Can it be good policy if it is well intended but the results are bad?

The Washington Post and the New York Times can still do interesting in-depth reporting but they are doing less and less of it all the time. And regrettably, even when they do that in-depth reporting, their underlying ideological and partisan orientation is so strong that it undermines, skews, and not infrequently sabotages that reporting.

The desire for well-written factual reporting doesn't go away, even if you can't find it in the places you used to rely on.

More and more think tanks, independent researchers, other institutions take the place of the old MSM. The Race Theory That Keeps Imperiled Black Kids Right Where They Are by Naomi Schaefer Riley of RealClearInvestigations is an interesting example.

RealClear started out as a news aggregator, presenting articles from local, national and international media on both/all sides of an issue. They have branched out into some original content creation, of which RealClearInvestigations in one.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a journalist who operates across frontiers. Newspapers and magazines. Mainstream Media and new media. Employee and contractor. Her own life is also across frontiers, with an inter-faith and inter-racial marriage.

In the above mentioned piece, she is looking at New Orleans where a new policy is taking shape, driven by a single judge based on identity and social justice theory. New policies which pander to racial identitarianism but which fail to keep children safe from harm and which imperil their development.

Family dysfunction, race, poverty, personal behaviors are all fraught topics. Besides being expensive to report, there is little ideological upside for most of the MSM. The most dysfunctional child welfare departments and some of the most tragic stories come out of jurisdictions governed by their party. Whatever truths there are to be discovered on the way to providing a better life for these children, people are going to be angry for one reason or another.

There are few obvious answers and little agreement on policy. "Do no harm" policies are disputed when they challenge ideological beliefs. Active racism is being embedded in state policy. Riley is calling us to focus on what is measurably the best for children and close our eyes and ears to policy setting based on ideological beliefs.

But that inaction came amid a growing push by liberal advocacy groups, child welfare agencies, and some judges to leave children in troubled homes instead of placing them in foster care.

No one argues that foster care cannot be improved. But this movement, which boasts strong financial and political support, is drawing attention for two reasons. First are concerns that it puts children at risk. The second is that it is based on racial ideology that ignores the evidence about child maltreatment.

A prime mover of this effort is Judge Ernestine Steward Gray, who has served in the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court since 1984. Because the case files are sealed, it is not publicly known whether she was directly involved in Brandajah’s case. But she is currently the judge primarily responsible for the vast majority of “child in need of care” cases. She has long argued that the child welfare system unfairly targets minority children for removal from their homes and is widely acknowledged to have almost singlehandedly shifted the parish’s policies on foster care.

She also has a powerful ally in the effort – Casey Family Programs. The organization, which has a $2.2 billion endowment, recently gave Judge Gray a leadership award honoring those who have “had a significant impact in improving outcomes for children and families and building Communities of Hope.”

JooYeun Chang, the managing director of public policy at Casey Family Programs, argued last year that the foster care system “traumatize[s] kids by removing them from the only communities they have known” only to place them in living situations that “are no better than jails.” The reason so many kids, particularly minority kids, are removed from the home, she said, is that “our system has been built on centuries of racism, classism and xenophobia.”

Across the country, advocates influenced and sometimes even trained by Casey Family Programs espouse the view that the child welfare system is racially biased and structured to break up minority families rather than protect children. In response, they say, the system should try to keep kids in their homes, reunify them more quickly if they have been removed, or keep them with extended family because they share the same racial background.

James Dwyer, a law professor at the College of William & Mary, has argued that minority parents – black parents especially – are often seen as the victims of racism and poverty, so there is a growing push to give them as many chances as possible.

Richard Gelles, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work, believes that leaving children in unsafe environments in the name of family preservation and racial justice is dangerous. “It’s almost immoral to hold a child's development hostage while you wait for parents to turn their lives around – if in fact they are going to be able to turn their lives around,” he told the PBS program “Frontline.” “What if it takes a parent five or six or eight years to turn their life around … and the only way you know that you've failed is the child is injured or harmed” in the meantime?

Dwyer said that is often the result. “We know that a substantial portion of parents reported once for maltreatment will be reported again if the child remains in their custody,” he told RCI. By contrast, “we know rates of abuse and neglect in foster care are miniscule by comparison — one quarter of 1% annually.”

In that light, it appears that Judge Gray and likeminded people across the country are conducting a high-stakes experiment – applying a new standard for what constitutes abuse and neglect for minority children and where at-risk children should be placed if they are removed. She is doing it with the full knowledge of state officials, but without any public announcement or scrutiny. She may also be in violation of federal equal-protection law. Gray says that she decides cases on an individual basis, but the people in her courtroom say that the issue of race is regularly invoked there and state officials say it is absolutely impacting her decisions.

A well-intended but wrong-headed judge, noble ends but ideological means, willful disregard for evidence, policy making through judicial or agency delegation, absence of accountability, absence of transparency. There is everything you might want for a news story. And yet it is not reported (except, of course, by Riley).

What are the results of this non-transparent ideological decision-making by proxy?

Gray’s views are taking hold in New Orleans. Between 2010 and 2018, the number of children in foster care in Orleans Parish fell almost 75%, from 126 to 36. During the same period, neighboring parishes have seen significant increases. East Baton Rouge, for instance, has gone from 126 to 208 during the same period. A map of Louisiana suggests that Orleans is a startling outlier with a rate of 1.7 children in foster care per 1,000 compared with neighboring St. Tammany and St. Bernard with rates of 4.9 and 6.8, respectively. The national average is 6 per 1,000 children.

Nationwide there has been an increase in the number of children entering foster care, from 397,000 in 2012 to 443,000 in 2018. Estimates vary, but for every five incidents in which a child is removed from his or her home, two to four of them have to do with a family member’s substance abuse. And Louisiana’s drug problem has certainly been getting worse. Its rate of overdose deaths has increased to 24.5 per 1,000, compared to the national average of 21.7.

In the past eight years, reports of child abuse and neglect in Orleans Parish have almost doubled from 2,556 to 5,589, and the number that merit an investigation has risen from 1,044 to 1,777. All of which suggests that, if anything, Orleans should be seeing a rise in the number of kids needing to be removed from their homes. But the parish is moving in the opposite direction.

[snip]

Both on and off the bench, Gray has suggested that racism is a major problem in the child welfare system. She has repeatedly invoked disparate impact theory, the idea that race-neutral policies can be racist if they impact one group more than others. In a 2018 article for the Louisiana Bar Journal titled “The Color of Justice for Children,” Gray wrote, “Nationally, youth of color are disproportionately represented at every decision point in the child welfare system. Their families are disproportionately referred to the system by institutions such as hospitals, schools and law enforcement.”

During the interview with RCI, Gray said she tries to make decisions on a case-by-case basis but she said she knows that “African Americans don’t make up 100% of the poor people in New Orleans. I have to wonder why poor white parents and poor Vietnamese parents aren’t being brought in.”

According to a 2016 report from the Children’s Information Gateway, black children made up 13.8% of the child population in the United States and 22.6% of those identified as victims by child protective services. Black children make up 24.3% of kids in foster care.

In her article, Gray rests her claim of racial bias on “research [that] shows that rates of child abuse and neglect are not higher in families of color. … [Factors contributing to this phenomenon] include poverty, a lack of community resources, as well as institutional biases from the police, the child welfare agency and the courts.”

But national statistics report that black children are more likely to suffer maltreatment and black women are more likely to be the victims of abuse than whites. Although various factors contribute to this, single parenthood, and especially living with a man who is not the biological father, is a common theme in a notable percentage of abuse cases. According to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the incidence of physical abuse for a child living with a single parent and a “partner” is 19.5 per 1,000. That’s almost twice as high as for children living with unmarried biological parents or a parent married to a nonbiological parent, and almost 10 times as high as for married biological parents. The data are similar for sexual abuse.

According to data from Child Trends, 70% of all births to black women in 2014 occurred outside of marriage, compared with only 29% of all births to white women. Family structure is a deeply important factor in determining the likelihood of interaction with child welfare officials – one that disproportionately hurts black children.

This is straight up judicial racism motivated by ignorance and ideological conviction and which is leading to injury and death of the very children who are already the most vulnerable.

There are no quick, easy answers but there are some answers which are transparently wrong.

And no one in the MSM is willing to report on it.