To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) by Cris Beam

years.To do this, states would receive financial incentives: $4,000 for each so-called normal foster adoption, and $6,000 for each “special needs” adoption.Even within this landscape of changing legislation, not everyone sees a pendulum swing, with pro-adoption folks on one side and pro-biological families on the other. The laws do change every several years, but the changes are influenced by everything from scientific discoveries to psychological trends to surges or dips in the child welfare rolls. And many key stakeholders in foster care don’t lobby for dramatic sea changes, but rather improvisational tweaks. For instance, with ASFA, some feel the adoption incentives unfairly disadvantage the biological families and argue that the same money should be awarded to agencies that successfully reunify families.Others have lobbied for more intense, but shorter, in-home support services for all but the direst (seriously violent or sexually abusive) family situations. If circumstances don’t improve within a matter of months, they say,
then
the child should be removed, providing further motivation for parental progress.Many people in child welfare say we break up too many families, many say the kids stay too long in care, many advocate putting more money or emphasis into this program or that, but nobody’s suggesting we ditch the system altogether, abandoning it for something entirely new.
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    Marcia Robinson Lowry, a lawyer who fought a famous battle for the rights of foster children, the Shirley Wilder case in New York,thinks the basic tenets of foster care laws have remained decent through all the shifts in public policy. Lowry says child welfare’s spotty report card has to do with a simple lack of incentive. People at all levels of the system, she claims, will do as little work as they can do because there’s no
reason
to do better. Because there’s no real cultural value placed on the lives of foster children or their families, the people hired to work for their benefit don’t strive to provide much value. So Lowry has built her life around making sure people in child welfare at least follow the laws as they’re written.
    After heading up the Children’s Rights project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she fought for Shirley Wilder, Lowry went on to found a separate organization by the same name in 1995, and to launch lawsuits against
entire states
that were performing poorly—where high numbers of kids were dying in care and living in substandard conditions. She and her team have successfully sued the states of Mississippi, New Jersey, Tennessee, and others, as well as the District of Columbia; Fulton and DeKalb Counties in Georgia; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After a case is settled, Children’s Rights sticks around to ensure that officials follow their mandates to appropriate more money to programs, audit agencies, hire more employees, and so on.
    In her corner office on Fifth Avenue and 28th Street in Manhattan, Lowry told me there are good laws in place that tell us when to remand a child, and when not to. Everybody knows, she said, that it’s best for a child to stay with his parents when at all possible. Everybody knows that a teenager should be with a family rather than in an institution. Everybody knows that providing good, old-fashioned social work services, like educational or financial resources to a mother, is preferable to taking away her kid. The law shows a clear preference for these things no matter what era we’re in. The trouble is, these carefully crafted services take more time and effort for the system to provide than simply sticking a child into any old foster home or a teenager into an institution and getting his case file off your desk.
    â€œThe basic tenets of foster care are good,” Lowry said. She’s distinguished-looking, with a silver bob and a direct expression that indicates she’s very busy, but