Efficiency vs. Children’s Lives: How Ned & KARA Expose Failures in Child Protection

“All adults are the protectors of all children.” – Don Shelby

(COVID’s impact on children is still with us)

I’m re-sharing Ned’s article because institutions constantly need reminding that “efficiency” is often the opposite of effectiveness when it comes to children. Some readers have been uncomfortable with the child/chicken analogy Ned uses. To that, the response is exactly the point: children deserve infinitely more care than chickens, which is precisely why the comparison should hit us so hard and so clearly.

From Ned:

To put it bluntly, what’s good for the administrators often may be bad for children. That bleak assessment is not always and everywhere the case, but it is close enough.

To explain, Ned compares the child welfare system to another system that manages “valuable biological entities”: the egg industry. People who work in egg production—farmers, bankers, regulators—are, like most of us, primarily concerned with their own and their families’ welfare. They find occupational niches where they can prosper. Their prosperity, status, and security depend on causing chickens to produce eggs with maximum efficiency.

Maximizing efficiency in that world means focusing on economic factors, not on the happiness of chickens or the lives of chicks that might have hatched. Profit is calculated as revenue minus costs, and most people in the system cope with any moral discomfort by narrowing their focus to financial outcomes and their own survival. Responsibility for the ethics of the system is diffused: if the public calls tiny cages torture, each person can say, “I didn’t make the rules. If I resisted, I’d lose my job and nothing would change.”

Ned’s warning is that this same mentality seeps into child welfare and child protection. When systems are built around “cost efficiency” instead of “cost–benefit” for children, the comfort and convenience of administrators take precedence over the safety and healing of kids.

This is an example that proves Ned’s point that efficiency in CPS ruins children in the system and is largely responsible for the truth in the organization creating what it was designed to stop.

Every year in the United States, roughly 7.8 million children are reported to Child Protective Services (CPS), yet the entire federal CASA/GAL budget sits at only about twelve million dollars.

That works out to barely more than a dollar per reported child, in a landscape where many of those children are not widgets but badly damaged human beings moving through investigations, foster placements, court hearings, and lifelong consequences. We talk about “child protection” as if it were a priority, but our funding and coverage choices say something very different.

Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASAs) are the only independent voice that speaks exclusively for the child in abuse and neglect cases. Parents have lawyers. Agencies have lawyers. There is a well-funded infrastructure of “parental rights” arguments and legal advocacy to protect adult interests.

Children have voice or enforceable legal rights of their own, in part because the United States is the only nation in the world that has refused to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a global treaty first opened for signature in the late 1980s.

In courtroom after courtroom, the child’s well-being is discussed, but the child is at the mercy of Child Protective Systems where caseloads are high and social workers stressed to keep safe sometimes well over 100 children each month. The stress is terrible and the pay is not that great.

CASAs are community volunteers whose only job as a Guardian ad Litem is to speak for the that child’s best interests. They take one or two cases as a rule and have the time to give each child the personal attention he or she needs at the most frightening and unpredictable time of their life. Think about it through the eyes of a child, abused so badly a judge has determined that their life is endangered and should be removed from a birth home. Waking up in a group home or with an unknown family out of the neighborhood, unfamiliar school and no friends and few personal belongings. A community volunteer with time to help the child through the cold and legal process of Child Protection goes a long way towards easing the fear and anxiety that pains every child in this system.

Most states don’t have statewide CASAs and North Dakota doesn’t have a CASA program.

Today’s CASA program serves only about one-third of children in care each year and roughly 400,000 children are kept waiting for a volunteer, that means on the order of 400,000 children each year in the foster care/child welfare system do not have a CASA because there are not enough volunteers and program management capacity in the system.

The mandate of “a voice for every child” is still far from reality.

On paper, official caseloads can sound manageable: you might see numbers like “30 families per worker” or similar ratios. But those statistics rarely tell the whole story. Under-reporting, misreporting, and differences in how “cases” are counted (families vs. individual children, open vs. screened-out reports) all obscure the real load on workers and courts.

Families in CPS court cases are often larger and more complex than families not involved with CPS, and that is not an accident. It reflects the role of epigenetics and generational trauma: child abuse and neglect frequently repeat across generations. Early adversity shapes brain development, health, and behavior, and those impacts echo forward, making it more likely that children who were once in the system will grow up to parent under the same extreme stress and instability themselves.

When we fund CASA child advocacy to the tune of twelve million federal dollars, we leave states and hundreds of counties without CASA programs, and allow hundreds of thousands of children to go without an advocate, create even more dire conditions for children and the communities they live in.

A single social worker or staff Guardian ad Litem may be responsible for dozens of families and far more individual children than the paperwork suggests.

In that environment, CASAs and volunteer advocates, where they exist, are often the only consistent human connection: the person who actually visits, actually listens, and actually shows up in court solely to tell the truth of the child’s experience.

Remove that voice, or never provide it in the first place, and the balance of power shifts even further toward systems designed to protect themselves and adults trained to argue their own rights, not the rights of the child.

This is why the scale and distribution of funding matters so much. Twelve million dollars at the federal level is not a serious investment in child advocacy; it is a symbolic line item that lets us claim we are doing something while leaving millions of children, and hundreds of thousands of voiceless in processes that will shape the rest of their lives. If we are willing to count 7.8 million reports a year, we must also be willing to count what it will truly cost to ensure that every child in the system has a real advocate and to break the generational cycles that bring families back into CPS again and again.

The historical lack of transparency about child outcomes in CPS clouds the understanding of what becomes of the children passing through the system. Because of the confusing tangle of privacy and security laws we are not likely to ever have a clear picture how these unfortunate children and youth succeed or fail once out of the system.

We do know that Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz has stated that 90% of the youth in Juvenile Justice have passed through Child Protective Services and that recidivism in America’s prison system at nine years has remained at about 80% for decades.

When we weigh efficiency vs children’s lives in child protection, we see a system that saves money on paper while costing children safety, stability, and hope. If Ned’s metaphor and KARA’s numbers trouble you, use that discomfort as fuel: refuse to accept a world where twelve million federal CASA dollars try to cover 7.8 million reports, where hundreds of thousands of children go without an advocate, and where “efficiency” quietly replaces effectiveness. Speak up, share this article, and ask the people in power to give children a voice and choose children’s lives over administrative convenience.

This may be a very efficient system

but it’s effective in the wrong way.

It produces exactly what it was designed to stop.

What you can do right now

Forward this article to your State Representative with a short note from you about the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Ask for:

Better tracking and public reporting of meaningful, outcomes-based metrics in child protection.
Real accountability for saving abused and neglected children from early death, deeper trauma, harsher punishment, and a lifetime of dangerous behavior.

When you share KARA’s reporting with friends, on Instagram and Facebook, and, most of all, with your State Representative (find them here), change will come a little bit faster. When enough of us become informed and speak up for abused and neglected children, we improve their lives and strengthen our communities.

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KARA reports on the issues of invisible children.

This article was submitted by Former CASA Guardian ad Litem Mike Tikkanen.

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INVISIBLECHILDREN – KARA (KIDS AT RISK ACTION)

“What we do to our children, they will do to our society.”
– Pliny the Elder, 2,000 years ago