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 John M. Hagedorn

Forsaking Our Children is the story of what happens when an activist sociologist—and former welfare rights organizer—is hired to reform a child welfare system. Written for social workers and activists as well as for academics and policy makers, this book combines often gut-wrenching personal stories and a compelling narrative of a hard-fought reform struggle with a critical history of child welfare. Despite today's adverse conditions, Hagedorn argues against defeatism, proposing a concrete and attainable blueprint for reform of the U.S. child welfare system.

How and why our child welfare system fails children and their families are central questions of this book. Chilling stories of these failures are combined with a new theoretical perspective which shows how welfare bureaucracies adapted to changing political conditions, substituting punitive interventions for the delivery of needed services. Hagedorn critically examines the history of public welfare  from the 19th century through the New Deal, the Anti-Poverty Programs of the sixties, and the "discover" of child abuse in the seventies. The logical conclusion of this history is the current emphasis on removing children from their families and the creation of a new system of orphanages. Applying lessons learned from restructuring modern businesses to the reform of welfare bureaucracies, Hagedorn argues that genuine reform does not involve either massive cutbacks or infusion of new funds.

    Author website:http://www.gangresearch.net

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"This is a solution-offering book. The chord struck is the fate of children, and the question of whether children receive the services they need and deserve...An on-the-ground book...Hagedorn's solutions make sense. He's not asking for more money, just more imagination and, shall we say, vision."
   (Los Angeles Times)

"This is a wonderfully clear and engaging account of the author's experiences as a reform-minded administrator in the Milwaukee social service bureaucracy. But it is more than that. John Hagedorn brings a sharp intelligence and nice erudition to his analysis of these experiences. The contemporary attack on the very idea of social provision should not be an excuse for ignoring the tangle of problems which have distorted the administration of social services—ultimately making social provision far more vulnerable to attack.
    (Frances Fox Piven, co-author, Regulating the Poor. Distinguished Prof. of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate School and University Center, City University of NY; and Richard Cloward, co-author, Regulating the Poor, Prof.  of Social Work, Columbia University)

"This book offers a powerful portrait of the challenges of implementing reform in public social service bureaucracies. John Hagedorn's thesis—that social service bureaucracies do not just take on a life of their own, independent of the social objectives they are intended to address, but are actively and deliberately self-serving—is worthy of serious attention from the policy and practice communities. His argument that future reform efforts have to focus far more on what it would take to alter the structures and conditions of frontline practice is a good one."
   (Robert Halpern Prof., Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development)

"Forsaking Our Children  is an unusual and important book about very tough issues. Hagedorn persuasively argues that the social work profession has been a major barrier to building effective anti-poverty programs. He asks the social work community to look inside itself and decide whether it is really doing any good. Anyone who cares about our system of child welfare should read this book."
   (Henry S. Webber, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago)

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