A new audit of Oregon’s child welfare system is an exercise in willful ignorance. That makes it more part of the problem than part of the solution.
Earlier this week, Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud devoted
a program to a new (and, as almost every headline noted, “scathing”) audit of the
state child welfare system, conducted by the Oregon Secretary of State’s
office. The producers invited me onto the program to respond to comments from the
state’s two top child welfare officials and the lead auditor.
I was in a studio near Washington, D.C., so I couldn’t see
the other guests. That’s why I’ll probably never know how they managed to fit
all those guests and an elephant into one studio in Portland.
The elephant in the studio is, of course, Oregon’s obscenely
high rates of tearing children from their families and trapping them in foster
care. That elephant has been hanging around for decades – Oregon has been
tearing apart families at rates far above the national average since at least
the mid-1980s. Through all that time, the elephant has been ignored by the state
Department of Human Services. And the
behavior of the auditors is, if anything, even worse.
The audit devotes exactly one sentence to the fact that
Oregon is such an outlier when it comes to tearing apart families. The lead auditor gave it a single sentence on
Think Out Loud – and the sentence was
shocking. She said she didn’t know if Oregon holding children in foster care at
a rate she described as double the national average made the Oregon system “worse
or better” than others.
In fact, it’s not quite that bad. Oregon actually holds
children in foster care at a rate about 60 percent above thenational average, not double. But the fact that the auditor thinks the rate is double and still doesn’t know whether that makes
Oregon better or worse is that much more appalling.
As I said during my segment on the program. which starts at
32 minutes in and can be heard here …
… it’s understandable that someone entirely new to child welfare
issues would not know, at the very start of the audit, if an insane rate of removal is “better or
worse.” But how can you go through months and months examining an agency and
still not know by the end of the process?
Did the audit team even ask why Oregon is such an outlier? Apparently not.
Not that you asked, but
…
Though the auditors didn’t ask, here’s why
a high rate of removal makes a child welfare system worse:
● Most cases are nothing
like the horror stories. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” Other
cases fall between the extremes. Massive
studies of typical cases show that children left in their own homes fare
better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster
care. And a
study of foster children in Oregon and Washington State showed that the
foster care system churns out walking wounded four times out of five.
● All that harm occurs
even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But study
after study, including two from Oregon, found abuse in one-quarter to
one-third of foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is
even worse.
Oregon,
in particular, has seen scandal after scandal over abuse in foster care. Indeed, on the very day those child welfare
officials, the auditor and the elephant piled into that studio, it
was revealed that DHS proposed deliberately allowing children to remain in
homes where caseworkers admit they think the children are not safe – in order
to settle a lawsuit seeking to bar the state from warehousing children in
hotels. (It’s another example of how efforts to fix Oregon foster care have
become a
pathetic game of whack-a-mole.)
● All the time money and
effort wasted on false allegations, cases in which family poverty is confused
with neglect and needless foster care, as in this
Oregon case and this
one, is, in effect, stolen from finding children in real danger who really
do need to be taken from their homes.
So the implicit assumption behind the auditor’s ignorance –
what she really was saying is: Maybe that high rate of removal makes children
safer – is false. In all those months, the audit team never checked to find
out.
That makes the entire audit an exercise in willful
ignorance. And it invalidates many of its conclusions.
Much of the audit is built around the premise that there is
a shortage of foster homes in Oregon.
But if you don’t know why Oregon is taking away so many children, you
don’t know if Oregon has too few foster parents, or too many foster children.
So we get page after page about recruiting more foster
parents. Worse, the audit calls for institutionalizing more children in so-called “residential
treatment” – accepting as fact the claims of the residential treatment industry
that this is the only option for children with serious behavioral problems.
Apparently in all those months of auditing the auditors
never reviewed the mass
of research showing that residential treatment is a failure and there is
nothing residential treatment does that can’t be done better with Wraparound programs.
Such programs bring all the help a child needs into her or his own home or a
foster home. To see how, perhaps the
audit team will have a look at this video:
Similarly, the audit refers to DHS resorting to the very worst
form of “care” opening up more parking place “shelters” as “potentially positive
steps…” They express no concern at all that shelters
are terrible for children. The qualifier “potentially” refers only to the
fact that the shelter might not be enough to deal with the so-called “shortage”
of foster parents.
A gratuitous swipe at
kinship care
The audit even takes a gratuitous swipe at the least harmful
form of foster care – kinship foster care, placing children with relatives
instead of strangers. Study
after study
after study
has found that kinship foster care is more stable, more humane and, most
important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.” Yet the
audit declares that many foster children “have acute mental and physical health
needs that career foster homes may be better equipped and specifically trained
to handle.”
Why? Do the auditors think relatives are inherently too
stupid to be properly “equipped” and “trained”?
And speaking of biases, just as only one sentence is devoted
to Oregon’s high rate of tearing apart families, less than a sentence is
devoted to the racial makeup of Oregon foster care. The audit notes that
one-third of Oregon foster children are nonwhite. But that is mentioned only in
the context of – as you’ve probably guessed by now -- the need to recruit more
foster parents of color. The possibility that Oregon’s high rate of removal
might be related
to racial bias is not even considered.
Even when the auditors are right, they fail to ask the
obvious questions.
●The
audit paints a picture of an agency so incompetent it can’t even produce an up-to-date
organizational chart. It also confirms
something some of us have long known: Oregon is where good ideas in child
welfare go to die.
But the audit doesn’t go back far enough – to the 1990s,
when Oregon had a chance to reform its entire system along the lines pioneered by Alabama – and blew it. It’s not
as if this information is hard to find – it’s all laid out in the epilogue to this Oregon Public Broadcasting / Salem Statesman Journal story.
●The
audit discusses how badly DHS sometimes treats foster parents, and even how
badly people in the agency sometimes treat each other. But it never asks the
obvious question: DHS really needs foster parents, and it really needs its own
employees. If this is how staff and foster parents are treated, how are they
treating birth parents?
But since the list of “stakeholders” the auditors spoke to
includes virtually everyone with any connection to the system except birth parents who lost their
children to that system, it’s not likely the auditors would think to ask that
question.
Given all that, it’s not surprising that the recommendations
amount to nothing but more of the same: Recruit lots more foster parents and hire
lots more caseworkers.
But we already know exactly what that will produce: The same
lousy system only bigger.
That won’t start to change until, at long last, someone in
Oregon says “Hey: There’s an elephant in the room!”
