BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Ending the History of Sacrificing the Poor : FORSAKING OUR CHILDREN: Bureaucracy and Reform in the Child Welfare System by John M. Hagedorn; Lake View Press $22.95, 245 pages

One of the few things many Democrats share with their Republican brethren these days is a distaste for and distrust of bureaucracies.

In our worst Kafka-esque nightmares their representatives appear, mean-spirited people bearing forms. Rather than providing useful services, they specialize in supervising court orders, removing children from their homes, holding onto their jobs and preserving the status quo.

Like it or not, welfare is a fundamental pillar of democracy, just like voting, and welfare is administered by bureaucracies. I have been searching, while Congress and the president try to compromise between the bottom line and the fate of the nation’s children and its poor, for a book that would explain our welfare system, offer solutions, and help me sound less like Rush Limbaugh when I talk with friends about taxation and government spending.

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. It is based on the author’s experience creating and coordinating the Milwaukee County Youth Initiative in 1988, a division of Milwaukee’s Department of Health and Human Services that has come to handle more than 10,000 child abuse referrals per year.

John Hagedorn’s first observations confirmed my worst fears about bureaucracies: More than 40 social workers performing specialized tasks pertaining to the welfare of a single family; social workers’ duties defined as “child removal”; pressure to place children in foster care; legal routines and paperwork; failure to engage in counseling that could help families stay together; money and contracts going primarily to white, upper-class neighborhoods.

Hagedorn found that visits with social workers bore more resemblance to police investigations than to what we traditionally think of as social work: helping people in need find solutions to problems.

In all fairness, part of the problem has been the overwhelming increase, since the 1970s, of child abuse and neglect cases, with social workers handling many more cases than they should. Public funding for social services has grown to handle these particular problems but the solutions have remained singularly unimaginative.

In 1991, Hagedorn writes, half a million children were placed by the courts in foster homes, often moving from home to home in a short period of time and ending up in Children’s Court as delinquents. Departments of social services across the country, he writes, have “restructured in such a manner to facilitate investigative and child placement functions,” not services.

“The history of social service reform,” Hagedorn claims, “is a history of sacrificing the poor on the altar of bureaucracy.” Rather than restructuring bureaucracies to meet the needs of changing populations and newly exploding problems like child abuse, welfare bureaucracies behaved, in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, like businesses, “tinkering with their managerial ideology,” adding new people, appointing friends of elected officials to run departments and agencies. Social workers were given specialized tasks like workers on a Ford assembly line rather than allowed to establish relationships with and solutions for their clients.

The legacy of the Reagan years was not the state’s reduction of cash benefits to the poor, but continued bureaucratic growth, as politicians exploited issues like child abuse without seeking real reform. Crime-fighting bureaucracies like police forces, prisons and other criminal justice facilities grew and multiplied, while social services languished.

Real reform is the best part of a book that a little too often reads like the dissertation it originally was. “The most common changes are add-ons,” Hagedorn quotes James Q. Wilson, professor of public policy at UCLA. “Real innovations are those that alter core tasks.”

While removing children from unsupportive families is often the best and only solution, the families should be treated as consumers of services, not merely as subjects for legal investigations.

Social workers benefit from working in teams, and from being able to perform a variety of tasks, not just specialized duties. Hagedorn has several good ideas for directing state resources to neighborhoods that most need them, including decentralized social workers and neighborhood councils. He cautions reformers against purely symbolic reforms such as pleas for more money, more staff or changes in administrators, as well as reform that has no follow-up evaluation.

“Forsaking Our Children” is an on-the-ground book, the kind that policymakers may never read. And while it does not answer all my questions about welfare reform, Hagedorn’s solutions make sense. He’s not asking for more money, just more imagination and, shall we say, vision.