NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 21, 2020

● A project by Boston Globe “Spotlight Fellows,” published by the Globe and ProPublica was extraordinary in its enterprise and noble in its goals. But it failed, and that failure is likely to hurt children. One reason for the failure: They did a massive project on a system that has a vastly disproportionate effect on children of color, yet the only national experts quoted are white. NCCPR has a full response here.

● One of the reporters who did the Globe/ProPublica stories made similar errors in covering a trial in a tragic case in New York City for The New York Times. In this blog post I compare the reporter’s actions to the Times’ Code of Ethics.

● Two important stories in recent weeks from Elizabeth Brico. Both, as it happens, deal with issues the Spotlight Fellows left out of their reporting. First, from Salon (via Undark): How when we take a swing at mothers who use drugs, the blow almost always lands on the children.  And, in The Appeal: How getting the journalism of child welfare wrong sets off foster-care panics.

● I’ve said before that white middle-class professionals and foster parents often turn child welfare systems into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.  For a classic case-in-point, check out this outstanding three-part series from the Chronicle of Social Change.  As soon as I started reading it, I knew the foster parents and the child welfare agency would try to play the bonding card.  So here’s some context about that, from I column I wrote last year for Youth Today.  Nor is there anything unusual about powerful foster parents working to bend systems to their will. Here’s another example.

Also in the Chronicle of Social Change:

● Prof. Jessica Pryce makes the case for race-blind foster care removal decisions, in which, before a child is removed from the home, a committee conducts a “blind removal meeting” in which all the information about the case is presented – except information that would give away the race of the family. 

● Jill Cohen, director of programs for the Colorado Office of Respondent Parent Counsel, writes about the success Colorado is having with the same kind of high quality family defense that has accomplished so much in New York City and elsewhere.

● The San Diego Union Tribune has a story about the latest in a string of lawsuit victories for families in which children were needlessly removed and/or subjected to behavior which, if anyone other than child welfare agencies did it, would be child sexual abuse.  The story asks why the county doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.

NCCPR'S NEW REPORT: LEFT IN THE DARK

“Spotlight Fellows” writing for the Boston Globe and ProPublica misunderstood a key federal law and got the causes of child abuse fatalities wrong.  Their massive project, reported and written with the best of intentions, is likely to make children less safe.

Today, NCCPR releases an in-depth analysis of stories that are a sad example of the way the journalism of child welfare often fails. The full report is available here.  Below are the key points.  As you read the report, I'm sure you'll understand why we decided to release it on Martin Luther King Day.

● Though reported with the best of intentions, stories written by two Boston Globe “Spotlight Fellows” and published by the Globe and ProPublica are likely to endanger the children they are meant to help.

The stories will encourage public policy that

          --Promotes foster-care panic, sharp sudden increases in removals of children from their homes that do terrible harm to children needlessly removed and overwhelm caseworkers so they have less time to find children in real danger.

          --Discourages women, particularly poor women and women of color, from seeking prenatal care or giving birth in hospitals, increasing the risk to their newborns.

          --Opens even wider the spigot of the “foster-care-to-prison pipeline” which leads to disastrous outcomes for children.  At the end of 2019, in fact, at almost the same time the Spotlight Fellows stories were released, this was documented brilliantly by the Kansas City Star.

● More than four decades of experience tracking child welfare – and the journalism of child welfare – make clear that the failure to provide context and diverse points of view concerning how to solve the problems the series exposed leads to such panics by workers, judges and child welfare agency leaders, all of whom fear being in the spotlight if they leave a child home and something goes wrong. 

● The reporters misunderstood the history and the politics of the law at the center of their stories, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. They made erroneous assumptions about key provisions of the law.

● There is far less consensus about CAPTA than is implied by the stories, in which only sources who reinforce the “master narrative” of the reporters are quoted.  That narrative suggests that CAPTA is fundamentally a good law that needs to be clarified, toughened and given more funding.  There is a vigorous debate among child welfare experts over this, with many believing CAPTA is a fundamentally bad law that harms children and should not be encouraged with more funding. But those viewpoints were entirely shut out of the stories, leaving readers in the dark.

● This was caused, in part, by a startling dichotomy in sourcing. Child welfare is a system that overwhelmingly polices the poor and, disproportionately the nonwhite.  But every national expert quoted is white. 

To understand how harmful this is, consider: In poor communities and communities of color, child protective services agencies are viewed, for good reason, in much the same way as the police.  It is inconceivable that a major series of any kind about the criminal justice system would leave out the voices of all national experts who are not white. It should be equally inconceivable when the topic is child welfare.

● The journalists’ view of CAPTA is seen most clearly in the series’ de facto endorsement of one of CAPTA’s worst provisions, the “plan of safe care” provision, which ratchets up surveillance of pregnant women and infants “affected” by parental substance use.  There is no evidence base for this provision – no research indicating it makes children safer.  What research does exists suggests that this sort of approach makes children less safe – by driving their mothers away from prenatal care and away from giving birth in hospitals.

● The stories show a fundamental misunderstanding of who winds up in the child welfare system and why, including a misunderstanding of crucial data about “substantiated” child abuse and neglect reports.

● Even as she was working on these stories, one of the reporters did pro-bono work for an advocacy group that takes strong stands on these same issues. That is a conflict of interest.

● None of this means everything about the stories was wrong. The reporters are right to highlight the need for a standard national definition for child abuse fatalities and near fatalities.  They also are right to call for far more public disclosure concerning such fatalities. In fact, they don’t go far enough. NCCPR is on record calling for much more transparency: a strong rebuttable presumption of openness for all court hearings and almost all records in all child abuse and neglect cases. 

● Contrary to what reporters who are called out for these sorts of failings often say, none of this means that child abuse deaths should be ignored.  No, it does not mean that, as sometimes has been alleged over the years, “you don’t want us to report it when children die!”  On the contrary, we need more coverage of such fatalities - coverage that gets at the real causes and real solutions.  At least one newspaper, the Dayton Daily News has done that.  And we need more stories about the consequences of getting the solutions wrong – which, as noted above, the Kansas City Star did  at almost exactly the same time as the Spotlight Fellows’ stories were published. 

● The Spotlight Fellows had the chance to advance the debate over how to reduce child abuse fatalities, a debate that has been going nowhere for decades. Instead, they offered only more of the same.  Perhaps others will do better.  Because the solution to the problems of journalism is more journalism.

NCCPR's FULL ANALYSIS IS AVAILABLE HERE

UPDATED: A New York Times reporter with a conflict of interest misunderstands the impact of a child abuse tragedy

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED TO INCLUDE EXCERPTS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES CODE OF ETHICS. 

New York Times reporter Emily Palmer has been covering the trial of the man who tortured and ultimately killed six-year-old Zymere Perkins in New York City in 2016.  She wrote a story which was published a short time ago, after the man was convicted.  But she’s been editorializing about the case on Twitter as she’s been covering it.

Because of that, and because of a conflict-of-interest issue, yesterday NCCPR appealed to New York Times Metro Editor Clifford Levy to intervene.  Perhaps he did. The story is not as bad as the tweets.  But it still allows the city’s claims that its response to the tragedy improved the system to go unrebutted.

In fact, many advocates argue that the city’s response has made the system worse, and made another tragedy like the death of Zymere Perkins more likely.  That’s partly because the overwhelming majority of cases seen by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services don’t involve torture and murder – far more often they involve the confusion of poverty with neglect, as the Times itself has documented well in recent years.

The story is not just harmful to the city’s most vulnerable children. It’s also an insult to Palmer’s colleagues at the Times who have done careful, finely-nuanced reporting like this  on child welfare in recent years.  I hope this story is not a signal by Levy that he is moving Times coverage of child welfare backwards.

Here is the email NCCPR sent to Levy yesterday:

Your forthcoming story on the Zymere Perkins case trial

Dear Mr. Levy:

            This morning one of your reporters, Emily Palmer, posted this tweet about a story she will be writing concerning the trial in the death of Zymere Perkins:

This a.m. the judge is instructing the jury on the law ahead of deliberations in a child abuse and death case. The case of Zymere Perkins, a 6-year-old who died in Harlem in 2016, did much to improve the city’s child welfare system. Story coming soon!  [Emphasis added.]

As I said in a tweet thread about this, I know Ms. Palmer has a deep and abiding passion for protecting children and I admire that.  But I, and other family advocates, also believe that passion has led to some serious misjudgments, most notably in her recent package of stories as a Boston Globe Spotlight Fellow.  Those stories, of course, are not your concern.  But similar problems appear to affect her approach to the trial in the Perkins case.  There is also a matter of conflict-of-interest which I’ll get to below.

            There are advocacy groups and scholars all over New York City who believe the Perkins case made New York City child welfare worse.  We believe it undermined reforms that were making children safer, set off a foster-care panic – a sharp sudden spike in needless removals of children from their homes – and vastly increased needless surveillance of impoverished families of color.  Indeed, the response to the Perkins case worsened the very problems documented so well by the Times in its story about foster care as the new “Jane Crow.”

            My point here is not to try to convince you that we are right and those who say the Perkins case made the system better are wrong (though I would greatly appreciate the chance to try in the future at the time and place of your choosing).  At this point, I am asking simply that a story written by a reporter who’s already taken a clear editorial stand both in today’s tweet and earlier receive extra editing to ensure that well-informed viewpoints from all perspectives are well-represented. 

            For the record, in response to my tweets about this, Ms. Palmer said that she was “alluding to data-oriented improvements.”  Frankly, I’m not sure what she means by this, but I do know that there are serious questions about whether ACS has been misleading in its use of data. I discuss some of those issues here More generally, there is documentation for our concerns about the system getting worse here and here.

  

            But second, Ms. Palmer has editorialized about this trial before.  In another tweet, she records a video about this case in which she declares at the end that “there is one man on trial, but there’s an entire agency at fault.”

            Really? Every single caseworker? Every supervisor? Every manager?  This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that makes everyone in the system run scared and rush to take away more children needlessly, doing those children enormous harm – and overloading the system making it even less likely that the next Zymere Perkins will be found.  An editorial writer or a columnist is free to do this, of course. Although I realize there have been vast changes in the industry since I was a reporter, I thought the news side was still supposed to refrain from this, even on Twitter.

            So now we have a reporter about to write a news story concerning a trial about which she’s taken a clear editorial position.  These concerns are reinforced by the fact that, even as she covered child welfare as a Boston Globe Spotlight Fellow she also moderated a panel discussion and wrote a fact sheet for Children’s Rights, an advocacy group that is active concerning these same issues.  In fact, in the past, they’ve sued the Administration for Children’s Services and its various predecessor agencies.

            When I tweeted about this, Ms. Palmer replied:

 Re the fact-sheet: I led a panel discussion that brought together a diverse group of voices on all sides. Parent advocacy groups attended and asked excellent questions.

            In response I tweeted this:

(1/2) I saw a tape of that discussion. All sides were *not* represented. Family defenders were in the audience; they literally did not have a place at the table. But more important, you did this for an advocacy group.

[2/2] Would it be OK to moderate a panel and do a factsheet for the NRA *or* for Everytown for Gun Safety and also cover gun control?

            I would add one thing more. This link goes to a flyer about the panel Ms. Palmer moderated. Take a look at who is on the panel, and, especially who is not: Separately, on its website, Children’s Rights has this link inviting readers to Download this fact sheet on Opioids and Foster Care, produced by reporter Emily Palmer. 

            I am sure Ms. Palmer is sincere when she said this group represented “all sides.”  And that’s precisely the problem with the way she has approached child welfare reporting. Who is missing? The Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem, the Center for Family Representation, the writers from Rise, the magazine written by parents who’ve “caught a case” and so on.  Of course they didn’t all need to be on the panel – but surely if you want to present all sides you’d fit in one of them. 

            Thank you for your attention to this matter.

What does the Times Code of Ethics say about all this?

 As noted above, New York Times reporter Emily Palmer, who covers child welfare, moderated a panel discussion arranged and sponsored by the group that calls itself “Children’s Rights.” That group works hard to influence public policy on child welfare issues.  It also regularly sues child welfare agencies across the country.  Ms. Palmer also wrote a “Fact Sheet” for Children’s Rights, linked to the event.

Here are the relevant sections of the New York Times Code of Ethics:

The Times freely acknowledges that outside appearances can enhance the reputation of its bylines and serve the paper’s interests. Nevertheless, no staff member may appear before an outside group if the appearance could reasonably create an actual or apparent conflict of interest or undermine public trust in the paper’s impartiality. …

Staff members should be especially sensitive to the appearance of partiality when they address groups that might figure in coverage they provide, edit, package or supervise, especially if the setting might suggest a close relationship to the sponsoring group. Before accepting such an invitation, a staff member must consult with the standards editor or the deputy editorial page editor. Generally, a reporter recently returned from the Middle East might comfortably address a suburban synagogue or mosque but should not appear before a group that lobbies for Israel or the Arab states. A reporter who writes about the environment could appropriately speak to a garden club but not to conservation groups known for their efforts to influence public policy. ...

Staff members may not collaborate in ventures involving individuals or organizations that figure or are likely to figure in coverage they provide, edit, package or supervise. Among other things, this prohibition applies to collaborating in writing books, pamphlets, reports, scripts, scores or any other material and in making photographs or creating artwork of any sort.

And for those wondering about the references to Ms. Palmer’s work as a Spotlight Fellow: Here's our full response to those stories.          

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 2, 2020

In a previous round-up, I noted the lead story in the latest issue of the Administration for Children and Families publication Children’s Bureau Express.  It’s called “It’s Time to Stop Confusing Poverty With Neglect.”  That column is excellent – but there’s more. The entire issue is devoted to this theme.  Among the other excellent stories:

● I’ve written before about child welfare’s “creation myth” – how the story of Mary Ellen Wilson, a little girl abused in the 1870s, supposedly proved the need for untrammeled state intervention into families.  In fact, Mary Ellen was a foster child.  And now, Katie Albright, who runs a family support center in San Francisco, adds another key fact:  Mary Ellen was taken from her mother in the first place when her mother’s poverty was confused with neglect.

● Jeremy Kohomban and his colleagues at The Children’s Village write about how what was once one of the most regressive, hidebound “residential treatment centers” (and a media darling, especially beloved by author Anna Quindlan) has had a reckoning. They acknowledge that their previous approach was rooted in racial and class bias, and they’ve transformed into a place that emphasizes serving families in their own communities.

● And Jey Rajaraman, chief counsel for Legal Services of New Jersey, writes about “How to Help Agencies Stop Confusing Poverty With Neglect.” Lesson 1: Focus on housing.

In other news:

● I have a column in Youth Today about who’s trying to push to the front of the line to exploit the Family First Act to “leverage” more money for themselves. Hint: It’s not families.

● In Canada, where the child welfare system is depressingly similar to ours, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has a story about a social worker who made it her mission to defend families whose children were taken needlessly – and what happened to her. (It’s what you think.)

● And there is sad news from Connecticut, where a federal court ruling may effectively give the state free reign to tear children from parents whose alleged mental illness is said to indicate they may abuse or neglect their children in the future.

NCCPR in Youth Today on who’s first on line to scarf up scarce $ thanks to the Family First Act. Hint: It’s not families

Remember the Family First Act? That’s the vastly overhyped federal legislation touted as a revolutionary change in how child welfare is financed. Supposedly, under Family First, lots of money that used to be reserved only for foster care will, at last, go to better alternatives. That was never going to happen. Very little additional money actually will go to those better alternatives.

And now it looks like the very first to benefit from Family First may not be families at all. It may be “providers” of the worst form of “care” in a state that is always a candidate for foster care capital of America. Yes, the first beneficiaries of Family First may be residential treatment centers (RTCs) in Wyoming, a state that regularly tears apart families at a rate nearly triple the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.

Read the full column in Youth Today.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 23, 2019

This edition is devoted entirely to following-up the outstanding Kansas City Star series on the harm of foster care.

● The Star has a round-up of reaction from public officials and others. Many public officials tried to deflect from the heart of the problem by focusing on one noncontroversial solution. After all, no one is against spending more to provide better educational opportunities to foster children. But it’s hard to take advantage of those opportunities if you don’t have a real home.  Much more promising is an effort by Iowa’s public defender, Jeff Wright, to expand high-quality defense for families, so children don’t have to endure needless foster care in the first place.

● NCCPR has an op-ed column in the Star about the one person who understands exactly how to fix the problems the newspaper exposed: A Kansas City police officer.

● And in The Appeal, Vaidya Gullapalli, senior legal counsel at The Justice Collaborative, links the Star findings to other stories showing the racial and class bias in the system.  

NCCPR in the Kansas City Star on foster care tragedy

With its series “Throwaway Kids,” The Kansas City Star has raised the bar for journalism about child welfare all over America. The very fact that reporters Laura Bauer and Judy L. Thomas had to begin their search for answers in America’s prisons speaks volumes about how we destroy children in the name of “saving” them.

Fortunately, the person who knows best how to fix it is right in Kansas City. He is Sgt. A.J. Henry of the Kansas City Police Department.

Read the full column here.