Hutson
is an expert practitioner of a standard tactic of America’s latter-day “child
savers:” never say no to a good idea, just “yes, but…” it to death.
Despite
her best efforts, Congress passed a law restoring the authority of the
Department of Health and Human Services to issue up to ten child welfare
waivers per year for the next three years.
But what Rutledge Q. Hutson and her allies couldn’t do in Congress, they
managed to do through their man on the inside, Bryan Samuels, who runs the
Administration on Children Youth and Families within HHS. As is discussed in previous
posts to this blog, Samuels has issued guidelines that effectively undercut
the intent of waivers – to reduce needless foster care. Instead, the guidelines seek to turn waivers into
a program to make foster care “better” by providing more “services” to improve
children’s “well-being.”
So
it’s no wonder that last week, Rutledge Q. Hutson couldn’t resist
gloating. She took her victory lap during
a meeting of representatives of various child welfare organizations. For starters, she admitted the obvious: That
she had, in fact, been against the waivers all along. But not anymore. Bryan Samuels had so radically altered their
true purpose that Hutson was thrilled.
In particular, she’s ecstatic over the fact that waivers won’t be
evaluated based on whether they keep children safely out of foster care and
prevent reabuse. Instead, for a waiver to be successful it will have to show it
also improved these children’s “well-being.”
This
ignores two salient facts:
●
The purpose of child protective services, the agency that can come into your
home and take away your child, is not, in fact, to apply subjective judgments
about that child’s “well-being.” Rather, its purpose is to prevent children
from being abused.
●
One of the best ways to improve any child’s “well-being” is to get him out of
foster care if he’s already there and keep him out if he’s never been taken
away.
Like
almost all child savers, Hutson means well.
After all, the very first child saver, Charles Loring Brace, who, in the
19th Century, engineered the confiscation of thousands of poor
Catholic immigrant children and shipped them off to the south and Midwest to be
raised by Protestant families, also meant well.
He sincerely believed Catholic immigrant parents were genetically
inferior, and his scheme was essential for their children’s “well-being.” Both Charles Loring Brace and Rutledge Q.
Hutson have devoted much of their professional lives to a vision for helping
vulnerable children. The problem isn’t
the good intentions, the problem is the lousy vision.
INVASION OF THE “WELL-BEING POLICE”
Turning
child welfare agencies into Well-Being Police sets up both waivers, and
parents, to fail. It actually risks
increasing entries into care in states with waivers.
That’s
because it compounds one of the biggest problems in the system right now: the
fact that once a parent loses a child to foster care that parent actually is
held to a higher standard than a
parent who never had child protective services in her life in the first place.
For
example, no law says that a person who is unemployed can’t have a child. But once a child is in foster care, getting a
job – not just any job, but a job that satisfies the whims of a caseworker -
often is a condition for getting the child back. Similarly, no law says that
parent who lacks housing deemed suitable by a caseworker can’t have a
child. But once the child has been taken
away, regardless of the reason, “suitable housing” often is a condition for
getting a child back. Witness these
cases from
Texas and South
Carolina.
Now,
under the Samuels waiver guidelines, the bar for getting a child back and being
allowed to keep that child is raised still higher. Waiver success, and therefore, parental
success, is to be judged not only based on whether the parent does not abuse
the child, but also on the basis of whether all sorts of “well-being”
indicators improve. So if a waiver keeps
children safely at home but they still do poorly at school, that’s a
failure. If a waiver keeps children
safely at home but they still have the same emotional problems (plus those that
may have been caused by foster care) that, too, is considered a failure of the
waiver and the parent.
Obviously,
that ratchets up the pressure on parents.
And it creates a back door to bring the coercive power of child
protective services far deeper into a family’s life. In short, it gives child protective services
even more grounds to tear apart families and hold children in foster care.
Gwendolyn
Clegg, a parental defense attorney in Oklahoma, aptly summed up the problem
with this approach in a recent article in the Tulsa World:
"Social workers want to fix all the
issues in the whole family. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. …[but] The law
only requires you be a D-plus parent, meaning it only requires them to correct
the reasons their kids came to us.”
Of
course that kind of statement gives a lot of my fellow liberals (especially
Rutledge Q. Hutson-type liberals) apoplexy.
After all, shouldn’t every child have A-plus parents?
Well
yes. But not by government force or
fiat.
There
are all sorts of ways government can and should improve children’s
well-being. Government could ensure that
every American has decent health care.
Government could pour funds into low-performing inner city schools (and,
by the way, stop scapegoating the people who teach there.) Government could guarantee access to high
quality day care and preschool.
Government could ensure that no American is homeless or lacks decent
housing.
Every
step the government takes to reduce the scourge of poverty will improve all
children’s well-being and help parents do an A-plus job. And not one of those steps involves imposing
on families the extremely dangerous, coercive power of the state.
When
it comes to what government should be able to do by force of law to a family,
it should indeed require no more than D-plus parenting. There are a lot of good reasons for that, not
least the fact that, foster care so often produces D-minus outcomes for
children.
The
idea of government as Well-Being Police also plays right into the hands of
those on the far right who love to stereotype all liberal ideas, and undercut
all efforts of government to offer a true helping hand, by exploiting the
extremism reflected in the Hutson-Samuels approach.
WATCHING THE WAIVERS
Does
this mean waivers are doomed to do more harm than good? Not necessarily. The actual federal law creating the waivers
includes none of this nonsense perverting their intent. What Samuels has issued are guidelines. Waiver proposals that focus on their rightful
purpose, safely reducing foster care, and on measuring success by seeing if
foster care is, in fact, safely reduced (as determined by things like reabuse
rates and rates at which children are returned to foster care) still can be
approved, particularly if there turns out not to be a lot of competition for
the ten available each year.
And
the public will have some voice, at least in theory.
The
first round of waiver proposals are due on July 9. At some point thereafter, ACYF will post the
proposals on its website and solicit public comment. So check back then and see if your state has
submitted a waiver proposal. Then speak
out – for it if it meets the true purpose of waivers, and against it if it’s
the kind of waiver that would make Rutledge Q. Hutson and her latter-day child
saver allies jump for joy.
Because
the final decision rests with someone who understands what a waiver is supposed
to do.
ACYF
is part of the Administration for Children and Families, which is run by George
Sheldon. Back when he was running the
child welfare system in Florida, which implemented a classic waiver with great
success, he testified at that same hearing as Rutledge Q. Hutson. During that hearing Sheldon talked about
meeting with former foster children:
Child after child after child told me I
would have rather stayed at home and dealt with the issues in that home than
gone into a foster care system where I was moved from home to home and school
to school.
So
the best hope, maybe the only hope, for what should have been the biggest
change for the better in American child welfare in decades is that George
Sheldon will show Bryan Samuels who’s boss.
