Living our values makes CHILDREN safer, too

    I'll bet a lot of my fellow liberals cheered last night when President Obama got to this line in his not-quite-a-State-of-the-Union address: "Living our values doesn't make us weaker," the President said, "it makes us safer and it makes us stronger."

    I checked a transcript of the President's speech just to be sure: There is no asterisk after that line, no parentheses containing the words "except if the allegation is child abuse."

For too many of my fellow liberals in the child welfare establishment, there is a mental asterisk when it comes to civil liberties. As long as you say the magic words "child abuse" it's o.k. to hold secret trials, it's o.k. to search homes and stripsearch children without a warrant, it's o.k. to deprive the accused of legal counsel, it's o.k. to detain children indefinitely based on a standard of proof no higher than "preponderance of the evidence."

    President Obama made the comment in the context of repeating his pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo. We on the left are all for it. But when the State of Texas held hundreds of innocent children in their own private Guantanamo last year, there was silence from the big, liberal child welfare groups. The Children's Defense Fund did not defend these children. They didn't seem to matter to Every Child Matters. Voices for America's Children stood mute.

    It's time the child welfare establishment erased the mental asterisk. NCCPR believes in civil liberties without exception. We have a Due Process Agenda because living our values makes children safer, too.

Statistics abuse at Michigan DHS

    Were there a hotline to which one could report statistics abuse, some people at the Michigan Department of Human Services would have their rights to their pocket calculators terminated.

    On Wednesday, NCCPR released the first of our reports on Michigan child welfare. The response from DHS was what one usually gets from a closed child welfare bureaucracy: they hid behind children. The agency that took Timothy Boss, Joshua Causey, Johnny Dragomir, Rickly Holland, Isaac Lethbridge, and Allison Newman from their parents and sent them into the duly-licensed foster homes adoptive homes and/or group homes of strangers – where all of them died - declared that "If we err, it will be on the side of protecting children."

    They claimed the report was inaccurate, but offered only one specific example – and they were wrong.

    The report states that Michigan institutionalizes children at a rate above the national average. DHS denies this.

    It's times like these when it's good to live in the Age of the Internet. Instead of going back and forth saying "do not!" "do so!" it's possible for anyone to see the data for themselves, quickly and easily. Here's how:

STEP 1: Follow this link to a database maintained by the Child Welfare League of America, using data every state reports to the federal government: http://ndas.cwla.org/data_stats/access/predefined/Report.asp?ReportID=384

    The link will take you to tools to create a table showing the number of children in foster care in every state by placement setting, as well as the national total in 2006, the most recent year for which these data are available.

    STEP 2: Follow the instructions for creating the table.

    STEP 3: The table lists children in a variety of placement settings including one setting specifically for institutions. Divide the Michigan figure in this category by the Michigan total and you'll get 14.4 percent. Do exactly the same thing for the national total and you get 10.2 percent.

    If, in fact, Michigan has some other calculation which offers a lower figure – if they're maintaining the equivalent of "two sets of books" – then the question becomes which one to believe. The figures I just cited are reported to the federal government's AFCARS database. If a state sends AFCARS inaccurate data, it can, theoretically, lose federal aid, (though the feds have looked the other way at some flagrant bending of the rules by the state of Kansas and, as noted below, Michigan may have fudged some figures too.) In contrast, when DHS produces its own data for the legislature or the public, it can define things any way it wants. So when there is a conflict, it makes sense to use what Michigan sends to the feds. And when we compared Michigan to Illinois and to the national average, we used this same data source, increasing the likelihood of an "apples to apples" comparison.

    It also is striking how quickly DHS claimed to be able to produce its own data on this – since up to now they haven't been able to produce anything quickly. For example, on October 30, 2008, I asked DHS for county-by-county data on entries into care. This is the kind of basic information that several states and localities make available instantly online. Others have been able to produce these data within a couple of weeks.

    But not Michigan. After months of repeated requests, I finally got data for calendar year 2008 in January 2009 – but the last two months were grossly incomplete. Such "data lag" is not uncommon. But most states will acknowledge this upfront. There was not a word about it in the table DHS sent.

    In another request, I asked the person to whom I was directed at DHS if the agency could tell me something as basic as the total amount of money the agency spends on all forms of substitute care. In a response on January 15, this person said this information was "not readily available" to DHS and "I have requested that our Budget Office provide this information." So far, I haven't received it. The endnotes to the report describe the elaborate process NCCPR had to use to try to estimate this figure. (I am not naming anyone I dealt with at DHS because I still think it's possible that they sincerely tried to provide the information and the agency was simply incapable of producing it.)

    That was my assumption in the report itself, and I cite examples throughout. In fact, I've found only one other state, Arizona, that performs as badly. But in light of how quickly DHS rushed to produce figures on institutionalization – figures that appear to contradict what DHS reported to the federal government - I have to wonder. In that regard, one of the experts hired by the group that calls itself "Children's Rights" for its lawsuit against DHS makes an interesting allegation. As I noted in the report itself, according to the expert, John Goad, DHS data on abuse in foster care are misleading and report figures so low as to be laughable. Yet DHS reports data to the federal government that it knows or should know are inaccurate.

    Does that apply to DHS statistics on institutionalization as well?

Breakthrough at NPR

DETROIT - Those who were once summarily dismissed by National Public Radio editor Andrea De Leon as "these people" - unworthy of the network's attention, finally were heard on NPR today.

Bernadette Blount, a parent organizer with the Child Welfare Organizing Project in New York City was among the guests discussing racial bias in child welfare during a segment of NPR's Tell Me More. Also on the program, a co-author of the landmark Michigan Race Equity Review, discussed in a previous post to this Blog.

The guests talked not only about racial bias, but about the profound harm wrongful removal does to children. In short, they talked about all the things that De Leon had succeeded in keeping off the air back in 2006.

The segment also directly contradicted the false claim by NPR Reporter Michelle Trudeau that "A child is placed in foster care only as a last resort, when parental maltreatment or neglect is extreme and unremitting." Ms. Trudeau however never has corrected her false claim, a smear against thousands of good, decent parents who lose their children when their poverty is confused with "neglect." I wonder if she was listening this afternoon? I wonder of De Leon tuned in?

And this segment was not the only breakthrough at NPR. Another story from Michigan, on another NPR Program Day to Day, devoted a lot of time to the problem of children removed because of family poverty.
The timing was good as well. NCCPR releases its own comprehensive report on Michigan child welfare on Wednesday.

These inconvenient truths still haven't cracked the wall of denial at NPR's flagship programs, All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition, but it's a start.

After all, even Jackie Robinson had to play in the minors before he made it to the Dodgers.

UPDATE: When real children become human teddy bears

Last week, there was a sudden cluster of news stories about "shelters" those parking places for children when they're first removed from their parents that are among the worst forms of placement for a child. There were hand-wringing stories in Virginia and Florida about shelters having to close – because, in fact, they weren't needed, and a celebratory story about the impending opening of one of the most barbaric types of shelters imaginable – one specifically for long-term care of infants and toddlers.

  So this seemed like a good time to repeat, with just a little bit of updating, two earlier posts to this Blog about shelters:

     AUGUST 14, 2006: WHEN REAL CHILDREN BECOME HUMAN TEDDY BEARS -- They may be the second most sacred cow in all of child welfare, and no wonder. Donors love them. They can get a plaque on the wall for giving money or furniture or, if they're really rich, donating a whole building. The volunteers love them. They can turn real flesh-and-blood human beings into human teddy bears who exist for the volunteers' gratification and convenience, even as they convince themselves they're helping children. Whey they get bored with their human teddy bears, they simply hand them back to the shift staff.

     In short, they're good for everyone but the children. 


    They are "shelters" - those first-stop parking place institutions in many communities where children are deposited for a few days or a week or a month or, often, longer, to be examined and "assessed" by "trained staff" in order to prepare them for exactly what they would have gotten without the shelters – usually a succession of foster homes.

    Shelters are exercises in adult self-indulgence and adult self-delusion. As with any form of orphanage, and that's really what shelters are, a whole rationalization industry has grown up around them.

    "How can you call us an institution?" the people who work at the local shelter say. "We have 'cottages' and they're so pretty. We even have a cutesy name. We're so homelike."

    Whenever somebody says his or her institution is homelike, I think of the stuff I sometimes put on bread when I'm trying to lose weight. It may be called "buttery spread" or "buttery light" but it always tastes like liquid plastic. I can tell the difference between buttery light and butter. And children know the difference between "homelike" and home.

    "Our shelter provides 'stability'" the operators will say, so children don't move from foster home to foster home. But it's the people in a child's life that create stability, not the bricks and mortar. A child in a shelter endures a multiple placement whenever the shift changes. She endures multiple placement when the weekend workers replace the weekday workers. And she endures multiple placement when the volunteer who seemed so interested in her last week has something better to do to this week and doesn't show up.

    "We must be doing good work," the volunteers say. "Look how the children come running up to us to hug us."

    Consider what one staffer at one of the shelters said. He works at Child Haven, a giant complex in Las Vegas that warehouses more than 150 children, including infants -- now, even stacking them up like cordwood in the gym. [UPDATE: Conditions reportedly have improved somewhat since this post was written.] The staffer told a local television station that he loves coming to work at Child Haven because babies and toddlers "grab my leg. They call me Mr. Lou. They tell me they love me."

    But when a young child grabs the legs of anyone who will pay him a little attention and tells him "I love you" he's not getting better – he's getting worse. He is losing his ability to truly love at all, because every time he tries to love someone, that person goes away. It's even worse than the well-known problem of children bouncing from foster home to foster home. We are setting some of these children up to become adults unable to love or trust anyone.

    The parking place industry will come back with claims that they can "assess" children and "stabilize" them, so that they can find the right foster home for the child when he or she leaves.

     That was the theory in Connecticut, when they set up a network of such shelters in 1995, in the wake of a foster-care panic that led to a huge increase in the number of children taken from their parents.

    But a comprehensive study of the shelters by Yale University and the Connecticut child welfare agency itself found that wasn't true either.

    On the contrary, the children who went through the shelters tended to have worse outcomes than those who didn't. The only thing she shelters were good at was wasting huge sums of money. (As usual, in child welfare, the worse the option for children, the more it costs).

    Of course, as soon as the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF) saw the results of the study they commissioned they shut the shelters down.

    Just kidding.

    In child welfare, research is no match for political clout and adult self-indulgence. Take away our human teddy bears? Never! As the Hartford Courant put it in this story, available in the paper's paid archive:

 "Three years after a study that showed short-term group homes for first-time foster children are a costly failure, the state Department of Children and Families is still funneling hundreds of children through the facilities each year."

But that doesn't mean DCF didn't take action. The agency used to have the study up on its own website. But after the Courant story came out, DCF removed the link. (I have a copy of the study, which I'd be glad to send to anyone who wants it.) [UPDATE: Eventually, a reform-minded leader of the state family policing agency did shut them down.]

     The final rationalization is the one in which the shelter operators admit shelters are a lousy option but, you see, there simply is no alternative. There just aren't enough foster homes, they say.

    That's the constant claim in Arizona, where a foster-care panic increased the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year by 40 percent in just two years. That created an artificial "shortage" of foster homes -- and a baby boom at the shelters.

     And all through the panic, who could be counted on for an inflammatory quote encouraging the needless removal of children? The executive director of the East Valley Crisis Center, the same shelter operator who kept insisting that it was a shame to have to rely on shelters – but there was no other alternative.

    And even with the panic, that shelter had room for some dubious cases. A Christmas-themed puff piece about the shelter in an Arizona newspaper in 2004 focused on two cases:
    In case #1, a mother has to give up her child because she is homeless.

    In case #2, a grandmother has to surrender her children because she "couldn't take the kids herself because of health problems." Then, after the children are separated from their grandmother, they are torn away from each other. The shelter insists it's for their own good. In fact, it was almost certainly for the shelter's convenience. The shelter's own website reveals that children are segregated by age. That's understandable. It's dangerous to mix age groups in an institution.

With everything we know about what works and what doesn't work for children in the 21^st Century, there is only one word for institutionalizing a child because his mother is homeless or his grandmother is ill: Barbaric.

When I mentioned this in an op ed column in that same newspaper, a shelter supporter replied by citing another reason she felt the shelter was essential: To warehouse children taken from battered mothers solely because those mothers had been beaten.

Fortunately a reform-minded head of the state human services agency [UPDATE: Make that former head of the state human services agency] and the threat of a lawsuit from the Youth Law Center have combined to reduce the use of shelters in Arizona. There's a long way to go, but it's a start.

    One hundred years of research is nearly unanimous: Institutionalization is inherently harmful. And the younger the child, the greater the harm. No one who writes puff pieces about shelters would argue that shift workers and volunteers dispensing indiscriminate pseudo-love to any child who walks in the door are a substitute for their love for their own children. It's no substitute for somebody else's child either – and the children know it. That's why institutionalization does them so much harm.

    And better child welfare systems know it as well.

    In Alabama, the system has been rebuilt to emphasize keeping children out of foster care in the first place. It happened as a result of a suit brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law (co-counsel for plaintiffs is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors).

    The lawsuit led to a consent decree that puts strict limits on shelters. The following is from Making Child Welfare Work, The Bazelon Center's book about the consent decree:


Because it is so traumatic to uproot a child, an important goal of [the Consent Decree] is to have the child's first placement be the only placement … To minimize moves, the decree outlaws the use of shelter care except under unusual circumstances. Workers are not permitted to park a child in a shelter while they look for a more permanent placement, unless the child can receive the full range of necessary services while in the shelter and 'it is likely that the [child's] stay in foster care will not extend beyond his/her stay in the shelter.' [Emphasis in original]. What this meant was that counties had to develop a sufficiently large and flexible array of [placements] so they could place children directly…to the setting determined as most appropriate for meeting the child's needs.


     There are two key indicators that the "no alternative" argument is just one more rationalization.

    The first is who the shelters take in and who they leave out.

    Everyone in child welfare knows the group for whom it is hardest to find a foster home: Teenagers, especially teenagers with behavior problems. To the extent that there is ever a "need" for a shelter or some other form of "congregate care" it would be for teens. Younger children are easy to place and babies easiest of all.

    So of course, these shelters are for teenagers, since that's where the need is.

    Just kidding again.

    Most of these shelters are only for children age 12 and younger.    There is no better indication that shelters really exist to serve the adults who work and volunteer there. After all, a teenager who's been through removal from his or her home is as likely to spit in your face as to throw his arms around you. They make lousy human teddy bears.
    So the shelters stick to children 12 and younger, including what the head of that Arizona shelter so cloyingly calls "the itty bitty ones."
    The second indicator is what happened when a reform-minded child welfare agency [UPDATE: Make that formerly reform-minded child welfare agency] called the shelter operators' bluff.
    In Michigan, after a decade of careening full-speed backwards, the state's Department of Human Services has been working to curb needless removal of children. Its innovations are beginning to pay off. As a result, in the Lansing area, DHS has become so good at finding homes for children who really had to be taken from their parents, that a brand new shelter stands almost empty.


     Of course, the community celebrated.
    Yep. Just kidding again.


     The Lansing State Journal treated this cause for joy as a tragedy. So did local politicians. And the local judge stepped forward and promised to overrule DHS and start filling the shelter with babies, even when DHS had homes available - - even though, under state law, the county would then have to pay the full $170-per-day cost of the placement instead of only half. Said the judge: "I guarantee you that place will be full."
    So much for the "we have to have shelters because there's no other alternative" argument.
    Prof. Victor Groza of Case Western Reserve University, which happens to be in Ohio, wrote an op ed column for the State Journal carefully explaining all the research on the harm of shelters. Yesterday, the head of the agency that runs the shelter replied, essentially as follows: Prof. Groza's not from here so he can't know anything; nyah, nyah, nyah. (This time, I'm not kidding). The agency chief nevertheless cited one out-of-state source that supports shelters - the trade association for shelter operators, the Child Welfare League of America.


     But then, the institutions lobby is particularly powerful in Michigan. In an earlier post to this Blog, I described how a trade association for some Michigan private child welfare agencies trooped up to the State Capitol to oppose the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Family to Family program, which keeps children in their own homes or with their extended families. (The Casey Foundation helps to fund NCCPR). They opposed it, because, they said, it's better for these disproportionately minority children to be torn from everyone loving and familiar and thrown in with affluent strangers in the suburbs because the strangers live in better neighborhoods. Another post pointed out that the private agencies' position may well be illegal.
  


AUGUST 17, 2006 TRUTH VS. TRUTHINESS IN LANSING - I had just posted the previous Blog entry about parking-place shelters when I saw the 60 Minutes story about The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert's nightly parody of certain cable news programs.
    I was reminded of that word he coined: Truthiness. It means believing something is true because you want it to be true.     As Colbert puts it: "You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut. … I don't trust books. They're all fact and no heart."


     Turns out, that debate over a parking-place "shelter" in Lansing, Michigan, discussed at the end of the previous post to this Blog, offered up a perfect example of the difference between truth and truthiness. The Lansing shelter is the one standing almost empty because the state child welfare agency doesn't need it – they're able to place almost all children in the area directly with families. Instead of celebrating, some Lansing politicians are treating this as a tragedy.
    As noted in Monday's Blog, on August 6, the Lansing State Journal published an op ed column by Prof. Victor Groza of Case Western Reserve University, in which he offers some hard truths: He notes that "for more than 60 years, studies have shown the damage of institutional care" and he carefully explains why shelters harm the emotional development of children.


 He discusses a rigorous recent study of shelters like the one in Lansing. The study found that the claims on behalf of such places don't hold up. After actually following the children who'd been through the shelters and a comparable group that had not, this study found that the children who started their foster-care odyssey in shelters did no better, and often did worse than those who were placed directly with families.
    The following week, the director of the shelter's parent agency offered up a response. It's classic truthiness.
    "Children have entered traumatized and exhausted," he declares. "They have left with a sense of stability, direction, normalcy, and love." And how does he know this? The children are too young for exit interviews. The shelter is brand new and the article doesn't even claim to have actually followed the children, much less compared them to those not placed in shelters. No, it's true because they want it to be true. They looked it up in their guts. Or, as the agency director put it: "Our early experiences at Angel House have confirmed what we expected" [emphasis added].
    As for all that research, well, the agency director has no more use for it and those darned "out of state academicians" than Colbert has for books, declaring: "We believe the people of mid-Michigan have more faith in the wisdom of local child advocates than the distorted views from academia…"


     Or, as Colbert put it the other night: "The world of illusion is wonderful. Join me in it."
     But when children's lives are at stake, we can't afford to live in a word of illusion. And we can't afford to make our decisions based on truthiness.
    [UPDATE: The reformer who tried to move the state Department of Human Services away from parking place shelters is gone. Angel House remains, albeit on a smaller scale. Details in a future post. And on Wednesday, in Detroit, NCCPR will release the first of two reports on Michigan child welfare.]

Robbing poor people to appease “Children’s Rights”

In 1996, Congress ended "welfare as we know it" replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. TANF was much harder to get, not only because of work requirements and time limits, but also because states were free to set up all sorts of barriers to make it as hard as possible for poor people to get help. As welfare rolls plummeted in a booming economy, states were supposed to use surplus TANF funds to help poor people become self-sufficient. The funds were supposed to be used for things like job training and day care.

    Some states did that. Other states used TANF to plug all sorts of holes in their budgets, in particular child welfare budgets, turning TANF into a child welfare slush fund. In some cases, this led to poor people subsidizing the middle class – in particular middle class people who wanted to adopt poor people's children.

    So in Connecticut, for example, The Hartford Courant exposed how more than $100 million in TANF money that could have been used to provide day care for low income families instead had been diverted into child abuse investigations and foster care with strangers. So the money that could have helped a single mother find child care for her children while she worked instead goes into investigating her on a "lack of supervision" charge because she can't get child care. Texas also uses TANF for foster care and child abuse investigations.

    In preparing our forthcoming report on child welfare in Michigan we found that several years ago, Michigan pulled almost all state funds out of prevention and family preservation. Almost every dime now comes from the federal government and almost all of that is from TANF. Michigan's prevention and family preservation money is, in effect, stolen from other uses that could have helped the same families.

    But it gets worse.

    In Michigan, more than $41 million in TANF money is diverted each year into adoption subsidies and adoption support services. (Ohio does the same thing on a smaller scale.) Some of that money may go to impoverished grandparents adopting grandchildren. But there is no means test for adoptive families who want this help. Indeed, had Madonna chosen to adopt her child from the Michigan foster care system instead of Africa, she would have been eligible for a subsidy – taken out of money intended to be used to help poor people become self-sufficient.

There are good reasons to provide adoption subsidies without a means test. The issue is where that money should come from. It should shock the conscience that wealthy adoptive parents can be given children from poor families, and then get money that should have gone to keep those poor families together in the first place.

But for shocking the conscience, it would be hard to top Georgia. What that state has done to poor people trying to get help from TANF is documented in a searing story from Mother Jones that ought to be required reading in the White House and among those on the left who may have come to think that maybe welfare "reform" wasn't so bad after all.

Among the most notable findings in the story is something mentioned almost in passing:

It seems that Georgia "cut spending on child care and put the[TANF] money into child protective services in the wake of a lawsuit against the state over the mistreatment of children in foster care."

    That would be the lawsuit brought by the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights." No doubt they would say they never told Georgia to find the money to meet its demands by taking it out of the pockets of poor people. But apparently, they didn't tell Georgia not to do it either.

    CR's founder, Marcia Lowry, likes to say that she doesn't know how to fix poverty, but she knows how to fix foster care.

    In fact, the results of most of her lawsuits suggest she doesn't know how to fix foster care either. But Marcia, if you're going to keep trying, could you at least not make the poverty worse in the process?

Stimulating more foster care?

    There is a lot that is good in the economic stimulus bill now pending in the Senate. But there is one provision that actually would worsen the current financial incentive for states to use foster care instead of better alternatives.

    As noted in a previous post, under current law, for every eligible child (slightly fewer than half of foster children nationwide are "eligible") the federal government picks up anywhere from 50 percent to about 74 percent of the tab; it varies from state to state. (I had previously put the high end figure at 83 percent, but that no longer is the case.) Poorer states get a larger percentage of their costs covered. But there is nothing like that for safe, proven alternatives to taking children from their parents. That's the key reason why federal spending on foster care vastly outstrips federal spending on better alternatives.

    The stimulus bill actually would make this worse.

The amount that states get back for foster care is linked to the amount they get for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poorest Americans. So, for example, if State X is reimbursed 70 cents for every dollar spent on Medicaid, it also gets 70 cents back for every dollar spent on foster care for an "eligible" child. As the Medicaid rate rises or falls, the reimbursement for foster care (and also some adoption assistance) rises or falls with it.

The stimulus bill would raise this so-called "match rate" by 4.9 percent. So that state that was getting back 70 cents on the dollar might get back nearly 73.5 cents on the dollar. Such an increase for Medicaid would be good. But the last thing Congress should be doing, even as more families are plunged into poverty, which so often is confused with "neglect," is to actually increase the incentive to tear apart these families. Odds are, when the Obama Administration proposed increasing the match rate for Medicaid they were barely aware, or not aware at all, that this automatically increased payments for foster care as well.

To stop this worsening of an already perverse incentive, Congress would have to act to apply the increase to Medicaid only.  And that's exactly what President Obama should ask Congress to do. Then the additional dollars that would have gone to foster care should be directed instead to family preservation. It would be a tragedy if one of the new president's first acts actually increased the already huge financial incentive for states to take children needlessly from their homes.