Yes, there IS a problem with the “culture change” in Connecticut: It hasn’t gone far enough

Connecticut, 1995: Emily Hernandez, a child-known-to-the-system, dies. Gov. John Rowland demands that caseworkers tear apart more families. There is a foster care panic, a huge increase in children torn from their families. Children continue to die.

Connecticut, 2003: Another child-known-to-the-system, Al-Lex Daniels, dies. Rowland sets off another foster-care panic. Children continue to die.

Connecticut, 2016: Another child-known-to-the-system, known in news accounts as Dylan, nearly dies, this time in the kinship foster home of a relative. But Connecticut does things differently now. The failings that led to the tragedy are identified, workers are disciplined, but there is no foster-care panic.

Connecticut has a different governor now (Rowland wound up in jail for corruption related to construction of a juvenile prison). As NCCPR discusses in detail inthis report, the current governor, Dannel Malloy, and the Commissioner of his Department of Children and Families (DCF), Joette Katz, have brought a culture change to child welfare: They’re refusing to play politics with children’s lives.

As Katz told the Hartford Courant:

Historically, when DCF had a bad outcome, everything would change. The next week, 500 children would be removed. We don’t do that. We know that wasn’t good for the kids.

Less Foster Care, No Compromise of Safety

What is good for the kids is taking away fewer children. In 2009 the state took children at a rate more than 45 percent above the national average. By 2014, the rate of removal was down to the national average – though, sadly, still above the rate in states that are, relatively speaking, national models for keeping children safe.

In 2010, Connecticut used the worst form of “care” – group homes and institutions – at a rate more than 30 percent above the national average. Since then, institutionalization has declined by two-thirds.

In 2010, Connecticut used the least harmful form of foster care – kinship care – at a rate about 25 percent below the national average. Now it’s about 25 percent above the national average.

After all that, child safety improved according to the most reliable standard indicator, the rate at which children known-to-the-system are re-abused.

Of course for someone like Marie Cohen, who’s never met an orphanage she didn’t like and who even sang the praises of an institution after it was exposed as a hellhole, all this success is terribly upsetting.  So she has seized on a report by the state’s official “child advocate” to try to blame Connecticut’s reforms for the most recent tragedy.

After acknowledging that Katz is right when she says a single tragedy “should not be used to reverse needed policy changes,” Cohen proceeds to urge exactly that.

She cites weasel-worded claims from the child advocate’s report concerning how some documents “appear to reference…” this, some workers “seemed to be” that, and some events “raise the specter” of children being at risk.

But even the child advocate said the issue was failure to follow policy and ignorance of policy, not the policy itself.

A Heaping Helping of Innuendo

Cohen then piles her own innuendo on top of the child advocate’s innuendo, claiming workers might be placing children in unsafe kinship homes in order to please Katz and senior management.

But a key problem in Dylan’s case was the failure to obtain a waiver approving the home where the abuse allegedly took place. Precisely because of identified risk factors in that home, it falls into a category for which a waiver must be approved personally by Katz, a level of accountability almost unheard-of in child welfare.  Another key problem: One caseworker essentially bragged in an email about her laziness.

Ignorance, laziness, refusal to follow procedures, and failure to get the Commissioner’s personal permission when required seem like odd ways to suck up to the boss.

The larger problem is the fact that “child advocate” offices almost always operate in the same way – investigate the worst horror stories and draw sweeping conclusions.  The problems with this methodology should be obvious (and, in fact, a former child advocate in New Jersey found a better way).

The Connecticut child advocate actually missed the single biggest failure in Dylan’s case. Excellent  reporting by The Day in New London makes clear that Dylan never needed to be taken from his own home, if only his mother had received the right kinds of help. The real problem with the culture change in Connecticut is that it hasn’t gone far enough. [UPDATE, MARCH, 2018: And tragically, in still another indication that the change hasn't gone far enough, DCF is relentlessly pushing to terminate the parental rights of Dylan's mother not only to Dylan, but to all her children.]

If only there were a better way to evaluate child welfare systems. If only Connecticut had some fully independent authority; say, someone appointed by a court, who could review the entire system, examine representative cases and see if things really are getting better or worse, then we’d – oh, wait, Connecticut has such an authority.

Thanks to a consent decree that dates to 1989, an independent monitor performs comprehensive assessments of the system. For decades those assessments were dismal. But now, things have improved to the point that all sides have agreed to a streamlined decree that even the lawyer suing the state calls “a recognition of sustained progress by DCF in significant areas of its practice, particularly during this administration.” [Emphasis added.]

As long as Malloy and Katz refuse to cave in to the take-the-child-and-run crowd, the progress will continue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the online news site, Connecticut Mirror.

From the Chronicle of Social Change.

Lessons for child welfare from the California “right-to-lie” case

In the past few years, we’ve learned a lot of ugly truths about the criminal justice system. (By “we,” I mean, those of us who are white and middle class. Poor people and people of color have known all along.)

But at least in criminal justice, every accused is entitled to a lawyer – though not necessarily an effective one. At least in criminal justice conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. At least in criminal justice, the records and the trial are public. At least in criminal justice, almost everyone now admits that racial bias is a problem, even if they disagree about how much of a problem.

And at least in criminal justice, a police officer sued after allegedly perjuring himself probably wouldn’t say, “Gee, I had no idea that was unconstitutional.”

In contrast, none of these protections is universal – and most never apply at all – in cases where the stakes often are higher: cases in which a child protective services agency decides to consign a child to the chaos of foster care.

The right to counsel, and whether hearings are open or closed, vary from state to state. In every state, child protective services can hide almost every mistake behind “confidentiality” laws. Homes can be searched and children can be strip-searched – and seized – without a warrant.

The standard of proof for a court to rubber-stamp removal of a child is only “preponderance of the evidence,” the same standard used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender.

And there is an entire coterie insisting that people in child welfare are so special, so superior to the rest of us, that racial bias isn’t even an issue. Stripped of all the blather and euphemism, their position boils down to this: Of course there used to be racism in America, and that made African-Americans and Native Americans bad parents, so we have to take away their children. Common sense, and abundant research, say otherwise.

Now, we can add one more difference: A child protective services caseworker, Marcia Vreeken, is claiming what amounts to a constitutional right to lie. Vreeken does not admit to lying – though a jury said she did – she merely says that even if she did, she’s entitled to immunity from civil suit.

How the Children were Harmed

This is the latest turn in a long set of cases involving a mother in Orange County, Calif., Deanna Fogarty-Hardwick and her two children, Kendall and Preslie. The mother and the children, now young adults, all have brought civil lawsuits.

The mother won a record damage award of $4.9 million after a jury found that Vreeken and another caseworker filed false reports and withheld evidence which would have cleared Fogarty-Hardwick. An appellate court judge said it was clear the judge and jury felt “the wrongful conduct was not an isolated incident.”

Here’s what happened, according to the Orange County Register:

The threat came first: “If you don’t submit to me, you’ll never see your kids again.”

 Then the Orange County social worker produced a document, telling her she must sign it.

 Suddenly, Deanna Fogarty-Hardwick was faced with [a choice:]  Sign a paper that says you’re a bad parent, or lose your children. Fogarty-Hardwick refused to sign it that day in 2000 and the very worst happened: Her two daughters, then ages 6 and 9, were placed in [a shelter] and then in foster care.

The Register reports that according Kendall’s lawsuit:

Vreeken and another social worker went with a uniformed police officer to take Kendall’s younger sister, who was “screaming and crying for her mother as she hid under the principal’s desk,”  … Kendall was also forcibly removed, leaving her “devastated.”…

 A therapist wrote to the agency that “Kendall … was tearful throughout the session, begging to go home. … She doesn’t know how much longer she can cope and visibly shook while relating this.” … [But] the social workers instead reported the children “were doing well.”

And now, in response to Preslie’s lawsuit, Vreeken is arguing that she is entitled to immunity because she didn’t know that lying to a court was a violation of the family’s constitutional rights.  Sure, there’s a California statute that says you’re not supposed to do this, Vreeken’s lawyer conceded, and well, yes, she might have known it was immoral and unethical but, hey, that doesn’t mean it’s also unconstitutional.

The oral arguments don’t indicate Orange County’s official position on this, but here’s a clue: Instead of firing Vreeken, the Orange County Department of Social Services promoted her. As of 2011, Vreeken was training other caseworkers.

Message to the Front Lines

Consider the message this sends to the frontlines. Caseworkers often are scapegoated if they leave a child in her or his own home and something goes wrong. But demand that a mother “submit” to your will, take the children and run and then lie about it, and not only will you not be punished, you’ll get a promotion.

Consider as well the one key difference between this case and so many others: Ms. Fogarty-Hardwick and family had the financial resources to wage a long fight, and ultimately be compensated for what CPS did to them. This was one of those rare cases where CPS reached into a white middle-class family.

What do you really think goes on when the family is poor and non-white?

Predictive analytics: The stop-and-frisk of child welfare

Like many of my fellow liberals, I get a lot of my news from the most reliable sources: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and, of course, The Daily Show.

Last week, The Daily Show did a superb analysis of “stop-and-frisk” – the policing tactic pioneered in New York City under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and struck down by a judge who branded it “indirect racial profiling.”

In the clip below, Trevor Noah goes through the problems with stop-and-frisk one after the other:

§  The rate of false positives – innocent people stopped and frisked – is staggering.

§  Though the name suggests a gentle, benign process, the reality is a deeply frightening, humiliating experience to those who must undergo it.

§  It is racially biased.

§  Defenders say it’s not biased, it’s based on applying a series of risk factors said to be associated with criminal behavior.

§  It backfires by sowing so much fear and distrust in poor communities of color that it undermines law enforcement and compromises safety.

But backers of stop-and-frisk – overwhelmingly white and middle class –  say they know better than people who actually live in communities of color. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich put it this way:

You run into liberals who would rather see people killed than have the kind of aggressive policing … And a lot of the people whose lives were saved because of policing in neighborhoods that needed it the most, were minority Americans.

But what else would you expect from right-wing Republicans like Gingrich, or Giuliani or Donald Trump himself? Liberals would never tolerate such a harmful, racially biased intrusion on civil liberties.

Or would they?

As you watch the clip, try this: Whenever Trevor Noah says “crime” or “criminal” substitute “child abuse” or “child abuser.”  And whenever he says stop-and-frisk, substitute child welfare’s version of stop-and-frisk, that much-hyped approach in which in which a computer uses demographic and other information to tell caseworkers which parents supposedly are a danger to their children: predictive analytics.

As with stop-and-frisk, predictive analytics puts a pseudo-scientific veneer on indirect racial profiling.  ProPublica proved it. And as with stop-and-frisk, predictive analytics leads to an enormous number of false positives, guaranteeing that many more innocent families will be swept into the system, and their children needlessly consigned to foster care, with all of the harm  that often follows.

Indeed, if anything the collateral damage of predictive analytics can be worse than stop-and-frisk. With stop-and-frisk, a child may see his father thrown up against a wall and roughed up, but at least when it’s over the child still will have his father.

Yes, there are some in the research community and elsewhere who are making a good-faith effort to wring the racial bias out of predictive analytics algorithms, or otherwise curb their misuse. But that will last only until the first news story about the death of a child “known to the system” that supposedly could have been prevented if only the child welfare agency had used all the data it had – essentially the Gingrich argument.

Unfortunately, once again too many on the left are willing to abandon everything they claim to believe in as soon as someone whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears. That never turns out well for children.

Opposition to differential response dealt heavy blow

There is a new study out from the federal government, another in a long line documenting that an approach to child welfare known as “differential response” is, in fact, safe.

Under differential response, some cases that formerly were subject to a full-scale investigation instead are assigned to caseworkers who “assess” the family and offer voluntary help.

The latest “revelation” that differential response (DR) is safe comes on top of many others. A 2011 literature review, looking at 23 studies, found none concluding that differential response compromised child safety.

Three more studies, all using random assignment and designed specifically to deal with alleged flaws in earlier research, have been published. Two found no indication that children in differential response were less safe; one found worse safety outcomes by one measure.

Of all these 26 studies, guess which was the only one to be the subject of a big story in the Chronicle of Social Change complete with the headline “Differential Response Dealt Heavy Blow.”

The Chronicle took a more low-key approach to the latest study. This one examined the six states that have used DR the longest. Once again, the review found no compromise of safety. It also found that states making more use of DR had lower rates of re-reports of maltreatment and lower rates of “substantiated” re-reports than states using it less.

But instead of gushing, The Chronicle story declares, “It is worth noting that in January of 2015, Minnesota — one of the six states focused on in this study – moved toward discontinuing the use of DR.”

It is “worth noting” only in the sense that, once again, we see how scapegoating efforts to keep families together in the wake of a high-profile child abuse death – as happened in Minnesota – trumps research every time.

It’s been much the same in Massachusetts. There, re-abuse of children and deaths of children “known to the system” declined during most years DR was in effect. But deaths may have spiked in one year. (Even that isn’t certain; there are a lot of questions about data, definitions, and causes of death.) That was enough to get the program killed. It is worth noting that, in contrast, no one ever concludes that the death of a foster child means we should abolish foster care.

Opponents of DR have another answer to all those inconvenient studies. They say, in effect, all the studies we don’t like are biased! They say this in an article that is, in itself, striking for its intemperate, defensive tone.

The authors seem to have quite a chip on their collective shoulder. They spend much time bemoaning the way proponents of DR characterize the traditional, investigative approach. In that approach, caseworkers investigate a family, pry into the most intimate aspects of their lives, may strip search the children and/or subject them to traumatic medical exams, and then may, if they so choose, walk out with the children. The authors are deeply offended by the fact that backers of DR refer to this as “adversarial.”

The ironies don’t stop there. I am aware of only one systematic experiment to actually test the bias of researchers in the child welfare field. It found a profound bias in favor of publishing articles purporting to show benefit to removing children.

 Enter APSAC

And now, we have the so-called American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children presenting a “special issue” of one of its publications devoted to DR – or rather, devoted to bashing DR. Every article is from a DR critic, and the guest editor of the issue, Judith Rycus, is a co-author of the all-the-studies-we-don’t-like-are-biased article noted above. Another co-author of that article is a former APSAC president.

APSAC’s track record for getting child welfare issues right is less than distinguished. As Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker explain in their book, Satan’s Silence, APSAC was formed in the 1980s largely by well-meaning “professionals” who promoted claims of a supposed epidemic of mass molestation and satanic ritual abuse in day care centers.

“From its inception,” Nathan and Snedeker write, “APSAC’s leadership roster was a veritable directory of ritual-abuse architects.”  Kee MacFarlane, who led the questioning of children in the notorious McMartin Preschool case, served on APSAC’s board – and received the group’s “Outstanding Professional” award – a decade after McMartin.  And in 1997, three years after writing an article promoting the idea that there really were secret tunnels under the McMartin Preschool, Roland Summit, another former board member, received the group’s “Lifetime Achievement” award.

For those who are not familiar with McMartin, this New York Times video is an excellent primer:

Given that track record, anything APSAC says about differential response should be taken with at least a shaker of salt.

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.

Family First Act has problems, but the “imminent risk” provision isn’t one of them

Have you heard the one about how the Family First Prevention Services Act supposedly isn’t really about prevention? The claim is based on the fact that the bill would require a child to be at “imminent risk” of foster care placement before federal Title IV-E funds could be used to fund prevention services for that family.

In fact, while the Family First Act has many problems, the “imminent risk” clause makes perfect sense – and yes, it is about child abuse prevention.

In June, Sean Hughes wrote:

Despite including the word “prevention” in its title, by only providing an entitlement to supportive services when families have reached that level of crisis, the bill isn’t really funding prevention at all.

 And Angie Schwartz tells us:

The goal of prevention should be to prevent abuse and neglect, not just prevention of entry into foster care.

Schwartz argues that the Family First Act doesn’t do this because “prior statutes” define imminent risk of foster care as something that happens only after a child has been a “substantiated victim” of abuse or neglect.

Let’s assume, for the moment, that the Department of Health and Human Services would choose to define “imminent risk” the same way in regulations implementing the Family First Act, were it to become law. Schwartz and Hughes are still wrong. Their statements reflect a basic misunderstanding of what it means to be a “substantiated victim” of child abuse or neglect.

It does not necessarily mean that the child was abused or neglected. For starters, state definitions of neglect often are so broad and so vague that they are synonymous with poverty. So this was a “substantiated” case of “neglect” that, in fact, led to removal. So was this.  And this. And several of the cases discussed here. None of these cases reflects actual neglect.

In Washington, D.C., in 2012, social services officials actually used the threat of reporting families to the child welfare agency to discourage them from seeking help with their housing problems.

In at least 28 states, statutes say explicitly that a case can be “substantiated” if the child is at risk of abuse or neglect – most often “substantial risk” – it doesn’t even have to be imminent. One place where the “imminent risk” language does appear: the federal definition of child abuse and neglect in the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.

Given that it is entirely possible to be “substantiated” as a child abuser without having committed an act of child abuse, it is entirely reasonable to target federal aid for child abuse prevention services to such cases.

Were there a law that allowed the use of federal Title IV-E funds for emergency cash assistance, or rent subsidies, or child care, that would indeed be child abuse prevention since it would prevent cases such as those noted above from escalating to the point where a child actually was harmed.

Preventing Foster Care Prevents Abuse in Foster Care

There is one other way in which prevention of foster care also prevents child abuse – and this is what the take-the-child-and-run crowd most hopes everyone will forget: All those studies that keep finding that many foster children were abused in foster homes. The record of group homes and institutions on this subject is even worse.

So in many cases, preventing foster care is preventing child abuse.

The real problem with the “prevention” piece of the Families First Act concerns another point raised by Schwartz: It is way too limited in the kinds of prevention for which IV-E funds could be used.

The bill would reinforce the worst instincts of child protective services agencies, paying largely for the kinds of help that make the helpers feel good, such as endless “counseling” and “parent education,” instead of what families really need. It’s not clear from the article discussing Schwartz’s concerns whether Schwartz is concerned about the lack of such funding for such services for birth parents; she’s clearly concerned about the failure to fund them for grandparents and other relatives who provide kinship foster care. In fact, both are a problem.

This failure is one of the main reasons I oppose the Family First Act.

Why targeting “imminent risk” makes sense

Of course, some would argue for both: funding more types of services and dropping the “imminent risk” clause. Indeed, that seems to be Schwartz’s position, at least for grandparents.

There are two problems with this. One is the obvious, practical problem that if you create an open-ended IV-E entitlement for “prevention” and say it can be applied to pretty much any family in America, the cost of the bill would skyrocket and it would never pass.

But there’s another problem: An entitlement of this kind that is too broad will vastly expand the net of coercive intervention into families. Instead of providing genuine help to families that really need it, an entitlement that is overly broad will lead to governments dragging many more families that don’t need “help” into a forced march through counseling and parent education that will only add stress to families, and harm their children.

So if and when the Senate takes up the bill, Senators should leave the “imminent risk” provision alone.