NATIONAL COALITION FOR
53 Skyhill Road
(Suite 202) / Alexandria, Virginia, 22314
Phone and Fax:
(703) 212-2006 / e-mail: info@nccpr.org
/ www.nccpr.org
80
PERCENT FALURE:
A
Brief Analysis of the Casey Family Programs
Northwest
Foster Care Alumni Study
By
Richard Wexler, NCCPR Executive Director
Imagine for a moment that you
went to a doctor and he told you the following:
· 80 percent of my patients don’t
get any better.
· A lot of the time, they get
worse.
· One-third of the time, I
commit malpractice.
But,
the doctor continues, if you’ll just pay me even more money than I already get
and build me a fancy new hospital, I’m sure I can reduce my failure rate to
only about 60 percent. Do we have a
deal?
Odds
are you’d look for another doctor.
But
what if all the other doctors told you the same thing? And what if none of them let on that there
were, in fact, better treatments with fewer side effects?
Odds
are you’d be furious.
Now,
consider a study released on April 7, 2005 by a large, Washington State-based
foster-care provider, Casey Family Programs, and Harvard Medical School. The study used case records and interviews
to assess the status of young adult “alumni” of foster care.
When
compared to adults of the same age and ethnic background who did not endure
foster care:
· Only 20 percent of the alumni
could be said to be “doing well.” Thus,
foster care failed for 80 percent.
· They have double the rate of
mental illness.
· Their rate of Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder was double the rate for Iraq War veterans.
· The former foster children
were three times more likely to be living in poverty – and fifteen times less
likely to have finished college.
· And nearly one-third of the
alumni reported that they had been abused by a foster parent or another adult
in a foster home.
The
authors went on to design a complex mathematical formula to attempt to figure
out how much they could improve these outcomes if every single problem
besetting the foster care system were magically fixed. Their answer: 22.2 percent.
Even if
one argues that foster care didn’t cause all of these problems, clearly foster
care didn’t cure them. Yet the authors of the study recommend only more of the
same: Pour even more money into foster care to “fix” it to the point that maybe
the rotten outcomes could be reduced by 22.2 percent.
At a
two-and-a-half-hour briefing for advocates, there was barely a word about
keeping children out of foster care in the first place.
Why,
then, do we continue to pour billions of dollars into a system which fails 80
percent of the time and actually abuses at least one-third of those forced into
it?
We do
it because, over 150 years, we’ve built up a huge, powerful network of
foster-care “providers” – “a foster-care industrial complex” with an enormous
vested interest in perpetuating the status quo. They feed us horror stories about foster
children whose birth parents really were brutally abusive or hopelessly
addicted. But such cases represent a
tiny fraction of the foster-care population.
As is
documented in NCCPR’s
Issue Papers, elsewhere on this site, far more common are cases in which a
family’s poverty is confused with child “neglect.” Several studies have found, for example, that one-third of foster
children could be back home right now if their parents simply had adequate
housing. (See NCCPR Issue Paper
5.)
Other cases fall on a broad
continuum between the extremes, the parents neither all victim nor all
villain. What these cases have in
common is the fact that the children would be far better off if states and localities
used safe, proven alternatives to foster care – alternatives that don’t come
with an 80 percent failure rate, and a 33 percent risk of child abuse. (See Nine Ways to do Child
Welfare Right).
Nearly as disturbing as the
study’s findings is how the study authors attempted to spin them.
The finding about the rate of
abuse in foster care is not mentioned in the press release accompanying the
study. It’s not in the Executive
Summary. It’s not in any of the glossy
material that accompanies the report.
One must dig it out of the report itself, on page 30. (The full report is available here:
http://www.casey.org/NR/rdonlyres/4E1E7C77-7624-4260-A253-892C5A6CB9E1/300/nw_alumni_study_full_apr2005.pdf)
During the entire briefing for
advocates, I waited in vain for the study authors to even mention the issue of
abuse in foster care. When I finally
asked about it, at the very end of the briefing, one of the researchers tried
to blame birth parents, speculating, without a shred of evidence, that maybe
the foster children had been abused during visits.
But that is contradicted by
the study itself, which states:
“One third (32.8%) of the
sample, however, reported some form of maltreatment by a foster parent or
other adult in the foster home during their foster care experience, as
recorded in their case files” [emphasis added].
If anything, this
underestimates the true rate of abuse, since a major problem in foster care is
foster children abusing each other (see NCCPR Issue Paper 1) and those
cases apparently were not counted in the study.
Of course, some will rush to
conclude that because family foster care has failed so badly, we should go back
to orphanages. There’s just one problem
with that. Over a century of research is nearly unanimous: The outcomes for
children warehoused in orphanages are even worse. (See NCCPR Issue
Paper 15.)
Though the authors try
desperately to ignore the obvious, their study is one more indication that the
only way to fix foster care is to have less of it. Until we realize that, foster care systems will continue to churn
out walking wounded – four out of five times.
###