Three takes on child welfare and poverty

Former foster parent Mary Callahan has a great column in the Chronicle of Social Change about how the definition of child abuse can vary with the income of the alleged abuser.  It’s already been shared on Facebook more than 540 times.

I have a column in the Chronicle on a similar topic:  Need Evidence That Child Welfare Sees Poverty As Neglect? Step One: Look

And at Youth Today I have a column summing up that a great video from the director of the child welfare system in Baltimore.  It’s called  The Jig is Up, Child Savers: Molly McGrath Tierney Is on to You

The IV-E “lookback” is a bureaucratic nightmare. Here’s why we should keep it.

Suppose for a moment you’re on a runaway train. It’s out of control, the speed keeps increasing and there’s a sharp bend in the tracks ahead. But the only brake on the train is a clumsy, complicated contraption that only Rube Goldberg could love.

You’d probably try to use the brake anyway.

As I’ve argued in my previous two columns about child welfare finance for this project, there are profound personal, political and financial incentives to needlessly tear apart families and consign the children to the chaos of foster care. There are brave people who push back against these incentives, and sometimes they succeed.

But there are only two real brakes on this runaway train. One option is a waiver, allowing funds from Title IV-E, the giant open-ended entitlement program for foster care, to be spent on better alternatives as well.

Nationally, there’s something called “the look back.” Before a state can be reimbursed for much of the cost of a given placement under Title IV-E, the state has to “look back” and determine whether the birth parents from whom the child was taken would have qualified for Aid to Families with Dependent Children – based on income limits in effect when that program was abolished in 1996. Because eligibility is linked to this standard, getting rid of this approach is called “delinking.”

The look back is a clumsy, cumbersome, bureaucratic brake.

But it’s the only national brake we’ve got on a structure filled with incentives for foster care. And in recent years, it’s begun proving its value.

Just ask Sean Hughes. In one of his columns for this project, he wrote that “for the first time ever, proposals to create child welfare block grants are originating from within the advocacy community itself.”

That’s not because the foster-care industrial complex – full of private agencies living off of endless per diem payments for holding children in foster care, and their army of trade associations, high-powered lobbyists and consultants – suddenly saw the light.

No, to the extent that anyone in mainstream child welfare is showing any flexibility on this issue, it’s thanks to the look back. Because thanks to the look back, if nothing at all changes, the federal government will be out of the funding-for-foster-care business in about half a century or so.

“I Suspect” Is Not An Evidence-Based Practice

The look back is part of the reason states lost out on $5 billion between 2005 and 2010, when Congress refused to consider letting states volunteer to take their IV-E money as a flat grant. The other reason, of course, was that states succeeded in reducing the number of children in foster care.

Hughes argues that can’t possibly continue. He writes:

I suspect that we’ve pushed foster care caseloads as low as we can without compromising child safety, especially since there is no data suggesting that maltreatment rates themselves have decreased.

“I suspect” is not an evidence-based practice, suitable for decision-making. And there are several problems with Hughes’ “suspicion.”

First, there are data showing that maltreatment rates have declined. As I noted in my previous column, the federal government’s annual “child maltreatment” reports show that rates of known child abuse peaked in 1993, they’ve declined in most years since, and never returned to that level.

And it’s known child abuse that is relevant here, since a state can’t take away an allegedly maltreated child it doesn’t know about. In addition, the federal government’s most recent National Incidence Study shows that child abuse not reported to authorities also is declining.

Iowa: Cesspool of Depravity?

Furthermore, while many factors contribute to increases and decreases in the number of children taken from their homes, actual child abuse ranks low on the list.

I know of no evidence that people in one state are vastly more prone to abusing children than people in another. Yet rates of child removal vary enormously, and that’s true even when you factor in rates of child poverty.

For example, Iowa tears apart families at a rate four times higher than Illinois. But it’s Illinois where independent, court-appointed monitors found that rebuilding the system to emphasize family preservation improved child safety.

So either Iowa is a cesspool of depravity with four times as much child abuse as Illinois, or Iowa is taking away too many children.

There are similar wide differences among counties within a state and among big cities. Phoenix takes away children at four times the rate of New York City. Does anybody seriously believe children in Phoenix are four times safer from abuse than children in New York?

Not only do rates of removal vary from place to place, they can skyrocket for reasons unrelated to actual child abuse. There is no evidence that actual child abuse in Florida shot up 50 percent between 1998 and 1999, yet 50 percent more children were torn from their homes in that time. Because that’s how child welfare systems often respond when horror story cases make headlines.

A high rate of removal almost always indicates a bad child welfare system. But a low rate of removal doesn’t necessarily indicate a good one. One has to achieve it the right way, as in Illinois and Alabama, another state where independent monitors found that a family preservation approach improved child safety. (The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law brought the lawsuit that led to the Alabama reforms. The center's legal director is a member of NCCPR's volunteer Board of Directors.)

If every state took away children at the same rate as Alabama, instead of taking away 264,000 children in a single year, we would take fewer than 169,000. If every place in America took away children at the rate of Chicago, fewer than 79,000 children would be taken away nationwide.

So there is, in fact, plenty of room to do more, by following the lead of places that already have done it while improving child safety. But it is extremely difficult to change child welfare without changing financial incentives. And “de-linking” would move the incentives the wrong way.

If the look back simply ended, funding for the foster-care entitlement would more than double. No matter how many children a state took away, a large part of the expense would be covered for every single child. And while foster care costs more in total dollars, that kind of reimbursement can make it cheaper for a state or county than safe, proven alternatives for which the state must pick up the entire tab.

Add that to the existing personal and political incentives, and the foster care population would skyrocket.

Another option, presented as cost-neutral, is to end the look back but reduce the reimbursement rate per case. But that’s not really cost-neutral. With the one brake on removing more and more children gone, more and more children would be removed. So the cost to the federal government will go up.

Either way, de-linking equals unlimited feeding time for a foster care-industrial complex led by private agencies whose very survival depends on getting paid for taking in more children and holding them in care longer.

Right now, our largest single commitment of federal funds to our most vulnerable children comes only after we tear them from everyone they know and love. That’s not something to be proud of. That’s an obscenity.

Eliminating the look back would, at a minimum, perpetuate that obscenity.

This analysis originally appeared as part of a series in the Chronicle of Social Change series entitled: “Dollars and Priorities: The Financing of Child Welfare” where it can still be found - for the moment. Since the Chronicle, the Fox News of child welfare, has taken to suddenly moving much of my work behind a paywall, I'm reprinting it here, with some changes to the links.

Governor of Texas doubles down on foster care tragedy

Gov. Abbott

The Texas Tribune has a story today about how Gov. Greg Abbott’s desperate effort to keep from being blamed for high-profile child abuse tragedies has led to thousands of low-profile child abuse tragedies.

That’s not how the story put it, but that’s what happened.

The Tribune obtained emails documenting how Abbott pressured the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to cut back drastically on a form of kinship care placement, called “Parental Child Safety Placements” after a child died in such a placement.  (Because, of course, children never die in any other kind of placement.)

Although Abbott’s office apparently cited three cases, one involved a four-year-old who fatally shot himself after finding a gun under a bed in the home of the relative with whom he was placed.  A horrible tragedy but, sadly, not something probably not unknown in all sorts of homes in Texas.  Another didn’t involve a child who was in a “Parental Child Safety Placement” at all.

In fact, study, after study has found that kinship care placements -- whether formal or informal, licensed or unlicensed -- are more stable, better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.” 

But Gov. Abbott isn’t about to let research get in the way of saving his administration from questions about how his child welfare agency “allowed” a child to die.  So, ignoring the advice of his then child welfare agency chief, John Specia - one of the very few people in Texas child welfare who is almost universally admired - he pressured DFPS to drastically curb these placements.  Specia has since resigned.

The result: This type of placement has been cut in half, and, in 2015, the number of formal entries into foster care skyrocketed by 37 percent over the year before.  That means far more children are now consigned to the formal Texas foster care system.  And by now everyone knows that placing a child in foster care in Texas doesn’t simply put the child at risk of abuse – it almost guarantees it.

HOW TEXAS HIDES ITS TRUE RATE-OF-REMOVAL

The emails also tell us something else:

Some in Texas have claimed they don’t have a wrongful removal problem because the rate of removal supposedly is low.

That’s always been misleading:

● The number of children torn from their parents in Texas each year is escalating rapidly — it soared more than 40 percent from 2009 to 2014 – and that was before the 37 percent increase in 2015.

● The statewide figure hides as much as it reveals. The rate of removal in Dallas is more than 20 percent higher than New York City and more than 90 percent higher than Chicago.

● Among the nation’s biggest cities, children in San Antonio are taken from their homes at the third-highest rate, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

But now we know something else: The official figures are 100 percent Grade A B------t.

Because Texas has been keeping all those “Parental Child Safety Placements” off the books – not counting them in the figures it reports to the federal government concerning entries into care.

But while kinship care is a better option than stranger care, it’s still foster care.  And a removal counts as a removal regardless of whether the agency goes to court or obtains formal custody.

Federal regulations define foster care as :

24 hour substitute care for all children placed away from their parents or guardians and for whom the State agency has placement and care responsibility. 

 The regulations go on to say that

the State is required to count a placement that lasts more than 24 hours while the child is in foster care under the placement, care or supervision responsibility of the State agency”

 Note that it does not say “custody” of the agency, only “placement, care or supervision responsibility.”

So yes, Texas is taking away too many children – but DFPS has been “hiding” many of them when it reports entries into care.

CASA’S IDEA OF A “CHAMPION”

One other item is noteworthy in the story.  It concerns the Texas chapter of Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).

CASA is the most sacred cow in child welfare.  It is a program in which largely white, middle-class volunteers are, in effect, deputized by courts to poke their noses into the homes of people who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately people of color, and pass judgment on how they take care of their children.  (Some CASA chapters actually are projects of the local Junior League.)  As my organization documents here, the results for the children in these families have been predictably awful.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Texas CASA took a look at the record of Greg Abbott, a governor fully committed to the far-right agenda of undermining children’s health, safety and well-being – not just in child welfare, but in all facets of state governement - and declared him to be a “champion for children.”

Read more about how to fix Texas child welfare

Read NCCPR's 2005 report on Texas child welfare

Child abuse commission: Surge? What surge? Michael Petit runs from his own rhetoric

Graphic by Murdocke23

The so-called Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities is gone. But the dysfunction that characterized its work – and made it resemble perfectly the child welfare system it studied – lives on.

First the commission chair, David Sanders, attempted to defend its work in the Chronicle of Social Change.  In the process, he dismissed the scathing dissent written by Cook County Judge Patricia Martin, the presiding judge of the Court’s Child Protection Division.  So Judge Martin wrote a response to Sanders’ column. 

In that response, she criticized the Commission’s signature recommendation, known for most of its history at the Commission as “the surge.”  At this Commission meeting alone, it was called a “surge” at least 45 times. As we explain in our own report on the Commission’s many failures, this recommendation calls for encouraging or requiring (it’s not clear which) states to go back and review every child abuse fatality over the past five years looking for common “risk factors.”

Then a “multi-disciplinary team” would be sent out into the field to re-investigate any open case that allegedly had even one such risk factor – thereby re-traumatizing the children who’d already been investigated - and probably leading to many more children being needlessly removed from their homes.

The surge is a wonderful name for this recommendation, since it conjures up images of police actions and people forcing their way into other people’s homes.  (Some Commissioners actually wanted to call it an “accelerant” – apparently not realizing that this term is commonly used for something that spreads an arson fire.) 

Realizing the problems with this kind of blunt and accurate terminology, the Commission instructed staff to find some way to put lipstick on a pig – i.e. find a euphemism. They came up with “retrospective review.” That’s why the word “surge” does not appear in the Commission’s final report. 

The Commission split over how to pay for this.  One group called for recommending the expenditure of $1 billion in federal funds.  At that same Commission meeting, one member of this group, Michael Petit, referred to this as a “down payment.”

After Judge Martin wrote her column, Petit submitted a column of his own.  He began a part of his critique by writing that “Martin states that our recommended review of cases (incorrectly characterized as a ‘surge’)…” thus leaving the impression that Judge Martin somehow made up the term herself.

Then Petit claims that   “Commissioner Martin mischaracterizes the need for funding reform as a “down payment.”  But Mike, you’re the one who used that term in the first place.

It says a lot about just how bad the Commission recommendations are that Petit has to run away from any language that describes them honestly.

What next, Mike?  Are you going to deny telling a Congressional Committee in 2011 that the states that do the best job preventing and responding to child abuse are the ones with “smaller, whiter populations”?

Abuse in foster care: The denial runs deep

Here’s the latest foster care horror from Oregon, according to the Oregonian:

Under the watch of the Oregon Department of Human Services, a lawsuit alleges, a young sister and brother were starved so severely by their foster parents and guardians that they weighed the same at ages 4 and 5 as they did at ages 1 and 2.

 Those facts, largely supported by the state’s own examination of the case, are laid out in a complaint filed against the state Thursday. It says the children ended up resembling victims of a famine: their ribs visible, their bellies protruding and their brain development severely affected.

 The suit says caseworkers and their supervisors and managers overlooked repeated specific complaints and glaring red flags… A caseworker saw the children less than a month before doctors at Randall Children’s Hospital determined they were suffering from chronic starvation, but the caseworker did nothing.

That story comes on top of this one, and this one. That’s just Oregon. A federal judge in Texas found rampant abuse in foster care. And in just the past week, there was this from New York and this from Utah.

Of course, there are plenty of horror stories about how children are treated by their own parents. In fact, the current child welfare system was largely built on such stories. When anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data.

But not in the highly-selective way Marie Cohen chose to do so in a recent column published by The Chronicle of Social Change.

She wrote that “State data compiled by the federal government show that the proportion of children in foster care who were the subject of substantiated maltreatment in foster care ranged from 0 to 1.34 percent.”

But the figures she cites come from child welfare agencies’ own investigations of abuse in foster care. For reasons that should be obvious, in such cases agencies have a strong incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file.

If the figures Cohen cites are to be believed, there are three states – Delaware, Vermont and New Hampshire – where absolutely no children at all were abused or neglected in foster care in 2014. New Hampshire has made that claim for five years in a row. Seriously?

Texas claims that fewer than one-third of 1 percent of foster children were abused in foster care in 2014. In other words, if 300 former foster children were gathered in a room and asked, “How many of you were abused over the course of a year?” only one would raise his or her hand.

That’s not what the judge found.

And in Oregon, which claims that fewer than three-quarters of 1 percent of foster children were abused, state law apparently sets a higher standard for substantiating abuse if a foster parent or institution staff are accused than if the accused is a birth parent.

In contrast, research has revealed alarming rates of abuse in foster care. One independent study after another has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, and the rate in group homes and institutions is even higher. And for reasons related to study methodology explained here, even those figures almost certainly are underestimates.

In response, Cohen abandons the fiction of the official figures and simply tells us the homes from which the children were removed must be even worse because the children were removed from those homes. But just because a caseworker says a home was abusive or neglectful doesn’t make it so – particularly since poverty itself often is confused with “neglect.”

Her argument also presupposes that no intervention other than foster care could prevent recurrence of abuse in the cases in which children were removed. But the real question is: How does the rate of abuse in foster care compare to what would happen if families simply got the help they needed?

It’s not hard to answer, considering that even when families don’t necessarily get the help, foster care often is a worse option. There are two massive studies involving 15,000 typical cases in which the researcher made exactly the sort of comparison Cohen demands: What happens to children placed in foster care and left in their own homes, in the same types of cases?

The children left in their own homes typically do better – and that’s even when the families did not necessarily get any help.

None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. But foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses. Cohen wants to further increase the dose. I prefer less toxic options.

Foster care in Texas: Could they at least stop institutionalizing 11-year-olds?

I’ve previously written about the hellscape of Texas foster care – as described by U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack, who found that abuse in foster homes, group homes and institutions isn’t just common, it’s rampant.  She ordered some limited reforms, and also promised to name a “special master” to oversee reform efforts.

After the judge issued her ruling, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) apparently decided they’d get in big trouble if they kept ignoring awful conditions in so-called “residential treatment centers.”  So they suddenly pulled dozens of children out of two of them.   But, of course, they had no place else to put the children.

Here’s what happened to one child, as reported by the Dallas Morning News:

An 11-year-old girl from Tyler, who’s had at least eight placements during her nearly three years in CPS custody, was among those shuttled from [the residential treatment center in] Lubbock.

After arriving at the San Antonio shelter, “Mary” (not her real name) was taken for at least one night to a psychiatric hospital, where she was sedated, according to interviews and court documents.

Removed from her birth family nearly three years ago because of emotional and physical abuse, “she does not deal with change,” said Tyler lawyer Karen Bretzke, who represents Mary’s interests.

“When the staff changes a shift, she gets a bit agitated,” Bretzke said. “You have to keep her world as consistent as possible.”

So, let’s review.

She's 11-years-old, she can't cope with shift changes - but the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services institutionalizes her.

No doubt, DFPS would say the usual: Not enough placements, didn’t have a choice, blah, blah, blah.  That’s also the theme of the story, of course, because in Texas many journalists reflexively write off the very idea of not taking away so many children as a bizarre notion concocted by a vast right-wing conspiracy.  This may be partly a response to the fact that a could case can be made for the idea that Texas is largely run by a vast right-wing conspiracy.  But it’s still wrong, and it’s still enormously harmful to children.

This story, for example, repeatedly refers to every child removed from the home, from the moment a DFPS caseworker or law enforcement officer takes the child away, as “abused and neglected.”  In criminal justice, reporters never say that everyone arrested is a “criminal.” They wait for a court to decide.  But in child welfare, children typically are taken away and consigned to foster care for months before a court ever decides the child was, in fact “abused and neglected.” 

But just as the normal standards of due process don’t apply in child welfare systems themselves, often the normal standards of journalism often don’t apply in child welfare coverage.

Or perhaps a lot of Texas reporters just think DFPS is so brilliant, so capable and so competent that the agency could never do things such as confuse poverty with neglect.

So they write the same stories over and over and over and get the same results for vulnerable children: None.  Meanwhile, the number of Texas children torn from their families is skyrocketing, up an average of 500 per month over a year ago.  That won’t change until reporters stop ignoring the only option that works: taking away fewer children needlessly by building a system that emphasizes help to keep families together – so there’s room in good foster homes for the children who really need them.

One state that learned that lesson the hard way is New Jersey. That state also faced a class-action lawsuit.  It ended in a settlement that was notably better than what Judge Jack has ordered so far.  That’s one reason why, at one point, New Jersey significantly reduced the institutionalization of young children.  The state also curbed entries into care.  There’s almost certainly been some regression since, but the lessons still are important for Texas.  That’s because the other reason for the progress was because, for several years, the state’s child welfare agency was run by Kevin Ryan.

Judge Jack has just named Ryan one of two “special masters” overseeing her order.

No one should expect miracles.  But perhaps we can finally expect a little progress – especially if a few Texas journalists decide to stop ignoring what works.

Model for Idaho foster care bill has ugly history

That bill I wrote about earlier this month, which would further privilege the already overprivileged foster parents of Idaho, appears well on its way to passage.

The bill would offer only a tiny window of opportunity for relatives to step forward to take custody of children removed from their parents by Idaho child welfare authorities.  And once a child has been trapped in foster care for six months, no matter why she or he got there, or why she or he was still there, preference for placement actually would shift to the foster parents if they’ve “bonded” with the child.

In short, it’s a bill intended to make life easier for middle class foster parents like Jamie Law, who, the moment she laid eyes on somebody else’s two-day-old infant, declared: “This is totally my kid.”

And why did the Idaho House of Representatives pass this bill unanimously?  Because they were fed a steady diet of horror stories from articulate middle class foster parents, people any state lawmaker could identify with.

According to the Spokane Spokesman-Review,

House Majority Leader Mike Moyle, R-Star, told of a 14-month-old boy who was removed from a loving foster home, where the foster parents wanted to adopt him, and sent to an out-of-state home where there was no interest in adoption. Instead, Moyle said, the interest was “because with that child comes a paycheck. Think about that. With that child comes a paycheck. I have a problem with that. It’s morally wrong.”

Hard to know where to start with that one. Does Rep. Moyle believe that foster parents normally don’t get paid?  How does he know why the people in the out-of-state home (presumably relatives, though he doesn’t say that) didn’t choose to adopt the children?  Because one of those overprivileged Idaho foster parents told him so? And, of course, no Idaho foster parent ever has seen a child as a “paycheck.”

But let’s assume for the moment that the story is true. If we’re going to go the legislation-by-horror-story route, we need to recognize that the horror stories go both ways.

So let’s start in a state which passed a law that the overprivileged foster parents of Idaho used as a model: Florida.

In that state, 10-year-old Nubia Barahona was beaten and murdered, allegedly by her adoptive father.  Her decomposing body was found in the back of the father’s truck. In the front seat, her twin brother was in convulsions from chemical burns.

Compounding the tragedy: Loving relatives had sought to adopt the children.  But an “expert” said the children were “bonded” to the Barahonas, who had first taken in the children as foster parents.  And Florida law–the one the Idaho foster parents are using as a model–said “bonding” could take precedence over any preference for relatives.

Of course the overwhelming majority of adoptive parents don’t behave as Barahona allegedly did.  It’s an aberration.  But so are the tales told by Idaho foster parents seeking a Florida-style law.  When anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data.

As I noted in my previous column about this bill,  study after study has found that placing children with relatives is far better for children’s well-being and, most importantly, safer than what should properly be called stranger care. Relatives also are far less likely to resort to potent and sometimes dangerous psychiatric medications to keep children docile when they “act out.”

The history of the Florida law is also instructive. It has its roots in a protracted custody dispute involving a little boy named Christian who was taken from his mother at birth in February, 2002.

Within days, a second cousin, Tiffany Delk, living in Tennessee, and her husband came forward seeking custody. The Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) ignored her.  In fact, they ignored at least 100 phone calls from Tiffany Delk over the next several months.  She was not allowed to see Christian until May or possibly October (news accounts differ).

Instead, DCF placed Christian with Denise and Ivar Baklid, strangers who wanted to adopt him.

In October 2002, for reasons that never have been explained, DCF changed its position and supported placing Christian with the Delks. A series of court rulings led to Christian being moved to the Delks and then briefly back to the Baklids until finally the Delks were allowed to adopt Christian.

Even though Christian wound up spending more time living with the Delks than with the Baklids before finally being adopted, backers of the stranger-care parents kept playing the bonding card, arguing that the child was “bonded” to the strangers, and that was far more important than blood ties.

And, once again, because it’s so much easier for legislators to identify with middle class strangers, they got a law passed to give preference to strangers when those strangers provided “continuity of care.”

That law was in effect when Florida DCF decided that the Barahona children were “bonded” to their foster parents–and chose them over relatives to adopt.

Now, Idaho appears headed in the same direction.