caseworker since, much to the authors' distress, they don't all have social work degrees) is the one who constantly is pushing the envelope, trying to scrounge up the funds for a security deposit so children don't lose their parents because of poor housing conditions or improvising a child care plan to avoid taking children on a lack of supervision charge and so on. They're also the ones raising hell with their bosses when such help isn't available, and demanding that politicians do their jobs and provide these kinds of resources. That's why their job really is much harder than that of the watchers. But it's still the job of the watchers to give those workers either a pat on the back or a kick a little lower, as needed, to make it happen. In other words, the reason "only the worker must attempt to secure scarce resources…" etc. is because it's her job.

It works in other fields. For example, when the federal government first set emissions standards for cars, the technology did not exist to meet the standards. Asking the auto companies nicely would not have changed that. But when the "watchers" in Congress said: "You have to do it, now go find a way" they found a way.

In contrast, the approach suggested by the authors: - sit around and wait until everything every caseworker needs is handed to her on a silver platter - amounts to giving up without a fight.

The danger of the authors' passivity can be seen in a study of caseworkers in Milwaukee. The researchers found that a crucial problem in failing to keep families together was lack of housing. But the caseworkers had built up a wall of denial – refusing even to acknowledge that housing was a problem for the families. The authors said the caseworkers "may tend to ignore housing as a problem rather than deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by the recognition that they cannot help their clients with this important need."

If only there were some "watchers" goading those workers to see that to which they had willfully blinded themselves – and pressing them to find a way to "help their clients with this important need."

IT'S ALL ABOUT POWER

Later, one sees what this article really is about – the authors' feeling threatened that anyone or anything might undermine their absolute power.

Take for example this Disney version of how caseworkers and families would happily work together toward their shared goals if only the "watchers" weren't in the way:

Individual case review needs to be done by the worker, supervisor, and clinical team with the family and changes put in place immediately to affect the outcomes for children and families. Waiting for a scheduled review gives the impression that decision making can be postponed and that the worker should delay action pending input from the watcher.

In fact, the authors cite no citizen review board anywhere in the country that requires workers to wait before adjusting a case plan in cooperation with the family. But the notion that most workers are, in fact, meticulously poring over case plans and even thinking about adjusting them in cooperation with the family is laughable.

The authors' real fear is even clearer in this passage:

[Citizen Review Panel] teams do not, generally, have ongoing, consistent involvement with the family. The development of a trusting relationship between families and caseworkers may be undermined by family involvement in forums with unknown persons, particularly if those persons are overtly critical of the service plan and its implementation.

Translation: We don't want any outsiders telling families they might actually have some rights, and the useless cookie-cutter no-services "service plans" we force on them are, in fact, crap.

Not that the authors see no role at all for watchers – or anyone else outside the system itself. On the contrary, the authors take a moment to give to the rest of us our marching orders:

Child welfare agencies need advocates to engage in lobbying for essential supports such as expert case supervision, competitive salaries, professional level workers, and staff development designed to help workers apply best practices to vulnerable children and families.

Got that? Our one and only job is to get out there and advocate – but only for giving social workers more money and even more power.

If nothing else this article offers an unintended glimpse of just how frightening and how demoralizing it must be for a parent to have to sit across the table from people like this, knowing that if they do not behave with sufficient deference and humility at all times, their children might never see them again.

FALSE CHOICES

The authors want us to believe the only alternative to their approach to accountability – the "give us more money and go away" approach - is the present collection of watching mechanisms which in fact, range from sometimes effective (lawsuits) to the occasionally effective (OBRCs) to those that usually are effective only at making things even worse (CASA).

That ignores the central fact about accountability mechanisms in child welfare: They aren't really meant to promote accountability at all.

Things like citizen review boards and OBRCs are meant to give the impression of accountability without the reality. They are rather like those super-secret Congressional committees that supposedly exercise oversight over the CIA. Secret committees – sometimes with only a few members having access to classified information - are supposed to oversee secret agencies. Of course it doesn't work.

It's the same in child welfare. When the authors complain that no other agency is subject to so much review, the truth is, it's sham review. The child welfare agency almost always emerges with its near-absolute power intact, free to do whatever if wanted before the watchers did their watching. That's no accountability at all.

To the extent that child welfare agencies are treated differently from other agencies, it's only because they've conned us into thinking their obsession with secrecy is a way to help children instead of a way to cover up their own mistakes. As a result we wind up with jury-rigged alternatives to the transparency that's essential in a democracy.

When the authors say this leads to more paperwork without improving outcomes, often that's true. But the alternative to bad accountability is not no accountability – it's transparency. So I'd be glad to offer the authors of this journal article, and their accompanying no accountability roadshow a deal: I'd scrap every foster care review board, and OBRC and I'd gladly see CASA abolished and the role of GALs transformed in exchange for nothing more than transparency. (OK, I'd do the last two even without transparency, but you get the idea).

By transparency, I mean:

• All court hearings are open.
  
• Almost all records are open.
  
• Agencies have the right to comment on individual cases.
  

(Details on all this are in our Due Process Agenda).

The problem in child welfare isn't that there are too many watchers, it's that there are too few – and most of those few can't tell the rest of us what they've seen. Real accountability, exactly the same accountability as exists for all other government agencies, means we all have to be the watchers.

Do we have a deal?

I didn't think so.

Especially since the biggest giveaway to the real agenda here – give us more money and go away – is the one form of so-called accountability that the authors actually like: It's the sham of "accreditation" a form of fake accountability created by CWLA itself, which I plan to discuss in the next post to this Blog.

The heart of the problem can be seen in that caseworker who allegedly said: "I have the power of God." To give a young, inexperienced worker the power of God, send her out on what she is convinced is a godly mission to rescue innocent children from the scum of the earth, knowing that there will be no penalty for removal and hell to pay if she leaves the child home and something goes wrong, and then expect her to exercise self-restraint is more than can be expected of most human beings. Rarely is the power of God accompanied by the wisdom of Solomon.