Wagner Professor Explores the Role of Race for Child Welfare Caseworkers

By Robert Polner

The work of child-protective caseworkers is normally closed to outsiders. But for two and a half years, Erica G. Foldy, assistant professor of public and nonprofit management at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, was permitted to sit in on scores of case discussions at one state agency charged with protecting children at risk of abuse and neglect.
    Foldy has long been interested in how people converse about race and ethnicity on the job, how—and whether—they cross that great divide. What better lab, she thought, than a child welfare agency. After all, social workers wade into a realm, the family, where most of us would probably agree that race and ethnicity matter. Therefore, these civil servants, carrying up to 18 cases each, had more reasons and opportunities than most of us to consider the role and relevance of their own racial and ethnic identities and those of the families they encounter.
    Observing the discussions of seven racially diverse caseworker teams, Foldy tried to discover what enabled and inhibited their capacity to learn specifically about the role of race and ethnicity in their work. Foldy asked a colleague, Tamara Buckley, a professor at Hunter College’s School of Education, to work with her in analyzing and writing up the data, and presented the findings at the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management’s fall research conference held in Los Angeles in November.
    What they found is that that the caseworkers in question tended to minimize the role and impact of race and culture in their work; in interviews, they downplayed race’s significance. For example, many said that they would attend primarily to a child’s medical and psychological needs, rather than race. This suggested that they saw race and ethnicity as somehow separate or irrelevant. And while some talked about the importance of the race and culture of the families they investigated, they did not see any need to learn about their own background or the impact it might have on their interaction with the families, even though best practice suggests that self awareness is critical when communicating and working across cultural lines.
    Foldy attended 96 case discussions in all, and race was brought up in 14 of them, usually superficially. But there were instances where workers discussed race and culture in depth and used them diagnostically. One such conversation explored whether “hearing voices” should be interpreted out of hand as a sign of mental illness or could be considered normal in some cultural contexts.
    Based on what they had heard, Foldy and Buckley divided the teams into two categories, “color blind” and “color cognizant.” They guessed that the latter would be more likely to have had conversations related to race, but that turned out to be untrue. Further study determined that the social worker teams differed in another key manner—the general capacity to engage in learning-conducive behavior, such as asking for feedback, reviewing work errors, and surfacing and debating different points of view. Possessing a generous capacity for learning alone did not predict whether a team would talk about race, but when combined with high color cognizance, it did. Only one of the teams showed both a high general capacity for learning and a high recognition of the role of race in their organization’s or clinical team’s work.
    “We hypothesize that any work group is going to need both color cognizance and a generic capacity to learn in order to learn about race,” explains Foldy. “You really need both those two elements, and those elements are independent and often don’t go together. A group may have one or it may have another, but unless you have both, you’re not going to learn about race.”