It looks like Alan Dettlaff has talked himself out of a job. The dean of social work at the University of Houston since 2015, Dettlaff has used his post to advocate the “abolition” of the child welfare system. In December, he was removed from his administrative role. A university spokesman told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the move was made “to better align the college with the university’s academic priorities, which include growing research expenditures and elevating the learning experience for all students.” But Dettlaff, who will get to keep his perch on the faculty, said the “resistance” to his message on racial justice “was too great.”
Dettlaff, one of the founders of the upEND Movement, argued that because black and brown families are disproportionately investigated for abuse and neglect, because their cases are substantiated at a higher rate, and because the children in these homes are more likely to be placed in foster care, the child welfare system is itself racist and should be eliminated. If anything, it should be replaced by a bureaucracy that gives poor people more money.
As the organization’s website explains: “The biggest threats to child safety and well-being are ingrained anti-Blackness in our policies and practices; economic exploitation produced by racial capitalism; the continuing cultural genocide produced by colonialism; gender oppression sustained through patriarchy; and White supremacist norms of good parenting, family, and safety — norms that maintain power in the hands of oppressive systems.”
Dettlaff comes by his abolitionism honestly. Earlier in his career, he focused his attention on eliminating police and prisons. Weirdly, the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on his firing focuses on these positions, making no mention of his views on child welfare. But if you want to know why it was unsustainable for the University of Houston to keep him on, all you have to do is look at the school’s funding streams.
Like a number of universities across the country, the University of Houston receives several hundred thousand dollars per year in federal Title IV-E funds allocated by the state of Texas to train its child welfare workforce. These universities are supposed to “prepare undergraduate and graduate students for work in public child welfare, as well as to provide high-quality in-service training to practitioners in public child welfare agencies.” Which is hard to do when you’re also advocating the abolition of child welfare agencies and smearing their employees as unrepentant racists.
For that matter, how do you teach employees to detect and respond to child maltreatment when you either don’t believe child maltreatment actually happens or simply believe that child maltreatment is all in the eye of the beholder? As the upEnd statement explained, “We seek to build a society where children, families, and communities self-determine what well-being and safety mean for them and are supported with the resources to do so.”
So, child protective services, in this view, will not be trying to determine which children are being abused and neglected. The children and families and communities will decide that. Never mind the laws that exist or the idea that it is the state’s responsibility to ensure that children are not being severely abused or chronically neglected.
Not only was Dettlaff’s rhetoric guiding ideas about child welfare, but he also opposed child welfare agencies working with law enforcement. In an open letter to social workers, he noted that members of the profession “absolutely cannot situate ourselves as the magic ingredient to eradicating racism in law enforcement — an institution directly tied to the legacy of American slavery — if we cannot dismantle racism within our own systems of care.” And during his time as dean, the college refused to place student interns in law enforcement organizations.
The idea that a child welfare agency would be unwilling to work with police is unfathomable. Child welfare agencies are regularly called when police find themselves at a home where the adults present are arrested and someone needs to help the children. Police often have to intervene in domestic violence cases and rely on expertise from child welfare agencies to determine if children are safe in that environment. And front-line child welfare work often looks a lot like police work. Agency employees are called to homes, not knowing who is on the other side of the door, needing to ask questions of the residents while gathering evidence of what might be going on. An increasing number of child welfare agencies are partnering with police departments to do this work more safely and effectively. But under Dettlaff, the University of Houston could not sully its hands associating with law enforcement.
It is hardly uncommon to find these attitudes in schools of social work. The Child Welfare League of America recently devoted an issue of its journal to “anti-racist approaches” in the field. Columbia’s School of Social Work invited Ibram X. Kendi as a guest, and the school has a lecture series called “Racial Justice and Liberatory Practice.”
One might question whether under these conditions it’s even possible to train public servants to detect and combat child maltreatment. Do students learn anything besides the importance of displaying racial sensitivity? Does anyone explain to them why black children are overrepresented in child welfare investigations? (Hint: It may have something to do with the fact that they are overrepresented among victims of maltreatment and among child maltreatment fatalities.) Probably not.
But at the very least, if states are going to send some of the billions of dollars the federal government allocates for training child welfare workers to these universities, they might at least pretend that it’s a worthwhile profession. Maybe they could acknowledge that there are problems with our child welfare system, but it serves a vital role in protecting the most vulnerable children in this country from adults who would do them harm.
Laura Abrams, professor and director of social welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an ally of Dettlaff, told Inside Higher Ed that the “backlash against child welfare abolition is strong, in part because social workers are highly invested [in] child welfare as a domain of our profession.” She noted that it’s hard for many to “envision a world without government child protection.” Of course, many of the people coming to her school and Dettlaff’s are actually there in order to be trained in government-run child protection. If the schools don’t like this arrangement, they should let the money flow somewhere else instead.
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One idea might be to direct some of these funds toward criminal justice programs and create special tracks in those schools for folks interested in entering child protective services. If your training doesn’t allow for the possibility that there are children of all races in this country who are being abused or neglected and who may need intervention from state authorities, maybe you should be teaching creative fiction, not social work.
Dettlaff, for his part, will “continue his own important scholarly work,” according to the university, focusing on “racial disparities, improving outcomes for LGBTQ youth, and addressing the unique needs of immigrant families.” Good for him. Maybe the state can suggest its workforce steer clear of this man’s nonsense.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum. She is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.
