The Herald vs. the Facts: Here’s how to REALLY learn from Alabama

Monday, November 23, 2015

Here’s how to REALLY learn from Alabama

One of the most bizarre stories in the Innocents Lost series was called “How Florida can learn lessons from Alabama.”

The story correctly pointed to Alabama as a model for doing child welfare right – unlikely as that may seem. But it got everything else wrong – implying that somehow the Alabama reforms were built around doing less to keep families together, when in fact family preservation is the heart and soul of the Alabama reform effort.

Indeed, in between a few paragraphs about Alabama at the start of the story and a few more at the end, are a series of recommendations. It would be easy for a casual reader to infer that these recommendations had something to do with Alabama. They don’t. They’re recommendations from Floridians who share the same views as the Herald reporters. They are not based on Alabama at all.

At NCCPR we know a fair amount about the Alabama reforms. That’s because they were the result of a lawsuit brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. Bazelon’s Legal Director, Ira Burnim, is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors. But he is nowhere quoted in the Herald story.

One of the reasons the Alabama reforms worked is because the director of the child welfare agency at the time, Paul Vincent, actually welcomed the suit as a way to finally get his state to fix the system. Vincent is still around, in fact, he spends a lot of time consulting for other systems, including on some occasions, Florida. But Vincent isn’t quoted either. Perhaps that’s because he would have said things the Herald reporters didn’t want to hear.

But hey, don’t take my word for it.

● For starters, check out the statement of principles in the consent decree itself

●The New York Times, which examined the Alabama reforms without any preconceived notions, called it "a wholesale overhaul of the child protection system to make it more pro-family."

● But you don’t have to be as big as the Times to figure this out. In 2003, the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader sent a team of journalists to Alabama to study the reforms. Unfortunately, the stories no longer seem to be available online, but the headline across the top of the front page summed things up: “Special report: Lessons learned from Alabama’s child welfare system: Work to keep families together.”

Of course it’s possible that the News-Leader, the Times, the people who led the reform effort and the statement of principles in the consent decree got it wrong, and only the Herald figured out the true secret of Alabama’s success.

But that’s not what the data show.

The Herald itself cites data showing Alabama’s excellent record for keeping children safe. But they left out the fact that in 2013, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, Alabama took away children at a rate 22 percent lower than Florida. When you run the numbers factoring in child poverty, Alabama took away children at a rate 35 percent lower than Florida.

And that, of course, was before the foster-care panic set off by Innocents Lost.

So, how can Florida really “learn lessons from Alabama”? For starters, by ignoring the Miami Herald.

● Read NCCPR’s full response to Innocents Lost. (The section on Alabama starts on page 18.)

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.

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Monday, November 23, 2015

Here’s how to REALLY learn from Alabama