Even using a method that tends to bias findings toward removal, the study found a massive amount of needless intervention into the lives of families.
The findings were so striking that even the so-called Chronicle of Social Change, the Fox News
of child welfare – couldn’t
ignore them:
[A] study out of one of Florida’s most populous counties suggests that much of this new influx [of children into foster care] could be handled without the use of an out-of-home placement, and in some cases, without much child welfare involvement at all.
Broward County (seat: Fort Lauderdale) tested its current child welfare decision-making process against a predictive analytics approach, which relies on data collection and machine learning to predict likely future behavior. The study, conducted by a group of researchers and supporters of predictive analytics modeling, suggests that 40 percent of cases referred for either a foster care removal, intensive services or both could have been handled with less-intrusive options.
The Florida findings should come as no surprise to anyone
who has been following the foster-care panic that has engulfed the state for the
past three years.
The study doesn’t break down what proportion of removals
were unnecessary; the 40 percent figure is for all cases in which a court
either ordered removal or the “services” for families, such as counseling and
parent education.
But if even half - 20
percent - of the removals are unnecessary that’s more than 3,500 Florida
children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love every year - shoveled
into a system that churns out walking wounded four
times out of five, and placed at high risk of abuse
in foster care itself. Indeed, we’ve
known for a long time that in typical cases children left in their own homes fare
better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.
All that misery is being inflicted on children because,
three years ago, the Miami Heralddecided more children needed to be taken away – and because what passes for
leadership at the Florida Department of Children and Families caved in to the Herald’s campaign to smear efforts to
keep families together.
When "help" doesn’t help
There’s another important finding from the study: Providing the kinds of “help” that makes the
helpers feel good – forcing parents into “counseling” and “parent education” - instead of giving families what they really
need, usually concrete help to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty, can be
worse than not intervening at all.
Again, no surprise.
Advocates of family preservation have been making
this point for decades. Now, even the CEO of ChildNet, the nonprofit in charge of
providing the services in Broward County, agrees, telling the Chronicle:
“It might not be that my child was removed because I was bad parent, but that I’m homeless,” [ChildNetCEO Emilio] Benitez said. “If I lost my job, and I just don’t have stabilized housing, that doesn’t mean I’m a bad parent. But we almost always make them go to parenting classes.”
The one surprise in the study
But one thing is a surprise: Predictive analytics
tends to magnify the biases of child welfare workers. If, even using predictive
analytics, it’s clear that Florida is taking away too many children, the study
almost certainly underestimates the extent of the wrongful removal problem. In
other words, the study underestimates the harm that the Miami Herald and the weak-kneed leadership at the Department of
Children and Families have done to children.
