http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/14947116.htmPaying the price of panic in Texas foster care
By RICHARD WEXLER
Special to the Star-Telegram
After sifting millions of Medicaid claims and other pieces of data, state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn has painted a devastating portrait of Texas foster care. For all the talk of "reform," the system is worse than ever.
State officials say Strayhorn is politically motivated. Maybe she is. She also happens to be right.
And that should come as no surprise. The real tragedy of Strayhorn's findings is that they were entirely predictable. In fact, our organization essentially forecast them in the report we released on Texas child welfare in January 2005.
We argued that Texas was in the midst of a foster-care panic -- a sudden spike in removals of children from their homes in response to highly publicized deaths of children "known to the system." We argued that many of those children were taken from parents who were neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Instead, their poverty had been confused with "neglect." Worst of all, we said, all those children needlessly removed from their homes would distract caseworkers from finding children in real danger.
We said Texas needed to pour new money into safe, proven alternatives to tearing children from their parents. If, instead, it just hired more caseworkers, the new caseworkers would chase after the new cases, and Texans would be left merely with a larger version of the same lousy system.
But the Legislature opted to virtually ignore alternatives to foster care in favor of an approach that can be boiled down to "Take the child and run." Strayhorn's findings reveal the result: the same lousy system, only bigger.
The number of children taken from their parents in Texas shot up 30 percent in a single year -- from 13,431 in fiscal 2004 to 17,428 in fiscal 2005. That probably will turn out to be the worst foster-care panic in any state in 2005.
This also means that, even when the poverty rates of the two states are factored in, Texas is taking away children at a rate more than 20 percent higher than Illinois. But it is Illinois that is, relatively speaking, a national model.
As that state's foster care population plummeted, independent, court-appointed monitors found that child safety improved. Rather than learn from the Illinois experience, Texas opted for the same take-the-child-and-run approach that has failed all over the country.
And who pushed hardest for more of the same? My fellow liberal, former Judge Scott McCown, director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities.
McCown is a man of noble purpose and pure motive. But whisper the words "child abuse" in some liberals' ears, and they'll support infringements on civil liberties that would make John Ashcroft blush.
McCown has the solutions flat wrong. There is a detailed discussion of McCown's errors in an appendix to our Texas report, which is available at
http://www.nccpr.org.
McCown has been campaigning relentlessly to tear more children from their parents for nearly a decade. The first time he succeeded (in 1999), removals of children shot up 27 percent, eating up hundreds of millions in new spending that was supposed to improve the system. Sound familiar?
But in child welfare, nothing succeeds like failure. So when child abuse fatalities were in the news again in 2005, McCown again told the Legislature and state officials to jump. And, afraid of being labeled soft of child abuse, they replied: "How high?" Now another panic is eating up the new dollars that were supposed to fix the system.
And what is the Department of Family and Protective Services reduced to doing in response to Strayhorn's revelations about the price of panic? Debating whether conditions for Texas children are, as Strayhorn says, even worse than before or merely no better.
DFPS responds to Strayhorn's specific findings about deaths in foster care by saying that some deaths were not related to abuse or neglect. DFPS may regret suggesting such a comparison -- because even if you count only the 11 deaths in foster care attributable to abuse or neglect, that's about 10 times the child abuse death rate of the general Texas population.
And that assumes that the state's official figure of 11 is accurate. Whether to call a death neglect or an accident often is a judgment call, and when the state is investigating itself, there is a strong incentive to check the "accident" box.
Fatalities are not, in fact, the best way of measuring safety -- for a reason for which we all should be grateful. Though each is a tragedy, the raw number of deaths in foster care is small enough to fluctuate because of random chance. But there is a mountain of other evidence, much of it cited in NCCPR's Texas report, that the overall rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than in the general population, and far higher than generally realized.
For example, one recent study of foster care alumni from systems better than the one in Texas found that one-third said they'd been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. The same study found that only 20 percent of foster care alumni could be said to be doing well.
But Strayhorn also makes a crucial error. She repeatedly refers to children as being even worse off in Texas foster care than they were with their birth parents. In other words, she maintains, children go only from bad to worse. That reinforces false stereotypes about birth parents. In fact, many children suffer no maltreatment at all at home -- they suffer only from poverty. They are not abused until they are forced into foster care.
How long will Texas officials blindly follow a policy that says the primary solution to family problems is to shovel children into a system that churns out walking wounded four times out of five? How many more Texas children will pay the price of panic?
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Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
http://www.nccpr.org The NCCPR report on Texas is great. Addresses RTCs, Wilderness, and while much is directed at Foster care, it applies to programs as well. Particularly, the difference between Accreditation and Regulation, which starts on pg 46
http://www.nccpr.org/reports/texasreport2.pdf
