A half century ago today, child welfare reform began when the Daily News stunned the city with the first installment of a six-part series about the system by reporters William Heffernan and Stewart Ain, headlined “Big Money, Little Victims.”
Then as now, New York City has a harmful child welfare system. While foster care has declined, children still are taken needlessly. And a massive child-welfare surveillance state remains, with children still tormented by needless investigations and stripsearches, often when family poverty is confused with neglect. The time wasted on these cases is stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger.
But the New York City system also does far less harm than its counterparts almost everywhere else, and it is far less harmful than it used to be. ACS now tears apart families at half the rate of Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Many organizations and visionary leaders contributed to this transformation, and continue to fight the system’s ongoing harm. But a good case can be made that the progress began 50 years ago this week with a stunning work of journalism.
Fifty years ago New York City child welfare was effectively run by scores of enormously powerful private agencies. Then as now, they had blue-chip boards of directors larded with the city’s business, civic and religious elite, so nobody messed with them. When the agencies said “Jump!” city government said, “How high?”
But starting on May 13, 1975, “The News has found that a large number of these private agencies deliberately keep children off the adoption market, and a vast majority of them make little or no effort to rehabilitate natural parents to whom some children might be returned.”
It was a matter of money: The agencies were paid for every day they held the children in foster care. Do the right thing and the money stopped. The series found:
- Agencies flush with cash that spent next to nothing on food and clothing for the children in their care. As the headline put it, they were “Bullish on Holdings, Bearish on Kids.”
- Agencies that would cover up abuse in foster homes for fear of losing out on those per diem payments. Sometimes they wouldn’t even tell police when a child ran away — for the same reason.
- A city government that ignored it all, or as another headline put it: “Horrors Abound, but City Sees No Evil.”
The series didn’t lead to immediate change; not by a longshot. But “Big Money, Little Victims” was the two-by-four that hit city officials hard enough to force them to begin seeking accountability. In her brilliant history of child welfare in New York, “The Lost Children of Wilder,” former New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein devotes two pages to the series and its impact.
Just a few years after its publication, Carol Bellamy, then president of the City Council, launched her own investigation. Bellamy’s director of human services, David Tobis, who led those efforts, went on to lead a foundation that nurtured New York’s strongest-in-the-nation family advocacy movement, a key reason for current progress.
What the series uncovered strengthened the hand of litigators. A lawsuit led to creation of an advisory panel that included some of the nation’s most brilliant child welfare leaders. They persuaded the first commissioner of New York’s Administration for Children’s Services, Nick Scoppetta, to follow their advice. Scoppetta, whose initial approach amounted to “take-the-child-and-run,” reversed course. The panel also helped build the case for what would become the nation’s largest system of high-quality interdisciplinary family defense, another key reason for current progress.
Not everything changed. The private agencies have never apologized. (On the contrary, now that some of the little victims are grown up and can sue, the agencies want a taxpayer bailout!) And one need only look at an agency like JCCA, which runs an institution mired in scandal, the infamous Pleasantville Cottage School, while CEO Ron Richter, pulls down $500,000 a year in compensation, to see that there is still big money and there are still little victims.
But one more thing is different: At long last, the contracts have changed. Agencies no longer will be paid for every day they hold a child in foster care, and the number of children they receive will be linked to their performance.
It sounds a lot like a plan first proposed in 1977 by Carol Parry, the head of ACS’ predecessor agency when “Big Money, Little Victims” was published.
Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, www.nccpr.org
