Olivia Golden, author of Reforming Child Welfare, answers five questions about the book and her time as former director of the District of Columbia's Child and Family Services Agency. In the book, Golden analyzes the strategies behind significant reform in troubled child welfare systems—recounting her own experience and that of administrators in Alabama and Utah in the context of national research about children and public management. Her research, insights, and practical recommendations can also be applied to reform of other public agencies in challenging times.
September 18, 2009
1. In your book, you debunk two common myths about child welfare reform—that it's easy and that it's impossible. How do these two myths discourage reform?
People may not admit to thinking reform is easy, but they do often say there's just one thing to fix—high caseloads or scant resources or social workers who just don't care enough. This thinking demands instant results, and that’s counterproductive.
"People may not admit to thinking reform is easy, but they do often say there's just one thing to fix....This thinking demands instant results, and that's counterproductive."
The other myth is that reform is impossible. And it's not. Families' lives can get better and cities and states can improve the results they achieve for children and families. I give some examples of both in the book. Alabama, Utah, and the District were able to serve children and families far better by the end of the reform periods I studied. They had a lot left to do, but children were much better off in important and measurable ways. For example, social workers visited children far more frequently, knew children and families better, and worked more closely with them and people important in their lives to develop plans for their futures. More services became available and children in foster care were less likely to live in big institutions and more likely to live in families.
Nationally, too, we've had some dramatic improvements. In particular, we do much better by kids who can't go home than we did 15 years ago. About 25,000 kids a year were adopted from foster care in the early 1990s, and now roughly twice as many are adopted each year and even more live with relatives who are permanent guardians.
My book also homes in on the great remaining problems in child welfare. But to solve the problems, we have to learn from the successes and figure out what it took to get there.
2. Why is child welfare reform so hard?
For one thing, it's hard because child welfare agencies have a particularly difficult mission that requires balancing important values. As a nation, we care deeply about parents' autonomy and children's safety. So the agency must walk a fine line as it seeks to watch out for kids and honor the value of family independence from government oversight and control. Another reason reform is hard is that some families face devastating problems, like depression, substance abuse, domestic violence, and deep poverty. It's especially hard to address those problems in the United States because, compared with other Western countries, we don't have some basic universally available services that could help families. Having access to health care, for example, might prevent a family from sliding into a situation where the child welfare agency must step in.
Also, reform is hard to achieve because tragedies, particularly child deaths, set off a spiral of public fury and attention that leads to firings and low morale. Sometimes, a tragedy can galvanize reform, but other times, the cycle of tragedy and response prevents reform from taking hold. Scapegoating contributes to a passive and demoralized environment where no one wants to take responsibility—everyone just wants to stay under the radar and out of trouble. Stopping this cycle involves reducing tragedies and changing the political responses. Both of those solutions are possible but neither is easy.
Added to all that, child welfare agencies, especially troubled ones that need reform, operate with insufficient resources and frequently in difficult political situations.
3. In your book, you explain why a clear vision is needed to spark change. Leaders in all three turnaround sites shared this strategy, though each one had a different vision for reform. Can you explain how these visions drove reform at each particular site?
It is striking that vision mattered in all of the settings. It's not how researchers and policy people usually think about improving a system. They think about going out and testing an evidence-based intervention for each specific problem and then putting each intervention in place, step by step. But a coherent overall vision is crucial for agency leaders even to figure out which problems really matter. Also, you need a vision so the many stakeholders—judges, social workers, and foster parents—understand what you’re doing and how they can help.
The visions at the three sites shared some broad themes—for example, that children do better in families—but how those themes were applied varied in places with different histories. Utah had already invested a lot of money into lowering caseloads without seeing real change. So the reform leaders there focused on creating a more family-focused system and giving social workers more training and clarity about their jobs.
In Alabama, reform leaders believed the system was too rigid and children were too often removed from their homes and put in foster care. The response was to move in the opposite direction and teach social workers how to customize services for each child and family. Social worker caseload was high and had to be lowered, but the reform leaders decided to fix how social workers were doing their jobs before bringing more people on board.
The District's history was one of chaos, high caseloads, and too many kids in institutions and group homes. Our vision of reform was seeing kids in foster families and kin families, not in institutions. We concentrated on lowering caseloads and building the social workers’ capacity to do their jobs in a different way.
The one universal in all three sites was a vision about how the agency should operate—that it should not see itself as a passive victim, but should be active, responsible, and accountable. That type of thinking seems to be a common theme for successful turnarounds.
4. What does it take to push an agency to reform? The three agencies you write about were operating under court supervision. Is that the best way to trigger change?
It's hard to know from my case study approach if getting the courts involved is the only way, or the best way, to reform. Court involvement can create not just a crisis that can spark reform but also the opportunity to succeed. Courts are pretty consistent in what they measure over time, so people can genuinely see success along the way. That was very important in these settings, where, as we've just said, people expect they will only get noticed if they fail. With the courts, agencies and their staff could see their successes measured and tracked for the first time. Courts can also offer more continuous and long-term oversight than can most elected officials, who may demand quick results even though reform takes many years. In the book, I draw lessons from the courts' role that should help spark change in settings where the courts aren't involved.
In the last chapter of the book, I talk about how people besides the agency leader can create an environment for success. Some of those suggestions are aimed at the federal government and Congress, some at philanthropies and at state and local elected leaders. I recommend national investment in early childhood programs and prevention and treatment services for maternal depression and substance abuse. Research has shown the benefit of early services to families, but these programs are often starved for resources.
I also look at what state and local officials can do. Many governors take office never having thought about child welfare issues. I was unusually lucky in the District because Mayor Anthony Williams had been a foster child himself. Governors and mayors should be personally involved in picking a child welfare agency director who has their trust. And they should share with that director an understanding about the agency's goals, strategies, and performance expectations.
5. Why did you write this book?
I really wanted to understand why child welfare reform was so hard. Why was it so hard to make sure kids had somewhere better to stay in an emergency than on a cot in the agency's office building? Why was it so hard for social workers to plan ahead for what might happen in children's lives? Everybody wanted these things to happen, but making them happen was difficult—so I wanted to understand why.
What I try to do in the book is combine lessons from experience and case studies, lessons from research about management and leadership, and lessons from research about child development and child welfare. Those worlds are too often separate, and I want researchers and policymakers to think about how those ideas connect. I'm a big believer that the insights that really spark change often spring from several kinds of knowledge.
I felt it was important to write about the intensity and the emotional ups-and-downs that go with trying to rescue an agency. New leaders may feel like they've failed or that they're unsuited for the job if they don't see change right away. It can be very hard and painful, but you can also make a difference—not only for those you serve, but for the people who work in service agencies. Social workers, teachers, doctors, and other people of very good will are often stuck in frustrating positions in systems with values counter to the ones they brought to their jobs. I hope my book will get people excited about changing and leading organizations so they do better by the people they serve and enable the people who want to make a difference.
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