The Road to ACS Disaster
David Hansel is a promising new head for the troubled Administration for Children’s Services. Let’s hope he can repair the damage done by Mayor de Blasio’s first ACS pick, Gladys Carríon. As Rich Calder and Bruce Golding reported in Monday’s Post, Carríon went so far as to downgrade a key Bloomberg-era innovation, ChildStat.
Modeled on the NYPD’s CompStat, these regular meetings connected top agency staff with field workers to review how cases were being handled — with the backand-forth broadcast agency-wide, so that everyone could learn.
Set up after the infamous 2006 beating death of Nixzmary Brown, ChildStat was designed to vastly improve ACS management. The process let caseworkers communicate directly to the brass, and let the brass get their own concerns out loud and clear — all without being stifled by intervening layers of management.
The program wasn’t popular with the agency’s lower ranks, who feared that the back-and-forth with management might lead to disciplinary action against field workers. Yet ChildStat did well enough to be copied in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Carríon, however, apparently found it too much trouble.
According to three former city officials, she stopped attending the meetings soon after she took over. She also terminated the agency-wide broadcasts of the sessions and had the emphasis shifted from nuts-and- bolts reviews of cases to larger policy issues: So much for making it about management at all.
The overall regress under Carríon was so bad that, as city Department of Investigation head Mark Peters noted over the weekend, ACS management simply blew off the DOI’s criticisms over tragedies like the death of 3-year-old Jaden Jordan.
“When we came to them with some of these concerns, they told us that their review showed there were no real problems with how this case was handled,” Peters noted.
Eventually, the DOI slammed ACS as having “high-level, systemic problems” — a report that finally forced Carríon’s departure from the agency (weeks after she’d officially resigned).
Here’s the thing: Throughout Carríon’s tenure, independent officials like Public Advocate Letitia James and Comptroller Scott Stringer issued repeated reports of serious problems at ACS — and Mayor de Blasio ignored them.
It wasn’t until dead children — slain despite being on ACS radar — started making the front pages of the newspapers that the mayor finally did anything. And even then, he let Carríon resign (and hang on for weeks afterward), rather than fire her.
Hansel’s record suggests he’ll do a better job. Let’s hope so — since it’s clear the mayor can’t recognize a management disaster until the press hits him over the head with it.