NOT SAFE for KIDS Fixing Our Broken Child Welfare System

NOT SAFE FOR KIDS Fixing Our Broken Child Welfare System

Naomi Schaefer Riley

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE Not Safe for Kids

Fixing Our Broken Child Welfare System

Naomi Schaefer Riley

October 2018

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

Contents Introduction 1 Can Big Data Help Save Abused Kids? 3 Reason, February 6, 2018 Why Child Abuse like the Turpin Family Horrors Is So Hard to Prevent or Halt 26 Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2018 Foster Kids, Wronged by the Courts 30 New York Daily News, April 20, 2018

This Is Us Gets Adoption and Foster Care Right 34 Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2017 The Challenge of Finding Homes for Rural America’s Foster Children 37 Atlantic, August 3, 2018 Opioid Abuse Isn’t “Victimless.” What About the Kids? 45 Bloomberg, March 30, 2018 Judicial Tough Love Helps Addicted Mothers Stay Clean 50 Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2018 What’s a Single Mom to Do During a Week in the Hospital? 54 Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2018 School and Home 58 Philanthropy Roundtable, April 2018

iii iv NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

Will Placing Fewer Children in Foster Care Fix the System? 66 Institute for Family Studies, May 16, 2018 No, the Child-Welfare System Isn’t Racist 70 Weekly Standard, June 4, 2018 Reconsidering Kinship Care 80 National Affairs, Summer 2018 About the Author 101 Introduction

aomi Schaefer Riley is an author and journalist who frequently Nwrites opinion pieces for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal. Like all good opinion writers, she informs her readers with solid reporting. She talks with the people who are involved in an issue and goes to the places where change is happening. For the past couple of years, she has applied her reporting skills to a topic that is not well understood by the American people—child welfare and foster care. Riley’s contributions to the literature on America’s most troubled families and children have shown us four things. First, our system for child protection is hardly foolproof. Second, the latest data tools and predictive analytics should be made available to child-welfare agencies to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their interventions. Riley reminds us that the early years of a child’s life are the most important to their development, and local agencies and courts must act in a more timely manner when deciding on a child’s fate. Third, when it comes to placing children removed from their homes, child-welfare workers and courts must reconsider the current practice of prioritizing blood relatives as caregivers. Riley reminds child-welfare stakeholders that providing a loving and stable home, irrespective of kinship, is the most important factor in protecting children. Fourth, her reporting demonstrates that the best solutions to our child-welfare problems must involve government, civil society, and partnerships between the two. Riley’s recent work confirms that child maltreatment continues to be a serious issue in the US. The long-term decline of stable two-parent families and the current spike in opioid addiction have put many more children at risk of abuse and neglect than there should be. The stakes are high. An estimated 1,750 children died because of maltreatment in 2016, up 7.4 percent from 2012.1 For the children who are removed 1 2 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS from their parents—more than 437,000 in 20162—the foster care system struggles to find, train, and keep suitable caregivers. Riley calls for more to be done to recruit and support foster parents who provide crucial aid to vulnerable children. In the broader world of poverty studies, we hear often from aca- demics with their narrow emphasis on data and from advocates and government practitioners who have their particular interests. Riley brings something different and important to the discussion, and that is why AEI is pleased to publish this collection of her work.

Robert Doar Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies American Enterprise Institute

Note

1. US Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau, “Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities 2016: Statistics and Interventions,” July 2018, https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/fatality.pdf. 2. US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Chil- dren and Families, “Number of Children in Foster Care Continues to Increase,” November 30, 2017, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/media/press/2017/number-of- children-in-foster-care-continues-to-increase. Can Big Data Help Save Abused Kids? Reason, February 6, 2018

t has been a little over a year since the death of 6-year-old Zymere I Perkins. The boy, who died in Harlem at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend, had been smacked as many as 20 times in a row in front of witnesses, beaten with a belt, placed under cold showers, and denied food as a punishment. In addition to bruises and broken bones, he was missing all of his front teeth. But apparently all his mother had to do was tell the city social workers that he had fallen—down the stairs, off a scooter, whatever—and they would close the case. According to a report released by the New York State Office of Chil- dren and Family Services in December 2016, 10 children died in the 12 weeks before Perkins, despite each being the subject of at least four abuse or maltreatment complaints.1 The New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) has since undergone an overhaul, installing a new commissioner and instituting greater measures of accountability for its employees. But to anyone who has been keeping track of such cases, the outrage and the plans for reform will sound sadly familiar. Ten years before Zymere Perkins, there was Nixzmary Brown, a 7-year-old girl from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brook- lyn who was tortured and murdered by her stepfather. In that case, too, ACS had been made aware of her situation at least twice before the fatal beating. Her school had reported her absent for weeks at a time. Neighbors said she sustained unexplained injuries, including a black eye, and that she seemed undernourished—weighing less than 45 pounds at the time of her death. 3 4 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

In the wake of that case, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the ACS to reopen numerous files. New York state legislators stiffened penalties to allow parents in such cases to be charged with first- degree murder. Efforts to publicize the city’s child-abuse hotline were expanded. Most metropolitan child-welfare bureaucracies have been through such a process at least once in the past two decades. From Gabriel Fernandez, the 8-year-old boy killed by his mother and her boyfriend in Los Angeles in 2013, to Danieal Kelly, the cerebral palsy–stricken girl who died in 2006 at age 14 after almost a decade of investigations by Philadelphia caseworkers into her mother’s failure to feed or bathe her, to 2-year-old Tariji Gordon of Sanford, Florida, who had been sent back to live with her mother after her twin brother suffocated, only to be found in 2014 dead and buried in a suitcase, there is always a shocking case that leads to a public outcry and then reform. But whether it’s pumping more money into the system or simply installing a no-nonsense leader at the top, few of these changes seem to make a difference. All too soon, things go back to the way they were. In Out of Harm’s Way, published in 2017 to much less fanfare than it deserved, sociologist Richard Gelles offers a devastating account of how little effect bureaucratic reforms usually have.2 More money, more staff, more training, more lawsuits brought against child protective services, or the ever-popular convening of more blue-ribbon com- mittees—nothing has really moved the needle on protecting children in recent years. In some cases, reform amounts to little more than changing the name of the agency. Some three million children are the subject of maltreatment investigations each year, 700,000 of which are substantiated. There are about 2,500 child fatalities due to abuse or neglect by a parent or caregiver in the US annually, and about half of those are cases child-welfare agencies were aware of beforehand. “If [child protective services] agencies cannot protect the children they already know to be at risk,” Gelles asks in his book, “whom can they protect?”3 For too long, we’ve been asking undertrained social workers to make high-stakes decisions about children and families based on patchy data and gut intuition. The result is a system riddled with CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 5 the biases, inattention, bad incentives, error, and malice that plague all human endeavors, but especially massive government bureaucracies. Every day, some kids are forcibly taken from their parents for the wrong reasons while others are left to suffer despite copious warning signs. The children the system is failing are disproportionately poor and members of racial minority groups. In many cases, their families have been devastated by generations of family breakdown, unemployment, drug abuse, and crime. But these cannot be excuses for leaving their fates to a system with such deep and abiding flaws. Conservatives have too often thrown up their hands, arguing that government cannot replace the family and there is not much to be done until the institution of marriage is repaired. Liberals, meanwhile, have suggested that these problems can’t be fixed until we end poverty and racism. In the meantime, bureaucrats are bumbling into the lives of too many families just trying to do their best while leaving some of the most vulnerable children in society unprotected. We can do better.

*** Gelles is a Boston native, and Red Sox paraphernalia line the shelves and windowsills of his office at the School of Social Policy and Prac- tice at the University of Pennsylvania. He also seems to have a thing for old-fashioned typewriters, which must look like ancient arti- facts to his students. But his work is forward-looking, not nostalgic. Gelles is one of the biggest boosters of predictive analytics in the child-welfare field. Predictive analytics refers to the use of historical data to forecast the likelihood of future events. Thanks to powerful computers, statisticians in recent years have been able to develop models for understanding, for instance, the probability that a criminal out on parole might commit a crime again. In the area of child welfare in particular, proponents are enthusiastic about the prospect of getting better information about children at risk. There is so much we don’t, and can’t, know about what goes on inside of families that child-welfare workers are largely flying blind. But big data has the potential to tell the likelihood that a child will be subject to neglect, abuse—or worse. 6 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

There are serious concerns about the collection and use of these data among civil libertarians. Studies have suggested that the models used to forecast criminal behavior overpredict crime by blacks and Latinos. There are also questions about what kinds of data are being collected and how. And then there are researchers who question the accuracy of such models altogether. But at least in the current pilot programs, there is no new intrusion into people’s lives. The goal is to do a better job of crunching the numbers that are already being collected—by the reporters of abuse or by welfare agencies and school systems. In this field, predictive analytics are being used to determine how urgently problems should be investigated and how resources like preventive services are allocated. For people who study the tragic details every day of the kids who fall through the cracks, this new method is the most dramatic development in decades. It’s easy to see how spending so much time reading about these cases—let alone working directly with victims of the worst sorts of abuse—could turn someone hypervigilant. But while Gelles is a self-described “safety hawk” when it comes to protecting kids, he isn’t some Law & Order: Special Victims Unit hysteric who sees pred- ators lurking around every corner. He simply believes that if social workers want to get better at their jobs, they should study math and statistics. “There are patterns, and if you get enough data and you run it through enough iterations, you will find the pattern in what appears to be chaos,” he says.4 This formulation will be familiar to those who have read Moneyball, journalist Michael Lewis’ account of how big data allowed the Oakland Athletics baseball club to sign better players for less money and win championships against much wealthier teams. In fact, at the beginning of his 2016 book The Undoing Project, Lewis lightly mocks all the other uses people have found for predictive analytics in the years since Moneyball was published. “In the past decade or so, a lot of people have taken the Oakland A’s as their role model and set out to use better data, and better analysis of those data, to find market inefficiencies,” he writes. “I’ve read articles about Money- ball for Education, Moneyball for Movie Studios, Moneyball for Medi- care, Moneyball for Golf, Moneyball for Farming, Moneyball for Book CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 7

Publishing(!), Moneyball for Presidential Campaigns, Moneyball for Government, Moneyball for Bankers, and so on.”5 And maybe we have overinvested in the promise of big data. In an October article in Slate, Will Oremus criticized our society’s “fetishi- zation” of these efforts and suggested they ultimately “went bust.”6 But before we write off sophisticated number crunching as yes- terday’s news, Gelles hopes we’ll at least consider whether it could improve a field whose success or failure haslife-altering , and even life-saving, implications for children—one that has experienced very little improvement in the past few decades.

*** Proponents of predictive analytics believe social workers still have an important role to perform in the system. Gelles has spent the better part of four decades training them. But he worries that we’re not giving these actors the tools they need to do their jobs well. (He has also made his share of enemies among social workers, to judge by the responses I’ve received when I’ve written columns that quote him.) With a Bostonian inflection, Gelles says it’s preposterous to send out “23-year-old ahhht history majors” to determine which children are at risk of abuse. “Even the state-of-the-art assessment tools being used in New York are no better at predicting risk for a child than if you flipped a coin.”7 He describes social workers’ “expertise” as “simply inadequate” to the task of knowing when children should be forcibly removed from their homes, writing that these decisions inevitably “are influenced by the worker’s personal characteristics, biases and experiences, which lead to a variety of problems concerning the reli- ability and validity of predicted risk.”8 But until the 1990s, caseworkers’ clinical judgment was the only thing they had to go on. One such caseworker was Kim Dennis. After graduating from Bow- doin College with a degree in sociology in 1979, Dennis went to work for Maine’s department of child services in the town of Caribou. “My mother told me I was good with people,” she says. “I thought I could help them solve their problems.”9 8 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

Dennis recalls receiving almost no training. Mostly, she visited the trailer homes of pregnant teenagers, instructed them in proper breathing techniques for when they gave birth, and told them about the public services they were entitled to receive. Every once in a while, though, she would be sent out to investigate a claim of child abuse. “I would knock on the door and say, ‘What are you doing to your kid?’ They would say, ‘No, I’m not doing anything.’ And I would leave,” she says. “My feeling was that we were prying into people’s lives. If it had been something serious, I wouldn’t have known. And if I had known, I wouldn’t have known what to do.” In retrospect, “the only thing I did know was that I had no idea what I was doing.”10 She quit a few months later. Today, Dennis is president of the Searle Freedom Trust. Her first job—the one where she was, in Irving Kristol’s famous words, mugged by reality—made her skeptical of the power of government to solve people’s problems. At Searle, she has helped to support projects that improve people’s lives through private means. (Searle is also a supporter of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that pub- lishes Reason magazine.) In the late ’90s, child-welfare agencies started using actuarial risk assessment models to determine which children were at a heightened risk of abuse. “The argument being, of course, actuary risk assessment is used in many, many industries that manage to make a profit in making the right decisions,” Gelles explains, “so why wouldn’t I use actuary decision making in these kinds of decisions?”11 Structured Decision Making (SDM), which is based on these models, did improve matters to a limited extent. For one thing, it imposed some uniformity on the factors that social workers took into consideration when making decisions. According to the Children’s Research Center, SDM was supposed to offer “clearly defined and consistently applied decision-making criteria,” as well as “readily measurable practice standards, with expectations of staff clearly identified and reinforced.”12 Unfortunately, it did not produce the magnitude of improvement that Gelles and others had hoped for. “The actuarial decisions are only as good as the data you have, and the child-welfare system had a limited portfolio of data,” he recalls.13 CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 9

States were collecting information on families through various agencies—child welfare, education, criminal justice—but it was difficult if not impossible for the different entities to share this information with one another or for social workers to access it. “The problem is that each agency would hire its own [information technology] person who did the software,” he says, “and the software would come from six different companies.”14 It wasn’t until 2010 that two places—Mecklenburg County in North Carolina and Mont- gomery County in Maryland—began implementing what was called “interoperability.” In many ways, predictive analytics weren’t a revolution so much as one more step in the long slog toward improving a faltering system. Bill Baccaglini, president of New York Foundling—the oldest foster care agency in New York City—says data and “regression modeling” have “been around for a long, long time.” So what’s new today? “The algorithms, they’re just much richer. There are just many more vari- ables in the model.”15 And that one step has made all the difference.

*** Emily Putnam-Hornstein has been steeped in data from the beginning of her career—which wasn’t actually that long ago. In 2011, the same year she received her doctorate from Berkeley, she published a paper on predictors of child welfare in the journal Children and Youth Services Review.16 The question, which at the time seemed to Putnam-Hornstein like an interesting exercise but not anything with practical implications, was whether you could predict on the day a child is born the likelihood that he or she would eventually enter child protective services. Putnam-Hornstein was surprised to find that the answer was “yes,” and “with a high degree of accuracy” to boot. Shortly thereafter, she was approached by New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development. When word about her work got around, there was an outcry. Citi- zens feared that the government’s goal was to take children from their parents before the first report of abuse had been made. In fact, policymakers were trying to figure out how they could best deploy their home visiting services, and they were interested in developing a proof of concept. 10 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

In 2012, working with lead researcher Rhema Vaithianathan, a professor of economics at Auckland University of Technology, Putnam-Hornstein developed a predictive risk modeling (PRM) tool for children in families that receive public benefits. Among the data used are the age of mothers and the date of their first benefit payment, but there were more than a hundred other factors as well. As Vaithianathan explained in the Chronicle of Social Change, “We see this train wreck in slow motion and no one is doing anything about it until that first call comes in. The question is, do we have an obligation to do something?”17 The ministry officials suggested that their data could be used to offer parenting programs to families with children at a high risk for abuse. The backlash to the idea was immediate, however. Richard Wex- ler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, suggested that using big data to determine which kids might be in danger resembles the plot of the movie Minority Report, in which police use psychic technology to figure out who is going to commit a murder and then arrest and convict the perpetrator beforehand. In an article on his blog called “Big Data Is Watching You,” Wexler, whose work has been cited by the New York Times and the Washington Post, wrote: “They are not proposing to rely on psychics in a bathtub. Instead they’re proposing something even less reliable: using ‘predictive analytics’ to decide when to tear apart a family and consign the children to the chaos of foster care.”18 Wexler cites a study by Emily Keddell of the University of Otago, which notes that 32–48 percent of the children in New Zealand who were identified as being at the very highest risk by the software turned out to be “substantiated” victims of child abuse. He decries what he sees as the unacceptably high “false positive” rate of such a system. “Think about that for a moment,” he wrote. “A computer tells a caseworker that he or she is about to investigate a case in which the children are at the very highest level of risk. What caseworker is going to defy the computer and leave these children in their homes, even though the computer is wrong more than half the time?”19 Keddell, the paper’s author, argues that the substantiation rate may not even be as high as it seems because child abuse is often ill-defined CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 11 and defined differently in different localities. Plus, caseworkers are subject to bias, including from pressure by an algorithm. “Substan- tiation data as a reflection of incidence have long been criticised by researchers in the child protection field,” she wrote. “The primary problem is that many cases go [unreported], while some populations are subject to hyper-surveillance, so that even minor incidents of abuse are identified and reported in some groups.”20 In 2015, the New Zealand program was shut down entirely. “Not on my watch,” wrote Minister of Social Development Anne Tolley. “These children are not lab rats.” She told the local press, “I could not believe they were actually even considering that. Whether it would have gotten through the ethics committee—I hoped it wouldn’t.”21 Putnam-Hornstein and her colleagues continued their work, developing new models informed by the pushback. In 2014, she began working on a proof of concept with the Depart- ment of Children and Family Services (DCFS) in Los Angeles County. Project AURA—the initials stand for Approach to Understanding Risk Assessment—looked at child deaths, near fatalities, and “critical incidents” in 2011 and 2012. Using data that were already being collected, including previous child-abuse referrals, arrests, and substance abuse histories, statisticians at a company called SAS created an algorithm and produced in each case a risk score on a scale from 1 to 1,000. “In Los Angeles, we are data rich but analytically poor,” says Genie Chough, the director of government affairs and legislation at DCFS.22 AURA offered Chough and her colleagues the chance to make use of some of the vast quantity of information that was being collected on the families they served. According to Chough, when SAS compared the predictions with actual outcomes, the algorithm was 76 percent accurate. While not outstanding, that is significantly better than flip- ping a coin and better than the findings from the New Zealand studies as well. Nonetheless, Chough and her colleagues ultimately concluded that AURA was “fatally flawed.” Perhaps because they realize how sensitive the program is and how much relying on the wrong model could have undermined public confidence, they areself-reflective and critical in a way you might not expect from government bureaucrats. Since Los 12 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

Angeles County used the private firm SAS, as opposed to a public university or some other open-source entity, to create the algorithm, it was not as transparent as they felt it should have been. The county attempted to validate the performance of the model, but researchers could not replicate it. Importantly, the data also could not be updated in real time. And with big data, the bigger and more current the inputs, the more accurate it is. Putnam-Hornstein says this fact is not necessarily intuitive, even for someone trained to analyze data. “As a research scientist, I had always been taught to think about models that are developed for descriptive purposes and causal relationships,” she says. But prediction risk modeling “is a different approach, a kitchen-sink approach. This is all the information we have at the time a call comes in. What can it tell us about future differences in outcomes? We are not looking at any one specific factor.”23 Los Angeles is ready to learn from its mistakes and start using predictive analytics to help screen the calls that come into its child-abuse hotline. There were 219,000 in 2017, according to Jennie Feria, the DCFS regional administrator who oversees it. These can come from “mandated reporters,” such as teachers and doctors, or from anyone who comes upon something he or she considers an instance of child abuse or neglect.24 About a third of these calls result in an in-person investigation by a social worker. The rest don’t meet the standard of “reasonable suspicion.” But this determination is often fraught. The operators at the hotline frequently don’t have all the information they need in front of them to make a call, and when they do, it’s easy to overlook some important factor or to underestimate what might be a significant warning sign. What kinds of signs are we talking about? The answer can be surprising. Pennsylvania has separate systems for reporting abuse and neglect. Child Protective Services monitors the former, while General Protective Services looks at the latter. That separation long resulted in useful information being lost. Once they started to look at the data, Gelles says, “What you find is there are a series of neglect reports—four, five, six neglect CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 13 reports—that predate a fatality.”25 Until this information was made available, he and most other experts and child-welfare workers assumed that there would be “a progression of physical violence up to a fatal incident. That isn’t the case. There are dysfunctions in the family that come to public attention,”26 but they sometimes stop short of abuse. Red flags include a home in disrepair and multiple cases of util- ities being shut off. Social services will help the family find better housing or get the power turned back on. “But when a family keeps coming to your attention and isn’t changing, that’s a serious sign that there’s something we missed here,” Gelles says.27 When parents could get running water and heat for their children but either repeat- edly choose not to or simply forget about it, there’s something very wrong. Yet the current system does not pay any special attention to those families. There is also information in big data that would make call screeners less likely to request an investigation of cases that don’t merit one. According to Putnam-Hornstein, one in three children in America will have contact with child services before the age of 18. That number suggests that agencies are wasting resources investigating cases that are highly unlikely to be substantiated. These false alarms significantly increase the caseload of child-welfare workers and make it difficult to focus sufficient time and energy on the cases that are most likely to need them. They also often justify further intrusions into family privacy. (In this sense, America’s child-welfare system is broken in much the same way its immigration system is: Law enforcement officers spend so much effort trying to catch people who want to garden ille- gally that they run out of resources with which to track down people who want to blow up buildings.) The use of PRM at a child-abuse hotline is primarily a matter of triage. Not only might an algorithm be able to sort out likely from unlikely cases of abuse, Feria explains, it could also help ensure that those cases at the highest risk—say, the top 5 percent—get identified and investigated immediately. While critics like Wexler worry about false positives, Gelles argues that the current system already produces plenty of the same. But right 14 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS now, they’re based almost entirely on the gut instinct of the caseworker visiting a home or the person answering the phone at a hotline. The next step in Los Angeles is stalled for the time being. The state of California is considering implementing predictive analytics at all of its county hotlines, since it is updating and revamping the technology it uses to field calls and collect data anyway. But doing so will be a long and bureaucratic process, Chough tells me. “L.A. County is anxious to get out of the gate. But now we have to wait for 57 counties to get on board, so we are in a sort of holding pattern.”28

*** There is one place in the US where predictive analytics have made their official child-welfare debut: Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The area, whose largest city is Pittsburgh, implemented the Allegheny Family Screening Tool in August 2016. Some 17 teams had answered a request for proposals put out by the county two years earlier, and Putnam-Hornstein and Vaithianathan’s was selected. In March 2017, the county published its first report on their project. The Department of Human Services “decided that the most promising, ethical and readily implemented use of [predictive risk modeling] within the Allegheny County child-protection context was one in which a model would be deployed at the time an allegation of maltreatment was received at the hotline,” the report explains.29 The county receives roughly 15,000 calls to that line per year. Each one is currently given a score from 1 to 20 that determines its urgency and severity. “Allegheny is one of the most forward-thinking counties in the country,” says New York Foundling’s Baccaglini,30 echoing a common sentiment among the child-welfare reformers I interviewed. For one thing, Marc Cherna, the Allegheny County Department of Human Ser- vices director, has served longer in that position than anyone else in the United States—since 1996. His agency is one of the few that haven’t followed the pattern of a big child fatality scandal followed by an ineffective cleaning of the bureaucratic house. Not to say things have always been great. As Cherna acknowledges, for the first several years he was there, “we were a national disgrace. We were written up nonstop. Kids were getting hurt.”31 CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 15

In 2014, Cherna received an award from Casey Family Programs, the nation’s largest foster child foundation, recognizing his accom- plishments in the position. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted, “The department has reduced the number of children in and out of home care by 48 percent in the past eight years. More than 80 percent of children who left the county system in 2012 ended up in permanent homes, with the vast majority returning to their families.”32 But Cherna believes there’s still plenty of room for improvement in keeping children safe—within their own families, as well as in foster homes. In 2016, Allegheny County was in a particularly good position to experiment with predictive analytics, because it had a lot of data and because its data were accessible across different government bureaucracies. In 1997, Cherna consolidated several bureaus into one Department of Human Services, and the Richard King Mellon Foundation and 17 other nonprofits created the Human Services Integration Fund “for projects that foster integration and support innovations in technology, research and programming that would be difficult or impossible to accomplish with public sector dollars.”33 Several of the chief information officers of those groups agreed to help Cherna with a project that ended up merging 32 different data sets. But there was another reason Allegheny County was the right place for this project. The Department of Human Services had built up a “high degree of trust” with the community, says Cherna.34 Scott Hol- lander, head of the legal advocacy group ChildVoice in Pittsburgh, confirms that assessment. Hollander, who has done similar work in Colorado and Washing- ton, says what’s different in Pittsburgh is “the willingness to try new things and not be afraid of failing. And there is a lot of discussion with stakeholders that doesn’t happen elsewhere.”35 For instance, when Cherna wanted schools to share data with child-welfare services and vice versa, Hollander and a number of his colleagues objected. “Hey, this doesn’t seem right. The parents don’t seem to know what’s going on,” Hollander says he told the agency.36 So Cherna asked Hollander and some of his colleagues, who work for 16 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS a parents’ rights group, to design a consent form that would be clear and fair. Before the Department of Human Services put out a request for proposals for the predictive analytics project, they met with legal aid and civil liberties groups to discuss the implications for families. According to Hollander, the response “was a mixed bag.” He recalls “people thinking this sounds interesting and you’re trying to protect kids, but the factors you’re describing seem like they could create biased decisions.”37 “If you’re looking at poverty and crime,” he continues, “the police don’t treat black and white people the same. You will echo the disproportionality that already exists in the current environment if you are looking at drug use, criminal activity, and whether there is a single parent as risk factors.”38 Hollander is not alone in his concern about the disparate racial impact of using predictive analytics. Just as members of low-income and minority communities are more likely to come into contact with law enforcement, Wexler argues, “the same, of course, is true when it comes to ‘reports’ alleging child abuse—some communities are much more heavily ‘policed’ by child protective services.”39 There’s no doubt that black and Hispanic families make up a disproportionate number of those who end up encountering child-welfare agencies. In New York City, that has been true for decades. According to public records, African American children made up 31.5 percent of the population of kids in the city in 1987 but accounted for 63.1 percent of children in foster care. In 2012, they made up 25.9 percent of the population and accounted for 59.8 percent of those in foster care.40 There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here. Poverty is highly correlated with abuse. There are a variety of reasons for that, which can be difficult to untangle. Poverty causes stress in marriages and other relationships, and sometimes that stress is taken out on kids. Child abuse is also more likely in homes with younger mothers or, as has been discussed, when a man besides the child’s father is present. And those two factors are more common among impoverished and minority families. CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 17

But the fear that child protective service workers target minority families is becoming increasingly common. Citing lawyers working on behalf of parents who have been investigated by the ACS, the New York Times suggested earlier this year that the agency is engaged in the “criminalization of their parenting choices,” a practice the paper called “Jane Crow.”41 In a story for the New Yorker in 2017, Larissa MacFarquhar quotes an attorney from the Bronx Defenders, a group that represents in family court parents who have been charged with abuse or neglect by child services, saying: “We are members of this system which we all strongly believe is racist and classist and doing harm to the families it claims to serve.”42 Baccaglini and many others who work in the child-welfare system are deeply upset by these accusations, not least because most of the child-welfare workers are themselves members of minority racial groups. According to the most recent statistics from New York, 65 percent of these employees were black, and 15 percent were Hispanic. “When you piece together all the data points, you are hard-pressed to advance the argument that the Times is making,” he says. “God, that space could’ve been used to really tell the story.”43 “You couldn’t even consider race a variable,” Baccaglini adds deject- edly. “It’s a constant. All the kids who come into this system, unfortunately, are nonwhite. The racial discriminatory aspects of the system happened well before with our opportunity structure—the ‘tale of two cities,’” as Mayor Bill de Blasio has called it. “The fact that the mom in the South Bronx cannot get decent medical care; the fact that the mom in the South Bronx cannot get a good job; the fact that the mom was put into an [individualized educational program] and never got a degree and then had a child.”44 But what about that child? The Allegheny Family Screening Tool was rolled out in August 2016. There are more than 100 factors that go into the algorithm— and race is not one of them. The system gives the call screener a score between 1 and 20 that describes the likelihood that the child in question will be re-referred or removed from the home within two years, based on what is known from historical data. The 18 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS screeners then assign an investigator to the cases with the highest risk scores. More to the point, the algorithm is not just about removing kids from problem homes, a step nearly everyone agrees should be taken only as a last resort. “If we can figure out which children are the most likely to be placed in foster care when a call alleging maltreatment first comes in, the hope is that we can tailor and target more expansive and intensive services to that family at the outset, so as to prevent the need for placement,” Putnam-Hornstein says. “Alter- natively, it may be that there is nothing we can do to safely keep the child in the home. But at least we will make sure to investigate so that we can remove.”45 To avoid confirmation bias, investigators are not told what score a family received when they go to visit the home. The results have been similar to those found in California: The model predicted with 76 percent accuracy whether a child would be placed in foster care within two years and with 73 percent accuracy whether the child would be re-referred—that is, whether child services would be alerted about that child again.46 The county also looked at other measures to evaluate the accuracy of the tool. “We are keenly aware,” Putnam-Hornstein acknowledges, “that by predicting future system involvement, we may simply be modeling (and inadvertently reinforcing) past decisions that were biased and/or wrong—placing children who could have stayed at home safely, and simultaneously failing to remove other children who are still being abused.”47 So they also collected data from a local children’s hospital. If the system is working correctly, you would expect that many of the children who come to the emergency room for cases of attempted suicide or self-harm—or as a result of other kinds of trauma that are associated with abuse—would be those who were previously given higher risk scores. And indeed they are. “Yes, the model is predicting placement in foster care among children referred for maltreatment,” Putnam-Hornstein notes. “But the model is sensitive to children experiencing the most severe forms of more objective harm.”48 CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 19

***

There will be more reports next year about Allegheny’s PRM system. In the meantime, Douglas County in Colorado is developing a model for its child-welfare agency as well. Vaithianathan, who is helping on the project, tells me her team was particularly enthusiastic about the county’s plan to test the model against a control group in real time. Some of the calls that come in will be scored based on predictive analytics models, and some will not. At the end of a certain period, the results for the two groups will be compared. It is possible that the county could cut the experiment short if the results are lopsided in one direction or the other—if children who are assigned a score have much better outcomes than those who don’t, or vice versa. But at the outset, this effort could provide the best possible kind of evidence about whether predictive analytics really affect outcomes for children. The future of PRM in child welfare is still an open question. The advent of big data has a mixed record at best when it comes to improving government bureaucracies. Take No Child Left Behind, a George W. Bush–era program that required states to more rigorously measure K–12 student outcomes via standardized tests. Despite high hopes, it hardly moved the needle in most public-school systems. Data alone aren’t enough; what we do with the data matters. Putnam-Hornstein acknowledges you could see a similar problem with the child-welfare system. “Two years down the road, it could really just be one more piece of paperwork they print up and attach to their case files. Maybe they don’t trust the score and so they just ignore it. Or maybe the child welfare workers don’t do anything different in terms of interventions with the families.”49 But Gelles suggests things may go the opposite direction—that the score will come to be relied on more than it is in these pilot programs, influencing decisions even after the “hotline” stage. “If you’re using this (a) to determine whether to remove a child from a home, or (b) to determine whether it’s time to return a child to a home,” he asks, “how are you not going to share that with the judge” tasked with making that call?50 20 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

It could also be used to screen foster parents. That might begin to address the concerns of people like Wexler, who worry about the safety and well-being of children taken from their families by the state. But none of the other researchers I spoke to were willing to discuss additional uses for the data yet. For now, they are focused on how to make PRM algorithms into the best call-screening tool they can be. The promise there is large enough. As Vaithianathan points out, “It’s implementable anywhere. The whole country could be using it because the data is already there. In California we are just using child protection data. In Colorado we are using data from the child welfare system plus the public benefits system.”51 Putnam-Hornstein agrees. Although it may be necessary to make tweaks based on the kinds of data available and what the system is aiming to do in a given county or state, it would not be that hard to create similar algorithms for other places. But just because the data are there doesn’t mean everyone will be happy about using them in this way. In a 2013 piece for Popular Sci- ence, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, the authors of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, warned about the dangers of using data to predict crime and to help determine which interventions may be necessary. “A teenager visited by a social worker for having the propensity to shoplift will feel stigmatized in the eyes of others—and his own,” they wrote.52 In other words, simply using big data could produce negative unin- tended consequences. Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, says that the issue has come to the attention of some of his organization’s state affiliates. “It could be like Moneyball, that human intuition in this area is just inaccurate,” he says. “And that even if the algorithms are also inaccurate, they might be less inaccurate than human intuition.” But, he adds, “It could be that’s not true. And that not only is the algorithm inaccurate but it could be worse than human inaccuracy [and] by making it seem like the judgment is coming from a computer, it is also hiding racial bias.”53 CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 21

“The adage ‘garbage in, garbage out’ never holds truer than in the field of predictive analytics,” writes researcher Kelly Capatosto in a report for the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State. “Subtle biases can emerge when seemingly ‘race neutral’ data acts as a proxy for social categories.” The result is that “data that is ostensibly used to rate risk to child well-being can serve as a proxy for race or other past oppression, thereby over-representing those who have suffered from past marginalization as more risky.”54 Putnam-Hornstein and her colleagues are sensitive to these concerns. When they began this work in New Zealand, they consulted extensively with leaders in the indigenous Maori community. Because native peoples are more likely to be caught up in the child-welfare system, they wanted to make sure this new tool was not having an adverse effect on them. But Putnam-Hornstein argues that even—and perhaps especially—if you believe the deck is stacked against racial minorities, predictive modeling could be helpful. Let’s say, for instance, that you believe the criminal justice system is biased so that the threshold for being arrested is lower for black men than it is for white men. That’s actually a reason to include race in your algorithm: to help account for that difference. This might sound like the soft bigotry of low expectations. Are we really going to say a complaint is less serious if it’s against a black man than if it’s against a white one? But Putnam-Hornstein is right: Num- bers can potentially correct for bias. For those worried about the over-involvement of child services in the lives of low-income and minority families, predictive analytics really can start to solve the problem. “It is absolutely crazy that more than one-third of American children experience an investigation for alleged maltreatment between birth and age 18,” Putnam-Hornstein says. That is a “huge intrusion into the lives of too many families.” Worse, she argues, “it means we are flooding our systems to such an extent that we cannot identify the children who really do need protection.”55 She thinks big data may be the key to not only catching kids who are falling through the cracks of the current system but also protecting 22 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS families who are being wrongly targeted. For the sake of all the children out there like Zymere Perkins, let’s hope she’s right.

This piece is reprinted with permission from Reason magazine, which originally published it in February 2018.56 It has been lightly edited for this compilation.

Notes

1. New York State Office of Children and Family Services, “New York State Child Fatality Report 2016,” https://ocfs.ny.gov/main/reports/2016- Child-Fatality-Report.pdf. 2. Richard Gelles, Out of Harm’s Way: Creating an Effective Child Welfare System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 3. Gelles, Out of Harm’s Way. 4. Richard Gelles (sociologist), in discussion with the author, Novem- ber 1, 2017. 5. Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). 6. Will Oremus, “How ‘Big Data’ Went Bust,” Slate, October 16, 2017, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/10/what_ happened_to_big_data.html. 7. Gelles, discussion. 8. Gelles, Out of Harm’s Way. 9. Kim Dennis (president, Searle Freedom Trust), in discussion with the author, November 7, 2017. 10. Dennis, discussion. 11. Gelles, discussion. 12. National Council on Crime and Delinquency, “SDM News,” July, 2012, http://www.nccdglobal.org/sites/default/files/publication_pdf/sdm-news- issue27.pdf. 13. Gelles, discussion. 14. Gelles, discussion. 15. Bill Baccaglini (president, New York Foundling), in discussion with the author, October 25, 2017. CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 23

16. Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Barbara Needell, “Predictors of Child Protective Service Contact Between Birth and Age Five: An Examination of California’s 2002 Birth Cohort,” Children and Youth Services Review 33, no. 8 (August 2011): 1337–44, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S0190740911001289. 17. Darian Woods, “New Zealand Crunches Big Data to Pre- vent Child Abuse,” Chronicle of Social Change, April 10, 2015, https:// chronicleofsocialchange.org/featurednew-zealand-crunches-big-data-to- prevent-child-abuse. 18. Richard Wexler, Big Data Is Watching, December 2017, http:// bigdataiswatching.blogspot.com/. 19. Wexler, Big Data Is Watching. 20. Emily Keddell, “Substantiation Decision-Making and Risk Prediction in Child Protection Systems,” Policy Quarterly 12, no. 2 (May 2016): 48, http:// apo.org.au/system/files/63845/apo-nid63845-44966.pdf. 21. Nicholas Jones, “Anne Tolley Scraps ‘Lab Rat’ Study on Children,” New Zealand Herald, July 30, 2015, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article. cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11489293. 22. Genie Chough (director of government affairs and legislation, Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services), in discussion with the author, October 16, 2017. 23. Emily Putnam-Hornstein, in discussion with the author, November 2, 2017. 24. Jeremy Loudenback, “Los Angeles to Process Child Abuse Reports Online,” Chronicle of Social Change, October 11, 2017, https:// chronicleofsocialchange.org/news-2/los-angeles-process-child-abuse- reports-online. 25. Gelles, discussion. 26. Gelles, discussion. 27. Gelles, discussion. 28. Chough, discussion. 29. Rhema Vaithianathan et al., Developing Predictive Risk Models to Sup- port Child Maltreatment Hotline Screening Decisions, Centre for Social Data Analytics, March 2017, https://www.alleghenycountyanalytics.us/wp-content/ uploads/2017/04/Developing-Predictive-Risk-Models-package-with-cover-1- to-post-1.pdf. 24 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

30. Baccaglini, discussion. 31. Marc Cherna (director, Allegheny County Department of Human Ser- vices), in discussion with the author, October 23, 2017. 32. Andrew McGil, “National Recognition for Marc Cherna of Allegh- eny County Health Department,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 22, 2014, http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2014/01/23/National-recognition- for-Cherna/stories/201401230249. 33. Allegheny County Department of Human Services, “Human Ser- vices Integration Fund (HSIF),” December 2013, http://alleghenycounty.us/ Human-Services/About/Funding/Human-Services-Integration-Fund.aspx. 34. Cherna, discussion. 35. Scott Hollander (ChildVoice), in discussion with the author, November 2, 2017. 36. Hollander, discussion. 37. Hollander, discussion. 38. Hollander, discussion. 39. Wexler, Big Data Is Watching. 40. Ronald E. Richter, “Disproportionate Minority Representation in the NYC Child Welfare System, Past and Present,” presentation, April 20, 2013. 41. Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Foster Care as Pun- ishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow,’” New York Times, July 21, 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/nyregion/foster-care-nyc-jane-crow.html. 42. Larissa MacFarquhar, “When Should a Child Be Taken from His Par- ents?,” New Yorker, August 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/ 08/07/when-should-a-child-be-taken-from-his-parents. 43. Baccaglini, discussion. 44. Baccaglini, discussion. 45. Putnam-Hornstein, discussion. 46. Allegheny County Department of Human Services, Office of Data Anal- ysis, Developing Predictive Risk Models to Support Child Maltreatment Hotline Screening Decisions, March 2017, https://www.alleghenycountyanalytics.us/ wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Developing-Predictive-Risk-Models-package- with-cover-1-to-post-1.pdf. 47. Putnam-Hornstein, discussion. 48. Putnam-Hornstein, discussion. 49. Putnam-Hornstein, discussion. CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 25

50. Gelles, discussion. 51. Rhema Vaithianathan, in discussion with the author, November 10, 2017. 52. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, “Should We Use Big Data to Publish Crimes Before They’re Committed?,” Popular Science, March 6, 2013, https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-03/should-we-use-big- data-to-punish-crimes-before-theyre-committed. 53. Jay Stanley (senior policy analyst, American Civil Liberties Union), in discussion with the author, November 5, 2017. 54. Kelly Capatosto, “Foretelling the Future: A Critical Perspective on the Use of Predictive Analytics in Child Welfare,” Kirwan Institute, February 2017, http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ki-predictive- analytics.pdf. 55. Putnam-Hornstein, discussion. 56. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Can Big Data Help Save Abused Kids? The Quest to Fix Our Messy, Meddlesome Foster Care Bureaucracies,” Reason, February 2018, https://reason.com/archives/2018/01/22/can-big-data-help-save-abused. Why Child Abuse like the Turpin Family Horrors Is So Hard to Prevent or Halt Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2018

ard cases make bad law. That may be the disturbing but H difficult-to-avoid lesson from the stomach-turning abuse suffered by the 13 children of David and Louise Turpin for at least a decade. The Turpins, who are set to return to court February 23, 2018, are an extreme example. It’s not only the number of children they allegedly mistreated or even the length of time for which the abuse went on. It’s also the fact that—so far as authorities can figure and despite what seems like a thorough search by the media—no one appears to have reported the Turpins to the police or child services. This fact alone makes the Turpin family unlike almost every other case of extreme neglect or abuse that has been uncovered in the past few decades. And it’s why any attempt to pass new legislation based on this tragedy will at best be ineffective at preventing similar situations and at worst unnecessarily infringe on the freedom of millions of decent families. Our system for child protection is hardly foolproof. Those in Southern California will recognize the name of Gabriel Fernandez, the 8-year-old boy killed by his mother and her boyfriend in Los Angeles in 2013 after multiple reports of abuse. In Philadelphia, there was Danieal Kelly, the cerebral palsy–stricken girl who died in 2006 at age 14 after almost a decade of investigations by city caseworkers. In Florida, there was Tariji Gordon, who was removed from her home after her twin brother suffocated and then returned to her mother. She was later found dead and buried in a suitcase. Political leaders responded to each crime with policy changes of one sort or another. In some instances, they hired more caseworkers 26 WHY CHILD ABUSE IS SO HARD TO PREVENT 27 or increased penalties for child abuse. They publicized hotlines to call when someone suspected abuse. Something had gone wrong inside our child-welfare bureaucracy—between the moment a report of abuse was made and the time a caseworker decided not to remove a child from his or her home. The changes had limited, if any, effect on the overall success of the systems. The Turpins weren’t even on the radar of that system. It didn’t fail them as much as it simply didn’t apply. Cut off from extended family years ago, they successfully isolated themselves in Riverside County and other locales. After one of the daughters ran away from home when they lived in Fort Worth, a former neighbor told the Los Angeles Times that he considered reporting them to authorities but decided against it because he knew that David Turpin had a gun. Others who noticed odd behavior simply decided to respect the family’s privacy. The children’s isolation was partly a function of homeschooling. The Turpins met California’s minimal requirements for the practice. Since their arrest, there have been calls for tightening those regulations. If only the children had been forced to report to authorities in some way, the thinking goes, surely someone would have realized what was going on. But there are reasons to question whether this would have solved the problem. In her 2013 memoir, Etched in Sand, Regina Calcaterra describes growing up on Long Island during the 1970s and ’80s with a mother who beat her and her siblings regularly.1 Cookie, as Regina and her siblings called their mother, left them alone for weeks at a time with no food and sometimes no heat. While Cookie was using the state’s payments for housing and food to buy drugs and alcohol, Regina and her siblings were regularly enrolled in school. Occasionally the police or child services would realize something was wrong. The siblings went to live with foster families more than once. But Cookie was a great liar, and the siblings—who did not want to be split up into different foster homes—learned to lie as well. The abuse went on for two decades. More contact with authorities might have reduced the isolation of the Turpin children. But, as sociologist Richard Gelles, an expert 28 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS on child-welfare systems, told me, “It doesn’t confront the issue that some people are able to put up a good front.”2 That the eldest Turpin son attended community college, earning A’s in many classes, bears this out. Gelles, who is the former dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that teachers and administrators—like neighbors and relatives—often engage in “selective inattention.” The research, according to Gelles, suggests that people are less likely to report those who look like them and seem to be from the same socioeconomic group. This is particularly true for white, middle-class families. “The more people are like me, the more reluctant I am to report their deviant behavior,” Gelles explained.3 Unfortunately, this tendency isn’t something that state or local governments can easily fix. Indeed, despite the horrors of the Turpin case, it’s not clear that we’d want them to try. We are already living in a country where more than a third of children under 18 years old come into contact with child services. Some of these are no doubt instances of real neglect and abuse, but others involve kids who have been left in the car while their parent runs into the dry cleaner. Do we really want to encourage people to report on their neighbor’s parenting practices more than they already do? The Supreme Court has said that parents have the right to raise children without unwarranted government intervention. As Gelles notes, we have created “a legal moat around the house, which very few of us would want to give up.”4 The Turpins are the terrible but extremely rare price we pay for this liberty. It’s hard to imagine what kind of state intervention would have prevented or halted the abuse.

This piece is reprinted with permission from the Los Angeles Times, which originally published it on February 6, 2018.5 It has been lightly edited for this compilation. WHY CHILD ABUSE IS SO HARD TO PREVENT 29

Notes

1. Regina Calcaterra, Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Sur- vived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2013). 2. Richard Gelles (sociologist), in discussion with the author, November 1, 2017. 3. Gelles, discussion. 4. Gelles, discussion. 5. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Why Child Abuse like the Turpin Family Hor- rors Is So Hard to Prevent or Halt,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2018, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-riley-turpin-child-welfare-law- 20180206-story.html. Foster Kids, Wronged by the Courts New York Daily News, April 20, 2018

hy do our courts make decisions about the fate of children on Wa timeline designed for adults? That’s the question that Rachel Schneiter and her family are asking themselves as they await a decision about what will happen to the now-3-year-old baby girl they took into their home shortly after her birth. Schneiter never planned to be a foster mother. A nurse for 18 years in a suburb of Buffalo, she volunteered through a church group to help young, at-risk mothers. One day in 2014, a pregnant mother who already had two small boys at home asked for help setting up a crib. Schneiter recalls the “terrible conditions” she saw when she arrived at the home (which was part of a supportive housing facility): “There were dirty, stool-filled diapers left on the floor. There was garbage covering every surface.”1 Schneiter developed a relationship with the mother, accompanying her to doctor’s appointments and trying to help her make conditions in her home suitable for children. When the mother went into labor, she asked Schneiter to be there and named her the baby’s godmother. And when child protective services determined in May 2015 that the mother was not capable of caring for her children, she asked for Schneiter to be appointed guardian for the 12-week-old Baby N., who at this point was already visibly malnourished. The girl’s two older brothers, meanwhile, were placed with another foster family. When the baby was a year old and the mother’s parental rights had been terminated, the Erie County Department of Social Ser- vices started talking about “reuniting” her with her brothers. While Baby N. had met her brothers a few times, she had no relationship with them. And the biological mother, who was pregnant with 30 FOSTER KIDS, WRONGED BY THE COURTS 31 another child, was not about to take them all back. But the Department of Social Services removed Baby N.—14 months old at the time—anyway and put her with the other foster family. The Schneiters filed an administrative appeal with the state Office of Children and Family Services. They pointed out what should have been obvious to anyone: Removing a baby who had spent the first year of her life with a stable, loving family to put her with strangers seemed crazy. Of course it’s beneficial to keep siblings together, but at what cost? Taking them away from the only mother they’ve ever known? It took Family Services until October 2016 to reach the same conclusion, deeming the Department of Social Services’ decision “arbitrary and capricious.” But instead of ordering Baby N.’s return to the Schneiters, Family Services ordered another Department of Social Services evaluation. When Social Services failed to complete the evaluation, the Schneit- ers went to the state Supreme Court, which concluded in February 2017 that Family Services had “abused its discretion in remitting the matter to (the Department of Social Services) and should have, among other things, immediately returned the child to the petitioners.”2 Unfortunately the decision was too vague—saying that the child should be returned as soon as is practical—for the bureaucrats at Erie County, who once again did not return Baby N. The Schneiters at least had two days a week of visitation at this point; they drove 135 miles each way in order to accomplish this. The legal fight continued. In October, the 4th Appellate Divi- sion reached the same conclusion as the lower court, ruling that the removal “was contrary to the child’s best interests.”3 But then the court said that because so much time had elapsed since the initial evaluation, Social Services should conduct yet another evaluation—and hold a final hearing May 14. Unfortunately, the Schneiters’ story is not uncommon. I hear from foster parents all over the country who are the victims of “arbitrary and capricious” decisions by child-welfare caseworkers. It is hardly surprising then that a study from the Foster Care Institute found that turnover rates for foster parents ranged from 30 to 50 percent.4 32 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

There are not much data on why foster parents decide to leave the system. A lot of states don’t seem particularly curious about the answer. But a 2004 survey of New York families who fostered found that of those who stopped, “dissatisfaction with agency” was the second most common reason after “adoption of foster children.”5 All of the back-and-forth with courts and caseworkers can amount to a full-time job, a number of foster parents have told me. And unlike the Schneiters, most do not have the time or money to appeal these decisions. In their defense, caseworkers are tasked with fulfilling (at least) two mandates at the same time: protecting the interests of the child while also reunifying birth families. But the bottom line here is a girl who is 3 years old has spent her entire life in legal limbo, being yanked unnecessarily from one home to another. Courts that are set up on timelines to determine whether an adult committed a robbery or whether a company engaged in fraud are making decisions about the fates of children. For years we assumed that early years didn’t matter. Now we know better. Our courts should, too.

This piece is reprinted with permission from New York Daily News, which originally published it on April 20, 2018.6 It has been lightly edited for this compilation.

Notes

1. Rachel Schneiter, in discussion with the author, March 27, 2018. 2. Schneiter v. New York State Off. of Children & Family Servs., N.Y. App. Div. (2017). 3. Schneiter v. New York State Off. of Children & Family Servs., N.Y. App. Div. (2017). 4. John N. DeGarmo, “Foster Parent Retention Revisited,” Foster Focus 6, no. 9 (February 2017), https://www.fosterfocusmag.com/articles/ foster-parent-retention-revisited. 5. Gregory Korvne, “Foster Parent Training and Support Assessment: FOSTER KIDS, WRONGED BY THE COURTS 33

Survey Results,” Center for Development of Human Services, January 2004, https://ocfs.ny.gov/main/fostercare/assets/3_FosterParentSurvey2004.pdf. 6. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Foster Kids, Wronged by the Courts,” New York Daily News, April 20, 2018, http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ foster-kids-wronged-courts-article-1.3944217. This Is Us Gets Adoption and Foster Care Right Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2017

’m always happy to discuss This Is Us,” says Jason Weber of the “I nonprofit Christian Alliance for Orphans. “Just don’t ask me if it makes me cry.” Weber, who directs the alliance’s efforts to recruit and train foster families, tells me the hit NBC show offers an extremely accurate portrayal of the “real tensions that exist” for anyone involved in adoption or foster care.1 Now halfway through its second season, This Is Us follows three story lines that touch on fostering and adoption. In the first, a couple loses a child at birth and adopts an abandoned baby, Randall. In the second, the adult Randall meets and develops a relationship with his dying biological father. And in the third, Randall and his wife, Beth, bring a foster child to live in their home. The show is heartwarming. Randall was abandoned by a drug- addled father after his mother died of an overdose. That he is adopted into a loving home is itself a kind of miracle. His reunion with his “bio” father brought many in the weekly viewing audience of 13 million to tears. “I think the relationship between Randall and his adopted parents and his longing for a relationship with his biological parents is spot on,” one woman wrote in a private Facebook group for adoptive mothers. “The emotional inner battle over loyalty to both is well represented.” This Is Us doesn’t paper over the challenges these families face. Some viewers were shocked by a judge’s refusal to sign off on Ran- dall’s adoption because he is black and his new parents are white. But this was not uncommon in the early 1980s, when the scene takes 34 THIS IS US GETS ADOPTION AND FOSTER CARE RIGHT 35 place. Congress didn’t outlaw racial considerations in adoptions until 1996. Randall and Beth’s foster child, Deja, has suffered abuse, and she flinches when Randall comes too close. She frequently acts out. Every time Randall and Beth feel as if they are gaining the teenager’s trust, things go south again. Weber is planning to show clips from the show to potential foster families. “The tense conversation that Randall and Beth have with the social worker and the internal struggle Randall has about Deja’s mom are so real and portrayed so well,” he says.2 An Indiana mother on the Facebook group wrote: “When [Randall and Beth] foster [Deja], I saw so many similarities with our teen in the beginning, especially the need to care for/give money to her mom. Or when the foster dad feels like he is the only one advocating for his foster daughters well-being and yells at the [social worker]! (I’ve literally had that exact conversation.)” Terri Moore, who has with her husband, Johnston, fostered 10 children and adopted seven, says she “thought they handled the girl’s ten- sion well . . . the fact that she was torn because she loves her mother, but was also growing attached to the foster family.”3 The Moores also work in this area—she as a court-appointed special advocate in Virginia and he as the founder of a foster care advocacy group called Home Forever. On her blog, Foster the Family, New Jersey foster mother Jamie Care writes: “Seeing foster care and adoption on the screen like this is a gift to foster and adoptive families.” But also: “It’s a gift to the people who’ve never considered adoption for their families. It’s a gift to the people who know that foster care exists but have never even considered it could have anything to do with them.”4 Other Hollywood portrayals of foster care and adoption have not been received nearly as well as This Is Us has. The 2009 filmOrphan , about a childless couple that adopts, earned the ire of foster and adoptive parents. A letter signed by leaders of 11 adoption and child-welfare groups said that the film “may impede recruitment efforts by feeding into the unconscious fears of potential foster and adoptive families that orphaned children are psychotic and unable to heal from the wounds of abuse, neglect, and abandonment.”5 36 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

It is not that foster and adoptive parents want TV shows and mov- ies to present a rosy picture of their experiences. Many foster parents are simply not prepared for the reality. “When kids come home it’s so much more difficult, more than anyone can believe,” says Kelly Rosati, who oversees adoption and orphan care for Focus on the Family and is herself an adoptive mother. “Marriages start to fray. People wonder: ‘Why have we done this? We used to be happy.’ Their days consumed with chaos and trauma.”6 For Rosati and the families who welcome these children into their homes, the answer is not to scare people or to deceive them but simply to offer a realistic picture of the hardships and the joy that fostering a child can bring. Now they have one.

This piece is reprinted with permission from the Wall Street Journal, which originally published it on December 29, 2017.7 It has been lightly edited for this compilation.

Notes

1. Jason Weber (Christian Alliance for Orphans), in discussion with the author, December 14, 2017. 2. Weber, discussion. 3. Terri Moore, in email with the author, December 19, 2017. 4. Jamie Care, “‘This Is Us’ Isn’t Just a TV Show,” October 11, 2017, http://www.fosterthefamilyblog.com/foster-the-family-blog-1/this-is-us- isnt-just-a-tv-show. 5. Associated Press, “‘Orphan’ Horrifies Adoption Groups,” Hollywood Reporter, July 17, 2009, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/orphan- horrifies-adoption-groups-86624. 6. Kelly Rosati (Focus on the Family), in discussion with the author, December 11, 2017 7. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “‘This Is Us’ Gets Adoption and Foster Care Right,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ this-is-us-gets-adoption-and-foster-care-right-1514586219. The Challenge of Finding Homes for Rural America’s Foster Children Atlantic, August 3, 2018

n 2012, there were 397,000 children in foster care in the United I States. By then this figure had, happily, been declining for years, from a high of 567,000 in 1999.1 But since then, it has steadily risen again: In 2016, the most recent year for which data are available, the number of children had increased to 437,0002—and the American foster care system isn’t equipped to handle them all. There are a number of terrible reasons why a child would end up in foster care—including abuse or severe neglect—but the parts of the country that have seen the biggest upticks in recent years are the areas that have been hardest hit by opioid abuse.3 Estimates vary, but for every five incidents in which a child is removed from his or her home, between two and four of them have to do with a family member’s substance abuse.4 Fostering and adopting children out of foster care can take an enor- mous toll on marriages and families; national estimates suggest that around half of foster parents decide to stop fostering during their first year of it.5 What can be done to help these children and their families? The problems are not just economic or legal—not just a matter of committing more funds or implementing some policy fix. They’re cultural, and the vexing task of supporting foster care families means addressing these cultural obstacles as well. It’s a lot of work—especially in rural areas, where many families are disconnected from sources of support like community centers and churches, or even neighbors. The percentage, for instance, of young adults ages 16 to 24 who are neither in school nor employed is higher 37 38 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS in rural communities than in any other places in the country, according to RCAC, a nonprofit that services rural communities.6 This lack of support that leaves so many kids without a safety net can also affect parents who choose to foster. Many of these foster families don’t have a social network of support—a group of other foster parents who are experiencing similar challenges or joys. In many parts of the country, helping foster children and connecting the families that take them in requires stepped-up efforts, often from outside the government. In Arkansas, one can see some of the most promising efforts in this regard—a network of stable, mostly middle-class families that have, through organizations that partner up with the government, made a commitment to shelter, care for, and mentor thousands of kids whose parents are incarcerated, addicted, or otherwise unavailable; to reunite them with their families if possible; and, if not, to provide a permanent, loving home for them. Although none of these organizations take government funds, state officials take the help eagerly. “We’ve long acknowledged that the state cannot do the job of caring for foster children alone,” said Marci Man- ley, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Human Services. “While we do work to recruit foster families, including identifying relatives who may be safe and appropriate options for children who come into care, the assistance of community partners is invaluable.”7 Paul Chapman, the executive director of Restore Hope, a collabo- ration among government agencies, churches, and other nonprofits, recalls that about a decade ago, the number of kids in care in Arkan- sas was over 3,000.8 Back then, a severe shortage of foster families meant that more kids were being placed in group homes or larger institutions. This was in no small part related, Chapman says, to the state’s high levels of incarceration. The state had the fastest-growing prison population between 2012 and 2016,9 and it had the highest number of children with an incarcerated parent in 2016.10 The number of foster children in the state kept going up; two years ago, there were more than 5,000. In order to take in foster children, families must undergo background checks, home studies, and at least 30 hours of training and have other people in the community submit recommendations THE CHALLENGE OF FINDING HOMES 39 on their behalf. This process is resource intensive for the government, and the state of Arkansas struggled with recruitment because the state’s department of children and family services was already short-staffed and underfunded. (Manley, the spokesperson, pointed out that recent funding increases “have resulted in reductions in caseloads that have gotten the state to the recommended national average caseload for workers for the first time in years” but did note that the demanding nature of the work makes staff turnover an ongoing challenge.11) A group of churchgoers across the state took notice of the problem and, in 2007, launched a volunteer organization called Children of Arkansas Loved for a Lifetime (CALL). Its staff encouraged pastors to talk more about foster care and adoption from the pulpit and began to offer training sessions for volunteers. Although the sessions were couched in religious teachings, they covered the same curriculum as the state. According to the Arkansas foster mothers I interviewed, they were also often more convenient and more welcoming to church members. All the training might be held over the course of a couple of weekends, instead of a few hours each week for several weeks, and it was offered in a greater variety of locations. The number of kids in Arkansas’ foster care system has hovered around 5,000 in the past couple of years. Meanwhile, the number of foster homes in the state that are certified and taking in kids has continued to grow. According to the Arkansas Times, it went from 1,601 in September 2016 to 1,821 a year later12—a modest but crucial uptick that means the proportion of kids placed in family settings, as opposed to institutions, has increased. (The majority of children in foster care, though, live in institutional settings.) The CALL, which operates in 44 of Arkansas’ 75 counties, is effectively a bridge between foster-parents-to-be and the state bureaucracy. The organization says that it trains half of new foster families in the state and that families it has trained have cared for more than 10,000 children and provided permanent homes for 800.13 The CALL’s offices operate as central locations for a county’s foster care needs. Each one is made to feel homey, with brightly colored play- rooms. County workers can bring children to the CALL if they’ve been 40 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS removed from their homes in an emergency (which is less jarring than having a child wait in an office cubicle or a police station). Most have a “CALL mall,” a thrift shop where foster families can pick up (for free) any clothes, diapers, formula, or toiletries they need for their kids. The freezer is stocked with dinners for foster families as well. The CALL is emblematic of a turn, in many evangelical communities, from international adoption (usually of infants) to domestic adoption of kids of all ages from foster care. It is one of several organizations that have cropped up in the past decade with this focus. Project 1.27, an adoption and foster-parent training program in Col- orado, was the pioneer and has helped to find a permanent home for hundreds of foster children eligible for adoption in the state. Other initiatives quickly followed, including Project Belong in Kansas, the 111 Project in Oklahoma (One Church, One Family, One Purpose), and Embrace Texas near Dallas. Eric Gilmore was part of this wave. After college, he and his wife (who had trained to be a social worker) volunteered to be house parents for teens aging out of the system. (House parents are typically married couples who care for three or four kids at a time in foster-agency-provided housing.) One young woman told him she had been in 50 different placements between the ages of 12 and 18. “The day after her 18th birthday, she was given a bag of clothes, one night’s worth of bipolar medication, and a one-way ticket to some biological family members,” Gilmore remembers.14 Stories like these shook him, and he and his wife launched Immerse Arkansas in 2010, in order to help older teens who were unlikely to be adopted. Immerse just moved into a new facility, a former nightclub near the University of Arkansas. There, teens and young adults can do laundry, look for jobs online, and take life-skills classes. Immerse offers transitional housing, overseen by a residential adviser. Its staff will take these former foster youth to job interviews and talk to landlords on their behalf. On Tuesday nights, there is “The Gathering,” in which current and former foster children can have dinner with mentors. There I met Dan Williams, a middle-aged civil engineer, who has been paired up with a teenage boy for several months now. They go out to eat and talk THE CHALLENGE OF FINDING HOMES 41 about things like how to budget or how to interview for a job. “These are things that your own kids just know. You don’t intentionally teach them,” Williams says.15 But no one has done that for these kids. Williams seemed a little stuck on how to help when I talked to him, though; the boy, he tells me reluctantly, is in prison for the next few months. It is a reminder that no matter how good a program is, there are bigger problems it can’t solve. Immerse Families is the result of a merger of Immerse Arkansas with a ministry at the Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock. The ministry’s four founders have all fostered and adopted, and one of them, Rachel Bell, told me that her friendships with the other three were an invaluable source of support in raising her two children, who have special needs and whom she adopted out of foster care. At the age of 27, Rachel was juggling eight therapy appointments per week for her children. “My friends were starting to have babies,” she said. “But my kids weren’t like their kids. My feelings weren’t their feelings.”16 “For us,” Bell says, “it was obvious that there was a primary need for families to have a connection with other families.”17 This is the spirit that animates a powerful initiative that Immerse sponsors each year, a spring retreat in the Ozarks for foster and adoptive families. The nearly 300 mothers, fathers, and children can hike, canoe, and go horseback riding together; parents can also attend lectures and support groups (needed for recertification by the state) while their children are supervised. One mother I talked to at the retreat told me about the relief she felt when surrounded by people who understood her experience. She said most people don’t understand why her daughter, who looks to be 8 years old and has the communication skills of a toddler, cannot do something as simple as hunt for an Easter egg by herself. But here, her mother tells me, no one stares or asks too many questions. Finding homes for children who have been abused, neglected, or abandoned by their own families is a daunting problem. But the way that these organizations in Arkansas have come together to address different aspects of that problem—mentoring parents, caring for infants and children on a short-term basis, taking in kids who need a 42 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS permanent home, helping young adults transition out of foster care— suggests a path forward. There are those who may lament the fact that faith-based char- ities are the groups that step in to fill this space—that state governments are simply not capable or don’t have enough resources to accomplish these goals. (Arkansas added another $24 million to its state budget for foster care in 2017.18) But the government has only so many tools at its disposal; it might set up more-robust training and support centers for foster families, but it can’t force families to take other people’s children into their home. Anything the government might do to replicate the success of the CALL would make even government-friendly types a bit queasy: Offering financial incentives to families to take children in (when they otherwise would not be inclined) is not the way to make a child feel loved and welcomed, and active recruitment efforts seem a more appropriate undertaking for advocates than for the state. Years of public-service announcements conveying a need for foster families—a strategy more suitable to government—have not yielded significant results. And government funding of such explicitly religious groups as the CALL would be out of the question. All of this leaves nonprofits in perhaps the best position to help, and religious organizations are the ones that have stepped up. Many people of faith (and Christians in particular) consider it their religious duty to care for those who need assistance—“the least of these,” as the Gospel of Matthew puts it. Perhaps secular organizations could contribute to these efforts as well—which, for instance, would ease concerns about how an LGBTQ foster child or foster parent would fare in the current system.19 But faith-based organizations have figured out a way to care effectively not only for children but for families in a way that no other groups have been able to—which holds a lesson for easing the burdens of the foster care system nationwide.

This piece is reprinted with permission from the Atlantic, which originally published it on August 3, 2018.20 It has been lightly edited for this compilation. THE CHALLENGE OF FINDING HOMES 43

Notes

1. Child Trends Data Bank, Foster Care: Indicators of Child and Youth Well-Being, December 2015, https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2015/12/12_Foster_Care.pdf. 2. US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau, “Trends in Foster Care and Adop- tion,” October 20, 2017, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/resource/trends-in-foster- care-and-adoption. 3. Laura Radel et al., “Substance Use, the Opioid Epidemic, and the Child Welfare System: Key Findings from a Mixed Methods Study,” US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, March 7, 2018, https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/258836/ SubstanceUseChildWelfareOverview.pdf. 4. Nancy K. Young, “Substance Abuse, Child Welfare and the Courts: How Do We Meet the Challenge?,” National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare, October 18, 2007, http://www.cffutures.org/files/presentation-pdfs/ Harvard%20Law%20School_10182007.pdf. 5. Ruth Patton, “Foster Parents’ Key Barriers to Agency Training and Support Groups,” Master of Social Work Clinical Research Papers, 2014, https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.bing. com/&httpsredir=1&article=1375&context=msw_papers. 6. Mariamne Beuscher, “Rural Youth in Poverty More Likely to Be Dis- connected,” RCAC, May 23, 2017, https://www.rcac.org/featured-news/rural- youth-poverty-likely-disconnected/. 7. Marci Manley (Arkansas Department of Human Services), in discussion with the author, August 3, 2018. 8. Kids Count Data Center, “Children in Foster Care,” https://datacenter. kidscount.org/data/tables/6243-children-in-foster-care#detailed/2/2-53/false/ 870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35,18/any/12987. 9. Council of State Governments Justice Center, “Arkansas,” https:// csgjusticecenter.org/jr/ar/. 10. John Moritz, “State Ranked 1st in Count of Kids of Jailed Parents: Research Finds 16% Affected,”Arkansas Democrat Gazette, November 23, 2017, http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/nov/23/state-ranked-1st-in- count-of-kids-of-ja/. 44 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

11. Manley, discussion. 12. Benjamin Hardy, “DHS Report Shows Improvements in Arkansas Foster Care System, Worker Caseload,” Arkansas Times, September 6, 2017, https:// www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2017/09/06/dhs-report-shows- significant-improvements-in-arkansas-foster-care-system-caseworker- caseload. 13. The CALL, “About Us,” https://thecallinarkansas.org/about-us/. 14. Eric Gilmore, in discussion with the author, May 8, 2018. 15. Dan Williams, in discussion with the author, March 20, 2018. 16. Rachel Bell, in discussion with the author, May 8, 2018. 17. Bell, discussion. 18. Magnolia Reporter, “Gov. Asa Hutchinson: More Foster Families in the State,” September 10, 2017, http://www.magnoliareporter.com/news_and_ business/opinion/article_2744d7f2-959b-11e7-8b2f-53d2e1ded7ed.html. 19. Benjamin Hardy, “In Arkansas, One Faith-Based Group Recruits Almost Half of Foster Homes,” Chronicle of Social Change, November 28, 2017, https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/featured/arkansas-one-faith-based- group-recruits-almost-half-foster-homes. 20. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “The Challenge of Finding Homes for Rural Amer- ica’s Foster Children, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/08/ foster-children-arkansas-call/566720/. Opioid Abuse Isn’t “Victimless.” What About the Kids? Bloomberg, March 30, 2018

he Donald Trump administration is being widely criticized for its Tget-tough approach to the nation’s opioid crisis. Targeting neg- ligent doctors and pharmacists and focusing on reducing the illegal drug trade—a war that includes President Trump’s call to execute convicted drug dealers—will not do much for those suffering from addiction, the critics say. Indeed, the Trump administration’s attitude seems to be at odds with popular opinion. In recent years, there has been a growing consensus among Americans that the war on drugs has failed. A 2014 Pew survey found, for instance, that two-thirds of Americans say that the government should focus more on providing treatment for those who use illegal drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Just 26 percent think the government’s priority should be on prosecuting users of such hard drugs.1 The question of whether drug users are criminals or victims of an illness is a thorny one for policymakers in many areas. This is especially true for child-welfare workers and family court officials. Every day, they must determine whether thousands of parents with drug problems are fit to take care of their children or whether those children are in such danger from abuse and neglect that they should be removed and placed with other family members, with a foster family, or into some kind of institutional setting. The notion that illegal drug use is a victimless crime—and therefore not a crime at all—is belied by the sharp increase in children taken into state custody in recent years. 45 46 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

Even if substance-abusing parents are not prosecuted in criminal court, the government must decide whether to remove children and even permanently sever parental rights or keep children in their families while offering parents more services and support in the hopes the parents will turn things around. Two new reports from the Department of Health and Human Ser- vices shed light on the problem.2 It may seem obvious, but for the first time research finds definitively that rates of overdose deaths and drug-related hospitalizations have increased child-welfare caseloads. The authors find that a 10 percent increase indrug-related hospitalizations is correlated with a 3.3 percent increase in foster care entry rates. While most middle- and upper-class Americans could likely find a family member or friend to take in a child in case they were hospitalized, those most affected by drug abuse often lack social networks, and their kids are much more likely to end up being cared for by a stranger. As one of the reports said, it was “more difficult to get parents with substance use disorders to comply with court orders or safety plans for their children.”3 And in the hardest-hit communities, there is a growing “difficulty of finding family to care for children because in many cases multiple members are misusing opioids.”4 In recent discussions I’ve had with foster mothers in Arkansas and West Virginia, they could each think of only one or two cases among the dozens of children they have taken in where substance abuse was not an underlying factor. The response to all of this seems haphazard at best. One of the government reports notes that assessment of parents’ substance abuse “was often cursory and lagged behind placement decisions.”5 Treat- ment for parents was often insufficient or not in keeping with what medical professionals would suggest. For instance, child-welfare workers expressed skepticism about the use of medication-assisted treatment (which combines medication with counseling and behavior therapies). There are no doubt ways to help these parents recover. But it is not uncommon for addicts to try to kick their habits multiple times. Many never succeed at all. In the meantime, children who are removed from their homes and sent to foster care settings are then sent back. OPIOID ABUSE ISN’T “VICTIMLESS” 47

The 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act technically mandates that children who have been in foster care for 15 of the prior 22 months must be eligible for adoption into a permanent home. But judges frequently make exceptions (in cases of placement with extended family, for example), and sometimes the court simply takes months or years to get around to these cases. “It’s as if family court thinks a child’s brain development is sus- pended and not taking place” while these decisions are being made, says Richard Gelles, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice.6 One solution would be to force the courts to take a different approach with these offenders. Family drug courts are similar to other drug courts and operate under state jurisdiction. They require both more regular check-ins with the parents than the adult courts do to see how their treatment is progressing and regular check-ins with children to see how they are faring. The first family drug court was opened in Reno, Nevada, in 1995, and there are now hundreds of family drug courts across the country, from Maine to Oregon. A paper from the National Association of Drug Court Professionals explains:

Unlike adult Drug Courts, where the ultimate incentive for the participant might be the avoidance of a criminal record or incarceration, in FDC the principal incentive for the participant is family reunification, and a potential consequence of failure may be [ter- mination of parental rights] or long-term foster care for the dependent children.7

A 2012 survey of the research on these programs found a significantly higher rate of treatment completion and higher rates of family reunification.8 But such programs—because they require many more resources than most family court systems have at their disposal—are still few and far between, and the effect of the drug crisis on children is growing. A bill that was just passed by the Arizona state house seeks to sever parental rights within one year when babies are born to substance abusers and the parents have not quit their drug habit 48 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS in the meantime. Other states have “right to a speedy trial” stat- utes for family court that would ensure such cases are decided in a timely manner. Ultimately, caseworkers and judges also need guidance from medical and psychiatric professionals. How many chances should a parent have before the state says that a child needs to be placed elsewhere permanently? This guidance will vary depending on a child’s age. Par- ents of children under 3 will have a much shorter timeline because those years are so vital to a child’s development. Just as with any misdeed, there needs to be transparency in the law about the consequences. If, after six months, an offender returns to a judge without even having enrolled in a treatment program, should he or she retain custody for another six months until the next hearing, as frequently occurs? If a parent has enrolled multiple times in treatment but keeps relapsing, should a child be put up for adoption? Many parents argue that the state didn’t provide enough services to help them kick their addiction. Should a judge rule that caring for a child is their responsibility, no matter how few treatment options are available? There are obvious reasons to be patient with the parents of these children. Many drug abusers are poor, undereducated, and socially isolated. Many have spent time in the foster care system themselves. And ideally society would want children to stay with their biological parents rather than placing them with strangers. But in designing a new national strategy for combating drug abuse, our compassion for parents cannot come at the expense of children.

This piece is reprinted with permission from Bloomberg, which originally published it on March 30, 2018.9 It has been lightly edited for this compilation.

Notes

1. Pew Research Center, “America’s New Drug Policy Landscape: Two- Thirds Favor Treatment, Not Jail, for Use of Heroin, Cocaine,” April 2, 2014, http://www.people-press.org/2014/04/02/americas-new-drug-policy-landscape/. OPIOID ABUSE ISN’T “VICTIMLESS” 49

2. US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assis- tant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, “Child Welfare Substance Use,” https://aspe.hhs.gov/child-welfare-and-substance-use. 3. Robin Ghertner et al., “The Relationship Between Substance Use Indicators and Child Welfare Caseloads,” US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, March 9, 2018, https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/258831/ SubstanceUseCWCaseloads.pdf. 4. Ghertner et al., “The Relationship Between Substance Use Indicators and Child Welfare Caseloads.” 5. Laura Radel et al., “Substance Use, the Opioid Epidemic, and the Child Welfare System: Key Findings from a Mixed Methods Study,” US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, March 7, 2018, https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/258836/ SubstanceUseChildWelfareOverview.pdf. 6. Richard Gelles (sociologist), in discussion with the author, Novem- ber 1, 2017. 7. Douglas B. Marlowe and Shannon M. Carey, “Research Update on Fam- ily Drug Courts,” National Association of Drug Court Professionals, May 2012, https://www.nadcp.org/sites/default/files/nadcp/Reseach%20Update%20 on%20Family%20Drug%20Courts%20-%20NADCP.pdf 8. Marlowe and Carey, “Research Update on Family Drug Courts.” 9. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Opioid Abuse Isn’t ‘Victimless.’ What About the Kids?,” Bloomberg Opinion, March 30, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/ view/articles/2018-03-30/opioid-abuse-isn-t-victimless-what-about-the-kids. Judicial Tough Love Helps Addicted Mothers Stay Clean Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2018

t’s a sunny spring day in Judge Alan Lemons’ courtroom, but it is I hard to feel optimistic. A screen next to his bench shows a set of slides, each with a picture of a young mother and a brief description of why she will be appearing this morning. Two numbers on each slide tell the real story: the ages of her children and the number of days she has been sober. Sometimes the numbers are quite low. “Child age: 3 months; days sober: 81.” Several of these women were using drugs while pregnant and lost custody after giving birth. Judge Lemons runs what’s called a “family drug court” here in Sci- oto County, where the rate of opioid overdose is among the nation’s highest. He is hoping that this unconventional model of justice will help parents kick their habit, allowing them to reunite sooner with their children. Family drug courts have been around for more than 20 years, but they have attracted new interest amid the opioid epidemic and rising rates of foster care. More than 15,500 children were in Ohio foster homes last year, up from 12,600 four years earlier, according to the nonprofit Public Children Services Association of Ohio.1 If current trends continue, the figure could reach 20,000 by 2020. Federal research confirms that the drug problem has increased child-welfare caseloads. A 10 percent increase in overdose death rates is correlated with a 4.4 percent increase in foster care entry rates, according to a March report by the US Department of Health and Human Services.2 50 JUDICIAL TOUGH LOVE HELPS ADDICTED MOTHERS 51

Regular family courts aren’t built to cope with the type or the volume of cases that now are coming before them. The rules vary somewhat from state to state, but Ohio’s are common. First comes a decision, often by a caseworker, to remove children from a home to prevent abuse or serious neglect. Then comes a hearing, usually the next day, to determine if the removal was appropriate, who should care for the children now, and what steps the parent needs to take to remedy the situation. After that a judge may not see the parent for more than three months. Usually little would have changed. Judge Lemons tells me he got tired of seeing parents after 12 months who hadn’t even gone for their drug assessments. “They’re not even beginning the case plan,” he says.3 Meanwhile, the children may languish, moving between different foster homes, staying with relatives who may or may not be capable of or interested in caring for them. Family drug court, on the other hand, meets every week. Par- ticipants, who opt into the program, are drug tested at least once a week. At each hearing the parent is expected to give the judge a progress report. It can seem like a support group at times. The judge then gives very specific instructions for what the parent needs to do. This eliminates the disconnect that sometimes occurs in regular family court between what a caseworker tells a parent to do and what a judge expects. A hearing in family drug court typically includes representatives from several public and private agencies: rehab centers, transitional housing authorities, child protective services, law enforcement, and appointed guardians for the children. They are supposed to ensure that the parents have enough resources and support to carry out the judge’s instructions. If the judge says the parent is ready to move from an inpatient treatment facility to transitional housing, the agencies in the courtroom know what to do. If he or she orders more counseling, they can set that up. Parents who fail to follow instructions face real consequences. They aren’t facing criminal charges, but a judge can put them in jail for a couple days for falling off the wagon. One woman I saw thanked Judge Lemons for “the wake-up call” he had delivered the previous 52 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS week. Others are required to do community service or check in with a local sheriff’s office every day. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist specializ- ing in addiction (and my colleague at the American Enterprise Insti- tute), says, “These immediate, certain, but not severe kinds of judicial responses are very effective in helpingdrug-addicted people change their behavior.”4 A 2012 research compilation by the National Association of Drug Court Professionals suggests that people in family drug court complete their treatments at a rate 20 to 30 percentage points higher than those in the traditional court system. Family reunification rates are 20 to 40 percentage points higher.5 Critics worry that these statistics suffer from selection bias, since only motivated parents will opt into the program. They also wonder whether family reunification is the best measure, since judges who get to know young women by hearing their stories every week may return their children before it’s appropriate. Children whose parents are in family drug court reenter foster care at lower rates, but not dramatically so. That isn’t necessarily surprising: Treating addiction takes time, and even people who take the right treatment steps can relapse. But Judge Lemons thinks family drug court is better than the alternative. “The thought used to be that you can’t force them into recovery,” he says. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force him to drink.”6 But with family drug court, the threat of a few days in jail can be strong motivation to stay clean.

This piece is reprinted with permission from the Wall Street Journal, which originally published it on May 25, 2018.7 It has been lightly edited for this compilation.

Notes

1. Public Children Services Association of Ohio, “PCSAO Factbook,” 2017, http://www.pcsao.org/pdf/factbook/2017/PCSAOFactbook.pdf. 2. Laura Radel et al., “Substance Use, the Opioid Epidemic, and the Child Welfare System: Key Findings from a Mixed Methods Study,” US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning JUDICIAL TOUGH LOVE HELPS ADDICTED MOTHERS 53 and Evaluation, March 7, 2018, https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/258836/ SubstanceUseChildWelfareOverview.pdf. 3. Alan Lemons, in discussion with the author, April 3, 2018. 4. Sally Satel (resident scholar, AEI), in discussion with the author. 5. Douglas B. Marlowe and Shannon M. Carey, “Research Update on Fam- ily Drug Courts,” National Association of Drug Court Professionals, May 2012, https://www.nadcp.org/sites/default/files/nadcp/Reseach%20Update%20 on%20Family%20Drug%20Courts%20-%20NADCP.pdf. 6. Lemons, discussion. 7. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Judicial Tough Love Helps Addicted Mothers Stay Clean,” Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ judicial-tough-love-helps-addicted-mothers-stay-clean-1527285794. What’s a Single Mom to Do During a Week in the Hospital? Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2018

leven days after the birth of her daughter in September 2017, E Charlotte—who asked me not to use her last name—began to have complications from preeclampsia, a serious pregnancy-related disorder that causes high blood pressure. She had to be readmitted to the hospital for almost a week. But as a recent immigrant from Senegal with no family or friends living nearby, she did not know what to do with her new baby. If no one was available, she feared child protective services would take the girl into custody. A hospital social worker told Charlotte about the Crisis Nursery at a place called the New York Foundling, which is the city’s oldest foster care agency. The nursery, opened in 1982, will care for children 10 and younger on an emergency basis for as long as 28 days. It’s a safe place for children when their parents fall sick, find themselves in danger from domestic abuse, or struggle with drugs or alcohol. The nursery provides a place to sleep, along with clothing, diapers, food, and other supplies. There’s even a teacher on hand to help school-age kids keep up with homework. Charlotte calls it “the best thing that happened to me in this town.”1 The Crisis Nursery is one of a growing number of programs around the country categorized as “preventive services.” It has helped hundreds of parents across New York City avert serious problems—abuse, neglect, or a long-term loss of custody of their children. The nursery, which runs on a budget of about $700,000 a year, is funded mostly by the city but takes private donations as well. Soon more resources could be on the way, thanks to legislation Congress passed in February 54 WHAT’S A SINGLE MOM TO DO 55

2018 along with its budget deal. The Family First Prevention Services Act may let states use federal foster care funds for preventive services like the Crisis Nursery. Jerry Milner, acting commissioner of the federal Administration on Children, Youth and Families, has touted the importance of preventive services. “Right now, we typically respond only after families have lost much of their protective capacity and children have been harmed,” he told the Chronicle of Social Change last year. “We need to strive to create environments where they get the support they need before the harm occurs, which, in my mind, calls for a reconceptualization of the mission and functioning of child welfare systems.”2 To take the Crisis Nursery as an example, it can house as many as 10 unrelated children—or 12 if there are sibling groups—at a time, from all five of New York’s boroughs. The average number of kids there is around seven, but the nursery also is frequently full. The sad truth is that there are probably hundreds of children in the city who could use a safe place to stay any given night. Some of their parents are sick or incapacitated. Some are temporarily homeless. Still, many of them would be nervous, as Charlotte tells me she was, to leave their children in a strange building in another part of the city with adults they’ve never met. Another idea is for parents in need to leave their children with nearby families. This is what Safe Families for Children facilitates. Founded in 2003, the organization has local chapters that recruit and train volunteer families to help parents who don’t have a built-in safety net of friends and extended family. Dave Anderson, a child psychologist who helped to pioneer the idea in Chicago, told me last year that the “fragmentation of families” is behind many of the problems in the foster care system. There are “no relatives or caring neighbors to turn to. People are not stepping up to be the backup caregiver.”3 Safe Families works with local churches to find volunteers, who then undergo interviews and extensive background checks. In New York, volunteers have not only provided emergency childcare but also acted as translators for parents who need help getting medical treatment for their kids or dealing with school officials. 56 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

Andrea Mungo, who belongs to Astoria Community Church, cared frequently for two young children during the day last year when doctors placed their mother on bed rest due to complications from her pregnancy. The woman’s husband risked losing his job in food service if he stayed home to help. Unfortunately, Safe Families volunteers in New York are not per- mitted to take children into their homes overnight. Mungo tells me there were at least two women in her church who would have been happy to do so, both of whom had undergone the necessary background checks and home studies. But the state has determined that this would trigger the same kind of regulations that cover, say, a foster care agency—even though the parents are not giving up custody of their children. Safe Families has been told that changing this rule would require an act of the state legislature. Over the past 15 years, Safe Families has arranged more than 35,000 placements across the country. Some of these children end up in the formal foster care system because the parents are unable to get their act together, but 93 percent of families are reunited. The average length of a Safe Families stay is 40 days, compared with two years for foster care.4 Safe Families can’t replace foster care, but it seems to work as a preventive measure. The organization began to operate in the UK in 2013. A report by the Nottingham City Council found that after a year of working with Safe Families, the number of children taken into government care dropped 12 percent.5 Although politicians may be slow to recognize it, the most effective social safety net isn’t necessarily the one provided by the government.

This piece is reprinted with permission from the Wall Street Journal, which originally published it on March 23, 2018.6 It has been lightly edited for this compilation. WHAT’S A SINGLE MOM TO DO 57

Notes

1. Charlotte, in discussion with the author, March 1, 2018. 2. Daniel Heimpel, “Trump’s Top Child Welfare Official Speaks,” Chron- icle of Social Change, November 6, 2017, https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/ featured/trumps-top-child-welfare-official-speaks. 3. Dave Anderson (child psychologist), in discussion with the author, December 15, 2016. 4. Safe Families for Children, “Our Impact,” https://safe-families.org/ about/impact/. 5. David Mellen, “Nottingham City Council on Safe Families for Children,” Safe Families for Children, January 5, 2017, https://www. safefamiliesforchildren.com/news/nottingham-city-council-safe- families-children/. 6. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “What’s a Single Mom to Do During a Week in the Hospital?,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ whats-a-single-mom-to-do-during-a-week-in-the-hospital-1521844795. School and Home Philanthropy Roundtable, April 2018

ntil a few years ago, Emily Bloomfield had not thought much Uabout the needs of children living in foster care. She had been working hard on education policy in Washington and had served on the board of the local charter-school authorizer. But then she was sud- denly given a front-row seat to the problems faced by kids who have had to be separated from their parents. The aunt and uncle of her husband took custody of their two grandchildren, after the mother and father’s parental rights had been terminated by a court. The grandparents, at their advanced age, weren’t sure they could manage full responsibility. But they knew the children needed someone to step up. So they did and began seeking help from extended family and others. “This got me pretty obsessed” with the problems of children in foster care, says Bloomfield.1 She points out that this situation is becoming increasingly common, thanks to family breakdown and drug addiction. More and more grandparents and other family members are being asked to step in for incapable parents, and they need help from their communities. In her education-policy role, Bloomfield also saw a niche for a spe- cialized school. Despite a thriving charter movement and a voucher program in DC, foster youth still often found themselves without schooling options that matched their specific problems. So she founded a school just for them—a boarding school, where they live five days a week. The charter school Monument Academy started its third year of operation in 2017 and currently has a fifth-, sixth-, andseventh-grade class, with plans to add one more grade each year until it serves kids 58 SCHOOL AND HOME 59 through high school. Bloomfield says that when it comes to this population, “a lot of money is being spent on failure. The outcomes are terrible.” But she is hoping that Monument can “provide a proof point” that there is a way to educate these children effectively.2 Lisa Bernstein, a member of Monument’s board and one of the early supporters of the school, made the same observation. Having been a coach and literacy teacher at various schools throughout the city, Bernstein tells me, “I had experienced personally that kid in your class who took up so much more energy and oxygen than all the other kids.” She remembers asking herself, “What can I do for this child? I am not enough.” Even “with the best-run schools and resources and the best principals, there is not enough bandwidth or programming or knowhow to address what these kids need.” As behavioral issues pile up, “their education slows down or pauses.”3 To tackle these deep challenges, Monument has adopted a more personalized system of learning, used smaller classrooms, and built “de-escalation spaces” where kids can go to calm down (with an adult) if their behavior veers out of control. The school provides intense mental-health counseling and has formed a partnership with George- town University to address physical-health concerns. “So many kids come in with little or no medical attention,” Bloomfield tells me. Undiagnosed asthma that causes difficulty in breathing. Untreated tooth infections. “One child was so upset he pulled a tooth right out of his head.”4 These problems, taken one at a time, can be addressed by a team of adults around a table. Monument works with each student’s foster parents—and biological parents if they are available. There is also an effort to work with caseworkers from family services, although current privacy laws make it difficult to share information between educators and caseworkers. (Another obstacle is DC’s very high turnover rate among caseworkers.) These challenges have led to Monument orga- nizing more care “in-house.” Monument uses a house-parent model in which 10 students live with two adults in a wing of the school building during the week, eat- ing their meals together and learning discipline, mutual support, and life skills such as doing the laundry and setting a table. “We want to 60 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS show them that this is what it’s like to live in a stable, collaborative family structure.” And, says Bloomfield, “We can ensure that they get a good night’s sleep, decent food, and hygiene.”5 The boarding aspect of the program also addresses one of the biggest challenges for foster students—the frequency with which they move. As foster kids get transferred from home to home (sometimes back to their biological parent or simply between foster families), they are often forced to change schools. While many juris- dictions have legislation that allows a foster child to remain in the same school even if he or she moves outside of the neighborhood, this can be a logistical challenge if the school is too far away. Plus, many of the students who come to Monument have been expelled from previous schools. Even with a strong team of adults, it’s a roller-coaster ride. Within the first six weeks of Monument’s opening, five kids out of the class of 40 were hospitalized. Monument found beds for them “in a place that knew what they were doing.” It got them stabilized, perhaps had their meds changed. “And then we got them back into the classroom.”6

There’s No Place like School

The school is spending more than $50,000 per child on average, including room and board. That’s almost three times the amount spent on the typical DC student. More than half of the students qual- ify for special-education services, so that drives up the per-pupil costs. But DC also has a fairly generous charter program that covers most of the cost (including the additional allocations for special ed). The rest is supplied by private philanthropy. Monument was launched with financial backing from the City- Bridge Foundation, the family philanthropy of David and Katherine Bradley. CityBridge picked Monument as one of the winners of its competition for new schools and new school models. It was looking for ideas that combined personalized learning with financial sustain- ability. Mieka Wick, CEO of CityBridge Education, a nonprofit the foundation started in 2017, tells me that the foundation was attracted SCHOOL AND HOME 61 to “an academic environment that will allow the teacher to be more of a coach and personalized partner.”7 CityBridge Education sees its mission as getting schools off the ground, not sustaining them indefinitely. One of the first issues addressed is real estate. “Finding a building is one of the biggest barriers,” says Wick.8 This is true of most charter schools, but schools that cater to foster kids feel this problem more acutely. Monument found an old DC public-school building, but it had to be renovated completely in order to make a separate space for the dormitories and de-escalation rooms. Schools for children with serious behavioral issues need a lot of space. Although Bloomfield is glad she found the building she did, she notes that there is not much outdoor space beyond a small courtyard. “These kids need to get out and run.”9 CityBridge does not pick up ongoing costs and has instead focused on helping Bloomfield assemble a board that will contribute finan- cially and in expertise. This is part of its role as “an angel investor.” Thanks to DC’s charter-school laws, about 93 percent of Monu- ment’s costs are paid for by tax dollars. But the school has depended on private funding in order to make its environment more hospitable to students and to hire an appropriate amount of staff. There are also ambitions to provide more comprehensive health care. The chances of replicating the model of Monument in other states depend in significant part on charter funding laws. Arizona, Flor- ida, and North Carolina all have voucher programs for kids in foster care. And in the fall of 2017, Oklahoma expanded a program for special-needs kids to include foster children as well. The school has committed since its inception to sharing its plans and best practices openly. There is a “knowledge center” on the Monument website that offers information to people who want to start something like this in their own community. While Bloomfield does not see herself creating another Monument—she might consider adding grades below fifth at some point—she would like to add a residency program that would train principals and teachers who want to do something similar. Mon- ument already hosts social workers who are looking to do some clinical hours for their training. 62 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

No Time like the Present

There seems to be a new national urgency to efforts like this. There are over 400,000 children in foster care, and some states, including California and West Virginia, have seen a large surge in this population connected to the opioid epidemic. Many foster children face chilling futures. According to the National Foster Youth Institute, one-fifth of the 23,000 foster children who reach age 18 each year have nowhere to live. Only half will find gainful employment by the time they are 24. There is only a 3 percent chance they will earn a college degree. One recent survey showed 14 percent of prison inmates in California had at one point spent time in foster care. All of this costs society a significant amount of money— an average lifetime cost of up to $300,000 for individuals who age out of the system. New efforts to head off these costs and human heartaches have been launched in several cities. Haven Academy, a charter school for kids who are or have been in foster care, was established 10 years ago by the New York Foundling, a 150-year-old Catholic charity that helps children in need, and expanded this fall to include a new middle school. Around the same time, Philadelphia became home to Arise Charter School focused on foster kids, which in 2015 converted to a private school called C.B. Community. Optimist Charter School in Los Angeles opened in 2013 to serve probation and foster youth. A school called Da Vinci RISE High in Los Angeles was one of 10 schools in 2017 to win a Super School grant, a contest funded by Laurene Powell Jobs. The RISE school started small—serving 30 students on one cam- pus—but it will eventually grow to 500 students. The plan is to offer personalized learning to students who are moved along as they demonstrate mastery of their subjects, instead of the traditional movement through age-based grades. A project-based curriculum will focus students on real-world experiences, and internships and other practical experiences will provide a way of earning course credits. Another project in the works is Sisu Academy, dreamt up by a former homeless kid himself. With an absent father and mentally ill mother, Jabez LeBret relied on friends for places to stay throughout SCHOOL AND HOME 63 high school and teachers and counselors for support. Despite their best efforts, he did not graduate. “The system wasn’t set up to manage my situation,” LeBret says.10 But his story wasn’t over yet. He beat the odds and earned his GED and then a college degree. He eventually launched a successful career in marketing. All the while he was trying to help kids who were like him—homeless, in foster care, or otherwise at risk. “I can speak firsthand to what it’s like to be in a new home every two or three weeks. It creates constant stress and uncertainty.” What these children needed, he realized, was a place just for them—one that would help them “develop important life skills.”11 So LeBret is working on a boarding school in San Diego. He cites programs such as Wasatch Academy in Utah (where boarded students work on a farm) and the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania (which has long educated orphans and poor children) as models for his proposed Sisu Academy. He envisions two business incubators and a working farm and chances for kids to start their own business ven- tures that could ultimately provide some revenue flow for the school. His goal is for Sisu to be tuition-free. To that end, he’s secured corpo- rate in-kind donations of furniture and software, and he is working on raising $16 million to welcome its first class of 80 students. But residential schools are not the best option for every child, and experts in the field recommend keeping most foster children close to their biological or foster parents. A child entirely removed from his or her extended family or community is often more vulnerable to dis- orientation and abuse. And LeBret says, “There is a direct correlation between the distance from family and the rates of foster care kids going AWOL and disengaging from the system.”12 But for children in extremely disorganized or dysfunctional families, a boarding school can be a saving grace. If the combination of a stable home and a decent education are the main predictors of adult success, then schools that offer these two things have a chance of dramatically improving life for some foster children, especially if they can expose the youngsters to a consistent group of adults who will care for them outside the classroom. Partial boarding also offers a respite for caretak- ers of these children, who are often under tremendous pressure. 64 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

A few years ago, some researchers at the University of Rochester revisited the famous “marshmallow test,” which evaluates a child’s ability to wait for a larger reward instead of grasping for a quick payoff. They determined that it was not simply some innate ability to delay gratification that allowed some children to wait. It turned out that the kids who came from homes where they had reliable adults, adults who delivered on their promises, were the most likely to succeed at the test. Children who came from environments where adults were con- stantly letting them down actually made a rational choice by grabbing resources quickly and running—because who knows if the offerer will really come back and fulfill the promise? Bloomfield says it is these students who need places like Monument the most. “They live in a constant state of anxiety and watchfulness. Their lives are full of unpredictability. They keep experiencing loss.” Bloomfield hopes to give these students the social and academic tools they need to rebuild their lives on more stable ground. She doesn’t promise miracles, just improvement. “We can provide respite.”13

This piece is reprinted with permission from Philanthropy magazine, which originally published it in the April 2018 issue.14 It has been lightly edited for this compilation.

Notes

1. Emily Bloomfield, in discussion with the author, October 10, 2017. 2. Bloomfield, discussion. 3. Lisa Bernstein (board member, Monument Academy), in discussion with the author, October 17, 2017. 4. Bloomfield, discussion. 5. Bloomfield, discussion. 6. Bloomfield, discussion. 7. Mieka Wick (CEO, CityBridge Education), in discussion with the author, October 19, 2017. 8. Wick, discussion. 9. Bloomfield, discussion. SCHOOL AND HOME 65

10. Jabez LeBret, in discussion with the author, October 3, 2017. 11. LeBret, discussion. 12. LeBret, discussion. 13. Bloomfield, discussion. 14. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “School and Home,” Philanthropy Magazine, April 2018, https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/philanthropy-magazine/ article/school-and-home. Will Placing Fewer Children in Foster Care Fix the System? Institute for Family Studies, May 16, 2018

ou’ve no doubt heard of the school-to-prison pipeline, “a disturb- Ying national trend,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union, “wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.”1 Now, according to some experts, including those present at a recent Brookings Institution event, there is a “foster-care-to-prison pipeline.”2 It’s true that a shocking number of kids who have spent time in foster care or who have aged out end up incarcerated. As much as 7 percent of the prison population in the US has spent time in the foster care system, according to Ron Haskins of Brookings. And 15 percent of inmates in California prisons have spent time in foster care. The “pipeline” metaphor is supposed to imply inevitability. Once something is in a pipeline, it can’t get out. But the word also implies something about the institutions and people who may have prevented a child from choosing a different route. The knock against schools is that their zero-tolerance policies and use of police officers, rather than “restorative justice” or in-school suspensions, are part of the problem. There are plenty of reasons to question that assessment, but how is foster care responsible for the kids who end up in prison as adults? And is there anything we can do to fix it? One idea would be to put fewer children into foster care at the beginning. If they don’t get put into the pipeline, the thinking goes, none of this will be a problem. 66 WILL FEWER CHILDREN IN FOSTER CARE FIX THE SYSTEM? 67

JooYeun Chang, the managing director of public policy at Casey Family Programs, told the Brookings audience that we

traumatize kids by removing them from only communities they have known . . . place them at best in family settings or multiple family settings or congregate care settings . . . that are no better than jails.3

And the reason we take so many kids out, particularly minority kids, she explained, is that “our system has been built on centuries of racism, classism, and xenophobia.” We have “this idea of rescuing children from bad people instead of treating underlying poverty addiction or mental illness.”4 So, is the problem that we remove too many kids from their homes? It’s awfully hard to demonstrate that since we can’t separate the effects on kids of being in abusive or neglectful homes and the effect of the foster care system. As Youngmin Yi and Christopher Wildeman point out in their article in the new issue of the Future of Children, “Prior research provides little insight into the direct effects of foster care placement on children: the few studies that use methods designed to isolate the effect of foster care placement haven’t reached a consensus regarding its impact on children.”5 The authors also note that, in addition to the difficulty of determining whether foster care is causing negative effects on kids or is merely correlated with them, child protective services systems vary widely across the states. In principle, this could mean we could do some interesting research comparisons based on different approaches to child welfare, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. But even if we wanted to reduce the number of kids in care, it’s not at all clear who would take them in. Most states have a severe shortage of foster families. Many people in the child-welfare world would like to see a greater reliance on kin care. But as Harvard Professor Robert Sampson, who offered the keynote lecture for the Brookings event, pointed out, it will be very difficult to keep these children at home or even in their communities because the problems likely affect their extended families as well. “If you have a 68 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS parent who has been arrested, you are twice as likely to have an aunt or an uncle who has been arrested,” he said during his speech.6 When I asked Sampson about kin placement as a strategy for keeping kids out of the foster system, he said that at least with regard to the neighborhoods he has studied, “it’s not a viable strategy.”7 Many of the panelists were excited about the prospect of the recently passed federal Family First legislation to offer moreevidence-based preventive service programs to families in crisis.8 As of now, only 7 percent of these programs seem to have any effect, according to Haskins. All this being said, there is no doubt we could make foster care better. We could do a better job recruiting more stable, middle-class families of all races. We could do a better job supporting the families who do this work. (The Brookings Institution’s recently launched CHAMPS program aspires to find policies that will help with these goals.9) And we could do more to move children into permanent adoptive homes more quickly. Children in foster care have had difficult lives—both before entering the system and while they are in it—but there is nothing inevitable about their trajectories.

This piece is reprinted with permission from the Institute for Family Studies, which originally published it on its website on May 16, 2018.10 It has been lightly edited for this compilation.

Notes

1. American Civil Liberties Union, “School-to-Prison Pipeline,” https://www.aclu.org/issues/racial-justice/race-and-inequality-education/ school-prison-pipeline. 2. Brookings Institution, “Helping Children of Incarcerated Parents and Children in Foster Care: A Princeton-Brookings Future of Children Event with Harvard’s Robert J. Sampson,” May 9, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/events/ helping-children-of-incarcerated-parents-and-children-in-foster-care/. 3. Brookings Institution, “Helping Children of Incarcerated Parents and Children in Foster Care.” 4. Brookings Institution, “Helping Children of Incarcerated Parents and WILL FEWER CHILDREN IN FOSTER CARE FIX THE SYSTEM? 69

Children in Foster Care.” 5. Youngmin Yi and Christopher Wildeman, “Can Foster Care Interven- tions Diminish Justice System Inequality?,” Future of Children 28, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 45, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1179175.pdf. 6. Brookings Institution, “Helping Children of Incarcerated Parents and Children in Foster Care.” 7. Brookings Institution, “Helping Children of Incarcerated Parents and Children in Foster Care.” 8. Family First Prevention Services Act of 2017, H.R. 253, 115th Cong. 9. Ron Haskins, “A National Campaign to Improve Foster Care,” Brookings Institution, June 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/ uploads/2017/06/ccf_20170622_foster_parenting_haskins.pdf. 10. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Will Placing Fewer Children in Foster Care Fix the System?,” Institute for Family Studies, May 16, 2018, https://ifstudies.org/ blog/will-placing-fewer-children-in-foster-care-fix-the-system. No, the Child-Welfare System Isn’t Racist Weekly Standard, June 4, 2018

re child-welfare authorities racist? That was the conclusion of an A article in Slate about a white lesbian couple from Oregon who killed themselves and their six black adoptive children by driving off a cliff in California in March 2018. (Two of the children are still missing but presumed dead.) “The ways in which Sarah and Jennifer [Hart] managed to continually evade the notice (or action) of officials is a luxury that is by and large only provided to white parents,” Rachelle Hampton argued.1 The Harts had come to the attention of child-welfare authorities in three states before this tragedy. They had been reported for beating one child and for withholding food from others, with few consequences. But white parents aren’t the only ones who have been able to evade child-welfare services. Remember Zymere Perkins of Harlem, the boy whose family was the subject of multiple child-welfare investigations before he was beaten to death with a broom handle by his mother’s black boyfriend in 2016? Or 2-year-old Tariji Gordon of Sanford, Florida, who was sent back to live with her black mother after her twin brother had suffocated, only to be found dead and buried in a suitcase in 2014? There is a long and tragic record of black children suffering abuse, neglect, and death even after child protective services were aware of the dangers these children faced in their own homes. And yet the claim that black parents are subject to greater scrutiny by child-welfare agencies simply by virtue of their race is a trope that is easy to find in academic circles, the media, and the world of child welfare. 70 NO, THE CHILD-WELFARE SYSTEM ISN’T RACIST 71

The statistics are clear: According to a 2016 report from the Chil- dren’s Information Gateway, white children made up 51.9 percent of the child population and 46.4 percent of children identified by child protective services as victims. By contrast, black children made up 13.8 percent of the child population and 22.6 percent of those identified as victims. The percentages of those who are in the foster care system are similarly disproportionate, with blacks making up 24.3 percent of kids in foster care and whites 43.4 percent.2 By contrast, Hispanic children are represented in the child-welfare system in almost exact proportion to their share of the population. They are 24.4 percent of the population, 24.0 percent of those identified as victims, and 22.5 percent of the kids in foster care. Asians are underrepresented in the child-welfare system, making up 4.8 percent of the population of children but only 0.9 percent of those identified as victims and 0.2 percent of those in foster care. When I ask Sharonda Wade, an African American woman who works as a supervisor in the Department of Children and Family Ser- vices in Los Angeles, what she makes of the claim that racial bias is responsible for the disproportionate rate of child removal among black families in Los Angeles, she tells me, “Racism exists inside our system—in health care, mental health, and criminal justice.” Wade says that “because black parents have had not-so-good relationships with other agencies, when our agencies come knocking, they witness us as someone they can’t trust.”3 Indeed, Wade tells me that a black person working for child protective services may actually make the situation worse from the perspective of black families. “Some people—even black people—feel like a black social worker won’t do a good enough job, that they’re not as educated, not as professional.” Even worse, “They see me as being a traitor.” During the four years she was an emergency response worker, clients would call her supervisor to complain. “They wanted a white social worker.” Others attacked her for working for child protective services at all. “Some of the moms would be screaming: ‘How dare you work for [child protective services]? You’re going to get your ass whupped for working for the man.’”4 72 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

And then there are the conspiracy theories. Wade has heard people accuse her of “selling black kids.” She has even seen flyers circulating in the community to this effect. When her agency started a program to send a public health nurse to visit kids (after a call about a 2-year- old who hadn’t received immunizations), a Facebook group formed, telling people not to let child protective services in because “they’re going to take your babies.” Wade says that this demonstrates the level of misunderstanding in the black community about her job and its incentives. “If I remove a child, it is so much paperwork for me. It’s an exhausting process. I would prefer you keep your child. We don’t want your babies. We want your babies to be safe.”5 Such accusations and conspiracy theories sound familiar to Randall Wilson, who has worked for the Philadelphia Department of Human Services for 21 years. Wilson is black, but he says the racial makeup of workers doesn’t matter because they “work in a system and tend to reflect dominant discourses of power.” If you are achild-welfare worker, “you are an agent of systematic power.”6 He raises the example of emergency room doctors who may be more likely to report suspicion of abuse in a black family than in a white family, even for two kids with the same kind of injuries. For her part, Wade is unsure that child protective services is adding “fresh” bias to the equation. And she is skeptical that her colleagues are taking children away from families for arbitrary reasons. After all, a disproportionately high number of child-welfare workers in the United States are black. In New York City, for example, 65 percent of Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) employees are black, and 15 percent are Hispanic.7 Moreover, child protective services workers are often responding to complaints made by people of color who live and work in the same neighborhoods as these minority families, such as mandated reporters like teachers and doctors. In New York, for instance, 40 percent of public-school teachers are nonwhite. And in Washington, DC, almost half of all teachers are nonwhite. It is not nosy, racist white ladies who are interfering in the lives of these black families. More often than not it is black people concerned about the welfare of black children. NO, THE CHILD-WELFARE SYSTEM ISN’T RACIST 73

Of course, there are cases in which child protective services didn’t need to be called. Recently, a school called Wade’s agency after a mother (who was black) refused to provide the school with an EpiPen even though her child had severe allergies. The mother said she couldn’t afford two of the pens and so had to keep the one at home. Rather than help her find asocial-service agency to help pay for the second pen, school officials reported that she was “hostile” and claimed they were concerned that “if she was hostile with them she was hostile with her kids.” Wade found no evidence for that. But she says the inability or unwillingness of some black parents to deal calmly with child protective services workers makes things more difficult for everyone. Her agency has done plenty of sensitivity training to defuse these situations, but she says it’s still not enough. When she was responsible for approving foster placements for kids who had been removed from their homes, Wade says, parents would often become frustrated that a child couldn’t be placed immediately with a member of the extended family. But extended family members have to pass background checks and meet other requirements in order to foster children. One of her black colleagues ques- tioned the need to jump through so many hoops: “So Grandma has got domestic violence on her record. What’s wrong with that? I’ve had a little domestic violence too.” Says Wade, “That’s not the kind of sensitivity I’m looking for.”8 Wilson also worries that it is harder to place black children with extended family members because of the many other issues that affect these family members. He tells me: “If you don’t address poverty, unemployment, and lack of stable housing, then when you go to look for a suitable caretaker, one of those issues could impede that child to be placed there.”9 This gets to the heart of the problem with the claim that the child-welfare system is racist: It fails to acknowledge that certain social factors are correlated with child abuse and neglect—and those factors are more likely to be present in minority communities. According to a report from the Child Welfare Information Gateway, these factors include economic challenges like poverty and unemployment, which disproportionately affect black families. Parents in these 74 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS situations are more likely to experience high amounts of stress, a con- tributing factor for risk of abuse.10 Another commonly correlated factor in child abuse is domestic violence between partners. As an article in Time pointed out in the wake of the video of football player Ray Rice beating his wife, “Black women are almost three times as likely to experience death as a result of [domestic violence/intimate partner violence] than White women. And while Black women only make up 8% of the population, 22% of homicides that result from DV/IPV happen to Black Women and 29% of all victimized women, making it one of the leading causes of death for Black women ages 15 to 35.”11 Family structure is another major predictor of child abuse. Single parenthood, and especially the presence in the home of a man who is not the biological father, is a common theme in a significant percentage of abuse cases. According to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, the incidence of physical abuse for a child living with a single parent and a “partner” is 19.5 per 1,000.12 That’s almost twice as high as for children living with unmarried biological parents or a parent married to a nonbiological parent and almost 10 times as high as for married biological parents. The data are similar for sexual abuse. According to data from Child Trends, in 2014, 70 percent of all births to black women occurred outside of marriage, compared with only 29 percent of all births to white women.13 For Hispanics, the rate is 54 percent, and Hispanic couples are more likely to remain together even if they don’t marry (which could explain some of the difference between black and Hispanic families with regard to interactions with child protective services). Family structure is a deeply important factor in determining the likelihood of interaction with child-welfare officials, and it is one that disproportionately affects black children. These statistics are not difficult to find, but like so many other claims about disparate impact being the result of implicit or explicit racial bias (whether it’s fourth-grade reading scores or elite college admissions or school suspension rates or incarceration rates), there is a reluctance to talk about the many other factors that might lead to these outcomes when it comes to child abuse and neglect. NO, THE CHILD-WELFARE SYSTEM ISN’T RACIST 75

Instead, advocates claim the laws themselves are suspect. Writing in the Atlantic about a “free-range child” law proposed in Utah, Indi- ana University sociology professor Jessica McCrory Calarco argued, “What counts as ‘free-range parenting’ and what counts as ‘neglect’ are in the eye of the beholder—and race and class often figure heavily into such distinctions.”14 In a letter responding to the Atlantic story, Diane Redleaf, legal director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare in Chicago, wrote, “Neglect laws currently are sweeping in millions of poor and minority families under amorphous standards. These laws and policies allow child-protection caseworkers to declare healthy and happy children to be ‘neglected.’ Often, parents get their names registered in child-abuse blacklists on the say-so of caseworkers without so much as a scintilla of evidence of neglectful care.”15 Similar claims have been made in other publications. For example, a 2017 article in the New York Times cited interviews with lawyers working on behalf of parents caught up with ACS in New York City, who claimed that ACS is engaged in the “criminalization of their parenting choices,” a practice the Times calls “Jane Crow.”16 Critics of the system often cite the fact that of the three million reports of abuse or neglect made each year, only about a third are “substantiated.” But as Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet notes in her book Nobody’s Children, “Fully 60 percent of the parents named in cases of suspected but unsubstantiated maltreatment show up in the [child protective services] system again based on new allegations.”17

*** It is true that the majority of families investigated by child welfare are poor and disproportionately people of color, but the growing consensus that this is the result of systemic racism or groundless accusations should be challenged, particularly in light of new legislation proposed in Minnesota. The Minnesota African American Family Preservation Act, which was introduced in both chambers of the state legislature in March 2018, would create a special council inside the state Department of Human Services to oversee how black children and families are treated. It would make it harder to terminate the parental rights of 76 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS black parents and force child protective services to place black children with other relatives or provide evidence for why such placement should not occur. And it allows parents to petition for families to be reunified when kids are older. This kind of language has great appeal for politicians on both sides of the aisle. And if you knew nothing about the child-welfare system today, you would wonder why anyone could object to the legislation’s stated purposes—“To protect the best interests of Afri- can American children” and to “promote the stability and security of African American families by establishing minimum standards to prevent arbitrary and unnecessary removal of African American children from their families.”18 But neither Wade nor Wilson thinks the legislation will have much effect on the system. Wilson cites the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) as evidence that race-specific laws seeking to keep children with members of their own family (or tribe) fail to have the intended effects. “ICWA has not significantly reduced the disproportional number of Native American children in foster care” because the underlying factors of poverty, substance abuse, and other social challenges have not really changed.19 Wade agrees that Minnesota’s plan holds little promise for limiting abuse or reuniting families. There are already rules governing when and how children who are in danger of severe neglect and abuse should be removed from a home; merely encouraging social workers to think extra hard about whether to do so doesn’t seem like much of a solution. Wade says she wouldn’t mind seeing the creation of some kind of advocacy center that black parents could call. “If these parents had concerns about social workers or wondered why [child protective services] was called in on them, they could call in and get help. Someone could explain to them: This is the process. This is how you get your kids back.”20 Such a service could help them fully understand the problems that led to the removal and connect with resources such as parenting classes or drug rehabilitation services. Wade and many of her colleagues do this already, but “for some of them, you can’t tell them nothing.”21 Wilson is correct in his comparison with the ICWA. Like the legislation in Minnesota, the ICWA was meant to right a historic wrong. The NO, THE CHILD-WELFARE SYSTEM ISN’T RACIST 77 institution of slavery did tear apart black families, and the US government’s policies toward Indians did much the same. But the solution has only made the problem worse. The ICWA has prevented children who are clearly the victims of serious physical and sexual abuse and extreme neglect from being placed in stable homes simply because of their race. There are several reservations where incidents of physical and sexual abuse have been numerous and egregious. According to a 2012 report in the New York Times, for example, the Spirit Lake reservation included:

38 registered sex offenders among its 6,200 residents, a rate of one offender for every 163 residents. By contrast, Grand Forks, N.D., about 85 miles away, has 13 sex offenders out of a population of 53,000—a rate of about one in 4,000. In one home on the reservation, nine children are under the care of the father, an uncle and a grandfather, each a convicted sex offender, a federal official said. Two of the children, brothers who are 6 and 8, were recently observed engaging in public sex, residents said.22

And Spirit Lake is not alone. At the Red Lake Chippewa reservation in Minnesota, one mental-health professional received reports of 75 children between the ages of 5 and 15 who were mimicking (and in some cases actually having) sexual relations with each other on a school playground. Astonishingly, child-welfare officials have been sanctioned for reporting these problems, and ICWA has made it all but impossible to remove these children from their communities and find safer homes for them. Keeping these children with their tribes is considered more important than their individual rights to safety and security. Legislation like the Minnesota African American Family Pres- ervation Act would likely do the same. Not only would it effectively encourage social workers to keep children in abusive homes longer (can you imagine a law that would encourage battered African Ameri- can women to stay with their husbands longer to preserve black families?), it would also encourage them to place black children with less 78 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS safe and stable family members rather than having the option of a nonblack family fostering or adopting them. The claims of systemic racial bias in the child-welfare system are pernicious not only because they will result in more limited—and potentially more dangerous—options for minority children, but because they affect black parents’ opportunity to properly understand the accusations against them and, if possible, work with child protective services to change their behaviors and reunify their families.

This piece is reprinted with permission from the Weekly Standard, which originally published it on June 4, 2018.23 It has been lightly edited for this compilation.

Notes

1. Rachelle Hampton, “The Devonte Hart Case Highlights a Profound Racial Disparity in the Treatment of Child Abuse,” Slate, April 3, 2018, https:// slate.com/human-interest/2018/04/devonte-hart-and-siblings-death-shows- racial-disparity-in-child-abuse-investigations.html. 2. Child Welfare Information Gateway, “Racial Disproportionality and Disparity in Child Welfare,” November 2016, https://www.childwelfare.gov/ pubPDFs/racial_disproportionality.pdf. 3. Sharonda Wade (Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Ser- vices), in discussion with the author, May 23, 2018. 4. Wade, discussion. 5. Wade, discussion. 6. Randall Wilson (Philadelphia Department of Human Services), in discussion with the author, May 23, 2018. 7. New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services, “New York City Government Workforce Profile Report FY 2016,” 2016, http://www. nyc.gov/html/dcas/downloads/pdf/misc/workforce_profile_report_fy_2016. pdf. 8. Wade, discussion. 9. Wilson, discussion. 10. Child Welfare Information Gateway, “Risk Factors That Contribute to NO, THE CHILD-WELFARE SYSTEM ISN’T RACIST 79

Child Abuse and Neglect,” https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/can/factors/. 11. Feminista Jones, “Why Black Women Struggle More with Domestic Violence,” Time, September 10, 2014, http://time.com/3313343/ray-rice-black- women-domestic-violence/. 12. A. J. Sedlak et al., “Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS–4): Report to Congress,” US Department of Health and Human Services, 2010, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/nis4_report_ congress_full_pdf_jan2010.pdf. 13. Child Trends, “Births to Unmarried Women: Indicators of Child and Youth Well-Being,” October 2016, https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/12/75_Births_to_Unmarried_Women.pdf. 14. Jessica McCrory Calarco, “‘Free-Range’ Parenting’s Unfair Double Standard,” Atlantic, April 3, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/ 2018/04/free-range-parenting/557051/. 15. Diane Redleaf, “Letters: Legalizing ‘Free-Range’ Parenting Is a Step in the Right Direction,” Atlantic, April 12, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ letters/archive/2018/04/letters-free-range-parenting/557558/. 16. Clifford and Silver-Greenberg, “Foster Care as Punishment.” 17. Elizabeth Bartholet, Nobody’s Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1999). 18. Minnesota African American Family Preservation Act, Minn. Stat. SF 3779 (2017–18), https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?session=ls90& number=SF3779. 19. Wilson, discussion. 20. Wade, discussion. 21. Wade, discussion. 22. Timothy Williams, “A Tribe’s Epidemic of Child Sex Abuse, Mini- mized for Years,” New York Times, September 19, 2012, https://www.nytimes. com/2012/09/20/us/us-steps-in-as-child-sex-abuse-pervades-sioux-tribe. html. 23. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “No the Child Welfare System Isn’t Racist,” Weekly Standard, June 4, 2018, https://www.weeklystandard.com/naomi-schaefer- riley/yes-racial-bias-is-a-problem-for-family-services-and-cps-systems-heres- how-not-to-fix-that. Reconsidering Kinship Care National Affairs, Summer 2018

he decades-long debate over kinship care in America seems to Thave been settled. The once-prevalent belief that only the most caring, stable families should be prioritized as placement options for foster children has been replaced with the assumption that relatives of foster children should always be looked to for assistance first. This might appear sensible; for most of human history, the preference for keeping children with extended family need hardly have been articulated. Yet in many cases, the results of placing children with their kin have been mixed at best. Often, such placements exacerbate the problems that foster care policies are meant to correct. To better answer the question of whether prioritizing kinship care is preferable to other methods of determining foster care placements, it will be useful to assess how we got here, to grasp the role that racial considerations have played in the rise of kinship care, and to appreci- ate the costs and the benefits involved. In some important respects, the turn to kinship care is a return to prior norms, but with some con- sequential differences.

The Evolution of Kinship Care

Until about the middle of the 20th century in America, kinship care had been considered the default solution for children whose parents were unable or unwilling to properly care for them. Relatives were expected to step up to help such children, and few others were willing to take them in. Orphanages were relatively rare prior to the 1830s, and even when urbanization and immigration made such institutions common, 80 RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 81 the children who lived there (many were not technically orphans) were seldom placed with strangers except to serve as apprentices or indentured servants. Despite attempts by child-welfare reformers in the 19th and early-20th centuries to alter the prevailing view of adoption as a sort of labor arrangement, 12 states still had indenture laws as late as 1927. A striking example of this approach is featured in Barbara Melosh’s 2002 book, Strangers and Kin. In 1918, the mayor of Bogalusa, Louisi- ana, wrote to the Children’s Aid Society of New York to request “some white babies . . . a carload [of] about thirty to fifty . . . We do not care to know anything about their antecedents or parentage. All we want to know is that they are healthy.”1 Although the society denied his request, it is indicative of an attitude by which disenfranchised children were viewed principally as commodities. Melosh also noted that the changes sought by child-welfare activists were viewed as extreme. “The emergence of modern adoption,” she wrote, “required a radically different understanding of family, one that overturned deeply held beliefs about blood and nurture, obligation and love, choice and chance.”2 The idea that not only would families willingly raise strangers’ children but that this practice could become commonplace did not really take hold until after World War II. From around 1945 to 1973, a period sometimes referred to as the “Baby Scoop Era,” there was a significant increase in the rate of premarital pregnancies. Many single women were pressured into giving up their babies for adoption to protect their reputations, and the rate of newborn adoptions rose significantly during this time. In a way, the concept of adoption had been turned on its head: Instead of being viewed primarily as a means for families to support their farms or businesses, it was now seen as an altruistic act. Soon, the number of families interested in adopting children exceeded the number of healthy babies available for adoption. Partly as a result of these demographics, and partly out of a desire to help those most in need or perhaps make a statement about Amer- ica’s pluralism, tolerance, and commitment to helping the destitute, American couples began to adopt internationally and across domestic 82 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS racial lines. Between 1968 and 1972, approximately 50,000 black and biracial children were adopted by white parents. These types of adoptions were not universally celebrated, however. As Melosh noted, “adoptions across national and racial lines . . . claimed a public visibility disproportionate to their actual numbers, a measure of the ways in which such families remain provocative— evoking utopian possibility, for some; and for others, providing a galling instance of white privilege at home and abroad.”3 Eventually, prominent African American and Native American leaders began to protest this trend. In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) issued a statement that took “a vehement stand against the placements of black children in white homes for any reason.” The group called transracial adoptions “unnatural,” “unnecessary,” and “artificial” and argued that such placements were evidence of the continued “chattel status” of African Americans. The statement read, in part:

We affirm the inviolable position of black children in black families where they belong physically, psychologically and culturally in order that they receive the total sense of themselves and develop a sound projection of their future.

Ethnicity is a way of life in these United States, and the world at large; a viable, sensitive, meaningful and legitimate societal con- struct. This is no less true nor legitimate for black people than for other ethnic groups. . . .

We fully recognize the phenomenon of transracial adoption as an expedient for white folk, not as an altruistic humane concern for black children.4

The NABSW’s president at the time, Cenie Williams, argued that temporary foster or even institutional placements for black children were preferable to their adoption by white families. This opposition resulted in a swift decline in transracial foster arrangements and adoptions. In 1973, the Child Welfare League of America revised its RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 83 adoption standards (which had been rewritten in 1968 to reflect a friendlier stance toward transracial adoption) to clarify that same-race placements were always preferred. The writings of Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) further contributed to the movement against placing black children with white families. In 1938, Malcolm’s mother, Louise Little, suffered a nervous breakdown after her husband was murdered. Six of her children, including Malcolm, were sent to four different foster homes. Malcolm was placed with a white family. In his 1965 bestseller, The Autobiog- raphy of Malcolm X, which he coauthored with journalist Alex Haley, Malcolm lamented that “[a] Judge McClellan in Lansing had authority over me and all of my brothers and sisters. . . . A white man in charge of a black man’s children! Nothing but legal, modern slavery—however kindly intentioned.” He went on, “I truly believe that if ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours. We wanted and tried to stay together. Our home didn’t have to be destroyed.”5 In 1990, Malcolm’s younger brother Robert became head of the Child Welfare Administration in New York City and endorsed kinship care as an antidote to the type of struggle he and his siblings had undergone. Nina Bernstein described Robert Little’s upbringing in her 2001 book, The Lost Children of Wilder, and noted that although he had been raised in a home with family friends, it was still a foster home. Because of this, he had grown up “feeling that the social workers who trooped through the house twice a year were an extension of oppres- sive white authority, like the courts, the police and the prisons.”6 Activists for Native American rights viewed white adoption of Native American children with the same sort of suspicion and antipa- thy. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Native American children had often been placed in boarding schools, in the hope that education would speed their cultural assimilation. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Indian Adoption Project, a program administered by the Child Welfare League of America and funded by a federal contract from the US Chil- dren’s Bureau and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, placed hundreds of Native American children with white adoptive parents. This was considered by many at the time to be a triumph for civil rights made possible by a decrease in racial prejudice. Soon, however, tribal advocates 84 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS denounced the project as only the most recent in a long line of policies meant to weaken or destroy Native American communities. These advocates believed that resisting such policies would entail recruiting more families from the same racial background to take in Native American children, or else finding ways to keep children with their immediate or extended families. The Indian Child Welfare Act, passed in 1978, gave tribes jurisdiction over children living on and off reservations who were wards of the state and made it extremely difficult for non-native people to adopt Native American children. Despite the growing support for race-based kinship care, however, there were attempts to push back against its complete acceptance as an ideal. In 1994, for example, Congress passed the Multiethnic Place- ment Act (MEPA), which, among other things, “prohibited State agencies and other entities that receive Federal funding . . . from delaying, denying, or otherwise discriminating when making a foster care or adoption placement decision on the basis of the parent or child’s race, color, or national origin.”7 MEPA was enacted, as law professor Joan Heifetz Hollinger put it in a 1998 report for the American Bar Association, “amid spirited and sometimes contentious debate about transracial adoption and same-race placement policies.”8 According to Hollinger, Congress had found not only that African American and other minority children were, on average, forced to wait in limbo in child protective systems for far longer than white children but that “racial and ethnic matching policies” had significantly contributed to these delays. The law, which was amended in 1996, included among its specific goals decreasing the length of time that children wait to be adopted and “facilitat[ing] the recruitment and retention of foster and adoptive parents who can meet the distinctive needs of children awaiting placement.”9 In 1997 and 1998, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued guidance documents based on the law that, according to Hollinger, suggested that “a child’s race, color, or national origin cannot be routinely considered as a relevant factor in assessing the child’s best interests.”10 Despite these efforts to limit the influence of the racial kinship- care movement, though, the rate of kinship care has continued to grow RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 85 nationwide. Between 2006 and 2016, the percentage of foster children placed in kinship homes nationwide increased from 24 percent to 32 percent, according to HHS. The total number of children in kinship homes grew by nearly 15,000 during that time, even though the number of children in foster care declined overall.11 There has also been an increase in kinship-care arrangements outside the formal foster care placement system, often referred to as voluntary or private kinship care. In West Virginia, for example, an estimated 28,000 children lived with a relative with no parent present in the home between 2013 and 2015, but fewer than 6,000 children were registered in the state’s foster system during that time. In Ken- tucky, approximately 81,000 children lived in kinship-care arrangements between 2015 and 2017, while fewer than 8,000 were listed in the foster system. Depending on the state, kinship-care arrangements outside of state-ordered foster care placements can be subsidized as well. In such cases, however, the state does not actually decide on the placement. For involuntary or public foster children—those who have been forcibly removed from their homes due to parental abuse or neglect and whose placements are decided by the state—the situation is quite different. States must then choose whether to seek out nonrelatives who have volunteered and trained to be foster parents or to recruit extended families. Many states have decided to recruit more kin for such cases, perhaps due in part to HHS’s official position on the issue: “Relatives are the preferred resource for children who must be removed from their birth parents because it maintains the children’s connections with their families. Kinship care is often considered a type of family preservation service.”12 The racial ideologies outlined above thus seem to have usurped the vision of earlier child-welfare reformers, who aspired to look beyond blood or race in seeking homes for children and assuring their well-being. Indeed, at the start of the 20th century, that had been widely understood as a progressive stance. Today, the country appears to have returned to the long-standing assumption that it is virtually always better for children to stay with their kin. 86 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

Kinship Care Today

Today’s kinship-care arrangements, of course, look very different from those of the 18th and 19th centuries. Recent federal and state legislation, rulings by the Supreme Court, and evolving practices among child-welfare agencies have all introduced new pressures, incentives, and expectations into the kinship-care system. The 1979 Supreme Court case Miller v. Youakim, for example, high- lighted tensions between new and old ways of viewing kinship care. The case concerned four siblings who had been removed from their mother’s home in Illinois and made wards of the state. Two of the siblings had been placed in the homes of nonrelatives, and the other two in the home of their older, married sister, Linda Youakim. Linda and her husband were deemed ineligible for certain federal foster care payments distributed by Illinois because of their relation to the children. These payments were, however, granted to the nonrelative foster parents. When the state requested that the Youakims also take in the other two siblings, they refused, citing the financial burden this would impose. In Miller, they argued that they should have received the same level of federal financial support as the nonrelative foster parents, in part because they had no legal obligation to care for Linda’s siblings. The Court ruled that relative caregivers cannot be denied federal foster care benefits if otherwise eligible. The state of Illinois had arguably been operating on a more traditional understanding of kinship care: that it is desirable for children to remain with their families, that families would willingly take in their relatives’ children, and that such arrangements cost the government less in time, energy, and actual funds than other institutional placements. The Miller decision prompted Illinois and other states to view nonrelative foster care and kinship care in a new, more equivalent light. This led to a range of policy changes and legislative proposals across the country, including granting preference to kin when determining foster care placements, expand- ing the definition of kin, and providing new sources of support to kinship-care families. RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 87

A widely publicized 1986 lawsuit against New York City had a similar effect. InEugene F. v. Gross, the Legal Aid Society alleged that the city had not provided adequate support, information, and services to relative caregivers. Compelling testimony by kinship caregivers demonstrated that they often lacked basic necessities for the children under their care, including beds, clothing, and school supplies. New York City subsequently expedited procedures for approving relative foster parents and began to provide them with the same level of reim- bursement as nonrelatives. As Nina Bernstein noted in The Lost Children of Wilder, by 1993, in part due to the influence of Robert Little, 43 percent of all children placed by New York City were assigned to kinship-care homes.13 Many of these placements were significantly subsidized by the city. In general, foster care grants in New York City were considerably more generous than grants offered by the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which mostly supported poor children living with their own mothers. Further, kinship-care payments from the city were often even larger than standard city foster care payments and up to seven times the amount of AFDC benefits. This presented a straightforward economic incentive for poor families to place their children in foster care and arrange for kinship-care placements. According to Bernstein, “[Robert] Little heard critics complain that foster care was now being used as a form of economic development for the black community, a back-door method of income redistribu- tion, but he saw nothing wrong with that. For years black children had been the raw material for a white-run foster-care industry that treated them to second-class service. Why shouldn’t money for their care stay within the black community instead, and help their own kind?”14 New York City was not alone in generously financing kinship care. For example, in 1996, two children living with relatives licensed by the Maryland foster care system would have received $1,070 to $1,100 a month; if they had been living at home, they would have received $292 per month from the state’s AFDC program. There are still other, more bureaucratic incentives to place children in kinship homes today. Fred Wulczyn, the founder and director of the University of Chicago’s Center for State Child Welfare Data, has 88 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS argued that the relative ease of placing children with kin may influence the decisions of caseworkers, who are generally not required to conduct extensive background checks and follow-up assessments for kinship caregivers, at least not to the same degree as for nonrelative foster placements. Overworked agents who can save time and resources by placing children with relatives may therefore sometimes do so regardless of whether such placements are truly in a child’s best interests. James Dwyer, a professor at William & Mary Law School, has also raised the issue of liability, explaining that, generally, “caseworkers prefer relative families [because] if something goes wrong, it’s the families’ fault.”15 In addition, because a preference for kin has become standard, according to Wulczyn, states often devote fewer resources to recruiting nonkin foster families. This has created a sort of chicken-and-egg problem. Nonrelative foster families may be in short supply because the political tide has turned toward seeking kinship-care families, who may in turn feel pressured to provide homes for children they cannot properly care for. A combination of these incentives may have contributed to an ongoing decline in adoption rates for black children. According to a 2017 report by the Institute for Family Studies, the percentage of black kindergarteners who were adopted fell from 23 percent to 9 percent between 1999 and 2011, even though 25 percent of all kindergarteners in kinship or foster care in 2011 were black. As the report noted,

The decline may represent the success of efforts by activists to dis- courage adoption of African-American children by white couples. It may also reflect child welfare agency practices giving preference to the placement of minority children with relatives, even when the relative is reluctant to take in the child or has only meager financial resources. Some state agencies have even used subsidized relative guardianship without formal adoption as a way of getting around support limits imposed by welfare reform.16

Overall, it is easier to go the kinship-care route. From the perspective of state social-service agencies, it is politically desirable, it RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 89 entails less vetting and follow-up, and it presents less of a liability risk. Depending on the state, it may also cost less than standard foster care payments (though, as we have seen, this is certainly not always the case). From the point of view of low-income parents, it may be finan- cially advantageous to fight for their children to stay with relatives rather than strangers. As in the past, kinship care may provide children with a form of stability that being raised by strangers might not. But the modern iteration of kinship care, which frequently involves state-financed, court-ordered placements, has introduced troubling elements into a once-informal understanding between family members.

Potential Consequences

Some have argued that this approach toward placing foster children with kin may encourage people who should not be caring for children to do so, or, as noted above, may incentivize low-income parents to abandon their children in order to enable their relatives to receive foster care payments. As Deborah Daro, a senior fellow at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall research center, explained, “There are people who would voluntarily come to this conclusion: Oh my sister is strug- gling, I will take care of her kids. But families in a formal exchange of money are in a different kind of situation.”17 To Daro, the distorted financial incentive to place children in relatives’ homes—people who, were it not for the money, would not be interested in (let alone capable of) caring for the children—is cause for concern and may even undermine HHS’s stated goal of preserving families. It is true, as the defenders of kinship care point out, that children in kinship care tend to be moved around less frequently. In New York, for instance, between 1990 and 2000, 8 percent of children in relative’s homes had four or more placements compared to 13 percent of children placed in non-kinship homes. Obviously it is important for children to experience as much stability as possible, and it is reasonable to assume that relatives might be more likely than nonrelatives to hold on to a difficult child out of a sense of familial obligation. But the 90 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS difference actually seems relatively small. Moreover, the data also suggest that children spend much more time in kinship foster care than they spend in nonrelative care. During this same period, children in New York State spent a median number of 492 days in care if they were living with nonrelatives and 1,358 if they were living with kin. Support- ers of kinship care would say that the current disparity is not as much of a problem as it seems because the kids are not experiencing the trauma associated with living among strangers. Indeed, they probably have more contact with their biological parents when they are living with kin. On the other hand, the fact that they are having this contact may mean that biological parents do not have the same kind of incentive to change their behaviors in order to get their children back. It may also be the case that relative foster parents are less willing to adopt the children permanently because they don’t want to be seen as responsible for separating the child from his or her parents. But this too has implications for children’s welfare. As long as they are technically in foster care, they are in the state’s custody, and the state—not the parents or other extended family—is making decisions about their future. This tendency toward less permanent solutions for children is one reason that Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet rejects HHS’s interpretation of “family preservation” as an ideal. In her 1999 book, Nobody’s Children, Bartholet compared children who had been returned to abusive homes in the name of family preservation to battered women, arguing that, until recently, women were largely dependent on their husbands, and victims of spousal abuse had few options.18 While we might be horrified today at the prospect of battered women being forced to live with the relatives of their abusive husbands, Bartholet explained, we have largely embraced this practice for abused, neglected, or drug-exposed children. In many cases, family members are asked or even pressured by state authorities to take in children who might be better cared for elsewhere. Bartholet further noted that there is little reason to believe that grandparents—often the people who raised the abusive parents—will provide substantively better care for these kids. RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 91

In a 2012 Buffalo Law Review article, Bartholet took particular issue with the widespread practice of “voluntary kinship care,” which she referred to as a form of “massive diversion” from child protective services. As she wrote, “Surely a child-friendly system would question such a . . . program and insist at a minimum on research assessing how children do in such informal . . . and unsupervised kinship care as compared to formal foster care.”19 Bartholet also criticized the priorities of drug courts, arguing that they frequently seek to help drug-addicted parents at the expense of children:

Family drug treatment courts began with a dual promise. First, they would provide drug-abusing parents priority access to treatment and other support enabling them to achieve rehabilitation and keep their children. Second, they would provide children the nurturing parenting they require to grow up healthy by moving children on to foster and adoptive parents if their biological parents were unable to achieve rehabilitation in a reasonable period of time—reasonable from the child’s perspective.20

But over the years family drug courts have increasingly emphasized the promise to parents and ignored the promise to children. They have focused primarily on rehabilitation with the goal of promoting family preservation, and when, as is predictable given the difficulties of treating addiction, parents continue to abuse drugs and alcohol, children have often been left in homes where substance abuse continues to limit parenting capacity, or if removed have often languished in foster care for years. James Dwyer echoed this concern in regard to child-welfare agencies, explaining that caseworkers don’t always want children to be removed from abusive, neglectful, or impoverished situations “because they think the adults are victims, too.”21 This attitude among courts and agencies may have led to a related trend in which nonrelative foster caregivers feel they are treated as second-class parents. Jen Yearout, who has served as a kinship caregiver for two of her nieces and later as a nonrelative foster parent, 92 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS believes the child-welfare system is flawed in the way it treats both kin and nonkin foster families. When Yearout was only 19 years old and busy balancing schedules at work and school, West Virginia’s Bureau for Children and Families placed her older sister’s two young daughters in her home. One of Yearout’s nieces was 18 months old at the time, and the other only eight months. In a conversation with me, Yearout said she is “horrified” when she remembers the conditions in which she cared for these children, explaining that she had virtually no knowledge of how to properly supervise her nieces and that “the caseworker never came to my apartment to see the conditions or whether I was qualified or whether I took them to the doctor.”22 At first, Yearout explained, she had felt compelled to try raising the children on her own. Her sister was a drug addict who had a record of engaging in prostitution and who led a generally nomadic life, sometimes staying with Yearout, sometimes in hotel rooms, and sometimes on the streets. It was only once her sister was in labor for her third child and had exhibited withdrawal symptoms while giving birth that Yearout alerted nurses at the hospital to her situation. The children were taken out of Yearout’s custody, eventually adopted by another family, and are now thriving in a safe and loving home. Yet Yearout still believes “it is God’s miracle that they survived.”23 Years later, Yearout married, and she and her husband, Caleb, decided to try to become foster parents themselves. They purchased beds, toys, and linens and generally made their home secure for children. They also underwent extensive background checks and hours of training, which Yearout said she had never been asked to do prior to being granted state-sanctioned responsibility for her nieces. After meeting with a caseworker, however, their application was denied. As Yearout explained, the caseworker had accused her husband of being an alcoholic because his hands shook—he has a nervous-system disorder—and of leering at women. She concluded that they were not fit to be foster parents. Shortly afterward, the Yearouts moved to Virginia and decided to try again. This time, their application succeeded, and they ultimately took in four foster children. Things did not go entirely smoothly, however. RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 93

The last child they fostered, whom they have since adopted, was born drug dependent in 2014 and spent several months in the NICU before coming home. He had to wear a helmet for a time because he kept hitting himself in the head, and he has a number of neurological and pulmonary issues. Yearout quit her job to care for the child full time, but caseworkers continually sought to send him back to live with his father and aunt. After two years of shuttling him back and forth, the state determined that the aunt’s record of problems with child protective services was reason enough to end her bid for placement and sever the father’s parental rights. In yet another troubling episode concerning child protective services, Yearout claimed, she was reprimanded by caseworkers for not agreeing to continue to house a troubled young girl who had attempted to sexually abuse her son. Mandy Leigh Finke, a foster mother in West Virginia who adopted eight of the children she took in and is in the process of adopting a ninth, recalled an experience similar to Yearout’s. Several years ago, she agreed to care for Kelsey, an infant whose mother was addicted to drugs. Despite this, caseworkers were determined to reunify the baby with her biological family, and Kelsey was sent home. Finke recounted that “about six months later, the state police did a drug raid on that house and found Kelsey in a playpen in the back of that house. Her mother was nine months pregnant with a heroine needle in her arm.”24 When Kelsey’s sister Bethany was born, she was placed with Finke, too. To Finke, this story provides just one example of the pervasive effects of parental andextended-family drug abuse on the children in her West Virginia community. Margaret Nichols Honeycutt, a pedia- trician who works in a town just across the Virginia border from West Virginia, agreed that drugs “are a multigenerational problem” in that area. She explained that many of the children she has seen who were born drug-exposed “may have the grandparent listed on the guardian certificate but . . . are going to the same home.” When that happens, she said, “the pathology is still right in their face.”25 Another of Finke’s foster children, Josiah, had been placed with her when he was around 15 months old. Prior to that, he had reportedly 94 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS almost never been taken out of his car seat and as a result would con- stantly rock back and forth the way he had as an infant—perhaps in an attempt to self-soothe or escape his confines. Josiah stayed with Finke for around a year before being sent to a relative in Florida. Finke said that she doesn’t know why it took so long to locate this family member, nor why the state determined it best to remove Josiah from a secure and loving home at a vulnerable point in his development. Finke has many more tragic stories regarding her adoptive and foster children, and she knows many people who won’t foster because they could not bear the pain of losing a child in this way. As she put it, “You do it in spite of the caseworker that you have that made your life miserable. You do it in spite of the parent who got their kid back who shouldn’t have gotten their kid back. You do it in spite of the judge who gave them the kid back who shouldn’t have given them their kid back.”26

In Defense of Kinship Care

Despite stories like Yearout’s and Finke’s, there are many staunch defenders of kinship care. Amelia Franck Meyer, the founder and CEO of the child-welfare nonprofit Alia, acknowledges that the opioid crisis and a range of other factors have contributed to hazardous conditions for children in kinship-care homes but disagrees that the ideal solution lies in seeking foster parents from outside a child’s family or community network. In a discussion with me, Meyer insisted that the question is not whether we can find strangers who are better able to care for these kids, but how best to support nuclear families or find children a place in their larger family systems. In contrast to foster mothers like Finke, who were devastated when child-welfare agencies found distant relatives with whom to place foster children they had cared for, Meyer argued that “we don’t look long or hard enough” to find the relatives of disadvantaged children. From her perspective, family members have a biological impulse to care for RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 95 one another, even if they’ve never met or are related only remotely. As Meyer explained, “We’re driven from a sociological basis to protect and prolong our gene pool.”27 She argued that the opposite is true, however, of nonrelative caregivers. To Meyer, “there is little that is more unnatural than to give up your own survival needs to care for the young of another.” She asserted that “living in a community where people look like you will only enhance your ability to thrive.”28 Meyer also believes that kinship care is preferable because a disproportionate number of minority kids are removed from their homes due to societal bias. As she put it, “The cultural norm is that people of color aren’t capable of caring for their children.”29 A continued emphasis on kinship preference could solve this problem, Meyer suggested. Shannon Moody, a policy director at the children’s-advocacy nonprofit Kentucky Youth Advocates, largely agrees with Meyer. She argued that the problem is not that kids are sent to live with extended family but rather that those families are not given the support necessary to properly care for abused or neglected children. Moody also noted the lack of consistent and thorough follow-up visits to kinship-care homes, stating that, often, “caseworkers feel better about the potential safety of relatives than . . . strangers.” In addition, there is often “no specific prevention plan in place and no specific rules about how many visitations caseworkers have to make.”30 Beyond financial help, kinship families should receive instruction on how to care for kids who have undergone traumatic experiences, along with ongoing support and possible monitoring. As Bartholet and other critics have observed, the research on kinship care’s effects is uneven at best, sorely lacking at worst. Yet it is worth noting that even among its advocates, few claim the current kinship-care system is working particularly well.

A Second Look

Despite the widespread acceptance of kinship care, many questions have been raised regarding its efficacy, along with proposals to curtail 96 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS or improve upon it. Some, like Meyer, argue that kinship-care recruitment has not gone far enough and that children would languish in the foster care system for fewer years and be moved around less if only states were better at locating family members. This might seem like an attractive position to liberals inclined to support Robert Little’s views on bolstering minority communities, as well as to conservatives, who tend to value the nuclear family. The NABSW’s 1972 position statement in favor of placing black children with relatives or other black people proclaimed that “the family is the basic unit of society.”31 This is a principle many conservatives hold dear, even if they would differ with the NABSW’s application of it. Others, like Shannon Moody, argue that there is not enough state involvement in kinship care and that if kinship families had more support and were provided with the tools to better care for the children in their charge, the system would improve overall. Then there are foster mothers like Finke and Yearout and legal experts like Bartholet, who flatly reject the idea of prioritizing kinship homes over foster placements. Finke and Yearout in particular look to their own experiences as proof that the pressure to find kinship placements has not served children well. They worry that the best interests of children—their physical safety, emotional well-being, and oppor- tunities for success—have been subordinated to what is essentially a political movement. This is at least partially correct. Although race hasn’t even been a factor in the adoptions of Finke or Yearout (as their communities are overwhelmingly white), this ideology has spread to every community in America. The statement from the NABSW relied largely on appeals to emo- tion and the importance of maintaining black culture rather than evidence that black children would fare better with their extended families in measurable ways. As the authors declared, “We now pro- claim our truth, substance, beauty and value as ourselves without apology or compromise. The affirmation of our ethnicity promotes our opposition to the trans-racial placements of Black children.”32 In a 2014 discussion on transracial adoption in the New York Times’ online “Room for Debate” feature, many of the experts, both pro- and anti-transracial adoption, relied on cultural or political arguments RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 97 rather than clear data or personal experience. Bartholet and others have insisted on the need for greater scrutiny of kinship care’s effects.33 While it is possible to sympathize with the sentiments underlying the kinship-care movement, it is important to reevaluate it in light of our decades-long national experience with its consequences. It is not at all clear that the principles on which it was founded are just, nor that the results have served children well. Of course, reforming kinship care will entail boldly challenging a long-standing practice that many have come to accept as obviously preferable. It will also require clarifying the goals of foster care agencies and carefully elucidating what we mean when we talk about the “best interests” of children. For as well-intentioned and sensible as the kinship-care movement may appear, the assumption that children will be well cared for by those close to their abusers—in many cases, the people who raised their abusers—might prove to have been short- sighted or even destructive.

This piece is reprinted with permission from National Affairs, where it was originally published in the summer 2018 issue.34 It has been lightly edited for this compilation.

Notes

1. Barbara Melosh, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 2. Melosh, Strangers and Kin. 3. Melosh, Strangers and Kin. 4. National Association of Black Social Workers, “Position State- ment on Trans-Racial Adoption,” September 1972, https://cdn.ymaws. com/nabsw.site-ym.com/resource/collection/E1582D77-E4CD-4104-996A- D42D08F9CA7D/NABSW_Trans-Racial_Adoption_1972_Position_(b).pdf. 5. Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). 6. Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (New York: Vintage, 2002). 7. Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994, Pub. L. No. 103-382. 98 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS

8. Joan Heifetz Hollinger, A Guide to the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 as Amended by the Interethnic Adoption Provision of 1996, ABA Center on Children and the Law, 1998, https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/ administrative/child_law/GuidetoMultiethnicPlacementAct.authcheckdam. pdf. 9. Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-188. 10. Hollinger, A Guide to the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994. 11. US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Admin- istration for Children and Families, “Trends in Foster Care and Adoption,” October 20, 2017, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/resource/trends-in-foster-care- and-adoption. 12. Child Welfare Information Gateway, “Kinship Care,” https://www. childwelfare.gov/topics/outofhome/kinship/. 13. Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder. 14. Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder. 15. James Dwyer (professor, William & Mary Law School), in discussion with the author, January 30, 2018. 16. Nicholas Zill, The Changing Face of Adoption in the United States, Institute for Family Studies, August 8, 2017, https://ifstudies.org/blog/the- changing-face-of-adoption-in-the-united-states. 17. Deborah Daro (senior fellow, University of Chicago), in discussion with the author, January 29, 2018. 18. Bartholet, Nobody’s Children. 19. Elizabeth Bartholet, “Creating a Child-Friendly Child Welfare Sys- tem: Effective Early Intervention to Prevent Maltreatment and Protect Vic- timized Children,” Buffalo Law Review 60, no. 5 (2012): 1321–72, http://www. buffalolawreview.org/past_issues/60_5/Bartholet.pdf. 20. Bartholet, “Creating a Child-Friendly Child Welfare System,” 1365–66. 21. Dwyer, discussion. 22. Jen Yearout, in discussion with the author, January 4, 2018. 23. Yearout, discussion. 24. Mandy Leigh Finke, in discussion with the author, January 4, 2018. 25. Margaret Nichols Honeycutt, in discussion with the author, January 4, 2018. 26. Finke, discussion. 27. Amelia Franck Meyer (founder and CEO, Alia), in discussion with the RECONSIDERING KINSHIP CARE 99 author, February 1, 2018. 28. Meyer, discussion. 29. Meyer, discussion. 30. Shannon Moody (policy director, Kentucky Youth Advocates), in discussion with the author, February 1, 2018. 31. National Association of Black Social Workers, “Position Statement on Trans-Racial Adoption.” 32. National Association of Black Social Workers, “Position Statement on Trans-Racial Adoption.” 33. New York Times, “In Adoption, Does Race Matter?,” February 2, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/02/02/in-adoption-does- race-matter. 34. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Reconsidering Kinship Care,” National Affairs 26 (Summer 2018), https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/ reconsidering-kinship-care.

About the Author

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. Her writing focuses on issues regarding child welfare, as well as parenting, higher education, religion, philanthropy, and culture. Riley has authored six books, including Be the Parent: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat (Templeton Press, 2018), ’Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America (Oxford, 2013), and The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians (Encounter Books, 2016). Before coming to AEI, Riley was a columnist for the New York Post and an editor and writer for the Wall Street Journal. A regular guest on television, she has appeared on NBC News’ Today, Fox News Channel, Fox Business, and CNBC. She has also been interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN’s “Q&A” program about her book The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid for (Ivan R. Dee, 2011).

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