Anderson: No. That's the wrong end. We need to think about how we make an assessment to pull the kid. Evidently, we're sending the wrong kid back home to the wrong family. Family preservation says that safety is number one. Safety is not number two or three. It's number one. The question you have to ask when you're ready to remove the kid or reunify a family is, Is this child safe? If the child is not safe, the next question you would ask is, Do I have the resources to keep this child safe at home? If your answer is no, then the child doesn't go home. So it's not family preservation that's the issue; it's the assessment. We are making poor assessments.
Reason: Are people making poor assessments because they are taking an unrealistic view of the system in which they are operating? A child's home life may be less than perfect, but the foster care system may be even worse.
Anderson: I think we have workers that go into a family and don't know what to look for because we haven't good criteria. We need to give workers an assessment tool so that they can ask the right questions.
When I used to do this work, I'd go into a home and sit there and just watch mom for a while, just watch her with her kids. I didn't care what the house looked like. I might spend a whole day just sitting on the sofa watching, just trying to get myself invisible in the family. Then, before I'd leave that day, I'd say, "Tell me about each of your children." Before I walked out of the house, I knew about how she related to her kids, where her stress points were, which kid she didn't like, which kid was going to be problematic for her, etc. When do our workers do that kind of work?
When I was working at a state agency, they did some filming on five families on AFDC. Four of them were black, one was white. We were sitting around, all us top executives, looking at these films. The black families had clean houses and the kids were dressed up, and everyone was saying how wonderful these four mothers were. The white female was out of shape, fat, and you could see the roaches in the film. Soda bottles were going up the wall, the dishes were all over the place, and people were getting embarrassed by how crappy this was. I said the family with the dirty house has the mother with the best parenting skills. She is not going to be a problem. She is going to be hard for the social worker to deal with, but her family structure is much better than these four.
Let's look at what each one of these mothers has said about her daughters. One mother and her daughter don't even look at each other. She calls a daughter a heifer. What is that? Why would you call your daughter a heifer? I mean, are you paying attention to relationship issues here? What were they all looking at? Material issues.
Reason: What is the role of the private sector in reforming the child welfare system?
Anderson: I would actually like to see all this contracted out except the police function. The police function is to go in and make an assessment of whether the kid ought to remain home or the kid ought to be removed. That's the only part that I think should stay with the counties or the state. Everything else--all the services, foster care, the adoption, in-home workers--ought to be contracted out to a nonprofit or a for-profit. I don't have a problem with profit. I don't care who it is, but the government ought to get out of this business.
Why should they get out of this business? Because if they get out of the business, you can contract it out to people who live and work in those communities. You can go into the home, you can go into the neighborhood, which is what we've got to start doing. You can't keep a kid safe from an office downtown. The whole community has to be involved in the safety of that child.
Reason: You moved the debate on AFDC. Do you see similar successes in child welfare?
Anderson: Yes. We've moved child welfare quietly, behind the scenes, in the direction that we want to go. The national debate around child welfare needs to happen the way it did with AFDC. I'm concerned that the debate will be family preservation vs. adoption, and I think that's the wrong debate. The debate is who are we deciding to take out of the home. So I might have to put my toe in that water.
Reason: How do you see yourself moving the debate after Pete Wilson's tenure?
Anderson: I never thought I wanted to write until I took this job. I never thought I had much to say. I am an applied person, not an academician. I'm a person who knows how to work and move things. I'm not an intellectual person. But I actually think I have some things to say. I'd like to do something that would allow me to give another view, because I have another view of what I think is going on.
I've been around government for 20 years, and I have a view of government as a manager. I've been mostly a manager in government, not a policy wonk. And I have some views on how to make it work better. And we need to talk about that, or you know what? We're going to lose our freedom in this country. And that scares me a lot.
Reason: Are you considering running for public office?
Anderson: Absolutely not. Well, I don't know. You know I said that I'd never live in California, so I'm away from saying "never." So I won't do that. I don't know what's going to be the next step.
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