New York City’s retreat from reform

In all of American child welfare, no one has a tougher job than John Mattingly, commissioner of New York City's Administration for Children's Services. And there is no one in America who could have done a better job than Mattingly when the system was engulfed in crisis in 2006.

Mattingly came to ACS from the Annie E. Casey Foundation where he worked on foster care reform efforts nationwide, and served on a panel of national experts that steered former ACS Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta away from a take-the-child-and-run approach and toward reforms that almost made New York City a national leader in child welfare. (While at Casey, Mattingly also recommended that the Foundation fund NCCPR, perhaps not one of his favorite recommendations at the moment.)

So reforms he helped initiate were well underway when Mattingly took over from William Bell who had succeeded Scoppetta. Mattingly built on those reforms and, at their height, New York City had safely reduced the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year from 12,000 to under 4,900. At the same time, he bolstered kinship care, an area where New York long has lagged behind other cities, reduced the use of group homes and institutions and even took the first tentative steps toward requiring real accountability from the huge, powerful private agencies that have dominated New York child welfare for 150 years.

And the challenges faced by Mattingly are unique among reform-minded child welfare administrators. There are very few such people in child welfare; but among those few the others either haven't faced a backlash yet or left before the backlash hit. Mattingly is the first to face head-on the powerful forces that always try to exploit tragedy to thwart reform.

● Mattingly was running ACS when the neocon ideologue who then had the child welfare beat at The New York Times turned child abuse deaths into a "series" that didn't exist and then blamed them on ACS' reforms. The deaths were tragically real, but there had been no increase in their number. ("It was a series," the reporter would famously explain later, "but not statistically.")

● That set the stage for the response to the hideous murder of Nixzmary Brown in January, 2006 – a huge spike in removals of children from their homes. The New York Post called for Mattingly's resignation and the Daily News came close. (To his credit, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ignored those demands. Indeed, while Bloomberg could have done better, he was a beacon of statesmanship when compared with the likes of Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C. or the Board of Supervisors in Los Angeles County.)

Had almost anyone else been running ACS at the time, the spike in removals almost certainly would have been worse and reform efforts in New York City now would lie in ruins. As I said, no one in America who could have done a better job than John Mattingly.

But John Mattingly could have done a better job than he did.

A series of missteps has become a retreat from reform that never needed to happen. In the year ending May 31, 2009, ACS took away more than 7,500 children. That's still a much better record than the 12,000 taken when the system was at its worst more than a decade ago, but it's a 50 percent increase from the year before Nixzmary Brown died. It happened because:

● Instead of defending reforms that had, by all objective measures, improved child safety, Mattingly pandered to the neocons. He fed red meat to the Daily News editorial board with inflammatory comments about how his own caseworkers were doing too much to keep families together.

● ACS made disingenuous claims about the surge in removals, arguing that more children were being taken because there were more reports of maltreatment. In fact, the rate at which families were torn apart far exceeded the rate of increase in reports.

● Mattingly invited the New York Times reporter who invented the notion that deaths were a "series" to watch him in full "get tough" mode at a meeting of caseworkers.

● When the city's Department of Investigation drew absurd conclusions about ACS based on a study of only the worst cases, ACS embraced the report instead of fighting back on behalf of the agency and its frontline workers.

● Mattingly issued a confiscation-at-birth policy, requiring his workers to automatically take into custody any child born to a parent who already had a child in foster care. Exceptions are possible, but very difficult.

● ACS partnered with the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" in a project that gives every other constituency in child welfare a full place at the table while relegating birth parents to a focus group.

● Mattingly threw cold water on plans to expand an excellent form of permanence for children, subsidized guardianship.

● ACS even is reportedly slowing down what may be Mattingly's signature accomplishment, moving children out of the worst form of care, group homes and institutions, and into families. Of course, everything is harder when you're taking away 7,500 children per year than it was when you were taking fewer than 4,900.

The message to the frontlines is clear and it is overwhelming: Take away children needlessly and the children may suffer terribly, but your career is safe. Have the next tragedy on your caseload and your career may be over.

Part of the fault rests with advocates like me. Precisely because we hold Mattingly in such high regard, and understood how much pressure he was under from the take-the-child-and-run crowd, we waited too long to direct our criticism specifically at ACS and Mattingly. So he was getting pressure only from those who wanted him to retreat even further from his own reforms.

All of which brings me to a publication on NCCPR's website called Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right. When we first published it, we could find only seven such ways. But, as more best practices emerged and more systems transformed, we added more programs and places to the list, until we reached 12.

Actually, for quite a while it was more like "twelve-and-a-half." That's because our listing for New York City had two parts. Our full-fledged "way to do child welfare right" was, and is, an outstanding model initiative called the Bridge Builders in the Highbridge section of the Bronx. (A few years ago, NCCPR received a grant from the Child Welfare Fund to help publicize this initiative.) But we also included praise for the general progress that had been made by ACS.

That part is no longer there. For the first time, we've had to take something off our list of "ways to do child welfare right." Because in New York City, there simply has been too much retreat from reform, for too long.

Next time, ACS, just say you’re sorry and go away

The tabloids quickly dubbed her "the miracle girl." Her name is Destiny Antonio. According to a story in yesterday's New York Times, here's what happened.

Destiny lives in a seventh floor apartment in a public housing project in the Bronx. There have been problems with the windows at least since July, according to her mother. She'd complained to the New York City Housing Authority, but the windows still hadn't been fixed by 1:00 a.m. last Friday morning. Then, according to the Times:

Ms. Antonio said she was asleep early Friday when Destiny was awakened by noise in the courtyard.

"Somebody was out there arguing," Ms. Antonio said, relaying her daughter's account.

Destiny apparently climbed down from her top bunk, and stepped up on a windowsill to investigate. The window had protective metal guards on the bottom, but Destiny pulled down the top half of the window and stuck her head through. Ms. Antonio said the window was supposed to lower only four inches, but Destiny managed to pull it down seven inches.

Somehow, she fell out, barely missing three air-conditioners and a grate made of metal and concrete below. She landed on a patch of overgrown grass, dazed but conscious.

So far, nothing in any news account contradicts this version of events.

As one would expect, Destiny suffered multiple serious injuries, and she'll have to be in the hospital for months. What one might not expect is that she would be forced to face interrogation in her hospital bed, at least twice, from New York City's Administration for Children's Services.

News accounts don't say how the agency was called in, but ACS is required to investigate any case forwarded by the state child abuse hotline in Albany. However, if the news accounts of this case are correct, as soon as a caseworker got to the home, examined the windows and conferred with police she should have had the decency to do three things:

1. Tell Ms. Antonio how sorry she was about what happened to her daughter.

2. Ask if there was anything the agency could do to help.

3. Go away.

But that's not what happened.

Although it was only a few months ago that there was a big fight over layoffs at the agency, ACS apparently was able to spare three caseworkers to traumatize the family with one interview after another. According to the Times, Ms. Antonio says they

swept through her home, taking pictures and pressing her children for information. During an interview, one investigator asked her 12-year-old son, Tamar, if he drinks alcohol, she said.

ACS actually was outnumbered by the cops – 12 police officers; so I guess the NYPD doesn't have much to do, either.
And that wasn't the end of it. An ACS worker was scheduled to interview Destiny, again, in her hospital room, Tuesday morning.

If the news accounts are wrong, and there was some good reason for ACS to behave as it did, then, thanks to an unusual law in New York, ACS has the legal right to explain itself. In this case, I think it also has the moral obligation to do so.

It is coincidence that on Monday, I began a series of posts to this Blog about ACS' retreat from reform. But this case is the perfect illustration.

On the one hand, the ACS response here still is better than what would have happened in many other communities. There are plenty of places where, in a case like this, the children would have been thrown into foster care on the spot – and that includes New York City when things were at their worst in 1997 and 1998.

But even when a child is not removed from the home, a child abuse investigation can be an enormously traumatic experience for that child and her or his siblings, even under the best of circumstances. After what this family has been through, the last thing the children need is the fear that they could be taken away at any moment, or anything else that undermines their chance to regain some sense of security.

There were a few years when ACS understood that. In fact, I'm sure the people at ACS understand that even now – but the fear engendered by the agency's post-Nixzmary Brown get-tough swagger means that the children in this family must keep fearing that they'll be taken away at any moment. And a little girl who survived a terrifying ordeal has to wonder when her next visitor in the hospital will be still another ACS caseworker.

ACS isn't helping its credibility with a silly claim in the Times story that, in the words of a spokeswoman, "This is a normal procedure any time a child is injured and adult caregivers are present when it happens."

In that case, I guess all parents had better think twice about teaching their children to ride a bicycle without training wheels – after all, you never know when the child might try to go too fast, fall off and break a bone. Even taking a young child to the playground now has its risks. And, as I said above, if it's normal procedure to send three ACS caseworkers to a single case, then workers must have a lot of time on their hands.

But of course this isn't really "normal procedure" in every case. It's only "normal procedure" in a case that already is in the news at an agency which might as well change its name from ACS to CYA – and where the family under scrutiny is poor and minority.

As it happens, I was 7-years-old and my brother was 2 when our family moved into a seventh-floor apartment in the Bronx. Unlike the Antonio apartment, It had no window guards on the bottom windows and no limits on how far you could open the top windows. They weren't required back then. But had anything like this happened to one of us, you may be sure our family would not have been harassed by the Bureau of Child Welfare (as ACS was known then). Because our seventh floor apartment was in a co-op (that's New York-speak for what amounts to a condo). And it was in Riverdale, a neighborhood some residents won't even acknowledge is in the Bronx.

More tomorrow.

Trading places

Seven years ago, when the Florida child welfare system was at its worst, we began a report on that system by comparing two leaders of large child welfare agencies. Both once had been prosecutors. Both started out believing that the answer to every child welfare problem could be boiled down to "take the child and run." But in New York City, Nicholas Scoppetta had been persuaded by a panel of national experts to reverse course. The agency he ran at the time, New York's Administration for Children's Services, had begun to rebuild by emphasizing family preservation. We urged his counterpart in Florida, Kathleen Kearney to do the same.

Kearney and Scoppetta are long gone. And today, the rate at which children are taken from their parents in Miami is far lower than the rate in New York City.

More tomorrow.

Let them eat focus groups!

Perhaps it all started with the Pew Commission on Children in Foster care, which should properly have been called the Pew Commission on Promotion of the Pew Commission, in which the Pew Charitable Trusts seemed to view the plight of foster children as little more than an opportunity to advertise its brand. (This was the subject of several posts to this Blog, but before it moved to Blogspot). Fortunately, a few months ago, Pew decided to declare victory and get out, accomplishing little, but embodying Stephen Colbert's adage: "If at first you don't succeed, redefine what you did as success."

In any event, one early tipoff to the problems with that Commission was how it treated various key parties to the child welfare process. There was a foster parent on the commission. There was an adoptive parent on the commission. There was a former foster child on the commission. Birth parents were relegated to a focus group.

Now that kind of tokenism seems to be all the rage. The recent "needs assessment" in Michigan had exhaustive consultation with people who run the system and work in the system, and one focus group for birth parents. There were six of them, from just one county. And in a system permeated with racial bias, all of the birth parents were white.

The latest example comes from New York City, where the City Limits e-mail Weekly reports that the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR) is in the final stages of preparing a new study of barriers to achieving permanence for children. The absurdities abound.

● For starters, it's absurd to think that after 150 years we really don't know why children languish in foster care.

Contrast this bureaucratic approach with how they faced the identical problem in Georgia. As is recounted in the Annual Report of Casey Family Programs, Georgia's child welfare agency called in a few experts from CFP, they sat down around a big table hashing out each and every case for as long as it took – and they got the job done.

Speaking about Anthony, a child reunified with his family through this process, an assistant commissioner of Georgia's child welfare agency declared:

We didn't form a Blue Ribbon Committee or rely on a university study or wait for the Legislature to get involved. And thank goodness we didn't, because Anthony still would be in foster care right now if we had.

That's the antithesis of the bureaucratic mindset at CR. But the waste of time may be the least of the problems with the New York project. Even worse:

● It would be hard to find a more regressive force in child welfare in New York or nationwide than CR. Their last big report on New York City child welfare stacked the statistical deck by simply ignoring any years in which the data didn't fit their preconceived notions. And across the country, untold numbers of children have been denied permanence because of a take-the-child-and-run mentality that CR has encouraged. (See our various posts on Michigan and a section of our second report on Michigan child welfare, called The Children Wronged by Children's Rights for chapter and verse.)

● Although it would be hard to find a more regressive force in New York, it's not impossible: A key partner with CR is the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies, which has the wonderfully- appropriate acronym COFCCA. This consortium of the city's enormously-powerful private foster care providers is what the late columnist Jack Newfield would call "the permanent government" of New York child welfare. Mayors and child welfare agency commissioners come go, but COFCCA is always there, its member agencies run by boards of directors that often are a who's who of the city's business, civic and religious elite. For decades they have been the key obstacle to real reform in New York City for one obvious reason: They're paid for every day they hold a child in foster care. Only recently has the city's Administration for Children's Services taken the first tentative steps toward changing those incentives.

●Another full partner in this project is ACS itself. But it was just three months ago that ACS Commissioner John Mattingly disappointed a lot of us by throwing cold water on one of the most promising avenues for permanence, subsidized guardianship. The federal government now will help pay the cost of this kind of permanence, which is close to adoption but allows, for example, a grandmother to become guardian to her granddaughter without having to push to terminate her own daughter's parental rights. It looks like New York, which long has lagged behind on kinship care issues, is going to refuse to take part because it doesn't want to put up half the cost. But Mattingly went further, arguing in an e-mail to a New York City think tank that

Those of us who have been in the field long enough know that most times, relatives will adopt if reunification is not a live option, if the agency supports them in their decision, and if it will achieve permanence for the child. In sum, kinship guardianship can be the best option for a small percentage of children, but the State of New York needs to be careful to craft regulations for its use that will continue the emphasis on adoption for most children who cannot return home.

In other words: If we strong arm grandma (by say, saying if you don't do it, we'll transfer your grandchild into the home of strangers), she'll go to court and push to terminate mom's parental rights. While that may make the adoption numbers look good, it's not necessarily best for the grandchildren. Furthermore, the Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) points out that in Illinois, a national leader in subsidized guardianship, formal adoptions actually increased after guardianship was added to the menu of options. For another example of a smarter perspective on this issue, see the response from Generations United in Youth Today.

The latest story from Rise, the outstanding magazine written by and for parents who have lost their children to child welfare systems, provides a good reminder that day-to-day casework at ACS has yet to reach the rarified levels suggested by Mattingly's comment.

And even Michigan (Michigan!) has proven more receptive to subsidized guardianship, with their child welfare agency noting the special concerns in the African American and Native American communities about terminating a relative's parental rights.

So if ACS continues to oppose subsidized guardianship as a partner in this new project, who'll speak up for the grandparents?

While City Limits seemed amazed that ACS and CR were working together, in fact, it's just one more indication of how far ACS has moved backwards from just four years ago, when it was in the forefront of reform. (And that retreat from reform has prompted me to take a small step I've never felt the need to take before concerning a once-progressive child welfare agency – something I expect to discuss in a future post to this Blog.)

●The last full partner is the Juvenile Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society; they provide "law guardians" for children in child welfare cases.

So the group that encourages taking away more children, the agency that takes the children, the private agencies that hold the children and the lawyers who represent the children all get a place at the table. And what do the birth parents get? A focus group.

This in a city which probably has the best-developed infrastructure of advocacy for birth parents in the nation. Excellent grassroots advocacy organizations include CWOP, People United for Children and Concerned Citizens for Family Preservation. There are three institutional providers of defense counsel for birth parents (an initiative which, to its credit, ACS supports), the Center for Family Representation, The Bronx Defenders and South Brooklyn Legal Services. Yet none of these groups is a partner in this project.

As is so often the case, everyone else involved in a child's fate is a full partner, the parents are reduced to supplicants. So when Commissioner Mattingly says "We should be able, at the end of this, to stand up together and say: These are issues we are all concerned about ... here's how we are going to work together to make the numbers look different" the people left out when everyone else is standing together" have every reason to view that as more threat than promise.

Los Angeles briefing materials now available online

LOS ANGELES - Our press release and related material distributed at our news conference here today is now available online at www.nccpr.org/lafor2009vx.pdf

The Loch Ness Monster effect

LOS ANGELES – Here's what caseworkers for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services actually knew about the case of four-year-old Lars Sanchez, according to a story in today's Los Angeles Times:

Lars' mother, Yolanda Tijerina, showed up outside her son's preschool one day and began screaming “at no one in particular.”

"I think you killed my son!" shouted Tijerina. ... "I think you killed my son. I have panic attacks."

The principal called the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. DCFS learned that the boy's grandmother said the mother had “episodes” and his adult sister said she believed the boy was in danger. According to the Times, citing sources close to the case, DCFS also

called in evaluators from the county Department of Mental Health to do an assessment of the mother, and the findings persuaded them that she was not a threat. That exam failed to diagnose the gravity of Tijerina's illness ...

In addition, the grandmother was at the home often and may have been living there.

According to the Times, based on the principal's report, the mental health evaluation and, apparently, their own observations and investigation

In the end, the social workers found that Tijerina often spoke nonsensically. They found that her "emotional stability, developmental status or cognitive deficiency impairs her current ability to supervise, protect or care for the child."

But they said this risk could be addressed through three months of informal monitoring by a neighborhood resource center and observation by family members and neighbors, according to county documents.
... Also counting in favor of the mother was the fact that she had been cooperative during the child-abuse investigation.

There was more information that might have swayed the investigators, but I'm only including what the story indicates DCFS actually knew when the decision was made.

I might well argue that these facts called for Intensive Family Preservation Services (described in full in NCCPR Issue Papers 10 and 11 at www.nccpr.org ) – in which someone would be present in the home long enough – sometimes several hours a day - to get a better sense of the danger to the child.

But there is nothing outlandish in deciding not to “take the child and run” in this fact scenario
--not without hindsight and the additional information that DCFS didn't have when the decision was made.

Had nothing gone wrong, I wouldn't have been reading this story on the front page of the Times on my way in from LAX this afternoon.

In fact, nine months later, Lars' mother killed the boy, in a particularly gruesome way. (And, once again, a member of the county Board of Supervisors was ready to throw a little gasoline on the fire.)

As a result, out of the tens of thousands of cases L.A. DCFS handles every year, this is one of the very few in which reporters can see the case file.

Since, once again, the agency is reflected through a funhouse mirror, it's no wonder the story includes this claim:

The documents, released by the county Department of Children and Family Services under a 2008 disclosure law, show in chilling detail how even dramatic evidence of a mother's illness was not considered sufficient grounds for removing a child from her care.

The problem with that statement is it's missing three words: in this case.

Because if one saw the system – regularly – in full; if there were equal access to all cases, one would see that over and over again, children tare taken for far, far less.

Just look at the case described in this previous post to the Blog, the post called "The everyday horrors of American child welfare").

Indeed, it is easy to imagine a very similar set of circumstances to those described in the Times today leading to wrongful removal – and, indeed, across the country it has:

Once again, the scene is a school and a mother is screaming. This time she's perfectly sane – but she's furious over the failure of the school to provide the right kind of special education for her son.
The principal isn't about to be spoken to that way, so she calls CPS.

Unfortunately, unlike Yolanda Tijerina, who apparently knew how to play the game – as the Times story says: “Also counting in favor of the mother was the fact that she had been cooperative during the child-abuse investigation” our hypothetical mother is still fuming when CPS arrives and tells off the caseworker, too.

In such a situation, you can be sure that child would have been taken away on the spot.
It was a Los Angeles attorney who first called this “flunking the attitude test.”

Indeed, consider another real case from Los Angeles, also discussed in a previous post to this Blog. (and available, if the direct link in that previous post doesn't work, by going here and then clicking on the link at the bottom of the middle column.)

Though it's not mentioned in this particular story, a cover story about this case in the now-defunct New Times Los Angeles makes clear that a key factor in the removal of the child was the fact that the mother didn't know how to grovel before a DCFS worker.

But as far as I know, this case, which ultimately led to the child dying in foster care, never made the front page of the Times or the Los Angeles Daily News. The other case, involving the father who lost his children solely for lack of housing, never made it into either paper at all.

So you get a system reflected in the equivalent of a funhouse mirror. Or, to put it another way, you get The Loch Ness Monster effect.

We've all seen those blurry photos of something that looks like a long neck sticking out of the water that purport to show the Loch Ness Monster. Everything else is hidden under the Loch, so it's easy to confuse what we think we see with the entire beast.

Similarly, if the only time the curtain of confidentiality parts in child welfare is when a child “known to the system” dies, it's no wonder people assume the only mistake the system makes is to leave children in dangerous homes.

Child welfare systems can't be fixed until people know how they really work and how they really fail. But that can't happen if the overwhelming majority of what they do, right and wrong, remains hidden. That's why it's so urgent to open all court hearings and create a rebuttable presumption of open records in all cases. That's why it's so urgent to drain the Loch – so everyone can see exactly what the creature looks like.

P.S.: Almost forgot: God only knows what kind of knee-jerk response the Board of Supervisors will come up with to this story, but is it too much to ask that at least they don't scare thousands of people away from voluntarily seeking help for mental health problems? Yes, probably it is.

Curbing The B.S. in L.A.

Which is the worst governing body in all of America when it comes to child welfare? Of all the governors, mayors, legislatures, and councils responsible for overseeing state or local child welfare systems, which has the worst track record for putting politics ahead of what's best for vulnerable children? There are lots of candidates.

No list would be complete without Washington D.C., of course, where Mayor Adrian Fenty's Queen of Hearts school of management blew down the house of cards that was D.C.'s slowly improving child welfare system and sent it right back into chaos. (For details just search this Blog for "Fenty" – he'd probably like that.)

But there's actually worse out there. Imagine Fenty times three. Imagine the child welfare agency derailed every time it gets on track because of endless demands to respond to whatever was on the front page that day. Imagine never-ending posturing, preening, pontificating pandering and micromanaging every time a high-profile case is in the news. And imagine it's been going on for more than 15 years.

No need to imagine, actually. Meet the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors: or, as they should properly be called, "The B.S."

The B.S. is one of the main reasons there is almost certainly a foster-care panic underway in Los Angeles right now. Later this week I'll be in Los Angeles for meetings with journalists and a news conference with local advocates and families, in the hope of helping to curb that panic.

But that won't be easy, given the behavior of three of the Board members.

There are five Board members in all. But Mark Ridley-Thomas was only elected for the first time last year, so he can't be held responsible for the behavior of his colleagues. The chairman, Don Knabe, is more of an enabler – he doesn't join in the ritual denunciations of the county Department of Children and Family Services, but he does nothing to stop them.

That leaves Michael Antonovich, Gloria Molina, and Don Yaroslavsky. And, to paraphrase a line originally used about at least two U.S. Senators, the most dangerous place in Los Angeles is between any of those three and a television camera.

Now, they're at it again. They are busy blasting, denouncing, and professing their shock and outrage. There are the usual calls for a full investigation. But why wait for an investigation to draw conclusions?

"I can't believe we have social workers overseeing these cases and then allowing these children to be murdered," said Antonovich – as though he'd just discovered the problem of deaths of children "known to the system" even though he's been on The B.S. since 1980.

Yaroslavaky, apparently having confused two sets of numbers, is blaming the latest tragedies in Los Angeles on efforts to keep children out of foster care. But in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year in L.A. was up 23 percent from 2003.

Molina promised that investigations are underway and added: "There are heads that will roll." (Clearly, Supervisor Molina is a believer in the "give 'em a fair trial, then hang 'em" approach to governance.) Molina also declared that "Anytime a child dies on our watch, we pay attention." The unspoken corollary is: But fail a child any other way and we'll ignore it, so you're free to practice take-the-child-and-run social work all you want.

Nor is there much evidence that paying attention, L.A. Supervisor style, has done children any good. Among them, Antonovich, Molina and Yaroslavsky have 62 years of time spent on the Board. So, if L.A. County child welfare is still a mess, they are far more responsible than the latest frontline caseworker to be caught in the crossfire or even the latest in a long line of DCFS directors.

There was one, brief period, where the Board behaved itself. Somehow, when he was Director of the Department of Children and Family Services, David Sanders managed to rein in the Board's worst instincts. (A lot of people all over the country would love to know how he did it.) But his successor, Trish Ploehn has been easily buffeted about by the non-stop grandstanding of The B.S.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that people in Los Angeles probably think this kind of behavior is normal – after all, they're politicians, right? Certainly some degree of grandstanding is commonplace in these situations. But Los Angeles County is simply in a class by itself.

In New York City, for example, after Nixzmary Brown died, Mayor Michael Bloomberg showed commendable restraint, and only one of 51 members of the City Council behaved like an L.A. Supervisor.

None of this is any secret in child welfare circles. Mention the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors at gatherings of child welfare professionals and they're likely to just roll their eyes, and thank their lucky stars they don't work in Los Angeles County.

But there are signs that, at long last, patience may be wearing thin. After the Los Angeles Times reported that about the same number of children "known to the system" died in 2008 as in each of the two previous years, the obligatory follow-up story was a little different from usual. This was the lead:

One county supervisor expressed shock, another fired off a press release demanding an investigation. But Monday's revelations that 14 children died last year as the result of abuse or neglect despite being under the watch of child welfare authorities should have come as no surprise to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. … Indeed, the supervisors were notified every time a child who had at least one prior contact with Family Services died. Case after case landed on their desks. …"

Yaroslavsky even is quoted at a meeting of The B.S. acknowledging as much. But soon it was back to business as usual.

And what is business as usual? In 1954, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont denounced his notorious colleague Joe McCarthy in words that need be changed only slightly to explain the modus operandi of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in child welfare cases. To paraphrase Flanders:

They don their war paint; they go into their war dance; they emit their war whoops; they go forth to battle -- and proudly return with the scalp of a social worker.