No matter how many times the Fox News of Child Welfare says
it does, it’s still not true.
I have previously noted the serious potential for harm
caused by the slanted “journalism” practiced by the so-called Chronicle of Social Change – the Fox
News of child welfare. Things like promoting a column using
a vile racial stereotype to attack an impoverished birth mother, or the Chronicle’s cozying
up to the group home industry.
But there’s something else worth noting: A bizarre, if
relatively harmless, obsession on the part of its publisher - and self-proclaimed "child welfare expert" -- Daniel Heimpel: His demonstrably erroneous claim, repeated
over and over, that Los Angeles County has the largest child welfare system in
America.
It does not.
Even using Heimpel’s measure of choice, it does not.
I have no idea why it matters so much to him. Sure, he lives
in Los Angeles, but it’s not as if having a super-sized child welfare system is
anything to be proud of. Yet Heimpel’s fervor about this runs so deep that less
than a month after Chronicle’s editor
John Kelly corrected the error, Heimpel repeated it, and seemed to double down
on it. It’s been repeated in story after story ever since. It’s reached the point where people in Los
Angeles County child welfare are starting to believe it.
Does it really matter? Not nearly as much as the Chronicle’s other failings. But if they can’t – or won’t
– get something so basic correct, why should they be trusted on larger policy issues?
It’s big – but not biggest
The Los Angeles County child welfare system is very, very
big. That makes sense given that Los Angeles County is very, very big. It’s
likely that Los Angeles has the largest child welfare system run by a county or other unit of local
government. But in most of America,
states, not individual counties, run child welfare. And it’s easy to forget
that there are states that have many more children than Los Angeles County – so
many more that it’s unlikely on its face that Los Angeles County would have a larger child welfare system.
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| TABLE #1: Sources are listed at the end of this post |
So if you simply measure the system by the number of
children it has the potential to be involved with, Florida and Texas (as well
as Georgia and Illinois, by the way) all are bigger. (Other states with larger
child populations are like California – individual counties run child welfare.)
Another approach is to use only measures that detail how
often the child welfare agency actually intervenes in a family’s life.
This table offers several possible measures, including
Heimpel’s choice, discussed below. Los Angeles comes out third in all of them:
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| TABLE #2: Definitions and sources are listed at the end of this post. |
● Number of children who were subjected to child abuse
investigations? Los Angeles is third,
behind Texas and Florida.
● Number of children in foster care? Los Angeles is third
again, behind Texas and Florida.
But Heimpel offers an answer for this one, writing:
Los Angeles’ child
welfare agency is the largest in the nation, serving more than 34,000 children,
almost 21,000 of whom are placed in out-of-home foster care.
In other words, he simply combines the number of children in
foster care and the number receiving “services” in their own homes.
There’s just one problem: Florida and Texas also provide
in-home “services.” And yes, they report
doing it for a larger number of children than Los Angeles.
So in category after category after category – including
Heimpel’s category of choice -- Los Angeles County, California is not the
largest child welfare system in America.
Complicating things further: There is plenty of room for
fudging some of these figures. For example, Texas coerces large numbers of
children into kinship foster care placements without taking the family to court
- and doesn’t
count them in its statistics on the number of children in foster care.
And, of course, these figures say nothing about the rate at which these jurisdictions place
children in foster care. One reason the Los Angeles system is so large is the simple
fact that it takes
away too many children.
The UN-correction
The Chronicle’s error
actually used to be even bigger. A year ago, the Chronicle published this
story which, in its original form, called the Los Angeles system the
biggest in the whole world! So I sent an
email to Chronicle Editor John Kelly
pointing out the problem. I’ve excerpted it here:
From: Richard Wexler
Date: Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 5:10 PM
Subject: Errors in the Charity Chandler-Cole story
To: John Kelly
I know it’s difficult for Heimpel & Co. to grasp that Los
Angeles is not the center of the universe, but there is one blatant factual
error in this story, …
Los Angeles County does not have the largest child welfare
system in the world, or even in the United States. The state-run systems
in Texas and Florida both are larger, whether measured by the number of
children living in those states or the number of children trapped in foster
care in those states. If you measure only by child population, Illinois
and Georgia also are larger. …
Kelly corrected the text of the story and, after I sent a
second email, he corrected the headline.
But while the Chronicle
has never again called the L.A. system the largest in the world, in story after
story the Fox News of Child Welfare has insisted it’s the largest in the United
States. The story citing the combined
in-home and foster care numbers – published only a month after the Chronicle corrected the earlier story - seemed
to be Heimpel’s way of doubling down.
That only made him doubly wrong.
It may not be true that everything’s bigger in Texas, but
the child welfare system is.
Table #1:
Sources:
Texas and Florida: Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey,
2016: http://bit.ly/2Oq5uBY (Impoverished
child data average the figures for 2014, 2015 and 2016); Los Angeles: Bureau of
the Census, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, 2016: http://bit.ly/2AVRSwj
Table #2
Definitions and sources:
Definition of
in-home services:
Texas: Children receiving Family Preservation Services, August 31, 2017;
Florida: Children receiving in-home services and family support services, April
30, 2018; Los Angeles: Defined as “In-home Services” mostly “Family Maintenance
Services,” August 31, 2017 Dates are the
same for number of children in foster care.
Sources:
Florida: Florida
Department of Children and Families, Out of Home care and In-home services, DCF dashboard: http://bit.ly/2KG56N3 Children in CPS
investigations: Office Of Child Welfare, 2017
Annual Performance Report, Fiscal Year 2016-2017 http://bit.ly/2OWV8u3; Texas: Department of Family and
Protective Services, DFPS Data Book: http://bit.ly/2ATQF8K; Los Angeles
County: Department of Children and Family Services, Out of Home care and
In-home services: Child Welfare Services
Data Monthly Fact Sheet, August – 2017 http://bit.ly/2vRv0rN CPS
investigations: California Child Welfare Indicators Project http://bit.ly/2nozJNO
