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"A brutal indifference has spread itself through the system," says Andrew Bridge, a former foster child in Los Angeles who went to Harvard Law School and now heads the Alliance for Children's Rights. He chaired a countywide panel that reviewed the state's foster-care record. Last January it concluded that the system in Los Angeles County operates with minimal data on its wards and a safety-monitoring process that is random at best. Some departments are not aware of what others are doing, so a child's safety often relies on guesswork. "Fundamentally," says Bridge, 34, "we've come a very small distance from the days when I was in foster care." In short, he adds, Los Angeles County lacks the ability to know the full nature of the quality of care foster children actually receive, "the full extent of harm children may face in foster care and how to protect children from harm in the future."
The foster-care crisis is a many-headed behemoth, and no single weapon has been able to defeat it. "There are so many actors involved in the decision of what happens to the children," says Secretary Shalala. "Different people have responsibility for taking them away from their family. Another group of people is responsible for placing them." Last year the General Accounting Office issued a report on juvenile courts, finding that judges and caseworkers do not work well together. Many judges mistrust the judgment of caseworkers and order additional assessments "to compensate for what the judges perceive as professional inadequacies."
The chief evil, though, may be decentralization. While the Federal Government doles out most of the funding, the welfare of children has traditionally been a state matter. In fact, many states see it as such a local issue that they pass down the decision making to individual counties. The result has been unwieldy systems that are grossly mismanaged. Fearing that they may create bloated bureaucracies, the states usually earmark the money for the direct care of kids, meaning monthly payments to foster parents and salaries for social workers. In so doing, they neglect the infrastructure. There are not enough computers, secretaries and clerks to do the cheap paper work that consumes social workers' time. There are not enough administrators to review the cases or think outside the box about creative solutions. "We've grown accustomed to allowing the critical function of caring for children to take place in an abysmal business setting," says Anita Bock, recently hired to head the welfare agency in Los Angeles. "I'm a fiscal conservative. I'm not interested in throwing money at the system. I'm saying give me some flexibility."
But there is no flexibility because the system is stretched to its limit. Some agencies have become so desperate to place children that any bed will do. Kids are being sent to foster homes with no forethought, and the states cannot guarantee their safety. Furthermore, the number of kids needing foster care is exceeding the number of families available to care for them. Even the most devoted of foster parents are dropping out of the programs, frustrated at times by a lack of support--as well as legal roadblocks to adopting the children if they so choose.