Episode # 32: Oklahoma Child Welfare Director Michael Williams
Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.
Five percent of children entering foster care nationally do so not from abuse or neglect, but because it’s the only way to unlock Medicaid financing for behavioral health care.
Custody for care is not a quirk or conspiracy. Instead, that datapoint reflects the distortions of tacitly designing child welfare policy as a backstop system of last resort.
It also captures key tensions constraining child welfare leaders:
What’s the appropriate role of data in decision-making, especially when it inherently collapses complexity?
Where’s the boundary line between insufficient accountability controls and ineffective process theater?
How can states upgrade their partnerships with the federal government amid simultaneously declining investment and rising expectations?
Today’s guest makes decisions shaped by these constraints every day.
Michael Williams currently serves as Oklahoma’s Child Welfare Director, and previously was Deputy Commissioner of Operations for Connecticut’s child welfare agency.
We talked about why Oklahoma was the first state to join the Administration for Children and Families’ A Home for Every Child initiative, and why he takes the approach of data informing and influencing decisions, rather than driving them.
If you wonder why a policy like custody for care persists when everyone involved decries its poor outcomes and clear cost inefficiency, this is a look behind the curtain.
