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Evolving Federal Child Welfare Law and Policy: Where Do We Go from Here?
By Shay Bilchik
This speech was the Keynote Address presented by Shay Bilchik at the 2003 Children's Summer Institute Interdisciplinary ChildLaw Conference: The Adoption and Safe Families Act After Five Years: Good, Bad, or Irrelevant?" Shay Bilchik is the President and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America.
My perspective is national, and I hope to make it positive, with a focus on future directions. Before I tell you where we should go from here, however, I have to tell you where I think we are now. And before I do that I want to tell you a little story-a story that relates to the eyes of a child.
It was a dark and stormy morning, like many we have had in the DC area this spring and summer. A second-grader had just started walking to school, and she was relishing in her newfound independence. On this particular morning, though, it was raining so hard that her mother decided to drive her. The child agreed, but she insisted on taking her umbrella. She told her mother firmly that if it weren't raining after school, she would walk home.
As the afternoon progressed, the rain stopped, but the winds whipped up, along with thunder and lightning. The flashing and rumbling were loud, and even a little scary. By a few minutes after 3:00, the mother decided to get in the car and see if her daughter would prefer to ride.
As she drove slowly along the route to the school, she saw her little girl walking. At each flash of lightning, the child would stop, look up, and smile. Again and again the lightning lit up the sky. Each time, the girl would look at the streak of light and smile.
When the mother's car drew up beside her child, she lowered the window and called to her, "What are you doing? Why do you keep stopping?" The child answered, "I'm just trying to look pretty. God keeps taking my picture."
So, to return to why we are here, if God were taking a picture of the U.S. child welfare system, five years after the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), what would it look like? I know for certain that it wouldn't be a black and white picture.
ASFA has many positives aspects:
- First, it has goals that we all endorse: safety, permanency, and well-being for our children and young people.
- Second, it is bringing child welfare into the Information Age, along with the other social sciences, and it is motivating state agencies to focus on concrete outcomes. This is a tremendous gain.
- Third, and closely related, it has created an accelerated learning curve for both public and private agencies. We are seeing more widespread use of state-of-the-art permanency tools, including concurrent planning and guardianship, and of approaches that build on the strengths of families, like family group conferencing and Family to Family, voluntary relinquishment of parental rights, and open adoption. It has provided the context for some of the states to launch new kinship care initiatives, and some of those are backed up by financial assistance for families who need it. This deserves our recognition and approval.
- Fourth, ASFA has inspired a long overdue increase in collaboration, both between the public and private sectors and across systems.
- Fifth, it has shone a light on permanency as an urgent need in a child's life.
- Finally, as perhaps its most measurable achievement, it has spurred an increase in adoptions from the public child welfare system. The number of these adoptions almost doubled from 1997 to 2001, from 26,000 to 51,000. Although the curve was headed up before ASFA, and is due also to the Adoption 2002 Initiative, the ASFA legislation can certainly take a share of the credit.
On the other side of the balance sheet, however, we see some outcomes that have not improved, and some that may even have worsened:
- First, there are still well over 500,000 children in out of home care-more than when ASFA was passed.
- Second, early intervention is still lacking in too many cases. Families continue to come to the attention of the child welfare system because their communities lack basic supports and targeted prevention and early intervention services. Too often, we wait until risk escalates into tragedy, until families require intensive and expensive interventions. (There were 2,796,000 children referred for possible child abuse and neglect in 2000). (Administration on Children, Youth, and Families. (2002). Child maltreatment 2000. Available online. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS).
- Third, appropriate services are also lacking for families whose children are already in care and who are subject to the ASFA time limits. In many communities, substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, and other supports for families are still woefully inadequate. Particularly for parents with Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) involvement - about two-thirds of the child welfare population, according to most estimates - effective treatment and long-term supports are essential.
- Next, lack of housing and income still separates families and prevents reunification.
- Children of color are still over-represented, and their families may be disproportionately impacted by ASFA. You'll be hearing more about this later today. In thirty of the forty states that have been reviewed so far, the entry rate for African American children was more than three times higher than the rate for Caucasians. In five states (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas), over thirty percent of the children in care are Hispanic, well out of proportion to their representation in the general population. In both North and South Dakota, more than twenty-five percent of the children in care are Native American-again far out of proportion to the representation of these groups in the general population.
- The need for culturally competent preventive, supportive, and treatment services is still largely unmet. For example, support for single parents - who are the primary adopters within minority ethnic groups, as the evidence shows - are still sadly lacking.
- The age of children in the system is going up, even though the intent of ASFA was to speed permanency. Over half of the waiting children are older than eight, and children over eight have opinions. This points up the importance of permanency approaches that involve the child and the extended family, such as guardianship. It also makes it vitally important for us to support young people in developing the skills they need for independent living and standing behind them while they make that transition.
- What's more, while the time from removal to termination of parental rights (TPR) has decreased, the time from TPR to adoption has increased, so children are still waiting as long as they were when ASFA was passed, an average of 44 months. And caseloads for adoption workers are increasing, as states eliminate positions from already understaffed agencies to offset budget shortfalls. I want to say more about the workforce crisis in child welfare, but I'll wait until I'm talking about solutions, in just a few minutes.
- Finally, geography continues to pose a barrier to the adoption of many children. ASFA mandated the elimination of barriers to inter-jurisdictional adoptive placement. Yet Adoption 2002, a report issued by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, found the following geographic barriers to adoption still firmly in place:
- Limited dissemination of information about waiting families and children;
- Reluctance on the part of agencies to conduct home studies for children who are outside their jurisdictions;
- Reluctance of agencies to accept home studies conducted by agencies in other jurisdictions;
- Difficulties in transferring Medicaid benefits; and
- Issues with the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC). (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (1997) Adoption 2002. Washington, DC: author.)
Although there is a national Internet photo-listing service, AdoptUsKids (in which the Child Welfare League of America is an active partner), and many states feature waiting children and families on Internet registries, overburdened workers do not often search these registries for families. Many remain reluctant to list available families, or to use families from other jurisdictions. Yet adoption recruitment has become increasingly national, even global, in scope.
With all of these shortcomings, it's hardly surprising that the Child and Family Service Reviews (CFSR) have not found a single state in full compliance, from the 40 completed reviews. This is something my predecessor, David Liederman, predicted when the ASFA legislation was passed without any provision of resources to the states. The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) supported the goals of ASFA then as we do now. Along with other child advocates, we helped to shape its language and its content. But we advocated strongly for funding to go along with the new mandates, and we were severely disappointed when the states were asked to build bricks without straw - to do so much more with no additional capacity.
Now, the child welfare system that I have worked with for most of my professional life is made up of smart, competent people who care deeply about the well-being of children, young people, and families. The states are failing for a number of reasons, but it is not because they don't care, don't know, or don't try. I think the lack of resources is a primary reason. This is a system that has never had the resources to properly carry out the public trust it was given, and that's a matter of historical fact. That's why, when people tell me that the child welfare system is broken, I tell them: not true; that it may have been designed, but it has not yet been built.
Still, resources aren't the whole story. Many thoughtful people, including the state commissioners, federal officials, and researchers who constitute our National Working Group to Improve Child Welfare Data, are concerned that the reviews are not measuring the right things. Because so little useful data was around in 1998 on quality-of-life outcomes for children and families, the Children's Bureau designed a CFSR process in which the data system determined the outcomes rather than vice versa. The information they set out to collect was the information that was available, what the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) and the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) produce. That's useful data for administrative purposes, according to Carrie Friedman, the director of our National Data Analysis System, but it doesn't tell us much about what's happening at the child, family, and community level. Many observers have also commented that the sample sizes are too small to yield useful data.
Going Forward
OK, so in spite of some real gains, 550,000 children are still in foster care, they're getting older fast, and minorities are disproportionately represented. We have to do better than this. So where do we go from here? What would it take for states to be making the grade, and to be passing their reviews on performance measures that really demonstrate success?
I can think of at least four things: better data capacity, greater attention to the child welfare workforce, better public policy, and a comprehensive, holistic vision for America's children, young people, and families.
Let me say before I go further that CWLA is absolutely in favor of a strong federal role in protecting America's children and ensuring their equal access to opportunity. Children in one state have the same inborn rights as those in every other state, and they should never fall victim to accidents of geography. The federal government has the capacity to equalize geographic disparities, and especially in these times of state budget crisis, that is what it should be doing. Flexibility that recognizes the uniqueness of each state and community? Yes indeed. But disinvestment and disengagement by the central federal authority? Absolutely not.
Better Data Capacity, Better Measures
On my first point, data capacity: CWLA is able to provide some technical assistance to the states, through our cooperative agreement with the Children's Bureau to administer the National Resource Center for Information Technology in Child Welfare. Unfortunately, this is an enormous country, and the amount we are able to provide is not nearly enough to meet the clamorous demand. We have recommended to the Children's Bureau that they provide assistance, as well as flexibility, to help states adapt the data measures in ways that can lead to excellence in practice.
In terms of flexibility, we recommend three specific adjustments:
- First, the Children's Bureau should encourage and assist states in measuring outcomes for subgroups within their populations, with different baselines and different goals for improvement within each group. For example, for the length-of-stay and placement stability measures, it would make sense for a state agency that has responsibility for both child welfare and juvenile justice to assess the two populations separately. For almost equally obvious reasons, a state may want to consider young children and older children separately.
- Second, they should encourage and assist states in using longitudinal data to measure their progress. For example, a state could measure the length of time to reunification for entry cohorts of children, comparing itself to a baseline over time and looking for statistically significant improvements. This would parallel the national outcome measures.
- Third, the Children's Bureau should provide specific examples of alternate or modified measurements that it deems appropriate for Program Improvement Plans (PIPs). These could include examples from the approved PIPs of other states that are using subgroups or longitudinal data.
In terms of resources, we recommend-and this too has been formally suggested to the Children's Bureau-that the Bureau provide both technical assistance and resources beyond what is currently available. The experience of the states that have benefited from our Center and from other supports could be made available to all the states. CWLA recommends three steps:
- First, create the opportunity for states to share tools that enhance their ability to use data effectively, perhaps through an online forum and through added sessions at the national Data Conference.
- Second, provide staff experts to help states do some of the work they need to make their data into a tool for better practice.
- And third, offer more capacity-building grants, so the wealth of information available in many of the state systems can be transformed into improved outcomes for children in other states.
AFCARS has come a long way since 1990. Since Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information Systems (SACWIS) made it possible, every one of the states is now reporting data to the federal system, either through SACWIS or through their legacy systems. Here too, we have suggestions: four steps to make this valuable instrument even more valuable to the states and the federal government.
- First, form an ongoing AFCARS advisory group, similar to the NCANDS state advisory group and coordinated with it, to guide long-term plans for improvement. The states should have the strongest voice in this body, though researchers and other stakeholders should also have their say. This would require additional federal funding, but meetings could be coordinated with those that already exist to keep costs in line.
- Next, provide better and more accessible definitions and guidance regarding AFCARS. Right now there is an online Child Welfare Policy Manual and an AFCARS binder that our National Resource Center keeps up to date. With additional staff support, however, we could organize, index, and cross-reference this binder and make it available on the Internet. The advisory group I just mentioned could identify areas where definitions need to be clarified, in order to make different states' data more consistent and more comparable. For example, it would be useful to provide a timeframe for counting hospitalization as a placement change that approximates short-term, for purposes of national comparison.
- Third, take better advantage of the national Data Conference to support improvements in AFCARS. This could be done by devoting a day of the conference specifically to AFCARS, having a technical assistance (TA) team available to provide one on one support during the conference, and offering subsidies for accommodations so that more state agencies could afford to send their staff members.
- Finally, we would recommend adding a new data element-population type-and clear definitions for each type, such as child welfare, juvenile justice, and mental health. This would encourage states to encrypt childIDs in the same way for each data submission, and consider the benefits of annual rather than semi-annual data submissions.
Returning to outcome measures, we believe it is time for a new generation. The current measures were developed at a time when states had very limited capacity, and they were based largely, as I said earlier about the CFSRs, on what could be measured rather than what should be measured. Now it's time to think it through again. We recommend that the Children's Bureau work collaboratively with state agencies, researchers, and other stakeholders to develop measures that are sensitive to different populations; include both entry-exit and point in time measures; and that can be clearly understood by all the users in the field.
While we're about it, we need solid national standards alongside and behind the state standards mandated by ASFA. The national standards developed for the CFSR process are useful as an aggregate measure, but they do not provide the detailed guidance that states need.
Importance of the Child Welfare Workforce
Let me turn now to the children and families behind the data and the people in our system who make a daily difference for them. I think all of you will agree that the hearts and hands and feet of our system are the child welfare workforce, and that many of those feet are walking out, or failing to walk in, for reasons that are clear to just about everybody. Two major national reports in the last few months have told us what we need to do about this. Here too, the federal government has a large role to play. In fact, the title of the General Accounting Office (GAO) report that came out this year was HHS Could Play a Greater Role in Helping Child Welfare Agencies Recruit and Retain Staff
That GAO report noted that workforce shortages were linked to poor CFSR outcomes in all 27 of the states that had been reviewed at that point. The other report, released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in tandem with a detailed study by the Brookings Institution, points out that social service jobs at every level consistently rank among the five worst-paying professional jobs as tracked by the U.S. Department of Labor. But money is usually mentioned last, if at all, in the exit interviews we have seen. It's frustration that drives people away. It almost seems that the more idealistic they are, and the more highly motivated to benefit others, the more quickly they find the working conditions in most child welfare agencies intolerable. Creative and entrepreneurial employees are frustrated by the lack of opportunities to take initiative. And so they walk.
I think you realize what a tragedy high worker turnover is-not just for our systems, but for our kids; how much it costs when a young person who has never been able to trust an adult finds someone trustworthy, takes the risk and reaches out to place her trust in that person, and then loses, yet one more time, because that worker leaves the agency. The workforce crisis in child welfare deprives the young people who most need stability, who face the steepest and loneliest climbs toward adulthood, of the tenuous footholds they are able to gain. And that's a tragedy.
The federal government has to do more. CWLA supports the Child Protective Services Improvement Act, H.R. 1534, which would create an incentive fund to help states build a strong workforce and also provides loan forgiveness for students who work in child welfare. That would be a good place to start.
We also recommend that the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) review and assess employee screening tools as part of the Child and Family Service Reviews currently underway. Competency-based interviews are one of the tools the GAO report recommends. HHS, which reviewed the GAO findings and agreed with most of them, should track the recruitment and retention of child welfare workers nationwide in the context of improving overall child safety.
There are things that agencies can do too, though. CWLA's Workforce Initiative has been busy for several years identifying agencies that are successful at recruiting and retaining high-quality staff and disseminating their best ideas to the field. Our team also studied best practices in the business world, to see what works for the for-profit sector. Most of our recommendations closely parallel those in the two reports, but the one that came from the business world is not in either of them, and I'd like to emphasize it.
Our study showed that every organization, whether it's the Ford Motor Company, Wendy's restaurants, or the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, will retain workers if it can make its mission crystal clear and gain its workers' commitment to that mission. And whose mission is more compelling than ours?
I frequently challenge the audiences I address to go out and invite everybody in their city, their state, and our nation to buy into the mission and vision of child welfare. But obviously, before we do that, we have to sell it to our own employees. Is it possible that we have been overlooking that first step?
I am not one who assumes that the business sector does everything better than the public or nonprofit sector. We're pretty good at what we do. Still, it may be that business has a few things to teach us about refining and packaging our vision and keeping it in front of our employees as a star to steer by. Let's at least think about that.
So what else did the reports call out as solutions for our workforce?
- All of the studies, including our own, mention university training partnerships. They work, especially when they include tuition support. In Kentucky and California, eighty-six percent and eighty-five percent respectively, of workers who are helped to obtain higher education, remain with their agencies beyond the time they committed to in accepting assistance.
- Training always pays dividends, even if it's in-service and in-house. And staff development opportunities that expose workers to a wider world pay big dividends. I mentioned earlier that the evidence shows our workers, by and large, are not doing what it takes to place children for adoption across state borders. Ada White, CWLA's director of adoption services, has noticed that once state staff members become involved in a national organization, such as the Adoption Program Managers Association or the Foster Care Program Managers Association, they quickly become more national in their vision. Unfortunately too many commissioners feel that sending staff to regional or national meetings is a perk. If this thinking prevents the building of bridges that could carry our kids to permanency, it is penny wise and pound foolish.
- Agency accreditation has gone a long way to boost morale and worker retention in a number of agencies, including large public agencies like Illinois'. CWLA supports agency accreditation. And we are seeing more state agencies, like Illinois, take up the challenge. That's good news for children and families.
- We also strongly support enhanced supervision, mentorship, career ladders, and leadership development, because we know they work. And because we're in big trouble without them! High turnover is a problem at the tops of our organizations as well as down in the ranks. In both the public sector (where commissioners have an average tenure of not much over two years) and the private (where charismatic leaders often determine the culture and character of an organization), the Baby Boomer generation is planning retirement. And in most cases, there's precious little planning for succession.
A few states, like Colorado, are taking leadership development seriously, to be sure that no agency is left without a rudder. But even in the best cases, good data can be a powerful factor in promoting stability and continuity. A successful transfer of knowledge presupposes that there is an organized and reliable body of knowledge ready to be passed forward.
To recap, then, two of the three directions we must take to reach better outcomes for our children are better data capacity, including better measures, and better support for our workforce. And as the leadership issue makes clear, the two are interconnected, in several ways. The Casey report notes that the human services workforce is largely invisible, from a data and management perspective, because so little reliable data exists to document our crisis.
Better workforce data could also be part of the leverage we need to do what nurses and teachers have been doing with notable success: winning the support of the public. Classrooms may still be overcrowded in some parts of the country, but ordinary Americans understand the connection between classroom size and educational outcomes. They do not yet understand how the same ratio impacts the child welfare system, largely because they don't know what our workers do in the first place. We have a huge public relations job ahead of us. It's not optional, and it's going to require all of us working together.
We need to sell the notion of home security as the foundation of homeland security, and of child welfare workers as first responders whose work is at least as vital to the common good as that of police and firefighters. At CWLA we call that challenge Making Children a National Priority. It's a challenge that we all share, as individuals and organizations.
In the short term, one of our most urgent and immediate policy challenges is preserving the whole notion of entitlements, with an administration that seems bent on downsizing the federal responsibility for child protection. We are worried about states accepting bargains that offer short-term relief but will leave them hamstrung a few years down the line - long term pain for short term gain. And even within IV-E as it now stands, it is urgent to de-link eligibility from the archaic standards that states were using to determine Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) eligibility in 1996.
Not only does this anachronistic arrangement make establishing eligibility an administrative burden, consuming resources that could be better used, but it leaves more and more children ineligible for assistance. Some states are able to draw down federal assistance for less than one third of their children in out of home care. Legislation has already been introduced in both houses to link IV-E to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) eligibility instead, and CWLA supports that legislation.
In addition, to ensure the continuing impact of ASFA, we need to stem the tide of children entering the child welfare system and strengthen reunification and permanency efforts for those children already in care. We can do that by ensuring that states and localities have the tools and resources they need to provide the range of services required to prevent unnecessary placement, facilitate stable reunifications, and achieve other permanency outcomes for children, including adoption and guardianship - but not at the expense of an already underfunded Child Welfare System. CWLA supports efforts to secure increased resources for the Promoting Safe & Stable Families Program, expanded IV-E waivers, and other measures that will further enable states to provide these important services. We also are supporting:
- Substance abuse treatment services for families, addressed in the Child Protective Services Improvement Act (HR 1534) and the Child Protection/Alcohol and Drug Partnership Act, S. 614.
- Access to Mental Health Services, addressed in the Improving Mental Health and Child Welfare Services Integration Program (Requires funding of $10 million).
- The provision of adoption incentives to increase adoptions, addressed by continuing the program with some modifications.
- The reduction of inter-jurisdictional barriers to adoption, to be addressed by modifying the current interstate compacts (ICPC and Interstate Compact on Adoption and Medical Assistance (ICAMA)) or creating a new compact that is dedicated to only interstate child welfare adoptions.
- Building tribal capacity to serve children and families by providing direct tribal access to Title IV-E funding (HR 443).
I'm not going to list all the policy measures that we support. I encourage you, though, to visit our web site, www.cwla.org, to click on "Advocacy", and to use Kids Advocate on Line to contact those people in Washington who work for you. Whatever your job title, you must also be an active advocate for children, and CWLA makes that easy.
On now to the holistic vision. CWLA has developed a Framework for Community Action, called Making Children a National Priority, that details the comprehensive network of supports we need to see in place for children, young people, and families, along with examples from places where parts of that vision are already in evidence. If we can realize our Framework vision, the child welfare system of the future will not be a system in isolation. In each community, it will be part of a comprehensive web of supports and services designed by community stakeholders to fit the unique strengths and needs of that community. At the local level and the national too, it will be built around the five universal needs of children, the cornerstone of our Framework, [the Basics, Nurturing relationships, Opportunities to succeed, Safety from harm, and Healing, when harm has already occurred] and built to ensure that every child receives the right services at the right time, for the right duration and at the right level.
Children grow and develop, as all of you know, on a fast and inexorable timetable. We do not usually have two chances to get childhood right, so we have to marshal our forces, across systems, to get it right the first time. ASFA has done us a favor by stepping up the urgency to more closely match the developmental timetable. And as I said earlier, though we are not seeing the results we would like to see, there is now a greater sense of urgency across our systems and a heightened awareness of the need for collaboration.
For just one example, ASFA underscored the importance of the courts in ensuring timely permanency for children. Greater judicial involvement and oversight are essential to provide the protections foster children need. Stakeholders must work together to secure the participation of all relevant parties, streamline court processes, ensure timely and complete documentation, and maintain that sense of urgency around every child's well-being. Although not often a focal point in the ASFA discussion, courts have also been challenged to fully respond to the ASFA requirements.
But courts, like the rest of us, are trying to respond to new mandates with little or no new resources. The same is true for schools, health and mental health care systems, income support and housing systems, and all the pieces of the puzzle that need to be in place if we are to ensure protection and access to opportunity for all our children.
I will close with a small, but at the same time, very big idea. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution has edited a new volume that makes a modest proposal: One Percent for the Kids. She and her co-authors are convinced that investing an additional one percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) every year would yield not only a tremendous increase in child well-being but significant cost savings in the long term. Just to put this amount in perspective, we are spending 2.5% of the GDP every year right now just to service the national debt, which has grown by nine trillion dollars in the last two years and is still growing rapidly.
I thank you for your attention today and for the opportunity to share with you my thinking about these critically important issues. So now let me conclude my comments by referencing back to the story I shared at the beginning of my remarks: our little girl smiling for God at every flash of lightening. When I think about the challenges at hand, I dream of a day when we all will be proud of the way we protect our children from harm. A time when we see a flash of lightning, and know that it captures a picture of an America where children have become a national priority. I want you to be in that picture with me. And I want thousands of other citizens to join us there. Let's start to make it a reality today. Thank you and enjoy the rest of the program.
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