● The consultants he’s bringing in have one thing in common: a fondness for computerized racial profiling.
● Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has crusaded against racial bias in law enforcement, now seems to find it acceptable it in child welfare.
The depressing script is being followed to the letter in New
York City.
Newspapers discover that children “known to the system”
sometimes die. Though there is no evidence that these tragedies are any more
common than before, now the press is paying attention. That turns the deaths into a “series” or a
“spate” or a “rash.” Then the child welfare agency, in this case the
Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), officially is christened “embattled”
and/or “beleaguered.”
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| New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio |
As is discussed in detail in a series of previous posts to
this blog, a slew of mayor wanna-bes rushes in exploit the tragedy by
announcing investigations and issuing reports. Gov. Andrew Cuomo does the same
to gain leverage in his feud with Mayor Bill de Blasio. De Blasio fails to
stand up for an agency that has, in fact, made remarkable progress,
taking away far fewer children with no compromise of child safety.
That should come as no surprise. Back when he chaired the
City Council’s Human Services Committee de Blasio proved adept at grabbing
headlines for himself by exploiting an earlier tragedy, the death of Nixzmary
Brown.
And of course there is the Ritual Sacrifice of the Agency
Chief, in this case Gladys Carrion. (Officially she retired. If so, it was
because the mayor wouldn’t stand behind her.)
Her replacement, David Hansell, has no experience specific to child
welfare. So he’s seeking advice.
There are several outstanding reformers in the field to whom
he could have turned. But chances are he doesn’t know about them. Instead
Hensell is looking for help in all the wrong places.
The people/organizations he’s bringing have done nothing to
distinguish themselves in the field. And they have one thing in common: a
fondness for computerized racial profiling, or to use the child welfare field’s
preferred euphemism, “predictive
analytics.”
Consultant #1
 |
| David Hansell |
Of all the choices Hansell has made the most difficult to
explain is his choice of Philip Browning, who
recently resigned as director of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.
In the 40 years I’ve followed child welfare, when I’ve read
stories in which people are asked to name systems that function relatively
well, I’ve never heard anyone mention Los Angeles.
There’s a reason for that. The Los Angeles child welfare
system is almost always embattled and/or beleaguered. It has the same sorts of high-profile
horror stories as New York City, and they provoke the same sort of response:
Foster-care panic. But unlike New York
City, L.A. tends not to recover from those panics. It just lurches from crisis
to crisis.
Browning is beloved by those who embrace a
take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. That’s because while Los
Angeles has all the same problems keeping children safe as New York City, Los
Angeles tears apart families at among the highest rates of America’s big
cities. In fact the rate-of-removal in Los Angeles is well over double the rate
of New York City – in fact, it’s more than 150 percent higher.
Or to put it another way, if New York City tore apart families at the rate Los Angeles tears
apart families, instead of taking away 3,702 children in fiscal year 2016, the
city would have had to take away more than 9,200 – a number that would be
higher than all but four of the past 24 years.
 |
| Philip Browning |
Browning did not make Los Angeles’ dreadful record of
removals any worse. But he didn’t make it any better. The already high
rate-of-removal in Los Angeles increased further at the beginning of his
tenure, which started at the end of 2011, then returned to about where they
were when he got there. And the number
of children trapped in foster care on any given day increased by more than 15
percent during his tenure.
And, by the way, Chicago does better than both New York and
Los Angeles – and in Chicago independent court monitors have found that the
emphasis on family preservation has improved child safety.
Los Angeles outperforms New York City in just one area: the
percentage of children placed in kinship foster care – that is, with relatives
instead of strangers. That improvement took place during Browning’s
tenure. Other than that, however, the
only thing Philip Browning can teach New York City is what not to do.
There was one other distinguishing feature of Browning’s
tenure in Los Angeles. He was a huge cheerleader for “predictive analytics” in
which computer algorithms use various “risk factors” to tell caseworkers who is
supposedly most likely to abuse a child.
As is outlined in detail in our publication Big Data is Watching You, predictive analytics has proven itself permeated with the same kinds of
racial and class biases that already plague child welfare. Yet in Los Angeles,
Browning brought in a private for-profit software firm to experiment with
predictive analytics using secret, proprietary software.
They didn’t use it on any actual cases. Rather, past cases
were fed into the computer and then it predicted risk. The algorithm predicted
many of the cases that, in fact, lead to deaths, near fatalities or “critical
incidents.” There was just one problem: It predicted vastly more cases where
there none of those things actually happened. In fact the rate of “false
positives” was over 95 percent. If
you predict that a vast number of cases will result in catastrophe, it’s no
wonder you’ll often be right, even as you are wrong far more often.
This means that, were this kind of system actually
implemented, vast numbers of innocent families would come under additional
scrutiny and their children would suffer the enormous trauma of needless foster
care placement – because no caseworker is going to risk being on the front page
as the worker who defied the algorithm and left a child in an unsafe home. So
all those children would face the high risk of abuse
in foster care itself.
And in the real world, all the time and resources squandered
pursuing these cases would be stolen from finding children in real danger –
potentially undermining any alleged gains the algorithm produced in finding such children.
Consultant #2
Consultant #2 is a private child welfare agency based in
Florida known as Eckerd Kids. In Florida, everything after the initial removal
of a child is handled by private “lead agencies.” Eckerd, which had the contract for the St.
Petersburg area was brought in to take over nearby metropolitan Tampa after,
yes, a “series” or “spate” or “rash” of deaths of children “known to the
system.”
They implemented a predictive analytics algorithm called
Rapid Safety Feedback. Eckerd then implied that this caused the deaths to stop
– they brag about this on their website.
As the same time, they piously proclaim that they don’t really know if
the two are related – and they really aren’t claiming any such thing.
In fact, the picture in Tampa is far murkier than Eckerd and
proponents of predictive analytics claim.
Full details are in Big Data is Watching You.
(Scroll down or search for “What Really Happened in Tampa.”)
And while backers of a take-the-child-and-run approach
across the country have been fawning over Eckerd’s methods, the agency seems to
be having trouble keeping its own house in order. A foster child in the care of
one of Eckerd’s subcontractors died
late last year and the foster mother has been charged with first degree
murder and aggravated child abuse. The foster mother worked as a marketing
manager for another Eckerd subcontractor.
There is no indication that Eckerd uses Rapid Safety
Feedback to screen foster parents. But if they did, this one probably would
have gotten a low risk score. Why? Because as the Tampa Bay Times put it in
an editorial that revealed a lot about bias in child welfare, analytics –
and journalism – the accused
seemed in many ways an ideal foster mother. College-educated with a $70,000 income, she lived in a nice Riverview neighborhood …
Of course, every agency has such failures. But it appears
that Eckerd is being sought out by child welfare systems across the county
largely on the basis of hype about how it supposedly stops such tragedies with
predictive analytics.
Consultant #3
Consultant #3 is Casey Family Programs. This is one of
several separate but similar foundations all endowed through the fortune of UPS
founder Jim Casey (the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which, long ago, funded
NCCPR, is another). Casey Family Programs is run by William Bell who joined
Casey after an undistinguished tenure running ACS. But I think the reason Casey is being brought
in is because of the recent work of its Executive Vice President of Systems
Improvement, David Sanders.
Sanders also ran the Los Angeles child welfare agency – and
he did a good job there. But more recently he’s been far less successful.
Sanders chaired a wretched mess known as the Commission to Eliminate Child
Abuse and Neglect Fatalities.
The commission was chaotic, it was angry, it was
dysfunctional, it was secretive and it made its decisions based on newspaper
horror stories. In other words, a
commission tasked with studying the child protective services system devolved
into a microcosm of that system. Details
are in a series of previous
posts to this blog, in NCCPR’s report
critiquing the commission’s work, and in a scathing dissenting
report from one of the commissioners.
And what was the key recommendation from this commission?
Take the racially biased, class biased approach of predictive analytics and
make it even worse. And what was the
basis for this recommendation? Eckerd’s
supposed success in Tampa.
From all this, an ugly picture emerges. New York City
appears poised to reverse decades of progress, albeit inconsistent progress, in
safely reducing the number of children consigned to the chaos of foster care.
And in another classic example of liberals
who forget everything they claim to believe in when someone whispers the
words child abuse in their ears, we have Mayor de Blasio. He has campaigned
against racial bias in policing, but apparently he’s ready to accept it in
child welfare.
Good reason to be
scared
During a previous foster-care panic in New York a
14-year-old wrote an essay called “I
am scared of ACS.”
Today, New York City’s vulnerable children have good reason
to be scared of ACS once again.
