Court Monitor: Michigan budget cuts may be illegal

SO WHY DIDN'T CR NOTICE?

No Hollywood studio is ever going to buy the rights to the report of an independent court monitor overseeing a child welfare system lawsuit settlement. And if you want to find the real news, you have to go past the executive summary.

Because the bombshell in the first report of the monitor overseeing the court decree governing child welfare in Michigan is buried in some genteel language at the top of page 34: Remember those slash and burn budget cuts in prevention and family preservation imposed by the head of the state's Department of Human Services, Ismael Ahmed, - even as he lavished rate increases on agencies that institutionalize children? According to the independent monitor, the cuts may well be illegal. They may violate the consent decree. As is discussed below, these cuts also are setting up some newly-reunified families to fail.

That leads to one crucial question: Why couldn't the group that brought the lawsuit, the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR) – figure that out? And why aren't they doing something about it – the way plaintiffs in a similar lawsuit in Illinois did in a similar situation earlier this year?

NCCPR first raised these questions when the budget cuts first were revealed months ago. We've come back to the theme repeatedly since then, as a search of this blog for posts mentioning Michigan will make clear. But CR remained silent. They didn't go to court, they didn't even protest. After we pointed out their silence, months ago, they hinted at action in a "tweet" on Twitter, but they didn't deliver. Now, months later, they offer some tepid comments in a press release.

Why? You'd have to ask them. But if you wanted to craft a lawsuit, a settlement, and a post-settlement enforcement strategy designed to thwart efforts to keep families together and promote the taking of children from impoverished families for adoptive placement with middle-class strangers, it would be hard to top the approach that CR has taken.

So CR sits idly by while prevention and family preservation are eviscerated in order to fund a hiring binge of child abuse investigators and foster care workers – and to promote the only form of permanence CR really seems to support: Adoption.

To the extent that this has failed, and to the extent that there has been any real progress in Michigan, (and the report shows there has been a little progress) it is because outside advocates, like NCCPR, have raised hell about CR's approach and problems in the settlement – and, it turns out, because of what amounts to a rebellion among frontline caseworkers. (More on that tomorrow).

CR waited for the monitor to point out what any lawyers who really cared about the best interests of children would have been shouting about from the start: "Early analysis suggests that … service cuts are not consistent with the Settlement Agreement commitments to increase investments in services" [p. 34]. The settlement agreement is legally binding on the state.

The monitor's report also notes that "some of these eliminated services are identical to those identified by DHS in its permanency backlog gap analysis and by Michigan State University in the Needs Assessment as being already scarce for children and families involved with the child welfare system" [p. 33]. Those two documents also are legally required by the settlement.

Didn't CR notice this? Or did they simply not care because they were getting more money for foster care and child abuse investigations, at the expense of prevention and family preservation?

In Illinois, when similar slash-and-burn budget cuts threatened a longstanding consent decree, the plaintiffs in that suit – the Illinois Branch of the ACLU – didn't sit around waiting for a monitor's report. They went straight to court – and got the cuts stopped. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that the Illinois settlement emphasizes working to keep families together – turning that state into, relatively speaking, a model of child welfare success.

In contrast, I haven't even seen CR speak out against the Michigan cuts, until its tepid press release today, much less use its enormous legal clout to fight them.

Setting up families to fail

The budget cuts also threaten one of the few substantive successes in Michigan reported by the monitor: The state is ahead of schedule in reunifying children in a "backlog cohort" – child welfare-speak for a great big group of children who have been trapped in foster care more than a year even though the goal is reunification. (Not surprisingly, most of this progress was made in cases where DHS directly supervises the case. The state's powerful private agencies, which are paid for every day they hold a child in foster care, are behind schedule in reunifications).

But successful reunification depends on ongoing help to the family after it's back together. Ismael Ahmed's budget cuts threaten those very services, increasing the likelihood that the children will come back into foster care.

Of course, if that happens, Ahmed's buddies at the private agencies can then scapegoat the reunification instead of the failure to support that reunification. They'll say "See? We shouldn't be reunifying these families? Let's just go back to rushing to terminate parental rights and pushing adoption-at-all-costs."

A win-win for Ahmed and his friends, a lose-lose for children.

Tomorrow: The frontline rebellion that helped save kinship care in Michigan

A consistent conservative gives meaning to “family values”

In a previous post to this Blog, I wrote about a Wall Street Journal columnist who challenged liberals who are appalled by the failure of authorities in Florida to return Riqfa Bary to her family in Ohio. He argued that we should be equally outraged by a New Hampshire court that forced a home schooling mother to enroll her child in public schools because the court didn't like the way the mother was educating the daughter concerning religion.

I wrote that the columnist was right about the New Hampshire case – and also called it to the attention of a very good columnist in that state, who wrote a column condemning the court decision. But I argued that the columnist had flunked his own test, since he could not bring himself to take on his fellow conservatives and argue for Rifqa's return.

But another conservative has done just that. He is someone in a particularly good position to know the facts of the case and he has been there, almost literally, from day one. He is Craig McCarthy, an evangelical Christian and, for the first three weeks of the case, the court-appointed lawyer for Rifqa's mother.

Once the Florida Department of Law Enforcement released its report finding no evidence for Rifqa's claim that she'd be killed if she returned home, McCarthy was free to write about what he knows of the case – and to urge his fellow evangelicals to reconsider. He did so in this op ed column in the St. Petersburg Times.

McCarthy writes:

I was annoyed as a Christian, as an officer of the court and as a litigator (in that order) that many with whom I agree on many issues were so willing to disregard the notion that a parent has the right in this country to raise and influence a child without governmental interference, unless there is evidence of abuse or neglect that is credible and not based on stereotypes or based on the beliefs or actions of what people who are not the parents might think, feel or do.

I know that feeling. It's the same one I get when my fellow liberals forget everything they claim to believe about civil liberties whenever someone whispers the words "child abuse" in their ears. (The FLDS case being one example, the common liberal willingness to deny due process protections and open, public court hearings to families in these cases being another.)

There have been two other noteworthy columns on the Rifqa Bary case. Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas offers another dose of common sense. And, taking off from a point first raised by Thomas, fellow Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell writes a hypothetical news story in which a Christian child runs off to the home of a radical Imam and claims her Christian parents will kill her because she's embraced Islam.

More evidence for a primary tenet of family preservation (and from such an unlikely source.)

…that tenet being that people can change.

1999:

"Resources have been added to the child welfare system for the past two decades without a measurable improvement … Adding resources, staff, more training, and other resources to child welfare reform has not yet resulted in measurable improvements, a reduction in child fatalities, or increased child well-being."

--Richard Gelles, Dean, University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, December 1999.

2009:

"They need more money, more workers, fewer caseloads, but by the time reports are published, everyone has moved on."

--Richard Gelles, Dean, University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice, Washington Post, August 25, 2009.

Statistics abuse in L.A.

The Los Angeles Times ran a response to NCCPR's op ed concerning the foster-care panic sweeping through the county. In claims that echo those of the county Department of Children and Family Services, almost word for word, Susan Edelstein, an adjunct assistant professor at UCLA, engages in some shameless statistics abuse.

First, she claims there is something wrong with the methodology NCCPR used to determine how many children are taken from their parents each year. That methodology is known as - counting. We measure the number of children taken away each year by looking at DCFS' own count of that very number.

That figure shows a 23 percent increase since 2003. In contrast, the adjunct professor relies on the number of children who happen to be in foster care on any given day. But that number can rise or fall for a variety of reasons unrelated to the number of children actually taken from their parents. For example, a large number of children aging out of the system with no place to go can cause this "snapshot number" as it's called, to decline.

The adjunct then compares the number of children taken from their parents in 1998 to the number a decade later and finds a decline.

We've never disputed that there was such a decline - for the first half of that decade. But the adjunct neglects to mention that the rate hit a low point in 2003 - and the current rate is, in fact, significantly higher than the rate in 2003.

The adjunct also challenges NCCPR's statements concerning a landmark study of the harm of foster care. Rather than go back and forth on this point, I hope people read it and decide for themselves.

That's why we include a link to the full study from the home page of our website, www.nccpr.org It's included in the item called "The Evidence is In."

The adjunct, who apparently does a lot of training, then says that her 40 years of experience tells her that the answer to everything is - more training. But training is no substitute for due process - especially when the trainer herself engages in statistics abuse. Perhaps it's time for the adjunct to retire and allow people with new vision and new ideas to handle the training.

Our take on the foster care panic in Los Angeles

This blog will resume in more sustained form later this week. For now, though, a link to our op ed column in the Los Angeles Times about the foster care panic in L.A.

CR’s new low

THERE'S A SMART NEW LAW IN TENNESSEE. GUESS WHO'S TRYING TO STOP IT

There are all sorts of incentives that push everyone from frontline caseworkers to judges to take away more children. Those same incentives push child welfare agency chiefs and government officials to demand such action.

Some of those incentives are personal. Most caseworkers, judges, etc. are middle class. It is far easier for them to identify with middle-class foster and adoptive parents in sparkling suburban homes than with impoverished birth parents in cramped, messy apartments. It's easy to just assume the children would be "better off" with people like "us" instead of people like "them."

Some of those incentives are political. Though caseworkers often say they're "damned if we do and damned if we don't" in fact, in more than 30 years of following child welfare, I've never heard of a caseworker being fired, demoted, suspended, or even slapped on the wrist for taking away too many children. All of those things have happened to workers if a child died or was seriously hurt in her or his own home. The same is true of judges, agency chiefs and pretty much everyone else who comes anywhere near child welfare.

You can take away huge numbers of children needlessly, subject perhaps one-third of them to abuse in foster care itself, destroy the psyches of many of the rest, and have them emerge years later, unable to love or trust anyone, and while the children will suffer terribly, the worker or the judge or the agency chief will endure no penalty. They might even be praised for it, gaining a laudatory nickname like "The Terminator" or "Cap'n Hook." When it comes to taking away children, you're only damned if you don't.

But the worst incentives are financial. No, governments don't "make money on foster care" as some have claimed. But while safe, proven alternatives to foster care cost less in total dollars, the huge amounts of money the federal government reimburses states for foster care can make it cost less for states to use foster care than to use those better alternatives. And private agencies, typically paid for every day they hold a child in foster care, do indeed make money on foster care. (For details, see NCCPR's Issue Paper on financial incentives.)

It's impossible to wring out all the lousy incentives; the best that can be done is to try to balance them – so they cancel each other out and leave parties free to make decisions on the merits.

One state has taken a tiny step in that direction – so, of course, the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR) – is trying to stop it.

The state is Tennessee, where apparently, in some counties, judges are so fanatical about child removal they're tearing apart large numbers of families even when the state child welfare agency itself doesn't want them to. So the state passed a law that offers one tiny check and balance. Once a county gets so bad that it is taking away children at a rate three times the state average (which, by the way also happens to be just about the national average), the county itself has to foot the bill for those additional placements.

How many counties is this likely to affect? Maybe one. According to The Tennessean, only one county placed children at a rate so obscenely above the national average in FY 2008, none in FY 2009.

But even the idea that somewhere, somehow a judge might pause and think more carefully before tearing apart a family is more than CR can stand. So they're seeking a temporary restraining order to block implementation of the law.

Their argument, of course, is that judges might be influenced by financial issues instead of "the best interests of the child." That might make sense in a world of pristine purity where there were not one incentive after another pushing for foster care even when it's against those best interests. What Tennessee does is try to balance the overwhelming pressure in one direction with a little pressure in the other; sort of like, oh, I don't know, balancing a scale.

CR also argues that children in counties where close to three times the state average number of children are being taken won't get the same "protection" as children in other counties because judges might hesitate to tear them from their parents. Wrong again. If a county is tearing apart children at a rate nearly triple the state average those children are less protected. They are less protected from having their poverty confused with neglect, less protected from abuse in foster care, and less protected from having their psyches destroyed by being bounced from foster home to foster home – just because the local judge is so fanatical he's tearing apart families even when the child welfare agency itself would rather he didn't. (Recall the landmark studies showing that, in typical cases, children placed in foster care usually fare worse even than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes.)

This law helps put those children on an equal footing with children in counties where judges are not such removal fanatics.

And finally, CR seems to have learned the lesson that when all else fails, they should cry meth. CR argues that the one county that once exceeded the 300 percent threshold also had the most seizures of meth labs. But CR does not say what proportion of children taken away came from those labs. Home meth labs themselves are a tiny part of the meth problem, however. And when the issue is addiction to meth, as opposed to making it oneself, meth is just as treatable as addiction to any other drug. Details are in NCCPR's publication, Epidemic of Hype.

There is no excuse for trying to stop one small step toward restoring balance and common sense in child welfare. And, saddest of all, there was a time when CR's founder and executive director, Marcia Lowry, understood that.

More than 20 years ago, Marcia brought to a Congressional hearing the lead plaintiff in one of her class-action lawsuits – a 12-year-old named Boyd, forced to endure five years in foster care just because his mother lacked adequate housing. At the time Marcia was crusading to enforce a 1980 law requiring "reasonable efforts" to keep families together.

''Boyd's mother had a difficulty, not a very serious difficulty, but it took her five years to get her children back,'' Marcia testified, according to a New York Times story. ''There was never any question of abuse with this family. These are children who are supposed to be protected by this very fine legislation. But reasonable efforts were not made in this case or in thousands of cases.''

And then the Times quoted Boyd: ''They took almost five years away from my life," he said, "and I'm only 12.''

Four recent studies have found that 30 percent of America's foster children are like Boyd - they could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing. But I have no doubt that, were a child like Boyd to show up at CR's offices today, their reaction would boil down to: "Go 'way kid, ya bother me."

In Tennessee, CR has just betrayed such children yet again.

This Blog will be on hiatus for a couple of weeks; barring extraordinary circumstances, I don't expect to be posting again until the week of Sept. 21. (Of course, I'd said that yesterday, too.)

A columnist flunks his own challenge

A columnist for The Wall Street Journal issued a challenge Sunday to those of us who are outraged by the failure of a Florida court to send Rifqa Bary back to Ohio. William McGurn says we should be equally outraged by what is happening to Amanda Kurowski, a ten-year-old girl in New Hampshire.

If the facts are as McGurn states, and other news accounts suggest that they are, he's got a point.

Child Protective Services isn't involved in this one. It's a custody case. Mom has custody and Dad didn't like the way Mom was educating the child – she was homeschooling her. There is no evidence that this has harmed Amanda – on the contrary, the court concluded that "the evidence supports a finding that Amanda is generally likeable and well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising, and intellectually at or superior to grade level."

So, what's the problem? According to McGurn:

The father has had long-standing complaints about the effect of home-schooling on his daughter's "socialization," even though Amanda has already taken classes at the school and participated in extracurricular activities. But the order appears to be based on the guardian ad litem's worry about Amanda's "rigidity on faith." The order also accepts the same guardian's conclusion that Amanda belongs in a public school because she "would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior and cooperation in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs."

Now, as it happens, that view of how children should be educated precisely matches my own. But just as I wouldn't want, say, Antonin Scalia giving me orders about how to educate my child, I don't want some judge I happen to agree with telling Amanda Kurowski's mother how to educate hers – not even if it was the non-custodial parent who asked the judge to make that decision.

So, Mr. McGurn, on behalf of "the family values left" I gladly accept your challenge. But you seem to have flunked it.

Having suggested that we on the left would be hypocrites to not see these cases as the same, McGurn then says the Rifqa Bary case is different because she said she'd be killed if she returned home. So, McGurn says, the judge should "take his time" because "the fear of an honor killing—even in the United States—is not irrational." His evidence: A grand total of three alleged cases of such killings. With those odds, Rifqa Bary is at far greater risk of being struck by lightning – every time she goes to and from the courthouse in Florida – than she is of facing an honor killing in her own home.

If a child can be torn from Muslim parents because there have been three alleged honor killings in the United States, then every Christian should be suspect because, very, very rarely, one of them blows up a clinic where abortions are performed or kills a doctor who performs them. And if a child can be kept from her parents based on evidence so absurdly – so irrationally - slim as in Rifqa Bary's case, after the parents are cleared by law enforcement in two states, then any family in any disfavored group, including homeschoolers, is at that much greater risk.

As is explained at the end of an earlier post to this Blog, it is the very fact that Rifqa soon will turn 18 that makes action so urgent, and makes leaving her in Florida the greater risk to her future happiness and well-being.

A footnote: The New Hampshire and Florida cases have something else in common: Both are afflicted with clueless "guardians ad litem" (GALs). Sometimes they're lawyers, sometimes they're volunteers, but either way they're often a huge problem. That's because their job is not to speak up for what the child wants but for whatever the guardian, in her or his infinite wisdom, happens to think is best. In an assessment of the Kurowski case, New Hampshire columnist Lily Robertson writes that after seeing GAL's in action in a number of cases, "I've become convinced that GAL actually stands for "Going Against Logic." I think she's on to something.