Of course, if one chooses not to remove children from dangerous homes, and instead “treat” them in-house, then the number of children in foster care declines automatically. Social scientist Peter Rossi, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, made himself unpopular in the world of child welfare experts by disputing the success of family preservation as being based upon flawed methodology. In his critical scholarly review of the policy, which was published in 1992 in Children and Youth Services Review, he cautioned evaluators to look at such factors as child safety and future rates of abuse as better measures of whether family preservation works. As well, Richard J. Gelles, director of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island, has observed that all rigorous studies of family intervention have failed to show that working intensively...