The headline on a
recent interview with David Hansell, Commissioner of New York City’s
Administration for Children’s Services, says “New York Child Welfare Leader
Looks to Reform the System.”
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| David Hansell |
Unfortunately, the evidence so far suggests that Hansell is
moving to un-reform a system that probably was as good as or better than any big-city
child welfare system in the country.
For the third time in 21 years, New York City is almost
certainly going through a foster-care
panic – a sharp sudden increase in children torn from their homes in the
wake of a high-profile tragedy. The
current panic seems to have worsened since Hansell arrived.
That doesn’t mean New York used to have a good system. “Best
child welfare system” is a bit like saying “best view of Trenton, N.J.” But,
according to key safety indicators and a
recent analysis from Casey Family Programs, a year ago it was a relatively good system – and getting
better. It was not “embattled” as it would
come to be described in almost every news story and the commissioner in 2016,
Gladys Carrion, was not “beleaguered.”
Until last September, that is, when ACS was mugged by the
city’s tabloid press, the governor, and an assortment of mayor wannabes who
grabbed their 15 minutes of fame at the expense of the city’s most vulnerable
children. Mayor Bill de Blasio, while
not exactly joining in the mugging, behaved like the bystander who runs away and
doesn’t bother to call 911.
Of course this led to the Ritual Sacrifice of the Agency
Chief. So Carrion was out and Hansell was in.
What the data tell us
Let’s start with the basics. New York City has a relative
wealth of child welfare data, which my group compiled at the end of our
report on the city’s child welfare system.
The recent Casey report added additional data.
The number of children in foster care on any given day in
New York City dropped from 48,000 in 1993 to a little under 10,000 in 2016. The number of children entering foster care
over the course of a year has risen and fallen over that time, but after
spiking during panics in the late 1990s and the late 2000s, it declined every
year through fiscal year 2016.
During that same period, the two key measures of child
safety – reabuse of children and foster care recidivism (the proportion of
children released from foster care who had to be placed again) both have
remained about the same. In the most
recent years, including Carrion’s tenure, both improved. And both measures are
better now than they were in 1997 – the year the city set a record for child removals,
taking more than three times as many children as in 2016.
But what about fatalities? As the Casey Family Programs report documents
in this chart,
among children “known to the system” homicide deaths
declined slightly. Even when you add in fatalities for which no cause of death
could be determined, the death rate remained the same. And, the Casey report notes, New York City
has an unusually expansive definition of what it means for a child to be
previously known to ACS.
Most important, as the Casey report confirms, though each is
the worst imaginable form of tragedy, we should be grateful that the raw number
of cases is low enough to make it impossible to “prove” anything based on these
horror stories. Or as the report puts it:
“It is not advisable to assess performance of and draw conclusions about a
system based on retrospective fatality review.”
The more reliable measures make clear that, under the
leadership of Gladys Carrion the not- particularly-embattled Administration for
Children’s Services engaged in a model of “trauma-informed” practice: The
agency significantly reduced the number of children traumatized by needless
removal of their homes, with no compromise of child safety.
Or, as the Casey report puts it: “ACS’s response to
allegations of maltreatment decreases the risk of recurrence over time.” The
report characterizes ACS as “a system that continues to strengthen and improve
outcomes for New York City’s children and families.”
How to embattle an agency
So how did ACS wind up embattled and Carrion wind up beleaguered?
● First came the attack of the tabloids. That happened
because every few years, usually in the wake of a particularly horrifying case
(this time it was Zymere Perkins), New York City news media discover that A)
the city has a child protective services agency and B) sometimes children known
to that agency die.
But unlike the police, who are praised when they reduce
crime even when they don’t entirely eliminate it, ACS is condemned because it
merely made children safer but did not prevent every tragedy. Once the media choose one tragedy to
highlight, then every succeeding tragedy becomes front-page news, thereby
making them a “series” or “spate” of deaths - until the media get bored and
move on.
● Then the politicians pounced. A
motley assortment of likely candidates in the next mayoral election
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| New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo |
They were aided by Gov. Andrew Cuomo who is engaged in a
bitter, personal feud with Mayor de Blasio.
And it’s all been compounded by a lawsuit from Marcia Lowry, who
divorced the group she originally founded, Children’s
Rights, and formed a new one, A Better Childhood. The lawsuit is so
ill-conceived that the lawyers who represent children in child welfare proceedings
joined the lawyers who represent parents in opposing it.
Hansell isn’t helping
This is the turmoil into which David Hansell walked. His
initial moves are likely to make things worse.
● His fondness for the city’s Child-STAT system in which
weekly meetings are held to pour over data and review cases shows no indication
that he understands the crucial flaws in that system – such as allowing casework
like this to go unchallenged.
● One of the consultants he’s brought in, Phillip Browning
ran a system, Los Angeles County, that takes away children at a rate well
over double that of New York City – with no evidence that L.A. kids are
twice as safe as their New York City counterparts.
● All of his consultants have a fondness for “predictive
analytics” or as it should properly be called, computerized racial profiling.
In contrast Gladys Carrion was one of the few child welfare leaders to
suggest that the predictive analytics emperor might have no clothes.
The Casey report warns that
reactive and punitive action following high-profile tragedies contributes to fear-based decisions and an increased number of children removed and placed in foster care. In addition, it overloads the system, and the staff, leading to poor staff morale and high turnover rates.
Although Casey didn’t say it, that also means workers have
less time to investigate any case properly, increasing the risk to children.
Unfortunately, Casey’s report suggests, albeit in the same genteel
language, that ACS is doing just what it warns against – stifling the system in
a mass of what might best be called CYA
rules, regulations, reviews and reviews-of-the-reviews, none of which
does anything to make children safer. In
some cases, Casey found, these new reviews are delaying provision of services
to families.
But worst of all, Hansell has done nothing to stop the
foster-care panic. It’s not his fault that in October, 2016, the first full
month after Zymere Perkins died, ACS tore children from their families at a
rate 75 percent above the same month a year earlier. But he does bear primary responsibility for
the fact that, in May of this year, the most recent month for which data
are available, entries into care more than doubled over the same month the
last year.
So congratulations Gov. Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, assorted
mayor-wannabees and Commissioner Hansell.
Soon ACS may well be off the hook. But now it’s the children who are
beleaguered and the families who are embattled.
