Legislators don’t seem fooled by recent media coverage
More than 25 years ago, when he was running the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, Jess McDonald created what he called his “EKG chart.” Resembling an electrocardiogram, it tracks huge spikes in the number of children caseworkers were tearing from their families immediately after stories about deaths of children “known to the system” are on newspaper front pages.
McDonald was charting one of the nation’s early foster-care panics. Sometimes these panics are set off by misleading news coverage, sometimes by politicians.
Most of the time, those who set off foster-care panics, like most who work in the system itself, mean well but don’t know any better. Less often, reporters sacrifice nuance for prizes — what legendary journalist David Simon calls “Pulitzer-sniffing.”
But as our understanding of what should be called family policing has matured, things are starting to change. In 2014, a series by the Minneapolis Star Tribune sparked a panic that sent the number of children in foster care skyrocketing 50% in three years.
That newspaper is trying again now, with stories scapegoating efforts to keep families together for child abuse deaths. But this time it looks like policymakers and lawmakers won’t be suckered. That is due in part to the state’s mobilized family advocacy and family defense movement, a new understanding of racism in family policing, and an innovative legal action.
When McDonald drew up his “EKG Chart” he was still coping with the aftermath of news coverage that set the pattern for getting these issues wrong and setting off foster-care panic: The Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the death of Joseph Wallace in 1993. Though the internet barely existed, the Tribune’s coverage went viral, prompting huge stories in major national media and a national television documentary. I critiqued the coverage and assessed its ugly consequences in this story for the Chicago Reader in 1995. The pattern is always the same.
During foster care panics, entries into foster care often soar 10% to 30% in a single year. In the worst panic I know of, in Florida in 1999, it was 50%. After some time passes, everyone from caseworkers to judges admits they rushed to take away children or to rubber-stamp such removals out of fear of news coverage. So thousands more children are carried off into the night screaming.
But there’s one thing foster care panics don’t do: They don’t make children safer. That’s true even when using the deeply flawed measure chosen by politicians and reporters themselves: child abuse deaths. In the few places large enough to measure, such as New York City, Florida and Illinois, the number of such deaths stayed the same or went up after foster care panics.
In contrast, dialing back the child welfare surveillance state, curbing foster care and bolstering concrete help for families does work. A liberal Texas think tank stopped crusading for more foster care after conducting this study, showing what did and did not make children safer. The “unintended abolition,” when family police agencies had to pull back during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrated the same.
And, according to independent court monitors, so did the experience of Illinois after McDonald stopped the panic. He worked with the Illinois Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has a longstanding consent decree in that state that emphasizes keeping families together. It worked until budget cuts undermined the progress.
That’s because the real reasons for the horror story cases have nothing to do with a supposed fanatical devotion to family preservation. Instead, they often result from workers so deluged with false reports, trivial cases and poverty cases that they have no time to investigate any case properly.
The journalism of foster-care panics was updated for the Internet Age by the Miami Herald in 2014. Shortly after the Herald stories ran, I was contacted by a reporter then at the Star Tribune who said he wanted to do a series “like the one in the Herald.” There followed a long series of emailed interviews. But each time I suggested a more nuanced approach the reporter claimed his editors would never accept it. So he did what he planned to do all along, followed the Herald’s example, cherry-picking facts and data and leaving out some pretty important context, such as:
- Every year since 1999, Minnesota has taken children from their homes at one of the highest rates in America, far above the national average.
- Minnesota’s record for racial disproportionality, when it comes to taking away Black children, is higher than the national average.
- Minnesota’s record for racial disproportionality, when it comes to taking away Native American children, is the highest in America, by far.
We have the detailed data here. Considering how much the Star Tribune left out, it’s no wonder entries into care soared 11% between 2014 and 2015 and another 10% by 2017.
Politicians rushed to jump on the bandwagon. The governor quickly created an OBRC (Obligatory Blue-Ribbon Commission) which promptly hauled out the obligatory “swinging pendulum.” It began its report this way:
“Minnesota’s child protection system has moved from one end of a spectrum to another since 1999. Prior to 2000, it was very focused on forensic investigations … There was not enough client engagement and too few efforts to strengthen families. Fast forward to our system today when family engagement is our primary focus, paramount in all we do. At times this focus is at odds with protecting children. … We need to stop and readjust the pendulum.”
But as we’ve seen, the data tell a different story. In Minnesota, the pendulum swings only from an excessive rate of removal to an obscene rate of removal.
But the best evidence that the Star Tribune’s foster-care panic failed to make children safer comes from – the Star Tribune. Late last year, the newspaper ran a series that read almost like a cut-and-paste of the 2014 series. It was filled with horror stories about deaths of children known to the system. So by their own criteria, the foster care panic they’d set off in 2014 and all that followed failed.
Fortunately, lawmakers appear less inclined than the Star Tribune to repeat their mistakes. That’s because there’s now a network of family advocacy in Minnesota that was only in its infancy in 2014: There’s the Institute to Transform Child Protection at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul. There’s the Minneapolis NAACP. There’s the family advocacy group Village Arms. There’s Isuroon, an organization aiding women in the large Somali community in the Twin Cities. And there’s that civil rights complaint filed on behalf of the NAACP by Children’s Rights, alleging that the systems in Minneapolis and St. Paul are rife with racism. For some reason, the Star Tribune doesn’t seem to have covered this.
Legislators appear to be listening. No legislator has issued a press release pledging to “crack down on child abuse.” No one has introduced one of those cloying laws-with-first-names. Instead, they’re looking at ways to bolster prevention, including the African-American Family Preservation Act.
The journalism of child welfare is dramatically improving, too, particularly at the national level. Locally, reporters for the Detroit News and the Dayton Daily News must have had more receptive editors — since they covered child abuse deaths with the nuance the Star Tribune left out.
But sadly, there’s plenty of Star Tribune-style reporting still going on. In Maine, once on the cusp of leading the nation in fixing child welfare, short memories in media, term limits in the legislature and dreadful leadership from two governors and in the family police agency combined to set off a panic that still hasn’t stopped. Media have been so credulous they haven’t even examined the track record of the politician leading the charge.
But for what sure looks like Pulitzer-sniffing in all its glory, no place tops the San Jose Mercury News, a once-great regional newspaper hollowed out by a hedge fund. Santa Clara County had reduced foster care and standard measures of safety, such as reabuse and returns to foster care remained the same or improved.
But recently the Mercury News has exploited an infant’s tragic overdose death. Some of the newspaper’s concerns may be legitimate, but mostly they’ve wrongly scapegoated family preservation. Politicians immediately caved — and the newspaper practically gloated about skyrocketing numbers of children torn from their homes.
When I wrote to the journalists about this I noted something I’d said long ago when I was invited back to my alma mater, Columbia Journalism School, to talk to a class about covering child welfare: “If journalists get it wrong on this beat,” I said, “children can die.”
At the Star Tribune and the Mercury News, they’re getting it wrong.
