Child Welfare

6/22/25: Once, while living with our family in a New Brunswick apartment in the late 1980s, I would occasionally see a pale young teenaged girl appear for moment or two on a balcony, but there was never any sign of her going to and from school or outside at all. Finally, I called child welfare, although of course you never know what happens or even if they respond. Now this heartbreaking, infuriating story of the abuse of a home-schooled child. I so miss teaching social policy; I teach theory, happily, but want to return.

4/14/25: Good news that Cuyahoga County’s solution to housing children on Euclid Avenue is soon coming to an end.

3/20/25: Ending Child Poverty key data (article from Jacobin).

Latest: Brent Larkin’s highly informed and invaluable coverage, and although the headline is about the Browns, is also about the real needs of our children and families. In case you are wondering, Randell McShepard, VP of RPM, is also co-founder and Chair of Policy Bridges, whose Executive Director is Gregory L. Brown. This group is central to the new Urban Agenda coalition founded recentlyhttps://policybridgeneo.org/mou-signing/. I like Brent’s proposed focus on early childhood education, but I may have to form a “beat” on those “older kids”, the teens, as youth unemployment has been a major focus for my political concerns starting in the 1970s. Watch for a “beat” on it.

Meanwhile, one of my concerns is that time and time again, we focus on what I call “programization,” as if another set of programs and services can solve the region’s poverty and in equality. But I do like Brent’s suggestion for a targeted tax for pre-school: “A small income tax dedicated to quality preschool and other worthwhile investments was overwhelmingly renewed by Dayton voters in November.” A small income tax dedicated to quality preschool and other worthwhile investments was overwhelmingly renewed by Dayton voters in November. A small income tax dedicated to quality preschool and other worthwhile investments was overwhelmingly renewed by Dayton voters in November.

While working for such pragmatic reforms, however, the Urban Agenda needs to ask big questions, such as this question, which I texted to the City Club during Friday’s great forum, The Case for Cities: “In 2017, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s A Greater Cleveland series asked the same kind of ‘what about’ question I want to ask you. The series asked: ‘What is it about the lives of inner-city kids that make them much less likely than their suburban counterparts to become prosperous?’ My question is: What is it about the collective impact of the compensation structure of the anchor institutions which Bruce Katz in your book The Case for Cities discusses--or their overall collective impact--that decreases economic inequality in urban counties or increases economic inequality?” Due to the outpouring of questions from the audience, which did include me but I was too shy to get in line, my question was not asked. But sometimes it is just formulating the question in your own mind which is valuable! And substack to the rescue, I can ask it here!

The Urban Agenda, if it is even to take seriously the needs of pre-school children in this county (since in my view focusing only on Cleveland is short-sighted given the poverty in inner-ring suburbs), must face up to such questions. Given the property tax exemptions and abatements which large employers in Cleveland enjoy, are they externalizing their costs onto the larger community by failing to pay a truly living wage to all its employees, including student employees and terribly exploited “interns”? Is the Gini co-efficient of inequality of the compensation structure of their employees and contractors show that it is more unequal than in the county as a whole or less unequal? Does the City and County have firm policies to ensure that they support and contract with organizations that have fair and equitable compensation structures for their employees and subcontractors? I do not know the answers to these empirical questions, but they are questions which must be asked in our county.

Introduction: I’ve remamed this one of my “beats” from Child Tax Credit and Child Poverty to Child Welfare. Although I worked in two group homes, and was a graduate assistant in the field at UMSSW for a year, this is not an area of my expertise. And it is the one “beat” for which I do not have a bibliography. What prompted me is this substack account of child marriage in the US from Let's Address This with Qasim Rashid.

Thank you Matthew Yglesias of Slow Boring! On my free substack Speaking from the Heart, I’m going to follow the Child Tax Credit & Child Poverty as a “beat” here.

Here is one key piece from Economic Policy Institute, courtesy of Max Sawicky of MaxSpeak.

From my stance as a progressive pragmatist on social welfare policy, who supervised hundreds of policy briefs as a full time social work educator, and as an activist long on the democratic left, the pandemic era Bennet/Brown Child Tax Credit was the single most important social policy measure since the Earned Income Tax Credit, which can and should have been extended to non-custodial parents with child support obligations (on condition of the payments being made. And I say single most important because what we needed instead of the Affordable Care Act was Real Medicare for All (with Pedicare, as originally intended), but don’t get me started.

Family allowances as in Canada and most civilized countries—as implemented temporarily here in the USA via the Child Tax Credit—were absolutely wonderful in their impact on child poverty and a reduced sense of desperation among low income households with children and a major source of relief for middle income families with children as well.

In recent years, pre-my-substack, I was often using my 3000+ follower LinkedIn to beg and plead for retaining this and even passing the still version that passed the House in Biden’s last two years, despite its giveawy provisions to the wealthy; anything to keep it moving forward for later expansion. But the Democratic Senate just didn’t make it a priority as of August 2024.

Now comes Slow Boring’s discussion of the CTC (disguised as a discussion of Manchin. Matthew Yglesias is correct in many ways on this, and I very much appreciate his attention to this. I hope he follows up and makes the CTC a subject for ongoing discussion. For my part, I’ve made it a “beat” on my sustack. Right now I have just a few items in my bibliography but I have dozens more stored elsewhere and will soon move them to it along with some additional commentary.

Here is the November 2024 Congressional Research Service report. Here is the Senate bill which was pending. The original House bill with reports on action in the Senate is here. Yes, progressives throughout our history have failed to prioritize action on social welfare measures targeted at assistance to poor women with children and instead favored broad brush measures that appear to broader constituencies. Perhaps being a school superintendent helped Senator Bennet to realize how key the Child Tax Credit was and is.