NCCPR in Florida Times-Union on fixing Florida foster care

I have often written that the solution to the problems of journalism is more journalism.

 Six years ago, bad journalism from the Miami Herald set off a foster-care panic in Florida.  (You can read about how bad here.)  Last month, good journalism from Gannett’s Florida newspapers and USA Today documented how Florida’s most vulnerable children are paying the price.  (And they didn’t flinch from saying that the Herald stories triggered it.) UPDATE: December 18, 2020: They published even more powerful stories this week.

And on Sunday, the Florida Times-Union published our response to the stories:

Investigation shines spotlight on child welfare reform

 Decades ago, in Illinois, the death of a child “known to the system” led to a surge in the number of children taken from their parents. With every caseworker terrified to have the next horror story on her or his caseload, they flooded the system with children who never needed to be taken from their homes.

 As a result, one advocate said, the child welfare system became “Like a laboratory experiment to produce the abuse of children.”

 Thanks to the outstanding stories published in the Times-Union and elsewhere by reporters for the USA TODAY Network, we know the laboratory didn’t close – it just moved to Florida.  Their reporting documents how the foster-care panic triggered six years ago by reckless scapegoating of family preservation for child abuse deaths led to thousands of children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love.

 Read the full column here: https://bit.ly/3lhlFlH

ASFA: The racist child welfare law from the 1990s that almost no one talks about*

*-UPDATE, DECEMBER, 2022: Until now. In 2022, upon the occasion of ASFA's 25th anniversary, a lot of people wrote about the harm it's done.  Here's a sample.

It’s time to repeal the law that turns child welfare into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.

           Pandering to our worst instincts about race and class is nothing new.  In the mid-1990s Congress passed three laws rooted in racism. It wasn’t just Republicans. All of the laws had the enthusiastic support of Democratic President Bill Clinton.

           The three laws combined devastated poor Black communities.  Many on the Left have now figured that out – when it comes to two of those laws, a 1994 “crime law” that accelerated America’s love affair with mass incarceration, and the 1996 welfare law that ripped away financial support for impoverished, struggling Americans.  Both laws, of course, disproportionately affect people of color.

           But there was a third bill, equally racist in its origins, equally harmful in its effects, that has largely evaded this recent reckoning.  That’s no surprise. It’s one more example of the classic problem of much of the American Left: Many of my fellow liberals will renounce everything they claim to believe in if you just whisper the words “child abuse” in their ears.

           That’s how we got the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA).       

How we got stuck with ASFA

           A series of trends coincided to bring us to ASFA.  One, of course, was the fearmongering and racism that pervaded 1990s politics. This was the era when House Speaker Newt Gingrich championed both ending welfare and putting poor people’s children into orphanages.

           Second was fear on the part of America’s foster-care industrial complex that the federal funds gravy train might be ending.  In 1993, for the first time, Congress put a little bit of real money behind help to keep families together. It was still a pittance compared with the giant open-ended entitlement for foster care, but suddenly scare stories started turning up in newspapers around the country about children left at home supposedly because of a fanatical desire to preserve families.

           One story in particular captured enormous national attention. The Chicago Tribune scapegoated family preservation for the death of a little boy named Joseph Wallace. Not only was that untrue, a family preservation worker nearly saved Joseph’s life.  The Tribune figured this out – eventually. But by then it was too late.  Even though the internet was in its infancy, for a variety of reasons, discussed in detail here, the story went viral. 

          

 Third, the child welfare establishment spread a related myth: They claimed that an earlier federal law, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, requiring “reasonable efforts” – and nothing more -  to keep families together, supposedly led to some children being left in dangerous homes and other children languishing in foster care.

This, too, is false. The problem of children languishing in foster care had been documented for decades before 1980; it was a major focus of the first story I wrote about foster care in my earlier career as a journalist – in 1976.

The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 was passed to prevent children from languishing in foster care.  But it did nothing to change the federal financial incentives that encourage foster care and discourage better alternatives. And the reasonable efforts clause – to this day – has never been enforced.

For example: Because federal funding is linked to claiming that reasonable efforts have been made, in Michigan 40% of judges admitted to lying and certifying such efforts had been made when they didn’t even believe it themselves.

So after a brief decline in the early 1980s, the number of children taken from their parents kept right on increasing in almost every year after that law was passed.  And though the federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment reports show that known cases of child abuse peaked in 1993, entries into foster care still kept going up. 

The reason children languished in foster care was not reasonable efforts, but the lack of reasonable efforts.  That's why children continue to languish in foster care today.  There were no efforts to curb needless removal and once in foster care the children were filed away and forgotten as overwhelmed caseworkers rushed on to the next case. 

Don’t say the O word!

             Meanwhile, in 1994, soon-to-be House Speaker Gingrich made that notorious proposal to force poor people’s children into orphanages.  Republican polling guru Frank Luntz sent House Republicans a memo telling them they could get what they wanted – if they stopped using the O word.

So suddenly, the Republicans started framing the issue in terms of adoption.  They told us millions of childless middle-class Americans were desperate to adopt foster children, but a Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy supposedly was trapping the children in foster care.

A lot of Republicans knew better, but they didn’t care; they were fine with orphanages.  For them, ASFA was the backdoor to the orphanage. A lot of Democrats were suckered by all the treacly talk about adoption.  ASFA passed nearly unanimously.

By 2000, one of the authors of ASFA, the late Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania - and a supporter of orphanagesw -- couldn’t resist a little gloating.  As he explained to the New York City publication Child Welfare Watch:

Initially, this was just supposed to be a safe families bill, not really an adoption bill at all. The adoption component was a way of sanitizing the bill, to make it more appealing to a broader group of people. Adoption is a very popular concept in the country right now. [Emphasis added.] 

What does ASFA do?

● ASFA blows huge holes in what little was left of the “reasonable efforts” requirement.         

● With limited exceptions, ASFA demands that states move to terminate children’s rights to their parents (which is what “termination of parental rights” really means) for any child in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months -  regardless of whether the child should ever have been taken at all, and regardless of whether the passage of time was the parents’ fault. 

As Jerry Milner, Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau in the Department of Health and Human Services and his Special Assistant David Kelly write in the latest issue of Children’s Bureau Express:

 In more recent times in public child welfare—with the passage of laws that place short time limits on efforts to help families regain custody of their children—we have created more legal orphans than children entering care without living parents. The underlying philosophies behind such laws placed value in getting tough on parents facing difficulties and has disproportionately affected poor parents, Black parents, and Native parents. We have fed a culture of blame.

 This should give us considerable pause.

 We have effectively tied parenting and family relationships to a calendar, and in so doing, one of the most sacred life experiences and purposes a human being can serve has been placed on a timer.

          ● ASFA pays states bounties of thousands of dollars per child for adoptions over a baseline number.  Since the states can keep the money even if the adoption fails, it encourages quick-and-dirty slipshod placements.

● But even more important than any single provision, ASFA sent a message to the child welfare frontlines: You should falsely equate child removal with child safety and rush to take away more children. (That’s what Gelles meant by “a safe families bill” that was “sanitized” by the adoption provisions.) And, of course, it sent that message to a system permeated with class bias and racial bias.

 So even as child abuse continued to decline, the number of children in foster care on any given day kept increasing, peaking in 1999.  It didn’t fall below the number when ASFA became law until 2003.  The number of children taken away over the course of a year kept increasing until 2006.  There were a few years of slow declines, then an increase and now the number is declining again. (Details and sources here.)

So ASFA’s true effect was to make the system bigger, tear apart even more families needlessly, and consign more children to the very chaos from which they supposedly were going to be saved.

Legal orphans

           As for all those promised adoptions, the army of childless yuppies never showed up.  Adoptions increased modestly – continuing a trend that had begun before ASFA passed. But the average annual increase in adoptions over the year before typically equals about four-tenths-of-one-percent of the number of children in foster care on any given day.  And we have no reliable data on how many of these adoptions fail, with the adoptive parents giving up on the children and sending them back into the system.  What little we do know is disturbing.

           

Worst of all, every year more children lose their rights to their parents than are adopted.  The result: A sharp increase in children aging out of the system with no home at all, separated from their birth parents, but without an adoptive home.  In many cases, these were children whose rights to their parents had been terminated, making them, as Milner and Kelly remind us, legal orphans.

           We estimate that between 1997 and 2025, because of ASFA at least 121,000 more children aged out of foster care with no permanent home than would have aged out had there been no ASFA. 

ASFA and safety

             Those clinging to ASFA also try to smear anyone who opposes this racist law with  the Big Lie of American child welfare – that anyone who opposes ASFA would, as one backer of the law put it, “put the rights of parents over the safety of children.”

           On the contrary, there is abundant evidence that, almost always, family preservation is safer than foster care. The high rate of abuse in foster care itself is one likely reason that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically do better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  And, of course, ASFA’s enshrinement of a take-the-child-and-run mentality overloads systems so workers have even less time to find the few children in real danger.

           ASFA makes all vulnerable children less safe.

           But then there’s nothing new about hiding an agenda that oppresses poor people of color behind myths about safety.  Newt “bring back the orphanage” Gingrich does the same thing to justify oppressive police tactics such as stop-and-frisk. 

How ASFA plays out case-by-case

           ASFA exploits the child welfare system’s worst instincts. Here’s how it works for child protective services agencies (or, as they should be called, family police agencies). Not all of this process was created by ASFA, of course, but all was worsened by it:

           ● First take away children because the parents are poor.  Although any poor family is a potential target, racism ensures that poor families of color are even more vulnerable.

           ● Then place the children with white, middle-class foster parents who really want to adopt the child.

           ● Through a process called “concurrent planning” – encouraged by ASFA – tell the foster parents their first obligation is to help reunite the family. But if, by some chance, they fail at that then they get what they really want: Someone else’s children.  

           ● Give the middle-class foster parents all sorts of help denied to the poor parents, such as a significant monthly payment – tax free – other “allowances” and sometimes even childcare.

           ● Because you really prefer those middle-class foster parents, stall and stall for 15 months.

           ● Then, invoke the provision of ASFA, which, with some exceptions requires states to petition for termination of children’s rights to their parents after 15 months.           

(Though one ASFA proponent claims the law includes a provision allowing judges to intervene at this stage if a state failed to make “reasonable efforts” that is flat-out false.  The state itself would have to confess to this failure in order to invoke the “reasonable efforts” exception and not file a termination petition.  Judges get involved only after the petition has been filed and the case has gone to trial.)

             Result: The child welfare system becomes the ultimate middle-class entitlement: step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.

 As Prof. Martin Guggenheim, co-director of the Family Defense Clinic at New York University School of Law (and NCCPR’s President) explains:

 ASFA has been responsible for the massive destruction of black and brown families. More than 2 million children’s parents’ rights have been terminated ... since ASFA was enacted. … It is an unpleasant truth that many of the organizations whose collective voice is condemning racist police practices now have for decades celebrated the approach enshrined in law by ASFA, some by explicitly celebrating adoption and others using the euphemism “permanency.”

             The Movement for Black Lives also has condemned the law, as have many other organizations advocating for racial justice.

How to fix it

 We can fix this if we learn the right lessons from the past 23 years.

Imagine what would have happened if, instead of passing a racist, regressive law such as ASFA, we’d put our effort into actually enforcing that earlier law, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980.  Think how many fewer children would have languished in foster care – because they wouldn’t have been taken at all and, for those who were taken, workers would have had more time to reunite them or, when genuinely necessary, get them adopted.

As Milner and Kelly write:

 During this time of reckoning, veils are being lifted and society is becoming increasingly aware of barriers to equity and the impact of laws that may appear neutral on their surface but cause harmful consequences. Child welfare legislation should not escape scrutiny. ... [W]e should pay thoughtful attention to the design and impact of our laws—old and new—to determine if they represent the knowledge we have about what families and children need to thrive and when they need it.

 So we know how to fix this. In fact, it’s a simple two-step process:

 ● Repeal ASFA.

● Enforce “reasonable efforts.” 

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

● What happens to a social worker who rushes her four-month-old to the hospital after the infant falls out of bed? It depends on her race, of course.  As you read this story, from The Imprint that begins with the social worker’s testimony at a City Council hearing in New York, please keep in mind: This happened in New York City. Wherever you are, it’s probably worse. 

● The City also covered the hearing, focusing on the ongoing problem of false allegations of “educational neglect” against parents who can’t get their children online for school.  The New York Daily News also took a close look at that issue. 

● One area where New York City has done relatively well is not taking away children just because their mothers are victims of domestic violence (thanks to a class-action lawsuit settlement for which NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs). But sometimes, it seems, caseworkers “forget.” Check out how Gabbie Rodriguez, the foster youth who wrote this moving column for The Imprint, and her siblings, wound up taken from their mother. 

How much worse can it get? 

● Check out Philadelphia, which takes away children at more than double the rate of New York City.  There, police are confident they can use the ultimate threat against a Black family and the city child welfare agency will back them up. I have a blog post about it. 

● Or check out Indiana, which takes away children at one of the highest rates in the country. It’s bad enough when family police agencies tear apart families based only on a positive drug test. But in Indiana, they contracted with a lab that allegedly falsified the results.  WTHR-TV in Indianapolis broke the story. 

● Or check out Florida, where the USA TODAY Network exposed the harm done to children by the state’s ongoing foster-care panic.  WFSU Public Radio included NCCPR’s response to the stories in a round-up of reaction. 

● The good news: Even that bastion of the child welfare establishment, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, has weighed in with an Issue Brief countering the racist media-fueled master narrative about COVID-19 and child abuse. I have a blog post about it.  On the other hand, Chapin Hall has not apologized for pouring gasoline on the fires of foster-care panic in Illinois. I have a post about what’s happening in Illinois, too. 

● The text of the inspiring keynote address form Lisa Sangoi of the Movement for Family Power at the upEND Movement virtual convening is now available online. 

● And finally, a preview: I’ve often linked to the excellent stories such as this one by Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News concerning so-called “child abuse pediatricians” and the tendency of some of them to find child abuse whether it’s there or not.  Starting Nov. 10, Hixenbaugh has a podcast on the topic.

Another sign of progress at Chapin Hall

For a bastion of the child welfare establishment
such as Chapin Hall, this is a big change.

Their latest Issue Brief debunks the dominant, racist media myth about child abuse and COVID-19

 In September I wrote a post for this blog wondering if there’s been an epiphany at one of the most regressive forces in American child welfare  -- Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. I wrote that

 For decades, Chapin Hall has been a bastion of 19^th Century-style “child saver” ideology and advocacy dressed up as “scholarship.”  You can read some examples of their track record here and here. But Chapin Hall has probably been at its worst concerning the whole issue of race. 

What gave me hope was a commentary in The Imprint by Chapin Hall’s executive director Bryan Samuels and also the fact that they’ve apparently withdrawn an “Issue Brief” from 2010 making the case that child welfare practitioners are so wonderful, so pristine in their lack of bias, that it is the one field in America that is immune from racism.

Now there is further reason for encouragement. It comes in the form of a new Issue Brief, published in September, this one about COVID-19 and Child Welfare. The paper lends the gravitas of Chapin Hall, long a “Godsource” for journalists covering child welfare, to debunking the widespread media-fueled myth that with fewer white middle-class “eyes” constantly watching overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite kids, their parents will unleash upon them a “pandemic of child abuse.”

 In doing so, they join the Associated Press, The Marshall Project and Bloomberg CityLab in pointing out the flaws in this racially biased mythology.

 

The Issue Brief does not say COVID-19 will do no harm at all.  The stress of increased poverty probably will lead to some increase in child abuse.  But to deal with that they suggest a novel approach – well, novel for Chapin Hall: Target the poverty, not the parents.

 In fact, they suggest carving out a large portion of cases, and apparently taking them out of the jurisdiction of child protective services agencies. I say apparently, because they’re a little vague about this. According to the Issue Brief:

 Child maltreatment categories should be refined to distinguish and address poverty-related neglect from child endangerment or abuse. … [H]otline reports of “neglect only” may be a phenomenon distinct from child endangerment. While lack of supervision, food, clothing, or shelter can surely jeopardize the safety of children, addressing these directly through concrete supports may be more efficient and effective than initiating a child welfare case that punishes families for living in poverty.

To which the proper scientific response is: Ya think????

Even more interesting is Chapin Hall’s analysis of that whole “pandemic of child abuse” myth, and the related claims that there will be a surge in child abuse discovered as more children return to school, and with that, a surge in the number of children placed in foster care. 

The Issue Brief points out that a sharp decline in reports from teachers and other school personnel is not unusual – it happens every summer.  It is not followed by a surge in actual child abuse in the fall.  If anything, these cycles suggest that, overwhelmingly, what’s really “missed” during the summer are false reports. 

And no wonder. When teachers are on the job reporting “child abuse” they’re almost always wrong.  Only 11 percent of their reports meet even the incredibly low standard for “substantiating” an allegation – it can be no more than a caseworker’s guess that it’s slightly more likely than not that the abuse or neglect occurred. 

But let Chapin Hall explain: 

Education personnel report the most cases of suspected maltreatment, but detect the smallest percentage of cases that reach the threshold for substantiation … Additionally, historical seasonal fluctuations in reporting that occur in response to school attendance largely affect the rate of unsubstantiated cases. Typical drop-offs in reports relate to concerns that do not reach the threshold of substantiated maltreatment; teacher reports in summer months that do result in substantiation remain steady. This suggests that in the current context, the number of reports that result in substantiated maltreatment is unlikely to fluctuate due to reduced teacher/school contact. 

Thus, it is unlikely that the dramatic reduction in hotline reports due to school closures will produce a rebound of substantiated maltreatment. Instead, those concerned with the well-being of children should shift their focus to the community drivers and economic stressors that elevate the risk for child maltreatment. Rather than focusing on how to increase mandatory reporting, efforts should be redirected to support and stabilize families to prevent child maltreatment. 

The danger of self-fulfilling prophecy 

Unfortunately, there is one factor this doesn’t take into account that may, in fact, make the return to school going on now different: self-fulfilling prophecy. 

As I explained in a previous post: 

If you tell teachers over and over again that while their students were out of school, they were abused in pandemic proportions, then the bruise that last year would have been seen for what it was, an accident, suddenly is child abuse.  The hungry child for whom they might have called a food bank now becomes a call to child protective services. 

So if there is a surge in foster care placements, it’s more likely to be the result of a generation of journalists who grew up on “health terrorism” – the deliberate distortion of the nature and extent of child abuse by advocacy groups supposedly seeking to “raise awareness” – buying into a fundamentally racist myth about child abuse and COVID-19. 

That Chapin Hall has made a modest contribution toward countering this myth is welcome.  But they could do a whole lot more.  As I noted in my previous post about Chapin Hall, in addition to once promoting the myth that there is no racial bias in child welfare, just two years ago they threw gasoline on the fires of foster-care panic in Illinois, contributing to skyrocketing needless removals of children in that state. 

They need to apologize, loudly and publicly, for both. 

And even now, the current Issue Brief shows an unfortunate, lingering fondness for the latest dangerous fad in child welfare, predictive analytics. 

But hey, I said epiphany – not miracle.

Police caught on tape reveal Philadelphia’s culture of child removal

When Philadelphia cops literally took the child and ran, they knew where they could get back-up if they wanted it.

 

Police smashed the windows of a mother's SUV, then dragged her and her children out.
What came next was worse. (Video by Aapril Rice)

By now you’ve probably at least heard about the story; perhaps you’ve seen the video.

 In the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police version, a two-year old was rescued from rioting by one of their officers. They posted pictures with this caption: 

 “This child was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness. The only thing this Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child.”

 But that’s not what happened. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

 Philadelphia police pulled a woman from an SUV during unrest in West Philadelphia Tuesday morning, beat and bloodied her, separated her from her toddler for hours, and kept her in handcuffs in the hospital, her attorneys said Friday.

 The toddler also was injured, they said. 

 The thing is, the lawyers’ version is the one that’s backed up with video.  

  

But here’s the part of the story I find striking.  According to the mother’s lawyers

  …police at the scene refused to tell her where her child would be taken, saying only “he’s gonna go to a better place, we’re gonna report it to DHS," presumably referring to the Department of Human Services, the city’s child-welfare agency.

 Fortunately, that apparently didn’t happen.  The lawyers say that after hours apart, during which the toddler was kept in the back of a police cruiser in his car seat, (which reportedly still had glass from when the police broke the windows of the SUV), and a trip to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to treat his injuries, mother and child were reunited.

 But what does it say about the culture of Philadelphia law enforcement and Philadelphia child welfare that the first instinct upon encountering a Black mother and her young child trying to slowly and carefully drive away from trouble is to, literally, take the child and run, apparently secure in the knowledge that Philadelphia DHS would back them up? How many other times have police threatened Black families with needless separation of their children because they knew the child welfare agency is their eager partner?  After all, Philadelphia tears apart families at one of the highest rates among America’s big cities.

 In fact, the child was at risk of needless removal at least twice. The mother is lucky that Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia didn’t simply assume she must have caused the toddler’s injury and call DHS – given their well-known hair trigger for such reports, and the fact that Philadelphia DHS encourages just that.  (I’m assuming they didn’t actually call DHS. So far there are no reports of a caseworker showing up at the family home.)

 Though it’s more likely to happen in Philadelphia than in many other big cities, this could have happened anywhere. All over America you can do almost anything you want to a Black family as long as you claim that “The only thing [you] cared about in that moment was protecting this child.”

NCCPR in Youth Today and WitnessLA: In child welfare, the racial bias is everywhere — even in the research

Consider this hypothetical scenario:

 A 10-year-old boy mouths off to a man on the street; His mother is with him. She slaps him in the face and yells at him, making clear he must never, ever do something like that again.

 Is that child abuse?

 According to the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence a widely touted survey from some of America’s leading family violence researchers, a survey used to measure the supposed prevalence of child abuse in America, the answer is yes.

 The survey asks this question: 

“Not including spanking on (his/her /your) bottom, did a grown-up in (your child’s/your) life hit, beat, kick, or physically hurt (your child/you) in any way?”

 Now let’s change the hypothetical slightly ...

Read the full commentary in Youth Today and WitnessLA

A lesson for Illinois child welfare: When history rhymes, families are destroyed – and children keep dying

History doesn’t repeat itself,” it’s been said, “but it rhymes.”  In Illinois, child welfare history is rhyming, and that is bringing down tragedy upon the state’s children in ways old and new.

 In 1993, Joseph Wallace, a child ‘known-to-the-system” was murdered by his mother. The casefile had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day Parade.  There was a rush to condemn any and all efforts to keep families together.  In the foster-care panic that followed the number of children torn from their homes skyrocketed. By 1997, a child was more likely to be trapped in foster care in Illinois than in any other state.  An already bad system was plunged into chaos.  Thousands of children were traumatized when they were taken from parents who were nothing like Joseph’s mother.

 All of it was done in the name of ending child abuse deaths. But those deaths increased – probably because workers became even more overloaded, so they had less time to find the relatively few children, like Joseph, in real danger.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services learned from those mistakes. A bold DCFS leader, Jess McDonald, embraced efforts to keep families together.  The number of children taken from their parents went down – and independent court monitors found that child safety improved.  In 2003, the lead monitor told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “Children are safer now than they were when the state had far more foster children.” Their 2018 report shows that safety continued to improve all the way through about 2011, when the agency was undermined by budget cuts.

 But memories are short. The death of A.J. Freund prompted the same knee-jerk reaction, with the same tragic results.

Between fiscal years 2018 and 2020 the number of children torn from their homes in Illinois has skyrocketed 30%.  The 17% increase in 2019 alone was the second highest increase in the country that year and it came at a time when nationwide, entries into foster care were declining.  In fact, even as the number of children taken nationwide approaches a 21-year low, the number taken in Illinois has hit a 21-year high.

 To understand the consequences think back to the family separations on the Mexican border.  Unlike what happened there, DCFS workers almost always mean well.  But the trauma endured by children separated from everyone they know and love is no different. 

That’s because most cases are nothing like the horror stories. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect. Others fall between the extremes.  That helps explain why at least six separate studies, two of them massive in scope and looking specifically at cases from Illinois, have found that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  It’s all coming down hardest on Black children who are in Illinois foster care at triple their rate in the general population.

 All that trauma occurs even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But study after study has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes.  The record of group homes and institutions is even worse. 

 In one respect history is not rhyming: This time there’s harm to children that’s brand new.  All those additional removals mean more caseworkers inspecting more homes from top to bottom, stripsearching children, walking out with those children, placing them in cars that have transported many others, and sometimes taking the children from place-to-place before finally depositing them with strangers.  In short, this time the foster-care panic also increases the risk of transmitting COVID-19 to children, families and caseworkers themselves.

 Some might argue even all that would be worth it if it saved lives. But on that score, history seems to be rhyming again. We can’t be sure yet, since cause-of-death in many cases from FY 2020 is not yet determined.  But it is likely that deaths may have decreased slightly from 2019 – when the number of fatalities was unusually high - but were higher than the three previous years, when removals were much lower. 

Once again, a foster-care panic is making all children less safe.

 In the 1990s, Illinois proved it could stop a foster-care panic. It can stop it again. But DCFS, the legislature and the governor need to act fact.  Because history is rhyming – but it’s not a nursery rhyme.