Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Abandoned Its Mission.

These two new books examine social service programs in the United States and suggest means to improve delivery of such services to those who need them most.

Unfaithful Angels chronicles the history of social work, highlighting turn-of-the-century pioneers Jane Addams, founder of Chicago's Hull House, and Mary Richmond, a Charity Organization Society activist who wrote Social Diagnosis, a seminal study in social systems theory, behavioral analysis, and casework. The authors also investigate the antecedents to social work - patronage, piety, Poor Law, and philanthropy - and their impact on the development of the profession; in addition, they show how major events - the Industrial Revolution, both world wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement - influenced the practice of social work and its image in the eyes of the general public.

The historical foundation rendered here points up a disturbing trend in social work at this end of the twentieth century - the exodus of its practitioners from work with the poor, the homeless, and other disadvantaged populations, into private-practice psychotherapy with a basically middle-class clientele, "the worried well." The authors know whereof they speak: Specht is dean and professor of the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley; Courtney trained as a clinical psychologist, but his interest in family and children's services led him to look to social work as a better solution to some problems. Both are appalled, and justifiably so, at statistics and facts such as these: Approximately 40 percent of the 140,000 members of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) are engaged in private practice for some or all of their work week; two-thirds of the legislative priorities of NASW state chapters documented in a relatively recent study involved licensure or third-party payments; the Council on Social Work Education has developed standards for accrediting schools in the field with no requirements for course content on such seemingly vital subjects as the poor, the aged, dependent children, group or community work, the law, or publicly supported social services.

As the authors point out, our tax dollars support social work education, which seems increasingly oriented to training students for private-practice psychotherapy, and our insurance plans pay for the middle class to be counseled for relatively minor problems. Perhaps most disquieting is the fundamental issue of the social good vis-a-vis the middle-class infatuation with buzzwords like co-dependence, inner child, and addictive personality, which may ultimately manifest not a quest for even self-improvement (never mind community improvement) but rather selfishness and avoidance of responsibility. The truly needy often have little or no access to psychotherapy, nor is there any indication that psychotherapy would solve their most pressing problems. However, Specht and Courtney do mention an alliance of strange bedfellows who believe psychotherapy may remedy all of our ills (personal and collective): neoconservatives, who hold the individual to blame for lack of financial, educational, and social success; and - seemingly at the other end of the ideological spectrum - new Age members of the human potential movement.

In their sometimes heavyhanded manner, the Unfaithful Angels authors advocate that social workers should beat a quick retreat from the private practice of psychotherapy and return to their original mission. They further promote a community-oriented approach to social work with services available to all (not just the poor), based in an easy-to-reach center, and accountable to the residents of an area. In fact, the Berkeley schools of social work and public health have already established a Center for Integrated Services for Families and Neighborhoods to help local communities contemplating such an approach. Children and the elderly, those with the greatest need for social services but the least degree of mobility for obtaining them at faraway sites, would benefit most from neighborhood centers, which would also function as volunteer bureaus, citizens' advice and education nuclei, and self-help group meeting places. Specht and Courtney recommend that the Department of Health and Human Services administer such centers, with state and county equivalents to the federal overseers.

While it is enticing to believe that such centers would deliver assistance in the quickest, easiest, and least expensive way possible - as is the objective of social work, the authors contend - most readers, even those sympathetic to the argument here, would like to see concrete examples of this concept at work. How would a center in Peoria, Illinois, compare with one in the South Bronx? Is a neighborhood measured in terms of population, political division, or geographic size? Who ultimately determines service priorities and funding allocations, the neighborhoods or the government? Financing is a particularly murky issue here.

However, the general point advanced by Specht and Courtney is quite well taken: "Social workers should not be secular priests in the church of individual repair, they should be caretakers of the conscience of the community. They should not ask, |Does it feel good to you?' They should help communities create good."

Many of the people, both clients and caregivers, whose lives are discussed in Jonathan Freedman's From Cradle to Grave are participants in community-oriented programs that Specht and Courtney would applaud. Some of the most effective programs, in fact, began outside so-called usual channels because conventional government bureaucracies were unaware of or unresponsive to local needs. Freedman, a San Diego-based, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, has taken an interesting approach in structuring his book, which is much more personal than Unfaithful Angels: he chronicles the life span from prenatal care for babies to old age as experienced by various Americans in need across the country. Freedman states that his goal was to learn "how people cope with the most destructive deprivations, and see how some manage to survive, grow, and thrive."

Programs that he describes include the Center for Family Life, which started sixteen years ago in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn as a modest attempt by Sisters Mary Paul and Geraldine to transform poor, gang-ridden streets into a real community; the center now provides full-time child care, after-school programs, counseling, food, health and foster care, and employment services free of charge to anyone in the neighborhood with teen-agers mentoring younger children and families becoming participants in progress. Services that aid displaced autoworkers, unwed mothers in the Pacific Northwest, and nursing-home residents in the Boston area are also featured.

As did Specht and Courtney, Freedman cites depressing figures: Social workers in Los Angeles County's Department of Children's Services often have caseloads of seventy-five or more (an appalling condition that may drive some into private practice, which is exactly where the Unfaithful Angels authors claim they don't belong); the United States holds twenty-second place in world infant mortality ratings; an estimated 60 percent of children born in 1987 will grow up in broken homes. But Freedman also offers a theoretical plan for overhauling social services and health care, to provide a railing for Americans to grasp as they climb from birth through maturity so that they won't have to "fall all the way down the stairs before they get help." As with Specht and Courtney, proposed financial arrangements for this plan seem quite hazy (although Freedman might have more to say on the issue after the fate of President Bill Clinton's health-care reform bill is decided).

From Cradle to Grave offers photographs of some of the people the author discusses, as well as follow-up synopses of their successes and disappointments after he initially encountered them. Avery frustrating aspect of this book is the absence of notes (except for a few footnotes scattered throughout the text) and lack of resource information about the particular programs mentioned here. Such information might have been helpful to readers. This is, after all, advocacy literature, and Freedman is not only a beautiful prose stylist but also a very persuasive writer. Motivated readers might wish to pay him the ultimate compliment of beginning their own social service programs after seeking advice on how to go about it from the folks mentioned in his book, or they might know someone who could use the services of these very programs. Or they might wish to donate time and/or money to Families First, LIFE, Options for Recovery, etc. If one is to judge from the straitened circumstances of the programs Freedman has documented in From Cradle to Grave, a single volunteer, contribution, or concerned public official may spell the difference between survival and termination for many of them.