What Does It Take to Reform Child Welfare?
Reforming Child Welfare is about what government can do for children in danger, children who have been failed by numerous public and private institutions and who have arrived at the last safety net—the public child welfare system. Society counts on parents to keep their children well and safe, but when parents can’t or won’t, then public child welfare agencies temporarily take on that responsibility.
This book is about how to deliver change in troubled public child welfare agencies. More broadly, it is about reform under difficult circumstances, including a history of failure, intense public scrutiny, and extremely limited resources. It is also about the national policy changes that would enable state and local agencies to reach a higher bar. Putting agency reform and policy together, Reforming Child Welfare is about why we should expect government to work better—and why we need to understand the time, persistence, and skill such improvement requires. Good ideas matter, but good ideas alone do not transform large organizations.
The job of the child welfare agencies at the heart of this book is summarized in federal law as “safety, permanence, and well-being.”1 To protect children’s safety, agencies operate hotlines to receive reports of abuse or neglect, investigate the reports and assess the family situation in person, determine whether abuse or neglect has occurred, and judge what should happen next to protect the child. Services to protect children may be delivered in their own home, if possible, or through removing them from the home. If children are removed from their parents and placed in temporary homes, then agencies are responsible for developing a plan and coordinating services so children can have permanent homes and families as soon as possible, whether with their biological family or through adoption or guardianship. Agencies must also attend to the well-being of these vulnerable children and families—their physical and emotional health, children’s education and development, and families’ stability. Finally, some public agencies, working alone or with community agencies, try to prevent child abuse and neglect by offering support services to families under stress.
A child whose experiences suggest the ways an agency can help is Lora,2 one of several thousand children involved with Washington, D.C.’s public child welfare agency—the Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA)—in 2003:
“Lora,” age 13, is the oldest child in a sibling group of four….In April 2003, [community agency staff] reported physical abuse of Lora by her stepfather .…Lora was removed by CFSA.…In June of 2003, Lora reported sexual abuse by the stepfather during the time he still resided in the family home. [Her mother] currently is receiving treatment for a blood clot on her brain which resulted from a brutal incident of domestic violence by the stepfather….
[After her mother received a protective order against the stepfather] Lora returned to live with her mother and three siblings in late August 2003….Both mother and daughter feel very positive about their experience with CFSA. They report their current worker has much empathy and concern for the well-being of the family. She offers advice and has provided financial help with school clothing for the children…. In addition to almost weekly visits to the family home, [the mother] reports that their worker frequently calls to check on the situation in the home….
Since the physical abuse incident in April 2003, many changes for the better have occurred for this family. Physical and financial stability have been achieved by their move to a Public Housing apartment and the beginning of TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] benefits and services. This mother has begun working on her GED and has clear plans to work toward employment, which will support her family without her having to work 14 to 16 hours a day...A wide array of services are being provided to this family…[including] family therapy and individual counseling for Lora.…Lora’s transfer to a new school seemingly has enabled her to start with a fresh slate as far as her past behavioral challenges are concerned.
So far, intervention by the child welfare system in this case seems to have helped turn things around for the child and the family. Lora got back on track academically and emotionally, and the restraining order against her stepfather stopped further abuse. Intervention also influenced her mother’s decision to seek help and counseling to keep an abusive partner out of the home, and possibly contributed to the emotional well-being of Lora’s three younger siblings, who now grow up in a safer environment. Even if the system has not eliminated the underlying difficulties faced by a mother with very limited education and skills, struggling to support her four children, and wrestling with her past dependence on a violent drug-abusing partner, it has changed the odds in her family’s favor.
If government intervention could make this kind of a difference in the lives of children and families routinely, that would be an important achievement from many different perspectives. We might care about the safety and physical and emotional well-being of Lora and other children like her because the test of a society is how well it protects the powerless. We might also care because research suggests links between the early lives of children and their future prospects. How well society responds may affect how well and how long children stay in school, how likely girls are to become teen mothers, and how much children will contribute to society, as workers and parents, when they grow up. Finally, we might care because we know that our families and friends might need such help some day. From all these perspectives, the importance of serving vulnerable children dwarfs the obstacles, however great.
Yet, child welfare systems far too often fail to make this kind of difference for children and families. Too often, children are seriously injured or die at the hands of their parents, sometimes in circumstances where the child welfare system should have known that something was seriously wrong. At the same time, too many children who enter the child welfare system leave it damaged by their experience. Some who are removed from their homes linger in temporary settings for years, grieving for the loss of their families, falling behind in school as they are bounced among foster care placements, and leaving care with no permanent ties. Other children find themselves trying to grow up in institutions, sometimes endangered by abuse from other children or staff, or deprived of caring, loving relationships. And too often, fragile families who look for help—substance-abuse treatment or help fighting depression—can’t get it until the situation spirals into abuse or neglect, and maybe not even then. As a result of these problems and more, child welfare agencies in about 30 states have been ordered to operate under the supervision of a federal or state court (Child Welfare League of America and ABA Center on Children and the Law 2005).
Agencies operate in a delicate zone, where national and state legislation authorize intrusive government involvement in families only when children are seriously in danger. As a result, agencies may fail by taking too little action or too much. A Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post series in 2001 documented eight years of child fatalities in the District, offering an indictment of failure to act that is often echoed around the country:
From 1993 to 2000, 229 children died after they or their families came to the attention of the District’s child protection system because of neglect or abuse complaints. In dozens of cases, police officers and social workers responsible for the safety of children failed to take the most basic steps to shield them from harm…. at least nine D.C. children…perished after police officers and social workers conducted incomplete investigations or left the children to fend for themselves with violent, neglectful, or unstable parents or guardians.3
The same year, the Salt Lake Tribune described Utah state legislators angry about the opposite issue, excessive intrusiveness into families:
More than 20 child welfare advocates, lawmakers, and attorneys are calling for sweeping changes in Utah’s child welfare system…“We have a problem in this state,” said Rep. Tom Hatch .…“We have several parents raising legitimate concerns that DCFS is removing children from homes unjustifiably… I’ve had constituents call me up with horror stories.” Rep. Paul Ray (R-Clearfield)…said, “When we have an organization that’s breaking up families, and we have to pass laws to protect people…it’s time to reorganize.”4
The intense public attention reflects the potentially devastating effects of both kinds of failures—children’s death or injury when public help is too little, too late and family disruption and emotional devastation for children and parents when it is over-intrusive. One recent review of the national evidence argues that “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the American child protective services system is investigating many families unnecessarily….At the same time, however, CPS [child protective services] may be intervening too lightly, and providing too few services to some families” (Waldfogel 1998, 26–27).
Many of the most public tragedies and failures cannot be laid at the feet of a single agency; drug abuse, family violence, and troubled neighborhoods have complex causes and no simple solutions. Yet even if one agency could not have solved the problem, could the system as a whole have made a difference? The grave consequences of failure make any lessons that improve services critical.
With so much at stake, the task of improving child welfare services is urgent, and the scale is large. In 2007, state child welfare agencies received 3.2 million referrals involving 5.8 million children (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS], Administration on Children, Youth and Families [ACYF] 2009). After screening and investigation, the agencies found that 794,000 children had been abused or neglected, and removed about 21 percent of them from their homes for some period. The remaining 5 million children, who were referred but not found to have been abused and neglected, are often in very precarious home situations, and seriously behind other children developmentally and behaviorally.
How to Identify Lessons That Improve Agency Performance
Unfortunately, it isn’t obvious how to identify which lessons will be effective in large organizations. Research on services and programs that work reveals evidence about how to help children and families that is important and useful in its context (see chapter 4 for a survey). But it falls short of this book’s goal, which is to identify ideas that have been tested in large public child welfare agencies, not just small pilot projects. To find such ideas, researchers need to grapple with the agencies’ real-life environment and scale: delivering services through hundreds or thousands of stressed frontline workers, in a tense public and political context, navigating complex relationships with a half-dozen big public agencies and private service organizations, and struggling to get city- or statewide personnel, budget, and contracting systems to help rather than hinder progress. Consequently, my interest is in ideas that have been tested in the worst large public systems, those with a history of persistent failure. As a former child welfare official, I want to understand how to raise the bar for all child welfare systems—how to make improvement possible for the most vulnerable families, even those in the most troubled settings.
Given my goal, a core method of this book is to analyze examples where a large and deeply troubled public child welfare system has turned around its services and results in measurable ways that outside observers can document. Reforming Child Welfare aims to delve beneath the surface in these turnarounds, examining the reasons for their historical failures, the multiple dimensions of the pattern-breaking strategies, the successes that they have chalked up, and their unfinished business. All child welfare systems have remaining failures, but those performing well should be aware of and striving to fix them. Exploring the patterns of change in different locations, and comparing the findings with broader research about what works in child welfare agencies and in other complex organizations, points to what must be done next to build on these still-too-rare successes.
I look closely at three examples but touch on several others. The first example is a personal account of change in the District of Columbia’s child welfare agency during three crucial turnaround years. I was the director during those years as the agency moved from court-ordered receivership to much better, though still flawed, performance. Writing from the inside makes it possible to analyze, in retrospect, what we thought we were doing, what it felt like, and what led us to good or bad choices. The advantage of a personal story is its richness, leading to insights about both setbacks and progress. At the same time, the lessons might not apply to other places: child welfare systems differ considerably by jurisdiction, and the District of Columbia, with its unique legal structure and history, might seem the most distinctive of all. In addition, the subjectivity of a personal story, the flip side of its richness, might mean that the lessons I draw are biased or just wrong.
To complement the D.C. case study, I examine two other success stories in Alabama and Utah. These two additional case studies of child welfare turnarounds allow me to test my impressions and hypotheses in two different settings. I picked Alabama and Utah as the second and third examples after interviewing about a dozen national experts and reviewing court reports and other evidence. I was interested only in dramatic, documentable turnarounds: systems that had started off very bad and got better, not good systems that had enhanced the quality of their work. My criterion for a turnaround was evidence of great strides over time, not evidence that no problems remained, since even much-improved systems would still have problems to solve.
I initially chose three locations to study, mostly because information pointing to a turnaround was available and consistent. I narrowed the examples down to Alabama and Utah where I was able to interview 5 to 10 leaders and review media coverage, court filings, and published reports. In the third of the originally planned sites, New York City, I was able to interview only a handful of leaders, so I do not try to tell its full story.
I also draw on the national perspective I gained as the federal official overseeing child welfare policy in the Clinton administration,5 on national data and research findings about child welfare and vulnerable children and families, and on research about management and leadership in public and private organizations. These broader perspectives help me frame and extend the site lessons, fill gaps, and distinguish between findings consistent with prior research and anomalies in need of additional exploration or interpretation. To address subjectivity, I used documentary evidence (court reports and newspaper articles) to supplement findings and interviews. I also tested my insights and lessons on colleagues from across the country, looking for hints about which findings had broad relevance and application. Most often, I found gasps of recognition, because while the specifics of the political and bureaucratic situation might be different, many failing agencies share the underlying problems—such as the inability to generate or use accurate data—that I found in the District.
It’s Not Hopeless: Success in Child Welfare
Talking with many people about this book’s theme, I have encountered two kinds of skepticism. First, many people suspect the situation is hopeless. If it weren’t, how could it so often happen that newspapers report a scandal or tragedy, an agency vows to reform, and yet another tragedy occurs a year or two later, under circumstances that suggest nothing has changed? And if it weren’t hopeless, why would we see the same recurring problems—social worker turnover, high caseloads, and failed decisionmaking, when children go home to dangerous parents or are removed from loving parents? Child welfare administrators can also come to feel success is impossible: they do their best, yet still find themselves failing and under attack.
The second kind of skepticism argues that success ought to be easy. Interestingly, the two views—that success is impossible and that a single obvious idea alone should save the day—sometimes coexist: it is impossible now, but it would be easy if only we had the political will or spent enough money to support reform, or if we replaced bleeding-heart social workers with tough policemen who aren’t fooled by parents’ promises to change.
Neither claim is true. Success in child welfare is not impossible, as evidenced by important recent progress, both local and national. And success is not easy, for a whole host of reasons. Understanding the complexity of the task is necessary to design and deliver the right local, state, and national policy and system changes to make things better for children.
Child welfare agencies can make a positive difference in individual cases, as suggested by Lora’s story, and in children’s lives across communities and states. Over the past decade, successful child-welfare reform strategies have emerged in both urban and rural systems that were once viewed as disastrous. While it is too soon to declare victory, these programs are much better than they were before, in significant ways that affect child welfare. Strong and credible evidence shows improvements in basic capacity, quality of services, and results for children and families. Improved capacity means, for example, lower caseloads for social workers and quicker investigations of abuse or neglect reports. Better quality means, for example, that families struggling to care for their children are more likely to find services and community support to help prevent abuse and neglect; social workers know children and families better, visit them often, and work with their extended families, teachers, and others active in their lives; and more children who cannot live safely at home live in nurturing foster families, not institutions. And in programs with better results, children who cannot live with their biological families are less likely to have to move among temporary foster homes and more likely to move quickly to a permanent home with a relative or adoptive family.
Struggles and Progress in the District of Columbia In 1995, the District of Columbia’s child welfare agency was removed from city government control and placed in receivership by the federal court, after a long history of failure—despite the best efforts of many deeply committed social workers, foster and adoptive parents, and community partners. But, in 2001, the commitment of a mayor, who had himself been a foster child, converged with the long-term involvement of the federal court to create an opportunity for change. I became director at that moment of opportunity, and by the time I left three years later, the agency had achieved measurable, though clearly incomplete and fragile, progress on behalf of children and families. During those years, I had the chance to work with an extraordinary team, in the agency and in the mayor’s office. Together, we learned many lessons, often painfully, about striving to reshape a child welfare system so it can live up to the values of the individuals who work in it, the expectations of the citizens who fund it, and—hardest of all—the hopes and needs of the children and families it serves.
In August 2002, I got off an airplane at Washington’s Reagan National Airport, fresh from a week of hiking in the mountains of Glacier National Park in Montana. It was the first real break I had taken in the 14 months since I had become director of the District’s newly created Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA). The 100 degree blast of a summer heat wave hit me as I left the airport, and I came as close as I ever have to turning around, buying a ticket back to the mountains, and leaving Washington behind forever. More than just the sapping combination of heat and humidity, it was the feeling that I could no longer face what I knew lay ahead of me the next day at CFSA: the same internal and external battles that I had left behind a week earlier; the same dread of the next crisis, when we would discover once again that we had failed to prevent a tragedy; the same sense of responsibility for failing so many children; and the same anger of so many deeply committed social workers, foster and adoptive parents, and even members of my senior team, directed either at each other or at me when our best efforts failed to create the change we sought.
I feared that my staff and I were losing our struggle to keep ourselves focused on long-term change, on escaping the legacy of decades of neglect, and that I might be losing perspective and with it my sense of energy and joy in the work. Part of what had drained us all was the newspaper coverage of failures: in April, Maryland’s threat to send children in foster families there back to the District; in May, a child’s death at the hands of her father; in July and August, a series of articles and commentaries on sexual activity among boys at a group home. There had been important successes over the past several months, too. Many more young children were living with families rather than in dormitory-like group homes, and early steps had been taken to develop new licensing requirements to protect children in group homes and foster settings. Even the situation in Maryland had been solved without uprooting the children. But none of us could savor the achievements, even for a moment. Two days after my return from vacation, I sat in my office waiting for union leaders to come by and tell me why their membership was so furious they were threatening a walkout.
A month after my vacation, in September 2002, we received some gratifying news. The court monitor, who conducted independent reviews of our performance for the federal court, told us we had passed our first test: we had met 15 of 20 measurable performance standards required by the Court. Among the most important changes were major improvements in the number of adoptions, the timeliness of abuse and neglect investigations, the proportion of children with up-to-date case plans, and the number of young children in family settings, rather than group homes. Sizing up these improvements, the federal judge ended our probationary status because CFSA had clearly demonstrated in 15 months that we could reform our system. After some very dark months, we had succeeded against all odds.
A year and a half later, in April 2004, I looked back on the summer of 2002 as a turning point in our ability to make significant agency changes that made a fundamental difference for children. In summer and fall 2002, we finally came up with the right recruitment and tracking strategies to sharply reduce social worker caseloads. While we couldn’t yet see it, we were solving a painful problem that had devastated morale and services for years. In March 2003, we had about 270 licensed social workers on board, compared with about 240 in October 2002, and average caseloads declined from 36 to 24. By December 2003, the average caseload was down to 17—half of what it had been 14 months earlier. This sharp reduction in caseloads dramatically improved morale and created the potential for better services and results.
Over the same months, during the winter of 2002–03, we instituted rigorous new licensing standards for facilities that provided group care to children, closing a facility that was not on par. At last, people started to believe change was possible. By the following summer, we could honestly say that no child was staying overnight in the CFSA office building—a once-common practice in most overloaded child welfare agencies around the country. The stress in the pit of my stomach at four in the morning started to ease.
Our information system got better and better at telling us what was working and where we needed to change course. By mid-2003, we were regularly reviewing social worker visits to children in each of our units and our private partner agencies, licensing progress for our foster homes, social worker caseloads, and much more. In fall 2003, a team of outside experts examined 40 CFSA cases chosen at random, interviewing children, parents, foster parents, social workers, supervisors, and others involved in the cases. The team observed that, based on the reviewers’ prior experience, CFSA had improved significantly in “many observable ways” (Center for the Study of Social Policy [CSSP] 2004b, 9).
In a summary report dated February 9, 2004, the court monitor gave an overview of agency performance:
On balance, the record of accomplishments in the past six months is considerable and reflects an organization that is committed to positive change and has the leadership and skills to carry it out….This is not to say that there are not serious issues remaining to be identified and resolved. However, the climate for working together on behalf of children and families is very different now than several years ago. (CSSP 2004a, 25)
So in April 2004, as I prepared to leave the agency, I could reflect on these recent reports and agree that there was much work left to do, but also that the agency’s climate and approach had changed in fundamental ways that meant better outcomes for children. When the director of a well-respected private social work agency in the District told me at my goodbye party that the joy had come back to her job because “now, we are helping families, doing what we came here to do,” I was deeply moved, and profoundly glad that I hadn’t headed back to the mountains nearly two years before.
Turnaround in Alabama Alabama’s child welfare system was sued in 1988 on behalf of a young boy named R.C., who was removed from the home of his recently divorced father after the child welfare agency received a report of neglect. R.C., already distraught from the divorce, was further distressed by the separation from his father. As he grew more unhappy, his behavior got worse, and he was moved to more rigid and distant institutional settings and put on more medication. Each time, R.C.’s behavior worsened.
The suit was the culmination of several years of deepening dissatisfaction with child welfare in Alabama, including a governor’s commission that found deep failures and made remedial recommendations, none of which were enacted by the legislature. To observers at the time, the R.C. case epitomized a system that damaged children deeply by treating families dismissively and failing to provide services that might have kept children safely at home. According to case reviews completed during the lawsuit’s discovery phase, the system also removed children arbitrarily, moved them around frequently, placed them in faraway group homes, and did not hold social workers or the agency accountable.
After a consent decree settled the R.C. case in 1991, Alabama embarked on a path toward a very different kind of child welfare system. The path was certainly not smooth. One governor along the way tried to end the reform by appointing a commissioner who opposed it and appealing the settlement order that provided its framework. But when the federal courts threw out the state’s appeal and the anti-reform commissioner resigned under pressure from many directions, reforms continued.
In 2007, 19 years after the case was filed, the court recognized the system’s progress and ended the case. Measured results for children, and in-depth reviews of the work of social workers and the experiences of children and families, both suggested dramatic improvement. In 2008, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals supported this decision, rejecting the plaintiffs’ appeal and ending the case. Everyone, including the plaintiffs, agreed that “We have a far, far better system in this state than we had 20 years ago when the lawsuit was filed.”6
Transformation in Utah Reform in Utah was also triggered by a lawsuit, filed in 1992, as widespread dissatisfaction with child welfare services came to a head. According to media reports, advocate observations, and the litigation itself, children were unsafe at home and in foster care, and workers had heavy caseloads and not enough training to make good decisions. Like Alabama’s system, Utah’s system was decentralized, “laissez-faire” in its absence of accountability, and lacking consistent standards for all counties.
But Utah did not achieve immediate gains on settling the case in 1994. While the state enacted new child abuse legislation and hired many caseworkers, juvenile court judges, legal advocates for children, and lawyers to represent social workers, progress on the measures in the court order stagnated. Morale was terrible, and despite threats of punishment for failure to achieve the court-imposed standards, basic measures of quality—like the number of caseworker visits to children and success in foster parent recruitment—did not improve. Why didn’t the court settlement have an early effect, as it had in Alabama? The reasons for this failure were a puzzle, especially since the state had just spent sizable sums to hire social workers and bring down caseloads.
By 1997, the judge, the plaintiffs, and the state all agreed that something needed to change. And it did. The judge appointed a court monitor, who proposed a somewhat different approach to state implementation of the settlement, and the governor’s newly appointed cabinet secretary and child welfare director ended a run of short-timers. Ten years later, in May 2007, the parties to the Utah court case found that “significant reforms to Utah’s child welfare system have been achieved” along with “significant progress in improving case practices and ensuring strong system performance.”7 The parties agreed that they would terminate the lawsuit in December 2008, if all went well in the last year. It did go well, so the judge ended the case for good in an order signed on January 5, 2009.8
National Examples of Success Nationally, the child welfare system’s persistent failures have driven repeated waves of reform. But if reform sometimes seems to be a constant cycle yielding no results, children nationwide are better off in several ways than they were a decade ago.
For starters, children have a better chance of living in a permanent family if they cannot go home to their biological family. Two important changes are the dramatic increase in adoptions of children from foster care—from about 25,000 in the mid-1990s to 50,000 or more each year from 2000 to 2006—and the expansion of subsidized guardianship programs, which now exist in more than 30 states and the District of Columbia (Children’s Defense Fund 2004) and have just been incorporated into federal law.9 Subsidized guardianship allows relatives to receive financial support to care for a child permanently, without completely severing the child’s legal ties with a biological parent, as an adoption would. For example, a grandmother can become her grandchild’s legal guardian and receive help from the child welfare system without cutting the child’s parent out of the picture. Like adoption, guardianship offers a child a permanent, lifelong family.
Another national success is the dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of information available on the child welfare system and the children in it. When I started at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 1991, child welfare was widely regarded as far behind other human services fields in information collection. Some state and federal officials argued that it could never catch up, that the inherent complexity of child welfare made it impossible to collect useful management information that is well-aligned with goals.
But such worst-case thinking turned out to be false. Even though states and advocates have many legitimate criticisms of federal information collection and performance review, the improvements of the past 15 years are striking. First, much-improved automated information systems in many states now keep track of children and of agency actions, allowing accountability for such key performance measures as the number of temporary homes children live in, the likelihood that they are living in families and not group shelters, the number of children in a social worker’s caseload, and the likelihood of repeat abuse. Second, qualitative reviews, modeled on Alabama’s system, now offer a structured look at the quality of day-to-day practices in each state and the results, as seen by individual children and families. These reviews form the core of the federal government’s official look at state performance, affording a far better glimpse of real-life practices than simply examining sample case files ever could. Third, new research tools—in particular, the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Wellbeing (NSCAW), a large national sample of children involved with the system—provide revealing data that can help policymakers improve child welfare services, such as how children are doing developmentally before and after they enter the system.
Yet It Will Never Be Easy
When I set out to write this book, one of the central puzzles that motivated me was why each step along the way to reform was so painful and difficult, despite the fact that agency staff and stakeholders agreed with the broad goals (if not the specific steps) of reform in the District of Columbia’s child welfare system. It took 18 months to hire more staff and start reducing caseloads and improving social worker morale, even though I had resources and early commitment from the mayor and District Council to help with hiring. It took two and a half years to end the practice of children sleeping in the office building; social workers, foster parents, private providers, and police officers, desperate for help, continued to bring children in late at night, even though none of them would have said the office was a fitting place for children to stay. The system’s failures were so complicated and persistent that they defeated the good intentions of many individuals. And, the resulting cycle of good people burning out and drifting away because they couldn’t “do what we came here to do” only made things worse.
Trying to understand these patterns and the possible routes to a solution, I kept asking myself several related questions. What underlying forces push a child welfare system to this point of failure, where deeply committed people simply cannot make the system consistent with their values? How can you break such a cycle? What ingredients of reform finally crack the iceberg and make such systemic change possible?
As I began studying other successes, the theme of complex systems that defied simple solutions emerged. In Alabama, many of the same social workers and managers who drove the reform had been part of the old, failed system for years, always believing they were doing the best they could. What spurred the change if it wasn’t new people? In Utah, major early steps by the state, including a sizable investment in hiring social workers and legal advocates for children, didn’t help performance. What mysterious ingredient was added after 1997? Nationally, legislation that now pours hundreds of millions of dollars into subsidies for parents who adopt children from foster care was hardly used at all in its first decade. Again, what changed?
It is important to answer these questions, to better understand why changing failed child welfare systems is hard, and what pieces have to align to make success possible. If reform appears to rest on oversimplified solutions—the budget in one jurisdiction, the number of social workers in another, replacing the leaders in a third—yet never succeeds, then the public, the elected officials who oversee child welfare agencies, and the press are likely to become deeply cynical about whether anything can work. That risk makes it important to understand not only the individual components of success, but also how the pieces coalesce to change the patterns of failure.
Answering these questions requires looking not only at the world of child welfare itself but also at what researchers have learned about public and private organizations more broadly. Some of what is so difficult in child welfare can be found in the tragedies of the families involved, the challenges of achieving success on the timetable of a child’s development, and the limits of knowledge about what works to prevent or stop abuse and neglect. But other answers are lodged in leadership and organizational challenges that cut across public and private organizations: specifically, how to respond and learn flexibly, when a history of failure colors everyone’s reactions, when organizational goals and missions are complex and contradictory, when multiple partners have to work together to achieve desired results, and when multiple bosses mete out punishment for failures.
By taking this extra step and comparing the problems and the solutions from the child welfare sites with the problems and solutions researchers have noted in other organizations undergoing rapid change, we can understand better what strategies work in the child welfare context. For example, we can see how reformers’ approaches to using information to change a stuck organizational culture compare with similar strategies in city governments, police departments, and private corporations. These comparisons also allow us to look for lessons from child welfare agencies that could, in turn, prove useful for reform of other troubled organizations. Because the child welfare settings are so hard, and in particular because they have such extreme public scrutiny and complex political settings, they offer insights that can likely help reformers in other tough public sectors orchestrate successful change.
The Personal and the Analytical in This Book
Since child welfare is about children and families who have often experienced devastating tragedy, even if they have also displayed astonishing resilience, it is by its nature very emotional for everyone involved. Many people who have encountered the child welfare system—whether as an abused child, a foster parent, a social worker, or a community advocate—have written powerful and deeply personal books drawn from those experiences. This book also offers a personal perspective, drawing on the experience of trying to spearhead change in an agency that had been under fire for more than a decade. Initially, I worried that it would be presumptuous to write about my own experience, when the real test of the system is the experience of the families and children in it, and of social workers on the front lines. But I concluded that just as the school principal’s or the superintendent’s experience offers insights into school reform, different from those of students or teachers, so my viewpoint that comes from trying to lead change provides unique lessons and insights.
The next challenge was finding out if those lessons and experiences contained some truth that was potentially applicable beyond my immediate context. My way around this dilemma was to explore and compare turnarounds in two other geographic settings. When insights in one setting didn’t hold true in another, I looked for differences in the underlying circumstances (such as the political setting, the agency’s history, or the characteristics of families) and in the leaders’ strategies for change that might explain the apparent contradiction and lead to other lessons.
In addition, my experience overseeing child welfare programs in HHS also shaped my perspective. It gave me a sense of the context for child welfare in the 50 states and a perspective on which themes are national in scope and which are unique to a jurisdiction.
Even more pervasive as a theme in this book, though, is that my federal experience put children’s development front and center in my thinking about child welfare. At HHS, I also oversaw the federal government’s largest child development programs, particularly Head Start and child care. When we convened the nation’s foremost researchers to help us design Early Head Start, a new program for babies and toddlers from the poorest families, I had a front-row seat as the experts laid out new scientific discoveries about children’s early development. Their expert insights about what to do and what not to do when family settings are less than optimal have fundamentally shaped my perspective on child welfare.
Finally, having led at a time of change in a federal agency before moving to the local level, I brought many “compare and contrast” perspectives. What would it be like working with the District Council, compared to Congress? With the mayor’s budget office, compared to the Office of Management and Budget? And perhaps most central to this book and to my task at CFSA, I wondered about the analogy to my experience with the federal workforce, where I had found that part of my job was to empower the many good people who came to human services work because they wanted to make a difference, yet had felt frustrated, stifled, and defeated over the years. Would I find the same thing with the District’s social workers, who had chosen such a challenging job and work environment? Would peeling back layers of frustration and cynicism free up their original passion and motivation, so we could make far-reaching changes for the District’s children? The next chapter begins that story.
