NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 20, 2025

It isn't just Pittsburgh. New York City also has an algorithm 
that slaps an invisible "scarlet number" on some children it 
deems at "high risk" for abuse or neglect.

● We all know about the predictive analytics child welfare algorithm in Pittsburgh – the one that independent investigators have found to be biased and the Justice Department reportedly is investigating. But largely under the radar, New York City’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, has been doing something similar, using an algorithm to take families already under scrutiny and decide which get an extra measure of oppressive surveillance. Now it’s been exposed by The Markup. 

Among the findings: 

“Using poor or biased proxies can lead to the wrong resource allocations, cause harm to families, and perpetuate systemic biases and disproportionality,” a technical audit of the system by the agency obtained by The Markup acknowledges. The internal audit found that the data used by ACS to train the algorithm likely included at least “some implicit and systemic biases” baked in, as some families are investigated at disproportionate rates. 

The report still concluded that the system more accurately predicted which past cases ended in harm than criteria the agency had chosen in the past …   

But, the story notes: 

Only a tiny number of cases lead to a child being severely harmed, meaning the algorithm’s predictions about hundreds of cases “are more likely to be incorrect than correct,” according to ACS’ internal audit. 

And while ACS isn’t dumb enough to say out loud that race is a risk factor, a report obtained by The Markup says the algorithm uses 

“variables that may act as partial proxies for race (e.g., geography)” to make its decisions, including a family’s county (or borough), zoning area, and community district.  

Families on this extra-black blacklist are never told they were flagged by an algorithm, much less why.  One young mother suspects she’s getting extra scrutiny because she grew up in foster care herself: 

“They target you from the minute you step out of foster care,” Hamblin said. “They have this microscope on you, and for them to build a case based off your prior records of you being in care—it’s not right. It’s like I never had a chance to really feel freedom. Like I’ve been under their watch since birth and I’m still under their watch.”

 ● Last week, the New York Daily News published a commentary from NCCPR about what’s happened in the decades since the News exposed the predations of New York City’s private foster care agencies. This week, Nora McCarthy, director of the New York City Family Policy Project, writes about what needs to happen now, and one of the authors of the original series, Stewart Ain, sums up what they found. That’s a useful reminder at a time when all over the country these agencies are seeking either taxpayer bailouts or virtual immunity from lawsuits by the children harmed while in agencies’ “care.” 

● UCLA Blueprint looks at the “rebel child” among the 900+ Court-Appointed Special Advocates programs in the United States. It’s the one in Los Angeles led by Charity Chandler-Cole, a child welfare abolitionist with lived experience. We’re going to need more data to be sure, but the very nature of who was made uncomfortable by Chandler-Cole is a good sign. From the story: 

Some volunteers and board members told her that her approach was scaring people. Some quit. One said she was triggered every time the new CEO used the words “social justice” or “racial justice.” 

But see this post concerning all the other CASA programs. 

● In Rhode Island, a state that tears apart families at a rate more than double the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in, the head of a foster care agency wrote about the urgent need to provide more support – to foster parents, because there’s a “shortage.” She portrayed foster parents as saviors, rescuing children who, until they came along, couldn’t sleep through the night, never heard laughter and were never listened to. As I noted in a response in the Rhode Island Current: 

[T]here also are many other foster children who cry through the night desperate to return to the parents they loved – and laughed with – and who desperately love them back; children who, even years after being reunited may dive under the bed or try to hide in the closet whenever there is a loud knock on the door for fear that they will be taken again; children taken because that family’s poverty was confused with neglect … 

A lot of that could be solved if birth parents simply got the kinds of generous support Rhode Island foster parents already receive from the state.

● In Iowa, which year after year tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the country, the Cedar Rapids Gazette reports that the state has settled a class-action lawsuit demanding improved mental health services for children eligible for Medicaid. The suit was brought by Disability Rights Iowa, the National Health Law Program and Children’s Rights. What sets it apart from other such suits is that this suit is not limited to children in foster care – it applies to any child eligible for Medicaid, including children who might be placed in foster care for lack of such services. The settlement emphasizes “essential home and community-based mental health services and supports” – not institutionalization. 

● The Washington Informer reports on the fourth annual Black Mothers March on the White House. Several mothers told heartbreaking stories of children who, in many cases, will never be allowed to live with them again. (Scroll down to the second story in the link.) 

● The Imprint has compiled a state-by-state guide to policies concerning the prescribing of psychiatric medication to foster children.  This is, of course, a guide to what’s on paper; it may or may not reflect what really happens. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From The Imprint: 

A longtime California pediatrician has surrendered his medical license after facing more than two decades of accusations that he sexually abused his patients, foster youth and boys in his home. 

The development in the case of Dr. Patrick Clyne, 63, settled drawn-out legal proceedings with the state Attorney General’s office, which was set to lay out its evidence to bar him from the exam room in a matter of weeks. … Clyne has long maintained his innocence and has never been criminally charged or arrested. … A separate civil case before the Santa Clara County Superior Court is scheduled to go to trial next month. 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 13, 2025

● The family police agency found all the allegations against Megan Knight to be unfounded. She even passed a background check to care for foster children in residential treatment. But her own children are still in foster care. That’s what can happen when families are literally defense-less. 

As the Missouri Independent reports, in still more stellar journalism from that publication, indigent parents in Missouri are not guaranteed an attorney at all – and when they get one, they’re often far too overloaded to do much of anything. Here’s what that means in the case of Ms. Knight: 

Her four-year-old daughter has been moved seven times since she was taken into foster care in April 2022. Knight said she’s developed behavioral issues Knight attributes to the trauma of separation and being tossed around from home to home. 

“When I was able to see her, she would always beg the caseworker, ‘Please, let me go home to my mom,’” she said. 

Now, her daughter is in care with a foster family and Knight doesn’t know where in Missouri they are or who the family is. Two of her kids are in another stranger’s home. 

● I have a commentary in the Missouri Independent about another of their excellent stories, about the case of a family needlessly surveilled, traumatized and often torn apart over and over  by the state family police agency. 

All of this happens in a state that year after year takes away children at a rate far above the national average. In addition to exposing the failure of the agency, the stories in the Independent also wind up exposing the failure of the Kansas City Star. 

● Now, a personal note: 50 years ago this week I was about to graduate from the City University of New York; I’d be going to Columbia J-School in the fall. Also 50 years ago this week, the New York Daily News published the investigative series that convinced me that I wanted to spend as much time as I could reporting on the child welfare system and what it does to children. I have a commentary in the Daily News about that series’ far more important impact: why I think it started a chain of events that led to real improvement in the City system. 

● Some of that improvement can be seen in the latest report from the New York City Family Policy Project, which documents an overall decline in surveillance and separation since 2019 – the last full year before the COVID pandemic – with no compromise of safety. 

● Perhaps you remember the scandal surrounding the “child abuse team” at Children’s Wisconsin Hospital. That’s the place where other doctors said they would be afraid to bring their own children to their own hospital after accidental injuries.  Now, WTMJ-TV and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report, one couple is suing. 

● Whenever it's pointed out to people in the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program that research overwhelmingly shows that the work they do in court makes everything worse, they try to divert attention by pointing to things like their work as mentors to foster youth. So why not just turn CASA into program like this program in Montana – a mentoring program without all the things that make CASA so harmful?

● Three more states have passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which attempt to give children a right to – childhood. 

● But another one of those bad bills became law in Washington State. This law is not anti-Catholic, as the Trump Administration claims – it’s anti-child.  I have a blog post about it. 

● And speaking of bad bills, it has come to this: Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that the Governor of Oregon personally testified in favor of a bill that would make it easier to institutionalize foster children out-of-state, and easier for their caregivers to abuse them. “The status quo is unacceptable,” the governor said.  That’s true. The problem is, as explained in this series of posts, the bill makes things even worse. 

That’s because, as usual, OPB does not mention that the premise behind the bill is false. The premise is that Oregon has too few in-state placements. Rather, Oregon tears apart too many families. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● Remember how Los Angeles County agreed to pay $4 billion to survivors of rampant abuse in various foster care facilities, including a notorious shelter? San Diego County is smaller. As The San Diego Unon-Tribune reports, it might wind up paying a mere $100 million or so. 

But San Diego County wants you to know that, as the story explains: 

“We prioritize the safety of all children and youth in our care,” the county said in a statement. “The county has comprehensive training, rules, procedures, and additional oversight to ensure the safety of youth.” 

Don’t you feel better already? 

● According to this story from WAGA-TV no one can explain how in the world the adoptive parents who nearly tortured a Georgia child to death ever could have been allowed to adopt the child and four siblings.  But here are a couple of possibilities: 

--Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, states collect a bounty of $4,000 to $10,000 for every adoption of a child over a baseline number. If things turn out as they did in this case, states don’t have to give the money back. So ignoring flashing red warning signs may have been worth up to $50,000 for the Georgia family police agency. 

--Getting those adoption numbers up also is the only time a family police agency is guaranteed good press, via those annual “Adoption Day” stories. 

--And while the story points to a “shortage” of foster parents, Georgia doesn’t have too few foster parents.  As this story and this one, from WABE Public Radio make clear, Georgia has too many foster children.

NCCPR in the New York Daily News: How the Daily News changed NYC’s child welfare

A half century ago today, child welfare reform began when the Daily News stunned the city with the first installment of a six-part series about the system by reporters William Heffernan and Stewart Ain, headlined “Big Money, Little Victims.”

Then as now, New York City has a harmful child welfare system. While foster care has declined, children still are taken needlessly. And a massive child-welfare surveillance state remains, with children still tormented by needless investigations and stripsearches, often when family poverty is confused with neglect. The time wasted on these cases is stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger. 

But the New York City system also does far less harm than its counterparts almost everywhere else, and it is far less harmful than it used to be. ACS now tears apart families at half the rate of Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Phoenix. 

Many organizations and visionary leaders contributed to this transformation, and continue to fight the system’s ongoing harm. But a good case can be made that the progress began 50 years ago this week with a stunning work of journalism. …

Read the full commentary in the Daily News

That Washington State law on clergy as mandatory reporters is not anti-Catholic – it’s anti-CHILD

● The Trump Administration launches a ludicrous "investigation" of a bad law.

● The real harm of this law: Impoverished parents in Washington State now have one less place to turn without risking being turned in to the family police because their poverty was confused with  “neglect.” 

Laws requiring clergy to report the slightest suspicion of child abuse or neglect are common – unfortunately. Laws requiring priests to report the slightest suspicion of abuse or neglect even when they hear about it in confession are less common but at least seven states have had them for some time – unfortunately. 

But two things have made the latest such law, in Washington State, the subject of national attention: 1. Local media hype, led by a local reporter who’s been, pardon the expression, crusading for it for years, writing stories that shut out any meaningful dissent. (Now he has something he can put on the “What did the stories accomplish?” line on awards entries forms.) And 2. the Trump Administration, which, presumably, saw the publicity and a chance to pander to its conservative base.  

So the Trump Justice Department is launching an “investigation,” calling the new law “anti-Catholic.” That’s likely to come as news to groups such as the Catholic Accountability Project and Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests which, mistakenly in my view, but sincerely, supported the new law. In case you didn’t know this Trump Justice Department: Chances are, most of the members of these groups are Catholics. 

No, the new law isn’t anti-Catholic. But it sure is anti-child. It’s one more example of a feel-good press-release-worthy law that ignores a huge pile of research and is almost certain to backfire. 

For starters, any law that expands mandatory reporting in any way is anti-child, because mandatory reporting backfires. It drives families away from seeking help, and overloads the system with false reports, making it harder to find the relatively few children in real danger.  That’s why so many one-time proponents of mandatory reporting have had second thoughts. 

But instead of heeding the research and replacing mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, in which professionals are free to exercise their professional judgment, Washington State lawmakers opted to careen full-speed backwards. 

The reason expanding mandatory reporting to clergy has support in some quarters is obvious: What comes to mind when you hear the words clergy and child abuse?  Priests raping altar boys – and bishops covering up the crimes. When Gov. Mike Ferguson (who, by the way is a Catholic) responded to the investigation he said “We look forward to protecting Washington kids from sexual abuse in the face of this 'investigation' from the Trump Administration." 

But the new law expanding mandatory reporting will do nothing to protect kids from sexual abuse. Pedophile priests either will stop confessing or go to a church where their voices won’t be recognized. 

It also can harm survivors, who sometimes first disclose their abuse in confession. Consider what a survivor group said in Australia, where pedophilia scandals have led to similar campaigns to end the exemption for the confessional: 

“The Seal offers victims a safe, secure and watertight place where they can be listened to without cost, where they can remain anonymous, and can decide what they’re ready, and not ready, to share – and all of this in complete confidence,” spokesman James Parker said. 

“The Confessional Seal as it presently stands literally saves lives and offers every abuse victim the chance to begin to heal.” 

But that’s only the beginning of the harm. Neither Ferguson nor anyone else supporting this law seems to have given a moment’s thought to the fact that in Washington State 93% of cases in which a child is placed in foster care don’t involve even an allegation of sexual abuse. In nearly nine times more cases the allegation is “neglect” which often means poverty – and clergy now have to report those, too. 

Now consider some hypotheticals about who is far more likely to be reported than a pedophile priest: 

● A mother is terrified.  She’s being beaten by her husband.  But when she threatened to go to the police he said: “Go ahead, call the cops! They’ll just call child protective services and they’ll take away the kids.”  She turns to her priest/minister/rabbi/imam and says: “Please help me to escape.  Where can I turn to protect myself and my children?” 

The clergyman replies: “I’m so sorry.  I’m now a mandated reporter and you may have allowed your child to “witness domestic violence” if he saw or heard you being beaten. So I have to call child protective services. 

● A single mother enters the confessional:  “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned,” she says. She says she’s guilt-ridden for having left her child home alone when she went to work and her regular childcare arrangement fell through.  She didn’t know what else to do. Her boss said he’d fire her if she didn’t show up; then she wouldn’t be able to afford the rent and the family would be evicted.  

After the priest prescribes the appropriate acts of contrition, the mother asks a question:  Might the priest know someone in the congregation who could volunteer to provide childcare if this ever happened again?  “As a matter of fact, I do,” the priest replies.  “But it’s too late to do only that.  You see, I am now a mandated reporter of child abuse.  What you did can be considered ‘lack of supervision.’  So I have to report you to child protective services” 

As it stands now, clergy are among the only helpers to whom impoverished families can turn with less fear that they will be turned in to a family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency).  Once the word gets around that even the confessional isn’t safe, you can bet that parents like those in these hypotheticals won’t come forward and ask for help.  Children at risk from pedophile clergy won’t get any safer – and children whose families' “crime” is poverty will be cut off from a potential source of support. 

Of course, it’s not a crime for lawmakers to rush into enacting bad policy that doesn’t have a prayer of stopping child abuse. But it sure seems like a sin.

NCCPR in the Missouri Independent: Hailey’s story illustrates Missouri’s failure — doing too little to preserve families

The Missouri Children’s Division has accomplished something most of us would have thought impossible: They got all sides in the debate over abortion to agree. 

They agree about Hailey, the young mother profiled in an outstanding story in The Independent. They agree that the behavior of the Children’s Division in surveilling, harassing, traumatizing and sometimes tearing apart Hailey’s loving family was, in the words of State Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, “really horrifying.” 

Over and over Hailey’s great-aunt, Jodi Spradley, overcame one obstacle after another to craft a fragile safety net first for Hailey and then for her infant as well.  Over and over the Children’s Division tore that safety net apart. The issue was never abuse, it was poverty – often housing. 

As Kelley Fong, professor and author of the landmark study Investigating Families said: 

“[I]t’s really striking that rather than provide her with what she needs to provide a stable home for mom and baby, the response is just to separate everyone. That is extremely traumatic for the new mom, for the baby, for everyone involved.” 

Yes, it’s horrifying. But here’s something more horrifying: A change in leadership at the Children’s Division means it’s likely to get worse. … 

Read the full column in the Missouri Independent

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 6, 2025

● The Missouri Independent has published a powerful story on what it means to confuse poverty with neglect. It is a story about a family that through enormous will and determination, marshaled meager resources to weave a safety net – only to have the family police come in, over and over, and rip it apart. It is a story as beautifully written as it is scrupulously reported. 

● Still, as this follow-up story makes clear, you’ve got to give the Missouri family police agency credit for this much: They united all sides in the abortion debate – everyone thinks the behavior of the family police agency in this case stinks. The story also includes NCCPR’s perspective and that of Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark study Investigating Families. 

● The confusion of poverty with neglect – and the first tentative steps to try to do something about it – also is the theme of this excellent story from the Maine Monitor. 

● When you swing a budget ax wildly and hit almost everything, occasionally you’ll strike something that deserves to be cut. That raises the question in this NCCPR Blog post: A whole lot of research shows that the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program, the most sacred cow in child welfare, does harm. So do facts matter? Or does wallowing in a warm, fuzzy narrative about overwhelmingly white, middle-class amateurs saving overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children matter more? 

● The Imprint looks at the kind of slash-and-burn Trump budget-cutting that really will hurt children and increase the risk that the family police will become part of their lives: cuts to Project Head Start. 

● Last week we highlighted a superb story from the New York City online news site THE CITY on the enormous harm of mandatory child abuse reporting laws. One item toward the end of that story was intriguing – it hinted that there may be a rebellion among the rank-and-file at New York’s celebrity-studded “child advocacy center.” I have a blog post about why that would be a very good thing. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From The Oregonian: 

The state will pay $3 million to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of two children who were sexually abused while in foster care after caseworkers placed a teenage boy with a documented history of sexual misconduct into the home, according to a negotiated agreement.

In the hope that facts really do matter, some hard facts about CASA

When you swing an ax madly and chop down virtually everything,
once in a while you’ll hit something that really should be cut

A whole lot of research shows that the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program, the most sacred cow in child welfare, does harm. So do facts matter? Or does wallowing in a warm, fuzzy narrative about overwhelmingly white, middle-class amateurs saving overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children matter more?

Links to all of the research cited in this post can be found here.

A ProPublica story aptly calls what’s happening now “The Trump Administration’s War on Children”:

The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. …  Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1… 

That doesn’t include more general proposed slashing and burning, such as cutting housing assistance, health care, and SNAP benefits with more on the horizon. 

But when you swing an ax madly and chop down virtually everything, once in a while you’ll hit something that really should be cut. And so one cut should be cause for celebration: The Administration is trying to cut $48.9 million in grants to the National CASA Association. The Association “sets standards” for hundreds of Court-Appointed Special Advocates programs and passes on some of that federal funding to some of them. 

Almost immediately, local reporters started churning out hand-wringing stories about how horrible this would be – because, obviously CASA is so wonderful, right? 

So while I don’t suppose this will do much good, I’m going to cling to the notion that facts matter and point out a simple fact concerning what abundant research tells us about Court-Appointed Special Advocates. 

Research tells us CASA doesn’t work. In fact, it documents how CASA does harm. 

CASA is a program in which overwhelmingly white middle-class amateurs, almost always well-intentioned, are given 30 hours of training (sometimes 40) and then sent off into the homes of overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families to pass judgment upon them. 

Technically, they make recommendations, but National CASA brags about how often the recommendations are rubber-stamped by judges. So a bunch of white middle-class amateurs often effectively decide if overwhelmingly impoverished disproportionately nonwhite children will be taken from their homes or, if already taken, will ever get to live with their own families again. What could possibly go wrong? 

The answer to that can be found in research: 

No matter how warm and fuzzy the program makes the volunteers (and the reporters who cover it) feel, study after study shows CASA is a failure.  

The research tells us that CASA’s only real “accomplishments” are: 

● Prolonging foster care.

● Making it less likely families will reunify.

● Making it less likely children will achieve permanence through guardianship with a relative.

● Making it more likely children will age out with no home at all.

● Spending less time on a case when the child is Black.

● Doing nothing to make children safer. 

No wonder one law review article calls CASA “an act of white supremacy.” 

Could it be that the researchers were biased – and out to get CASA? On the contrary, these findings come from studies commissioned by National CASA and Texas CASA, and another done by a former CASA in the program she evaluated. 

Does every study come out this way on every measure? No. But the largest and most rigorous do.  Indeed, when researchers conducted a review of the literature seeking to find out if CASA is an evidence-based program, their answer was clear: No. 

Again, links to the studies are here. 

On the extremely rare occasions when anyone at CASA is asked about this mass of research, the program seeks to divert attention from those findings by pointing to other things it does, such as providing emotional support and mentoring for foster youth, and advocating to get them the services they need. Some CASA chapters also engage in intensive efforts to find extended family to take in children so they don't have to be in foster care with strangers. Those are fine things to do – and if CASA were willing to limit itself to doing only things like that, it would be making a useful contribution. It’s when the overwhelmingly white middle-class amateurs effectively become judge, jury and, sometimes, family executioner for overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families that they do vastly more harm than good. 

A classic example is CASA’s new program to help young people aging out of foster care. That’s a great thing to do. But wouldn’t it be better if CASA didn’t make it more likely that those children would age out in the first place? 

And yet, none of this information makes its way into all those local news stories. In most cases, CASA propaganda simply has been repeated so often that reporters don’t think to question it. But that’s not good enough. 

All over America news organizations rally behind the slogan “facts matter.” Do they? Or do feel-good myths matter more?