From the New York Times: Foster Children at Risk, and an Opportunity Lost

Two decades ago, New York City embarked on an experiment aimed at better assisting and protecting its most vulnerable black and Latino children. At its heart, the effort involved creating and supporting foster care agencies that would, at long last, be run by men and women of color.

The city and state opened their wallets. Child welfare experts embraced the concept. There was the sense among some that a kind of racial justice was about to be won.

Luis Medina, a charismatic and outspoken child welfare administrator who had grown up poor in the city, became one of the most aggressive proponents of the new philosophy. Mr. Medina liked to say that foster care in New York had become an evil and racist system that was engaged in little more than rounding up poor minority children. He suggested that the traditional foster care agencies that had long been dominant were too interested in collecting government checks.

And so when Mr. Medina took the top job at an old-line agency, St. Christopher’s Inc., in the early 1990s, he began transforming it. He hired additional black and Latino caseworkers, and made a priority of appointing minorities to the agency’s board of directors. He promised to recruit local foster parents from the same neighborhoods as the children coming into their care. He argued that black and Latino families, like all others, had a “sacred right” to stay together, and he pledged that his agency would do everything it could to keep intact the families torn at by poverty, illness and drugs.

Yes, by all means, do not use the foster care system to take children out of their unhealthy environments. Put them right back in. And to any liberals who may believe this endeavor was ever admirable to begin with, you are wrong. The welfare of children should not be an issue of race. I don’t care if a family is white trash or black ghetto or whatever the hell else. If they are abusing or neglecting their children, they have forfeited their right to an “intact family.”

He said minority parents, long demeaned by the child welfare system, would be respected. Mr. Medina even helped create a traveling show: a troupe of parents who talked on stage about their struggles with a hostile foster care bureaucracy. It played across the nation, from Florida to California, and produced applause and tears.

But all these efforts eventually came undone, often at a serious human cost.

Who would have expected that a liberal ideology would have such deadly consequences?

Twenty years later, the city’s ambitious undertaking to improve foster care for the city’s black and Latino children has spanned four mayoral administrations and consumed hundreds of millions of dollars in city, state and federal money. The New York Times spent months examining the investment in minority-run agencies — what once seemed a bold and overdue shift in one of the most challenging areas of social policy.

It is as much a story of trouble as of triumph. The Miracle Makers Inc. of Brooklyn, which swiftly grew into one of the largest of the minority agencies, was banished from foster care in 2005 after years of poor performance that shortchanged children. Two other minority agencies, responsible for hundreds of children, were shuttered and their officials convicted of stealing money. Another closed after city investigators found that agency staff members were giving jobs and contracts to relatives.

Children with St. Christopher’s, city records show, were abused or neglected at disturbing rates. Family Court judges and lawyers cited the agency for years for ineptitude in handling children’s cases. In 2002, St. Christopher’s got so few children adopted that the city gave it a grade of zero in its performance scoring system.

I guess I am confused. How can a foster care organization receive a grade zero and still be responsible for the lives and wellbeing of children?

And from 1999 to 2005, seven children whose families had been involved with St. Christopher’s wound up dead. While city and state investigators did not fault the agency directly in each death, in every case they linked agency personnel to a chain of failures and oversights in protecting the children — a discouraging record even for the perilous world of foster care.

The article goes on (and on and on) and ends up saying that screw ups are not limited to minority organizations in the foster care industry. Well, obviously. My point is, affirmative action clearly did not fix the problem. If anything, it made it worse by promoting a system based on color instead of merit.

This story disgusts me. Have we truly reached the point in our society where being politically correct is more valuable than human lives? I’m not sure why I even bother asking that question. It is fairly apparent, given the state of abortion legislation in our country. Some people make excuses for individuals who are pro-abortion, saying it is difficult to be pro-life when you cannot actually see, touch, or hear the child developing in the womb. As if ultrasounds and the rapid progression of prenatal care technology aren’t enough of a rebuttal to that argument, this article should be. Sacrificing the lives of poor and abused children is the logical result of a society which has abandoned the inherent value of human life from fertilization to natural death.

Oh, and as a short post script:

In 1996, stung by the gruesome death of a young Latino girl, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani committed to a total reorganization of the city’s child welfare system. By 1997, the city had come up with a reform plan that benefited the minority agencies that were in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Mr. Medina had served on a panel that shaped the reform plan.

He’s done so well for New York City, by all means, let’s give him access to the entire nation’s welfare system.  Vote Rudy ‘08!