The Herald vs. the Facts: Congratulations, Miami Herald, you got your foster-care panic

Monday, November 16, 2015

Congratulations, Miami Herald, you got your foster-care panic

Too bad you did nothing to make children safer.

● Read our full critique of InnocentsLost

The Innocents Lost series has been a huge success – if you happen to be a reporter or editor for the Miami Herald. The series picked up lots of awards, in part because awards judges generally don't do fact checking. (The series did not win two of the most prestigious journalism awards – no Pulitzer Prize and no award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. In both those cases, we sent the judges our rebuttal.)

But it didn’t work out so well if you happen to be a child called to the attention of the Florida Department of Children and Families.

As anyone familiar with child welfare could have predicted, there was a foster-care panic. And every available measure suggests that children are no safer than they were before.

That's not the result the lead reporter on the series, Carol Marbin Miller, or her colleagues wanted. Nor were they out to "sell newspapers" - or generate pageviews - or even to win awards. I believe they genuinely thought their work would help children. But so did Kathleen Kearney, when then-Gov. Jeb Bush named her to run the Florida Department of Children and Families in 1999. Kearney promptly set off an even worse foster-care panic. The results of those good intentions gone awry were tragic then, and they are tragic now.

Innocents Lost did about as much good for the children of Florida
as the Iraq War did for the Iraqis. So every time the series

won an award, I thought of this moment.

In the first year after Innocents Lost was published, the number of children torn from their families in Florida shot up by 12.5 percent. If current trends continue, by the time the second anniversary of the series rolls around in March 2016, the increase will be 17 percent. (Full details and links to data sources are at the end of this post.)

The number of children trapped in Florida foster care on any given day (the “snapshot number”) is up 20 percent.

Put another way: in the first year after the series ran, Florida took away 1,763 more children than in the year before the series appeared. By March 2016, if current trends hold, Florida will have taken another 2,314 more children than likely would have been taken if not for Innocents Lost. That’s 4,077 children in all

● 4,077 more children, many of them torn from homes where the only real crime was poverty.

● 4,077 more children, many of them torn from everyone loving and familiar.

● 4,077 more children, many of them on their way to being bounced from foster home to foster home, only to emerge years later unable to love or trust anyone.

● 4,077 more children, many taken from safe homes only to be placed at enormous risk in foster care. Several studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes.

● 4,077 more children who, if they are typical cases of maltreatment, are likely to fare far worse even than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes as documented in two landmark studies.

And this actually understates the impact. Because reporting by the Herald in 2011 also set off a foster-care panic. That year entries shot up by ten percent – they had only just returned to their pre-panic level when Innocents Lost was published. (Indeed, it was that earlier reporting which prompted NCCPR to create this website devoted to setting the record straight.)

This does not mean that none of those 4,077 children should have been taken from her or his home. But the paradox of a foster-care panic is that it undermines good decision-making in all cases. With workers so overwhelmed with so many more cases, they almost certainly made more errors in all directions - taking away more children needlessly and overlooking more children in real danger.

Consider what the available data show so far:

NO INDICATION CHILDREN ARE SAFER

The Herald reporters probably would argue that all that suffering on the part of children needlessly removed from their homes is worth it because, after all, with all those children swept into foster care, child safety must be improving.

But it isn’t.

The standard indicators for child safety are reabuse of children after a prior case of abuse, and foster care recidivism – the percentage of children returned to foster care within a year of discharge. The good news: These indicators have not gotten any worse since Innocents Lost was published. The bad news: They haven’t gotten any better.

In contrast, when Bub Butterworth and George Sheldon led DCF down a path of real reform and entries into care declined, a series of independent evaluations found that child safety improved.

Both of the measures noted above are vastly better measures of safety than fatalities, and that’s for a reason for which we all should be grateful. Though each is the worst imaginable tragedy, in a state with more than four million children, the number can rise or fall due to random chance.

But since this is the measure of choice for the Herald, let’s take a look.

Oh, wait. That’s going to be difficult - because Florida DCF has so vastly altered the way fatalities are measured and results are released that a comparison is almost impossible.

Florida now has come up with three different definitions of “known to the system” – and applied them to all child abuse deaths. That includes some categories that clearly are due to maltreatment, such as “inflicted trauma,” some that clearly are not, such as “natural causes” and some, notably drowning, that could be either.

So we’re stuck with seeing how many deaths of all kinds involve children in some way “known to the system.” And even then the picture is mixed, with such deaths declining in one category, down a little in another, and actually increasing in a third.

In short, Innocents Lost did about as much good for the children of Florida as the war in Iraq did for the Iraqis. That's why every time the series won an award, I thought of George W. Bush in front of his “Mission Accomplished” banner.

THE MIAMI HERALD’S FOSTER-CARE PANIC AT A GLANCE

Innocents Lost was published in mid-March 2014. To come up with the most accurate comparison of “before” and “after” I have left that month out of the comparison. The data below compare the 12 months from March 1 2013 through Feb. 28, 2014 with the 12 months from April 1, 2014 through March 31, 2015. The 2016 data are based on a projection using data from April 1, 2015 through Sept. 30, 2015.

Number of children taken from their parents:

Year ending February 2014: 13,908

Year ending March 2015: 15,671

Year ending March 2016 (projected) 16,222

INCREASE: 17 percent

Number of children in foster care on any given day (“snapshot number”):

February 2014: 18,533

February 2015: 20,762

September 2015: 22,358

INCREASE: 20.5 percent

All data are from the superb database maintained by Florida’s Center for Child Welfare. For entry data click on the “Child Welfare Services Trend Report,” for foster-care recidivism data click on the “Federal Measures” report and for re-abuse data click on the “Non-recurrance of Maltreatment” report.

Why we're responding to Innocents Lost, and earlier failures at the Herald.

This post was updated on February 19, 2012 and November 12, 2015

This website actually began three years before the publication of the Miami Heraldseries Innocents Lost. That’s because the same distortions and misrepresentations that characterize the Herald series were apparent in earlier reporting as well. So in addition to our in-depth response to Innocents Lost, this website includes detailed analysis of that earlier reporting. This introduction also covers both:

About 15 years ago, the state of Florida was the national example of failure in child welfare. News organizations across the state flocked to Florida after it was revealed that a foster child had been missing for 14 months – and was presumed dead – before the state Department of Children and Families even noticed.

In fact, NCCPR had predicted the collapse of the Florida system in 1999, shortly after Kathleen Kearney, a former Broward County judge, was named to run it.

Kearney’s approach to child welfare could be boiled down to a single sentence: Take the child and run. During her first year as DCF Secretary, the number of children torn from their homes soared by 50 percent, the worst statewide“foster care panic”we’ve ever seen. And entries into foster care stayed at this obscenely high level for seven years.

NCCPR issued report after report on Florida’s failure. And ultimately those reports, and other factors had an impact.

A new governor, Charlie Crist, brought in new leadership. First Bob Butterworth and then George Sheldon reversed course and embraced safe proven approaches to keeping families together.Independent outside evaluations found that the reforms improved child safety.And during 2009 and 2010, the two years when Florida took away the fewest children since 1998, deaths of children previously known to DCF plummeted by nearly half.

In 2011, we noted that if anything, there is a need for more such reform. Even in 2010, Florida’s statewide rate of removal still was abovethe national average, and significantly above the rate in states that take, proportionately, far fewer children – including Alabama which the Heralditself says should be a model for Florida. So the notion that, during the Butterworth and Sheldon years, some kind of pendulum had swung too far toward preserving families was a myth.

But ever since Butterworth and Sheldon changed course, opponents – what we have come to call the “Kearney DCF-in-exile” - waited for a horror story in an attempt to discredit the reforms. There’s no literal organization by that name, of course. There are no secret handshakes or clandestine meetings. They’re just a bunch of people who either worked for Kearney or supported her policies; people who believe the destruction of all those families somehow made children safer – notwithstanding overwhelming evidence that it did nothing of the sort.

They found an eager ally in Carol Marbin Miller, the longtime reporter on the child welfare beat for The Miami Herald. Miller is a skilled and tenacious journalist. She’s as good at poring over documents as she is at ingratiating herself with sources and colleagues. She’s mastered the art of making everyone feel she is their friend. Indeed, her ability to make people want to like her also makes it hazardous for anyone to criticize her, since she has so many friends among Florida journalists.

But somewhere along the line Miller went from reporter to advocate – becoming a de facto spokeswoman for the “Kearney DCF-in-exile.” In her stories in 2011, she did exactly what she did in Innocents Lost: She distorted data, took information out of context, got time frames wrong, and systematically left out facts that contradicted her point of view.

That kind of reporting endangers children. In 2011 we wrote that it risked setting off another foster care panic, a huge sudden spike in needless removals of children from their homes. And that, of course is what happened – twice. There was a spike in removals in 2011 and then, just when things had gotten back to normal, Innocents Lost set off a foster-care panic that continues to this day.

Not only does this do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, it also overloads workers so they have less time to find children in real danger and are prone to take shortcuts.

Indeed, that first foster-care panic, under Kearney, may well have contributed to a key failure in the very case that made headlines in 2011, the death of Nubia Barahona, something made clear by the far superior reporting ofThe Palm Beach Post.

The fact that the child who died a hideous death, and her brother, who nearly suffered the same fate, allegedly are victims of a foster father who had adopted them didn’t matter. In a front-page story on February 27, 2011, Miller soon exploited the tragedy to attack reforms that have successfully reduced foster care and improved child safety in Florida; something she’d already tried to do late in 2009. In retrospect, it’s clear that this February 27, 2011 story was, in effect, the template for Innocents Lost

For a short time, it worked. During the first month after Miller's shoddy reporting, entries into foster care soared. But other media didn't buy the snake oil Miller was selling. Virtually every major news organization in Florida has been to this site. Their reporting set the record straight.

Sadly, as of December, 2011, entries into care were up about 13 percent compared with the same period in 2010. That's largely because of poor leadership from the DCF Secretary at the time.

Sadder still, it was just after things calmed down that Carol Marbin Miller and her colleagues engaged in the same kind of shoddy reporting, on a massive scale, and produced Innocents Lost. As we noted above, that started a foster-care panic that continues to this day.

On this website we attempt to set the record straight. This site includes:

● Our full response to Innocents Lost

●Key facts.

●An overview if the distortions and omissions in the 2011Herald story.

●The fatality data theHerald left out then and now.
●The errors line-by-line: Excerpts from the 2011 story with a detailed point-by-point rebuttal.
● The real roots of tragedy in the Barahona case.
● The trouble with “Kearney lite”.
● In search of solutions.

Pages

Monday, November 16, 2015

Congratulations, Miami Herald, you got your foster-care panic

Too bad you did nothing to make children safer.