With the Allegheny Family Screening Tool

Many problems

One of my favorite former journalists, Barbara White Stack, recently wrote a commentary for the Post-Gazette about an initiative of one of my favorite child welfare leaders — Allegheny County Department of Human Services Director Marc Cherna (Feb. 11 Forum, “An Agency That Works, Helping Kids and Their Families”). But this time, I must disagree with them both.

The initiative is the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, an algorithm that assigns a risk score to every case in which a child is reported as an alleged victim of abuse or neglect.

The problems with AFST are legion:

• The AFST doesn’t predict child abuse. It predicts only whether, once reported, the family will be reported again or whether the child is likely to be removed from her or his parents. But the Department of Human Services acknowledges that decisions to call in a report alleging child abuse are rife with racial bias.

• Most reports don’t fit the stereotype of parents torturing children. Far more common are cases in which poverty itself is confused with “neglect.” If a family is reported because of poverty and, a year later, the family is still poor, there’s a good chance the poverty will be confused with neglect again and the family will be reported again.

• In many cases, seeking help through public benefits raises the risk score. In her new book “Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor,” academic Virginia Eubanks has a devastating critique of AFST: “Because the model confuses parenting while poor with poor parenting, the AFST views parents who reach out to public programs as risks to their children.” That can, of course discourage parents from seeking help.

• One of the two academicians chosen by DHS to conduct a highly touted, superficial “ethics review” of AFST not only is a faculty colleague of one of the AFST designers, but actually co-authored papers with her.

• In an Orwellian twist, DHS is considering expanding AFST by slapping a “risk score” on every Allegheny County child — at birth.

Rather than eliminating the inherent racial and class biases in child welfare, the Allegheny Family Screening Tool merely automates those biases. RICHARD WEXLER

Executive Director National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

Alexandria, Va.