NCCPR in The Imprint: Safety Science is Good for Aviation, But in Child Welfare, it Won’t Fly

A column in The Imprint last month begins by quoting an odd claim made by David Sanders, in the preface to the report of a commission he chaired. He wrote: “Child protection is perhaps the only field where some child deaths are assumed to be inevitable, no matter how hard we work to stop them.” 

Really? I know of no fire chief who has claimed it’s possible to prevent any child from ever dying in a fire. I know of no police chief who says we can ensure that no child ever will be shot to death on the street. I know of no doctor who promises that no child ever will die of cancer. 

It is always the goal. But it is one where every other field recognizes our reach will exceed our grasp. Suggesting otherwise is a sign not of nobility but of hubris. 

The column in question touts the value of applying what its authors call “safety science” to child welfare. …

Read the full column in The Imprint

PART THREE OF FOUR: Reputation laundering in child welfare: “Social Current”

That’s the current name of a child welfare trade association that co-opts the rhetoric of reform to promote the same old family policing agenda 

The hearings about the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection have prompted a lot of talk about “reputation laundering” as former Trump Administration officials try to distance themselves from the president they served so faithfully – the most notable example: former Attorney General William Barr. 

As America’s racial justice reckoning finally catches up with “child welfare” – or, as it should be called, family policing – the “child welfare establishment is engaged in its own campaign of reputation laundering.  Yet none of the recent trips to the reputation laundry from child welfare establishment groups includes support for any proposal that would reduce their power.  That’s how we know the real goal is to co-opt the rhetoric of change and put it to use maintaining the oppressive status quo.  Consider the second of three recent examples. 

Social Current 

That’s the name-of-the-moment for a group seems to change its name more often than most people change their Facebook profile pictures.  Most recently it was the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities and before that the Alliance for Children and Families. But no matter how much they try to hide it, it’s another trade association full of private foster care and “residential treatment” agencies. 

Their “Director of Practice Excellence,” Amy Templeman, co-authored an op-ed column for The Hill with the authors of an important study debunking the racist myth that, in the absence of overwhelmingly middle-class, disproportionately white  “mandated reporters” in the lives of children who are neither, COVID-19 would lead their parents to unleash upon them a pandemic of child abuse.  On the contrary, the increase in direct cash assistance and community-based mutual aid organizations prevented any such pandemic.  

On the surface, the op-ed is a plea to continue such assistance in order to reach families “upstream” (which, by the way, is the latest buzzword in child welfare). But look more closely: Templeman contends that one way to do that is to reauthorize the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). 

CAPTA is the federal law that did so much to get us into this mess in the first place.  It is CAPTA that encourages states to create the massive child welfare surveillance state that includes mandatory reporting laws that inflict needless trauma on millions of children each year – to the point that more than half of all Black children will have to endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  The very research highlighted in the op-ed shows these laws are not needed to keep children safe, and other research shows they backfire, overloading workers so they have less time to find the few children in real danger and driving families away from seeking help – in other words away from the “upstream” prevention Templeman claims to support. 

CAPTA also encourages massive state databases of rumor and innuendo – so-called central registries that ensnare millions who are falsely accused or whose poverty is confused with neglect.  These blacklists – in every sense of that term - shut impoverished parents out of exactly the kinds of jobs most accessible to poor families, driving them deeper into poverty. 

And CAPTA drives women away from seeking prenatal care and away from giving birth in hospitals, through provisions demanding that states turn them in to the family police if their newborns are “affected” by drugs. 

The actual amount of money states get through CAPTA is tiny – they would save more by defying its odious provisions, thereby reducing needless investigations and foster care. 

Scholars from Barbara Nelson to Mical Raz have documented that in order to get CAPTA passed in 1974, its sponsors had to misrepresent “child abuse” as having nothing to do with poverty and everything to do with personal failings of parents.  Yet now, Social Current seeks to co-opt the rhetoric of reform to support this awful law. 

Perhaps that’s because the only people who do benefit from CAPTA are agencies that investigate families, and agencies that provide often useless “preventive services” like “counseling” and “parent education” and/or warehouse children in foster care: In other words, members in good standing of “Social Current.”  

CAPTA isn’t the only part of Social Current’s agenda that belies Templeman’s rhetoric.  Social Current wants to blast a huge loophole into federal law to make it easier for states to use federal Medicaid funds on the worst option of all: institutionalizing children.  That’s about as far from “upstream” as you can get. 

This also is unsurprising given Templeman’s other hat: running a division of Social Current designed to implement recommendations from a federal advisory commission – a commission whose entire thrust was to vastly increase family policing. 

And that role brings us to Templeman’s other exercise in reputation laundering.  In a recent journal article she co-authored, she engages in a nearly Trumpian mischaracterization of the commission report, a misrepresentation reminiscent of how the aforementioned Bill Barr mischaracterized the Mueller report.  But unlike the situation with Barr, Templeman actually was executive director of the commission whose report she now misrepresents.  Compare for yourself: 

● The actual report 

● How Templeman spins the report 

● NCCPR’s full analysis of the report 

But the mischaracterization of the commission report is just the beginning.  The thrust of the journal article is supposedly a critique of mandatory reporting laws – the same laws mandated by CAPTA.  The article admits that “mandatory reporting, as it stands, is not an evidence-based policy.”  It goes on to review the harm of these laws – though it understates that harm. 

When you have a regime of mandatory reporting for which there is no evidence of benefit and abundant evidence of harm the logical thing to do is simple: Abolish it. 

But Templeman and her coauthor do not propose abolishing mandatory reporting; they propose only “improving” it.  They don’t propose curbing current mandatory reporting laws in any way.  Instead, they appropriate the rhetoric of family policing abolitionist Joyce McMillan.  Over and over, without attribution, they use a version of McMillan’s phrase “turn mandatory reporters into mandatory supporters.” But they strip it of all meaning, co-opting it in service of an agenda that suggests little more than adding other phone numbers mandated reporters could call instead of "child protective services" - and, of course, that classic panacea – more training! 

There is not one recommendation in their paper that would in any way curb the power of the system.  And though they’ve stolen Joyce McMillan’s line, there is nothing in their proposal to make mandatory reporters mandatory supporters. 

What real change looks like 

If “Social Current” – or whatever it decides to call itself next - was serious about racial justice, if it was serious about ending the rampant confusion of poverty with neglect, if it was serious about ending a child welfare surveillance state that makes all vulnerable children less safe, they would endorse a due-process and finance reform agenda that includes at a minimum: 

● High-quality defense counsel for all families at risk of being caught in the family police net.

● Real child welfare finance reform – not the tokenism of Family First.

● Repeal of the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act – or at least strong backing for legislation proposed by Rep. Karen Bass that would curb its worst excesses.

● Repeal of CAPTA.

● Repeal – not “improvement” -- of mandatory child abuse reporting. 

But Social Current and the other groups we spotlight in this series will never go near an agenda like that. 

Because their real message is the same as it’s been for decades: Sure, fund “preventive services” as an add-on – that we get to run of course -- but we must continue to be judge, jury and sometimes family executioner for millions of children, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite.  We’ll just co-opt your rhetoric and hope you won’t notice. 

On Monday: One more example. 

Read all the posts in this series here.

Child abuse “fatality review”: Rearranging the file cabinets on the Titanic

A government agency review of a child abuse death in Pennsylvania profanes the memory of the victim – Grace Packer – or as she always should have been known, Susan Hunsicker

 

She was born Susan Hunsicker.
When she died, at age 14, she was Grace Packer.

Child welfare systems, and a lot of reporters who cover them, put a lot of faith in the concept of child abuse “fatality reviews.”  Get experts to look at what went wrong, the theory goes, and we’ll learn the lessons we need to stop these tragedies from ever happening again.

Journalists vent much outrage at the lack of such reviews and/or the failure to make them public – and in fact, if you’re going to do them, they should be public. But too much faith is put in “fatality reviews” as a tool for systemic reform.

That’s because the whole exercise is based on two false premises:

● First, it assumes that broad, general lessons can be learned from the most extreme, most aberrant cases.  In fact, a process of random case review would be vastly more valuable, since you’d be more likely to find out what typically goes wrong. Such a process also would be a constant reminder that the errors go in all directions, with some children left in dangerous homes even as many others are taken from homes that are safe, of could be made safe, with the right kinds of help.

● Second, it assumes that reviews are done by people with the same professional experience, the same outlook and the same general mindset as the people who screwed up in the first place will produce get fresh, useful insight – instead of a collection of boilerplate, blather and excuses.

The failure of fatality review is most glaring when the agency is, in effect, investigating itself because the death occurred in a foster or adoptive home.

Case in point: A fatality review that actually profanes the memory of the child who died, a 14-year-old who was born Susan Hunsicker, but died as Grace Packer.

The facts of the case

When Susan Hunsicker of Norristown, Pa., and her brother were taken from their parents, Rose and Rodney Hunsicker, the ostensible reason was that her parents were not able to protect the children from abuse by others. 

Apparently based on the assumption that they could do a better job of this, a county child protective services agency (or as they’re usually called in Pennsylvania, Children and Youth Services) placed the child with a foster mother who helped her husband rape the girl.  After the first rapist was convicted, she hooked up with a boyfriend whom she helped rape the girl again - and torture her, and murder her.

If the horrible facts sound familiar, but the name does not, that’s because, as I noted earlier, by the time she was raped, tortured and murdered her name was no longer Susan Hunsicker. It was Grace Packer.  Her foster mother, Sara Packer, had been allowed to adopt her and change her name.

There are two salient facts about Sara Packer. 1. She had a penchant for bringing child rapists into the   2. She worked for the private foster care agency that approved her as a foster parent – and placed Susan and a sibling in her home.

There is one salient fact about Rose and Rodney Hunsicker: They almost certainly could have raised their daughter safely with some help.  It can be said with absolute certainly they’d have done better than the system that took their children away from them.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2017:

“[Their lawyer David Tornetta] said he came to know the Hunsickers as a loving couple who were unemployed but could have become better parents with some help. … "’I can't imagine what that young child went through," Tornetta said. "I guarantee you if that child had been in Rose and Rodney's care, it wouldn't have been anything like this. Nothing, nothing.

Tornetta told WHP-TV the parents jumped through all the hoops thrown in their path by child protective services. 

But it didn’t matter.  The system wanted Sara Packer to have these children, and that’s what was going to happen.  So the Hunsickers’ parental rights were terminated.

How this affects the fatality review

As a result of all this, anyone who reviews the case has strong incentives to willfully blind themselves to the real issues.  That is what happened in the Susan Hunsicker fatality review. (Perhaps we can restore some of the dignity stolen from her by the review by at least calling her by her rightful name.) 

The format of the document is odd – in effect, two reviews in one: one review done by counties involved in the case, the second done by the state, which simultaneously responds to the county review. Nevertheless, the report is remarkably revealing – but not in the way its authors intended.

The report reveals a system mired in minutiae and buck passing.  Over and over one reads recommendations that boil down to: Counties: You should do this. State response: We’re already doing it. If you don’t want to face the real issues, you point fingers at each other.

The report is, almost literally, a case of rearranging the file cabinets on the Titanic.  At one point it  

reveals a system whose idea of reform is “Establishing protocols regarding file organization throughout all counties …” The state’s response to another recommendation: “[T]he Resources and Cross-System workgroup of the PA Child Welfare Council will be reviewing this matter.”

Wow. Don’t you feel better already?

The recommendations themselves usually amount to little more than the equivalent of cutting and pasting from some manual somewhere about best practices. Were the circumstances not so tragic, the report would read like black comedy – something that might turn up in an episode of The Office.

Worst of all, of course, everyone overlooked the elephant in the room: Susan Hunsicker never should have been taken from her own home.  As long as CPS agencies don’t understand that children such as Susan Hunsicker can and should remain safely in their own homes with the right kinds of help, these tragedies will happen over and over.

“Misinformation … reported as truth”

It is sad but unsurprising that the reviewers gladly talked to caseworkers and supervisors but, apparently, never spoke to speak to Susan’s birth parents.  Were they too afraid of what they would learn?  Such an interview would seem particularly useful in light of one of the few findings from the county report that is useful:  “Reports provided to Lehigh County [by the private agency overseeing Susan’s foster care] contained many inaccuracies including wrong dates, and this misinformation was then reported as truth.”

Did it not occur to anyone to ask how much more misinformation has been reported as truth in this case – particularly about why Susan was taken away in the first place?  How many more children are trapped needlessly in foster care because of “misinformation … reported as truth”?

Making matters worse, the counties, in their report, have the gall to whine about how “overwhelmed” they are.  But what’s overwhelming them is the deluge of false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which poverty is confused with “neglect.”

Recommendations that would make things worse

Some of the recommendations made by the counties in their report would make this worse.  They suggest toughening enforcement of penalties for “mandated reporters” of child abuse who fail to report anything and everything.  That will only further scare them into further overloading the system with false reports.  That will both increase the chances of more children needlessly removed from their homes – like Susan Hunsicker – and more children in real danger being overlooked.

Another recommendation seems to suggest in effect, that agencies treat enough false reports as, in itself, evidence of abuse or neglect. That would encourage more malicious reports, as in: “If I just call often enough, they’ll have to substantiate it!” Still another recommendation would needlessly slow down reunification.

It’s the same idiocy that led to passage of similar laws in the wake of the revelations of abuse by another Pennsylvania foster parent – Jerry Sandusky. 

Then, having shown no vision, no insight into their own failings and no creativity about solutions, the county report says: Everything will be fine if you just give us more money! But Pennsylvania already spends on child welfare at the ninth highest rate in America –  even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

When the children are inconvenient – institutionalize ‘em!

But it gets worse still.

Having ignored the urgent need to keep children out of the system entirely, they actually recommend making it easier to use the very worst option for children – institutionalizing them. (Of course, they couldn’t know that this recommendation would become public just weeks after still another institution was exposed as a hellhole -- Pennsylvania’s own Glen Mills.)

But even when they’re not Glen Mills, Institutions don’t work --  except for CPS agencies. They can use institutions to get youth like Susan Hunsicker, whose problems the system did so much to cause in the first place -- off their hands and make them someone else’s problem.

The William Barr approach to full disclosure

A page from the report indicates how little
the State of Pennsylvania really wants us to know.

And finally, it’s a good thing there have been detailed news accounts describing what happened in this case, because it’s impossible to figure out from the public version of this report. That part of the report has been redacted into meaninglessness.  In fact, trying to figure out what happened to Susan Hunsicker based on this report is like trying to understand the Mueller Report based on William Barr’s summary.

Laws such as the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act put a lot of faith in fatality reviews. So does the execrable report from the so-called Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities.

But, as the report on the death of Susan Hunsicker makes clear, fatality review can be fatally flawed.

Child abuse fatalities: The Keystone Kops of commissions tries to polish its image

Remember the Keystone Kops of Commissions?  Its official name was the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities.  But its entire process was marked by secrecy, chaos, anger, racial bias and a proclivity for making decisions based on newspaper horror stories. So instead of studying the child welfare system, the commission essentially recreated the child welfare system.

Now a member of the commission, Teri Covington, is trying to salvage the commission’s reputation by essentially giving the commission credit for almost anything that anyone is doing, or planning to do, that might have something to do with reducing child abuse deaths.

So Covington declares in The Hill that, thanks to the commission “a tremendous amount of progress and change” has occurred.

Normally when one reads that “a tremendous amount of progress and change” been made in dealing with a problem, one expects evidence that the problem actually has been solved – or at least ameliorated.

But for the Commission the standards are far lower. In lavishing praise on her own work Covington cites no evidence that there are actually fewer child abuse deaths.  The most recent federal data, while not terribly reliable, and only from 2016, actually suggest an increase in such deaths.

Instead, Covington devotes her column largely to bragging about how states are throwing paperwork at the problem.  Some places have prevention plans!  One even has a strategic plan!

The good news: Few seem to take the commission seriously

In one sense this really is good news. Because if states were implementing the worst of the actual recommendations of the Commission, (and, sadly, here and there that is happening) our child welfare system would be even worse than it is now.

The Commission assumed that child abuse fatalities could be isolated from larger problems and predicted in advance.  As Child Trends, among others, has explained, they can’t. The reason for that is one for which we all should be grateful. Though each is the worst imaginable tragedy, the number is too small to detect meaningful patterns.

Even if you double the officially-reported number of child abuse fatalities you get 3,400 – out of 73,600,000 Americans under age 18. That’s a tiny number of needles in a gigantic haystack.

Yes, you can try to isolate this or that “risk factor” – but where that risk factor exists it means only that the chances of a child dying go from infinitesimal to ever-so-slightly less infinitesimal. And you risk wreaking havoc in an enormous number of families who happen to have the same "risk factor" but are not about to harm any children.

You'll never find the needles by trying to vacuum up the haystack

Though couched in the soothing rhetoric of prevention, the Commission recommendations are all about trying to vacuum up the haystack - scarring far more children who were never actually abused by inflicting traumatic investigations and, often, stripsearches and creating a regime of domestic surveillance that would make the NSA blush.  All that would only further overload child welfare systems, actually increasing the chances that children in real danger will be missed.

It also would further overload foster care, filling more foster homes with children who don’t need to be there, notwithstanding the two massive studies that found that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes fared better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. And it would further lower the quality of foster care, where already study after study has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even higher.

700,000 more useless investigations

Consider just one recommendation: Right now, child abuse hotlines screen millions of calls every year. The standards for screening-in calls are incredibly low, yet, after investigation 83 percent of screened-in allegations turn out to be false. (And you know that oft-repeated claim that the reports aren't false, child protective services just couldn't "prove" abuse or neglect? That's also false.)

Yet, as we discuss in our analysis of the Commission report, the Commission recommended that every call about a child under age 3, no matter how absurd, be investigated with no screening at all. That would add at least 700,000 additional investigations per year – a 39 percent increase for the average caseworker.

Still another recommendation, which the commission called a “surge” or an “accelerant” until they realized that wouldbe bad p.r., would reopen thousands more cases based on the flimsiest criteria.  Again, as we discuss in our response, the one time a state actually tried this it backfired; child abuse deaths increased.

The commission also rushed to embrace the latest fad in child welfare – predictive analytics.  Think of it as Big Brother meets the movie Minority Report. It’s already in use in criminal justice – and, in a comprehensive investigation, ProPublica already has found it rife with racial bias. 

The commission itself was willfully blind to the massive problem of racial bias in child welfare – voting down one recommendation after another to deal with it. The recommendations came from one of only two African-American members of the commission, Judge Patricia Martin.

That should be no surprise. Michael Petit, the commissioner who came up with the idea for the commission, and who was most fervent in advocating what amounts to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, once told a Congressional committee that the places doing the best jobs of preventing child abuse are the ones with “smaller, whiter populations.”  During commission deliberations his condescension toward Judge Martin was deeply disturbing.

The digital poorhouse

In child welfare, predictive analytics is one pillar of what Prof. Virginia Eubanks, in her book Automating Inequality, calls “the digital poorhouse.” Ultimately, many of those pushing the use of predictive analytics in child welfare want to assign a risk score to every child at birth. Eubanks’ devastating critique of what is actually the least harmful version, in Allegheny County, Pa. was just excerpted in Wired.

The model the Commission endorsed, called Rapid Safety Feedback, may well be worse. Covington brags that seven states adopted it. She neglects to mention that one of them, Illinois, already has dropped it, after it failed spectacularly.

Even the agency that invented Rapid Safety Feedback never claimed it could predict who would kill a child. And one of the nation’s leading proponents of predictive analytics specifically warned the commission that no predictive analytics model could do that.

The commission left that out of its report. To find it you have to look in the scathing dissent published by Judge Martin, after, she says, the commission chair threatened to censor any dissents he didn’t like – still another example of how the commission proved to be at least as dysfunctional as the child welfare system itself.

Better solutions

The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero. But approaching that goal requires a radically different approach than the one recommended by the commission.  It requires learning from a study of what does and does not reduce child abuse deaths. That study found:

●The rate at which people report child abuse does not change the number of child abuse deaths.

●The rate at which a state screens reports for investigation does not change the number of child abuse deaths.

●The rate at which a state takes children from their parents does not change the number of child abuse deaths.

The same report found three key factors that do correlate with higher rates of child abuse deaths:

●High rates of poverty

●High rates of teen pregnancy

● Low rates of services to prevent child maltreatment.

That means, of course, if we take some of the millions of dollars states waste investigating false reports, initiating “surges,” and consigning children to needless foster care whenever there is a high-profile tragedy, and spend it instead on proven prevention programs that focus on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty, then, finally, we might see a decline in child abuse deaths that’s significant and sustained. (And no, a new federal law, the Family First Act won’t really do that.)

We might also reduce the burden on caseworkers caused by chasing down all those false allegations and poverty-confused-with-neglect cases, giving them a better chance to find the needles in that giant haystack, reducing child abuse deaths still further.

Child abuse commission: Surge? What surge? Michael Petit runs from his own rhetoric

Graphic by Murdocke23

The so-called Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities is gone. But the dysfunction that characterized its work – and made it resemble perfectly the child welfare system it studied – lives on.

First the commission chair, David Sanders, attempted to defend its work in the Chronicle of Social Change.  In the process, he dismissed the scathing dissent written by Cook County Judge Patricia Martin, the presiding judge of the Court’s Child Protection Division.  So Judge Martin wrote a response to Sanders’ column. 

In that response, she criticized the Commission’s signature recommendation, known for most of its history at the Commission as “the surge.”  At this Commission meeting alone, it was called a “surge” at least 45 times. As we explain in our own report on the Commission’s many failures, this recommendation calls for encouraging or requiring (it’s not clear which) states to go back and review every child abuse fatality over the past five years looking for common “risk factors.”

Then a “multi-disciplinary team” would be sent out into the field to re-investigate any open case that allegedly had even one such risk factor – thereby re-traumatizing the children who’d already been investigated - and probably leading to many more children being needlessly removed from their homes.

The surge is a wonderful name for this recommendation, since it conjures up images of police actions and people forcing their way into other people’s homes.  (Some Commissioners actually wanted to call it an “accelerant” – apparently not realizing that this term is commonly used for something that spreads an arson fire.) 

Realizing the problems with this kind of blunt and accurate terminology, the Commission instructed staff to find some way to put lipstick on a pig – i.e. find a euphemism. They came up with “retrospective review.” That’s why the word “surge” does not appear in the Commission’s final report. 

The Commission split over how to pay for this.  One group called for recommending the expenditure of $1 billion in federal funds.  At that same Commission meeting, one member of this group, Michael Petit, referred to this as a “down payment.”

After Judge Martin wrote her column, Petit submitted a column of his own.  He began a part of his critique by writing that “Martin states that our recommended review of cases (incorrectly characterized as a ‘surge’)…” thus leaving the impression that Judge Martin somehow made up the term herself.

Then Petit claims that   “Commissioner Martin mischaracterizes the need for funding reform as a “down payment.”  But Mike, you’re the one who used that term in the first place.

It says a lot about just how bad the Commission recommendations are that Petit has to run away from any language that describes them honestly.

What next, Mike?  Are you going to deny telling a Congressional Committee in 2011 that the states that do the best job preventing and responding to child abuse are the ones with “smaller, whiter populations”?

NCCPR in Youth Today on the failures of the child abuse fatalities commission

Child Abuse Fatalities Commission Staggers to a Close

During a congressional hearing in 2011, Michael Petit, who then ran an organization called Every Child Matters, was asked which states do the best job protecting children. His answer: those that have “smaller, whiter populations.”

Today, Petit is the driving force behind the so-called Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, a federal commission that seems to view part of its job as squelching any discussion of the pervasive racial bias in child welfare.

Read the full column in Youth Today

● Read NCCPR’s full analysis of the Commission recommendations

● Read Judge Patricia Martin’s scathing dissent from the Commission report

● Read all NCCPR Blog posts about the Commission

CECANF shocker: Commissioner blasts work of child abuse fatalities commission in scathing dissent

She publishes it herself after commission chair allegedly threatens to censor dissents.

● Read Judge Patricia Martin’s dissent

● Read NCCPR’s analysis of the Commission recommendations

●Read all NCCPR Blog posts about the Commission

One day before the release of the final report of the so-called Commission on Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities (or as we call it, the Keystone Kops of Commissions) one of the Commissioners has issued a scathing 24-page dissent that excoriates the Commission not only for some of its recommendations but for its chaotic process and wasteful spending.

Cook County Judge Patricia Martin, the presiding judge of the Court’s Child Protection Division, and one of only two African-Americans on the Commission (the other is Commission Chair David Sanders) published the dissent herself after, she says, Sanders threatened to edit or censor entirely dissents he didn’t like.

We don’t agree with all of Judge Martin’s recommendations, but her report adds vital context to the debate over child welfare – and crucial insight into the stumbling, bumbling way the Commission did its job.

Among the revelations:

● The final report includes major changes made after the Commissioners took their final votes.  “Those changes were incorporated into the Consenting [Majority] Report without being seen, deliberated or voted upon by the entire Commission.”  The report even went to the printer before Martin was allowed to see it, she says.

● Poor people paid for the Commission.  The Commission spent lavishly - $4 million over two years – traipsing around the country holding hearings and hiring a 20-person staff.  That would be less of a problem if the money had not come directly out of poor people’s pockets.  It turns out, Martin says, the funding was drawn from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) – the program that replaced “welfare as we knew it” in 1996. 

So money that was supposed to go to help poor families with things like day care – so they are less likely to have their children taken away on “lack of supervision” charges – was diverted to fund a Commission whose recommendations, if enacted, would lead to many more children being taken needlessly from their homes.

Sadly, this is only the most flagrant example of using TANF as a child welfare slush fund.  States have been doing it for years.

● Martin says the Commission “misrepresents or ignores” the experts who testified at the hearings.  One example she cites is the Commission’s embrace of the latest fad in child welfare, “predictive analytics.” Martin writes:

[T]he Consenting Commissioners recommend immediate implementation of “predictive analytics.” First, predictive analytics needs further testing and requires the building of a solid data infrastructure in order to work. Second, the expert testimony emphasized the inherent limitations of predictive analytics.

Martin then quotes the testimony of Prof. Emily Putnam-Hornstein of the University of Southern California School of Social Work, who told the Commission:

“[W]e would be mistaken to think about predictive risk modeling, or predictive analytics, as a tool we would want to employ with that end outcome specifically being [preventing] a near fatality or a fatality, because … I don’t think we will ever have the data or be able to predict with an accuracy that any of us would feel comfortable with and intervene differently on that basis.”

● Martin also blasts the process by which the Commission developed its signature recommendation – something it called a “surge” until it tasked its huge staff with coming up with a better euphemism.  Under the “surge” caseworkers would reinvestigate thousands of cases in which they already had decided to leave children in their own homes under supervision – disrupting the families all over again.

Martin calls this recommendation “another example of this practice of selective citation and arbitrary creation…”  She writes:

Not one witness recommended nor intimated such an approach to eliminate fatalities. Instead, Commission leadership unilaterally decided to include it as a “signature recommendation.” More troubling is that this recommendation encourages foster care placements despite expertise and research that demonstrates that the better path for our children is providing services in home. While purporting to “save lives immediately,” this signature recommendation corrupts theConsenting Report.  … The Consenting Report reads like a tabloid or infomercial relying on sensationalism to convince Congress and the Administration to eschew their good sense and spend an additional $1 billion annually on this recommendation. [Emphasis added.]

● Martin also blasts “The unorthodox process for editing the Consenting Report…”  She writes:

Commissioners have been allowed to submit changes and additional materials after the final vote. Those changes were incorporated into the Consenting Report without being seen, deliberated, or voted upon by the entire Commission. Moreover, the final report incorporating those changes was not released to this Commissioner prior to submission for printing. A simple comparison of the voted upon draft and the final report reflects substantive changes. Thus, the full Commission was deprived of information to perform its duties and/or select commissioners were granted favor to privately shape the report devoid of deliberation. … Therefore, it is this Commissioner’s position that the validity of the Consenting Report must be viewed with trepidation. [Emphasis added.]

And Martin describes what she had to do to get her report published:

[T]he independent submission of this Dissenting Report is yet another reflection of the flawed process. As the reader may be aware, there were two dissenting commissioners. The process was structured such that the opinions of individual commissioners were limited to two page letters to be printed with the Consenting Report. No commitment was made for dissenting opinions. Instead, the Chairman of the Commission stated that he would review dissents and then decide unilaterally whether to exclude the dissent, to edit the dissent, or to include the dissent without alteration in the Commission’s official submission to the President and Congress. As a result, this Commissioner chose to submit the two page letter and to absorb personally the costs of printing and distributing this official document.

We're doing our part to get the word out.  We've posted Judge Martin's dissent here.

Child abuse fatalities commission has found the answer: Throw platitudes at the problem!

Try our "Mad Libs version" of the commission's
latest blog post

 Have you heard about the computer program that can churn out political speeches.  Apparently, such speeches are so predictable and so clichéd that now a literal machine can write for a political machine.

I thought of that as I read the collection of strung-together platitudes that constitutes the latest  blog post from the so-called Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect fatalities. Just how devoid of content is this thing?  Well, you can read the original here.

Or, make it a little less painful by just looking below at what I call the Mad Libs version.  I’ve removed all references specific to child welfare and child abuse fatalities.  But other than that, it’s exactly what Comission Chair David Sanders allegedly wrote.  Try filling in the blanks with just about any other pressing problem – race relations, the global economy, education, poverty, environmental protection.  I particularly like the fact that item #1 on the list of “three major problems” can be used for almost anything without changing even one word.

So, for anyone out there who might someday chair a “blue-ribbon commission” file this away.  You never know when you might need it:

THE "MAD-LIBS VERSION" OF AN ACTUAL POST TO THE BLOG FOR THE COMMISSION TO ELIMINATE CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT FATALITIES

_______  Today and Envisioning a Stronger ___________ System for the Future

As the Commission nears the end of its work on the issue of ____________, it is clear that there are no simple answers to this complex challenge.

There have been promising findings from a few communities that have come together in ways that appear to be reducing _______________. These approaches are hopeful, and the Commission will build its recommendations off of what we’ve learned about what works and what does not and what approaches appear to hold promise. Unfortunately, we found only a few well-researched programs that are demonstrated to ______________ and only a handful of communities that had chosen to attempt to _______________. Furthermore, we found that a coordinated national response that reflects and responds to the urgency of the present crisis is lacking.

Based on the promising efforts we observed, we identified three major challenges facing communities that hindered efforts to reform _____________:

First, there is a lack of sustained leadership and accountability at the federal, state, and local levels. Leadership on this issue will require strategic planning, coordination across multiple agencies, sustained focus, and a level of resources to bring about significant change.

There is also a lack of evidence-based research and clear data about _________________. There is no standard mandated reporting system _______________, and definitions, investigative procedures, and reporting requirements vary from state to state.

And finally, a lack of cross-system collaboration places too much of the onus on ______ for __________________.

As we have heard from agencies across the spectrum, in order for any strategy to succeed, it will need to include a multidisciplinary model that features meaningful and mutually accountable partnerships among ________________, and more. We recognize that this kind of deeply rooted collaboration, while necessary to generate real and lasting solutions, takes time.

Yet we know that there is no time to waste if we are to ______________right now, today. As we completed this work, we read hundreds of headlines about ____________________. Not a day has gone by that we haven’t thought about _____________.

That is why, as we near the release of our final report, our Commission is reviewing options for both immediate recommendations that will begin to ____________ right away and comprehensive changes to create a redefined _______________ of the 21st century.

Solving the issue of _____________________is within our reach, if we can apply the lessons of the past, act with urgency to _______________, and create a new vision for a more effective ____________ system of the future.

                                                                        

There is, however, a very serious side to all this.  Whatever problem you used to fill in the blanks, odds are it was an issue with serious consequences for a lot of people.  The issue of child abuse fatalities is among the most serious imaginable. But it is throwing platitudes at the problem that trivializes it, not pointing out that those platitudes and recycled bad ideas are all this commission has got.