Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children 0871543257, 9780871543257

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HIGHER GROUND

HIGHER GROUND New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children

Greg J. Duncan, Aletha C. Huston, and Thomas S. Weisner

Russell Sage Foundation

•

New York

The Russell Sage Foundation The Russell Sage Foundation, one of the oldest of America’s general purpose foundations, was established in 1907 by Mrs. Margaret Olivia Sage for “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States.” The Foundation seeks to fulfill this mandate by fostering the development and dissemination of knowledge about the country’s political, social, and economic problems. While the Foundation endeavors to assure the accuracy and objectivity of each book it publishes, the conclusions and interpretations in Russell Sage Foundation publications are those of the authors and not of the Foundation, its Trustees, or its staff. Publication by Russell Sage, therefore, does not imply Foundation endorsement.

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Thomas D. Cook, Chair Kenneth D. Brody Robert E. Denham Christopher Edley Jr. John A. Ferejohn Larry V. Hedges

Jennifer L. Hochschild Kathleen Hall Jamieson Melvin J. Konner Alan B. Krueger

Cora B. Marrett Richard H. Thaler Eric Wanner Mary C. Waters

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Duncan, Greg J. Higher ground : New Hope for the working poor and their children / Greg J. Duncan, Aletha C. Huston, Thomas S. Weisner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87154-325-7 (HB) ISBN 978-0-87154-167-3 (PB) 1. Working poor—Wisconsin—Milwaukee. 2. Poor—Employment—Wisconsin—Milwaukee. 3. New Hope Project (Milwaukee, Wis.) I. Huston, Aletha C. II. Weisner, Thomas S., 1943– III. Title. HD8072.5.D85 2006 362.5′840977595—dc22

2006027799

Copyright  2007 by Russell Sage Foundation. First paper cover edition and afterword  2009. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Reproduction by the United States Government in whole or in part is permitted for any purpose. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. Text design by Genna Patacsil. RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION 112 East 64th Street, New York, New York 10021 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

About the Authors

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Chapter 1

Introduction

1

Chapter 2

Creating New Hope

15

Chapter 3

Participants

31

Chapter 4

The Evaluation

42

Chapter 5

Work and Poverty

51

Chapter 6

Children

68

Chapter 7

Families

82

Chapter 8

New Hope’s Lessons

100

Chapter 9

New Hope and National Policy

113

Appendix

New Hope Program Impacts

122

Afterword

135

Notes

141

References

155

Index

165

About the Authors GREG J. DUNCAN is Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy and faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. ALETHA C. HUSTON is Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor of Child Development and fellow in the Population Research Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. THOMAS S. WEISNER is professor of anthropology in the Departments of Psychiatry (Semel Institute, Center for Culture and Health) and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Acknowledgments Most books are long in the making and this one is no exception. It began for the three of us in 1995 when we were members of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood. Few foundations have been as willing as MacArthur to make open-ended investments in such a diverse group of researchers and provide the time and seed funding for innovative research. Our collaborations and the design and new directions of this work would not have happened without the Research Network. The network’s success owes much to its visionary leader, Jacquelynne Eccles. Robert Granger, then at MDRC and now president of the W. T. Grant Foundation, offered the Research Network the opportunity to extend the MDRC evaluation of New Hope to include its effects on children and families. He would have been a fourth author had he had the time. Many other network members contributed at various stages to the New Hope project, including James Johnson, Cynthia Garcia Coll, and, especially, Vonnie McLoyd. The core New Hope evaluation, focused on income and employment, was supported by a diverse group of funders and skillfully conducted by MDRC. In addition to Robert Granger, Tom Brock, Fred Doolittle, Johannes Bos, Cynthia Miller, and Carolyn Eldred were particularly instrumental in MDRC’s evaluation of the program. The Child and Family Study was supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the W. T. Grant Foundation, and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD 36038) and used the core services of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (5 R24 HD042849). The ethnographic fieldwork data management and analyses used core services of the UCLA Qualitative Fieldwork Core, funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (5 P30 HD004612, Eli Lieber, codirector). Duncan’s efforts in writing the book were generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, which hosts a visiting scholars program. Duncan’s year there provided an ideal setting for working on the book. Huston is grateful to the University of Texas at Austin for the Dean’s Fellow research leave granted her. Weisner thanks the Center for Culture and Health at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior for research support.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many of the remarkable individuals involved in developing and running New Hope were generous and patient in providing their accounts of its history and correcting our initial attempts to put the story of New Hope on paper. We relied most heavily on Julie Kerksick, David Riemer, and Tom Schrader, but we are also thankful for the time that Sharon Schulz, Don Sykes, and Robert Haveman gave to us. Tom Brock of MDRC provided valuable insights into the implementation of New Hope and the links between the evaluation team and the New Hope program. Weisner led our effort to understand how New Hope affected its participating families by collecting qualitative and ethnographic data from New Hope and control group families. The terrific fieldwork team that visited the New Hope ethnographic-sample families between 1998 and 2004 included Conerly Casey, Amy Claessens, Mimi Engel, Victor Espinosa, Christina Gibson-Davis, Eboni Howard, Katherine Magnuson, Andrea Robles, Jennifer Romich, and Devarati Syam. Lucinda Bernheimer supervised their efforts and participated in data analysis. Edward Lowe provided outstanding supervision for the fieldwork of 2003 and 2004 and helped analyze the data collected. Claudia Solari also provided data analyses and valuable assistance in preparing qualitative data for this book. Helen Davis worked on the qualitative data on fathers and partners. At UCLA, Karen Quintiliani, Faye Carter, Sonya Geis, and Allison Tom-Yunger all provided research assistance for the qualitative team. Hiro Yoshikawa and Edward Lowe, with Weisner, also led a parallel study of New Hope work pathways, the contexts of work and family life, and impacts on children of variations in work pathways. This edited book, Making It Work: Low-Wage Employment, Family Life, and Child Development (also published by the Russell Sage Foundation), complements our book, also uses the New Hope data, and includes contributions from many chapter authors. Many individuals participated in designing, collecting, analyzing, and writing scientific reports about the quantitative data. Westat, under Alexa Fraser’s supervision, collected the data for the assessment conducted two years after random assignment. Survey Research Management, led by Linda Kuhn, collected the five- and eight-year follow-ups. The talented team that designed the child and family measures, led by Aletha Huston at the University of Texas at Austin (and the University of Kansas when the program began), included Sylvia Branca, David Casey, Danielle Crosby, Jessica Cummings, Chantelle Dowsett, Sylvia Epps, Anjali Gupta, Amy Imes, Rashmita Mistry, Marika Ripke, and Mi Suk Shim. This team also analyzed data and wrote papers, as did Greg Duncan’s group at Northwestern University—which included Amy Claessens, Christina GibsonDavis, Mimi Engel, Eboni Howard, Katherine Magnuson, and Jennifer Romich—and teams led by Johannes Bos and Cynthia Miller at MDRC— x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

which included Colleen Parker, Cindy Redcross, Anne Sweeney, and Ana Ventura. Our larger understanding of the program and its possible role in the country’s policy debates has been shaped by many discussions with two MDRC leaders—Judith Gueron and Gordon Berlin. We are grateful to the many people who have provided comments on draft chapters of the book: Gordon Berlin, Rebecca Blank, Tom Brock, Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Cecelia Conrad, Fred Doolittle, Dorothy Duncan, Kathryn Edin, Paula England, Victor Espinosa, Nancy Folbre, Irv Garfinkel, Christina Gibson-Davis, Pam Fent, Robert Granger, Judith Gueron, Ron Haskins, Heather Hill, Eboni Howard, Julie Kerksick, Virginia Knox, Edward Lowe, Katherine Magnuson, Jitka Malecˇkova´, Sara McLanahan, Larry Mead, Ron Mincy, Pamela Morris, Suzanne Nichols, Natalia Palacios, Robert Pollak, Anna Gassman Pines, David Riemer, Howard Rolston, Jennifer Romich, Deborah Rubien, Beth Schulman, Arloc Sherman, Timothy Smeeding, Claudia Solari, Claudia Strauss, Joanne Spitz, Carol Worthman, and Hiro Yoshikawa. Barbara Ray did a masterly edit of our penultimate draft.

xi

Chapter 1 Introduction

I

“

f you work, you should not be poor.” This is the implicit social contract in America. Work is a fundamental value in the United States, and hard work should bring rewards. Until recently, it generally did. As the prosperity of the country grew in the years after World War II, so did the fortunes of most of its people. In the last twenty-five years, however, the earnings of low-skilled workers have fallen further behind. It is no longer true that a rising tide lifts all boats. The working poor are disproportionately minorities and women, particularly single mothers. Many lack the necessary resources to juggle the responsibilities of earning a living and giving their children the love and supervision they need. People at all income levels find it difficult to balance family and work, but the challenges are all the more daunting for those employed in low-wage jobs with few if any benefits. Many move from one job to another, work irregular hours, and take on a second or third job, yet find themselves taking home a paycheck that leaves them in poverty. In the last twenty years, as awareness of working poverty has begun to permeate our political consciousness, policy makers have begun to search for solutions. In this book, we tell the story of one promising effort called The New Hope Project, an experimental program that lasted three years. New Hope was created by a dedicated and visionary group of community activists and business leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who believed that work should be the best route out of poverty. New Hope was not a welfare program, but a social contract. Its founders understood the basic inadequacies of the low-wage labor market and forged a set of work supports for full-time workers—both parents and nonparents, men and women—that would lift them out of poverty as well as provide essential benefits in the form of health insurance and child-care subsidies for people who needed them. A decade later, there is clear evidence that New Hope reduced poverty and promoted the school achievement and development of children of working, low-income parents. We know this because the program was

HIGHER GROUND

subjected to a careful evaluation. The names of people who applied for New Hope were put in a lottery; half were accepted into the program and the other half became a comparison group. We go beyond the statistical reports and surveys to tell the stories of some of the people who participated in New Hope—what their families were like and what happened to them and their children during and after the three-year New Hope program. In these individual stories, we learn about the complicated circumstances in which adults attempt to sustain a balance of work, family, and individual needs and, more important, which supports help them achieve that balance. Our research offers some of the strongest evidence to date that work supports make a difference in the lives of people in the low-wage labor market. None of us—the founders of New Hope, the participants, or the researchers—are under the illusion that work supports can solve all the problems in the larger economy or all the individual difficulties that can impede adults’ efforts to support themselves. Overall, however, we conclude that the policies tested in New Hope offer the United States a positive and feasible model to achieve the goal of the American social contract that work should pay while allowing low-income adults to sustain a reasonable balance between work and family. AN IDEA TAKES ROOT The story of New Hope begins in the late summer of 1979, when a group of social activists gathered at a retreat in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania to hammer out the final details of an organization to push for large-scale changes in employment laws, policies, and programs. Called the Congress for a Working America (CWA), the organization’s stated purpose was, according to Julie Kerksick, one of the key participants, “to create the right and opportunity for a decent and productive job for every American who wanted to work.” Kerksick, her husband John Gardner, and many others in the group were labor organizers who thought of themselves as outsider activists pressing for change. They had joined forces with leaders from the “inside,” including David Riemer, a policy expert with state and national government experience. Almost ten years later, in Milwaukee, the organizers had scaled back their original hopes of transforming national economic and social policies but continued to search for work-based solutions to entrenched poverty in the United States. In his book, The Prisoners of Welfare: Liberating America’s Poor from Unemployment and Low Wages, Riemer laid out a set of policies to promote and support employment for the poor.1 Soon he and Kerksick, working with other activists and community members, combined the book’s ideas with hard-won lessons from running small2

INTRODUCTION

scale employment programs. The result was a proposed policy demonstration aimed at proving that such policies could work. They named the experimental program New Hope and began to mobilize community support. Tom Schrader, the CEO of the Wisconsin Gas Company, first heard about New Hope at a meeting of the Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC), an organization of Milwaukee business leaders that was asked to lend its support. He liked what he heard, particularly the idea that the program was based on providing incentives and reducing barriers to work. “The idea was comprehensive,” Schrader said. “It was economicdriven, and it really was going to take out some of the underpinnings that had created the dependencies that were in the social system at the time.” When Schrader was asked to assume a leadership role on behalf of the GMC, he readily agreed. A central reason for his quick agreement was a meeting that Kerksick had arranged with some mothers receiving financial and medical assistance from what was then the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) welfare program. One of the mothers reported that she had found a job but that her earnings soon made her family ineligible for health insurance. She quit her job and returned to welfare because, she said, it was the best thing for her children. Schrader was appalled. He believed that public policies should motivate people to work and to seek better jobs that would help their families, rather than force a mother to choose between work and her family’s well-being. These three people brought different skills and personalities to a project that ultimately extended over the next decade. Riemer was an intense, intellectual visionary. Kerksick was a tireless, energetic, and dedicated community organizer who put a human face on poverty and the poor. Schrader was a thoughtful, practical business executive with a strong commitment to building his community. From these roots, New Hope’s organizers assembled a remarkable and varied coalition of politicians, business leaders, community organizations, and policy experts. In August 1994, New Hope opened its doors in two of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods. With its stipulation that participants must be employed full time (thirty hours a week) to qualify for its benefits, New Hope was designed to increase the incentives and reduce the barriers to work by offering an optional menu of earnings supplements, subsidized health insurance, and subsidized child care. Based on the belief that everyone deserves the opportunity to escape poverty through employment, the program was available to all adults who were willing to work, not just to those with dependent children, a significant departure from welfare policies past and present. Individuals could pick and choose the 3

HIGHER GROUND

supports that fit their needs, rather than adapt to a one-size-fits-all program. For those with dependent children, the system was carefully designed to make work pay more generously than welfare. If a participant could not find a job, the program provided opportunities for temporary community service jobs that paid the minimum wage but still qualified that person for benefits. What New Hope required: Proof of thirty or more hours of work per week What New Hope provided: An earnings supplement that raised income above the poverty line Subsidized child care Subsidized health insurance If needed, a temporary community-service job Respect and help from New Hope staff Who was eligible: All adult men and women, regardless of family status, with low family incomes and living in Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods

New Hope was consciously different from welfare. First, it was voluntary. If an individual was not ready to meet the program’s full-time work requirement, he or she could come back when ready. Second, all of New Hope’s services were available in a single office to reduce the time-consuming and confusing process of dealing with multiple agencies. Third, each participant was assigned to a project representative who provided information about jobs, educational opportunities, child care, and other resources in an atmosphere of respect. Unlike most welfare offices, New Hope operated under the philosophy that the program was a social contract under which both parties bring something to the table, rather than a paternalistic scheme that tells its clients what they must and must not do. Participants provided a commitment to full-time work. New Hope offered the necessary supports to ensure that they would not be poor and that they and their families had access to basic health and child-care benefits. THE PEOPLE OF NEW HOPE Men and women from a wide range of backgrounds were among those hoping for help from New Hope. Because New Hope was open to all low-income adults, almost 30 percent of its applicants were men. Michael, for example, lived with his parents and shared custody of three 4

INTRODUCTION

children younger than age five with their mother.2 He had been unemployed for some time when he applied for New Hope. After a job search, he qualified for a community service job for six months (the maximum allowed) while attending a job-training course. He also used the health insurance when he needed surgery. “It helps,” Michael said of New Hope. “I like the benefits, health insurance. New Hope also helped me get on track when I didn’t have a job.” Some applicants were women who had no children at home. Rachel was older than fifty and by her own account had not worked in over twenty years. Angela, a thirty-three-year-old, was frustrated because she was unable to earn enough to meet her basic needs. She applied for New Hope because she thought it might help her find a job and give her extra income every month. “It’d help put [my income] up to where I can live off it,” she said, “because Uncle Sam robs the single person, like me, without a gun, and you just don’t see the money.” Others had children at home and needed a jump start or extra supports. Inez was twenty years old and already the mother of an infant, whose biological father was in prison. She was living with a new boyfriend, Marco, receiving welfare and working part time in a drugstore when she heard about the New Hope program at a job fair. “What do I have to lose?” she thought. New Hope helped her get a full-time job so that she could reach the thirty-hour threshold. At age twenty-four, Lakeisha found herself separated from her husband and responsible for three very young children. She had neither a high school diploma nor work experience, and she had been receiving welfare continuously since the birth of her first child. She wanted to earn a high school equivalency degree (GED), but the welfare office would not continue her payments while she attended school unless she also worked full time. But how could she do that with three children and little support from her husband? New Hope’s offer was different, and Lakeisha saw it as a better way of leaving welfare and getting a job. Elena, age twenty-three in 1994, immigrated to Milwaukee from Central America when she was thirteen, living with various family members until she graduated from high school. When she applied to New Hope, her husband, Manuel, was in prison for dealing drugs, leaving her with two young children. Elena had worked as a part-time receptionist while her mother took care of the children, but when Elena switched to fulltime work, she struggled to piece together child care. Her mother was unavailable in the afternoons because of her own job, and no one else in the family could help. In the first interview with her New Hope project representative, Elena repeatedly stressed that she just wanted child care to ensure that her children were safe while she worked full time. 5

HIGHER GROUND

Inez, Lakeisha, and Elena were all young mothers—the group that many welfare programs were designed to serve. To better understand the lives of the working poor, we include their stories in this book. We choose to feature these three women because they illustrate the many ways in which New Hope was used to maintain a balance between work and family. Inez, Lakeisha, and Elena all used New Hope, although not everyone in the program did so. All three are mothers and none is married to the father of her children in a conjugal household. Although New Hope included single men and women without children, 70 percent of the entire New Hope sample were—like Elena, Lakeisha, and Inez—single mothers with children. Because of the heightened interest in the effects of welfare reform on children, we were interested in how these mothers and their children were faring. Could New Hope positively affect both child and family well-being as well as participants’ employment trajectories? Therefore, to learn more about these families, we spoke extensively with them and more than forty other people in the study over the course of the New Hope demonstration.

BACKDROP TO NEW HOPE: THE WORKING POOR IN AMERICA These profiles are just some stories of the 23 million American adults in 1994 who were living in families with incomes below the official poverty line, which, in today’s dollars, was about $15,800 for a single parent with two children.3 Poverty is surprisingly common among full-time working adults in the United States. At the inception of the New Hope program in 1994, 6.5 million American adults, whether parents or not, were working full time but earning too little to lift their families above the poverty line.4 Even more American children—7 million—lived in families who were poor despite a parent working full time. Some 2.6 million children with working parents also lacked health insurance. Poverty is widespread among the working population in part because economic growth is no longer creating better opportunities for people with low skills. In the years that followed World War II, economic growth generally led to improved earnings for all workers. Since the 1980s, however, many more workers have remained poor even in periods of prosperity.5 Jobs often have been available, but wages have fallen, leaving people working harder to stay afloat. Manufacturing jobs that paid reasonably good wages have become scarce, outnumbered by service jobs with low wages and fewer benefits.6 Furthermore, many of the new jobs are in the suburbs, far from the homes of the poor. Economists attribute these changes in wages and jobs to technological 6

INTRODUCTION

changes that favor high-skilled workers, an international economy, an influx of immigrants willing to work for low wages, and the erosion of minimum-wage and union protections. Although economists may not agree about the relative importance of these causes, they do agree that the economic and employment world faced by a person with little education in the mid-1990s offered few options for escaping poverty. These economic changes have come on top of long-standing inequities in the labor market for women, African Americans, and other minorities.7 Although the earnings gap between men and women declined in the years before 1994, it has not disappeared. In 1993, women working full time were earning about 70 dollars for every 100 dollars earned by men with similar levels of education.8 Gender and race inequities in wages and typically low levels of schooling converged in families headed by single mothers who were African American or Hispanic, leaving the majority of them in poverty.9 Milwaukee, with a population in 2000 that was 39 percent black and 12 percent Latino, was one of the most highly racially segregated cities in the United States.10 The segregation was due in part to the annexation of large tracts of open land to the north and west, which would in most cities have been separate suburbs. These areas had been settled by whites in recent decades, leaving blacks in the central city, where New Hope selected its participants. Having lost much of its industrial base in the 1970s and 1980s, Milwaukee’s economy echoed national trends. Although Wisconsin’s economy had generated a head of steam by the mid-1990s, jobs were often located far from the inner-city neighborhoods where most of the poor lived. Milwaukee’s downtown had little of the hustle and bustle of a prosperous city, and many of its poor neighborhoods were infested with drugs and gangs. Given this economic and social context, New Hope’s set of work supports could be critical to workingpoor adults.

ENDING WELFARE AS WE KNOW IT New Hope was created during a time when the nation was moving toward a consensus on the moral value of work and self-sufficiency as key goals for the poor and, correspondingly, toward agreement that welfare needed to be reformed. Although there had been scattered public and private programs to assist indigent parents throughout the nation’s history, the first major federal initiative was launched when Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC) was included in the Social Security Act of 1935 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. This program provided small cash grants 7

HIGHER GROUND

to support children whose fathers had died or left them bereft, and was designed to allow mothers to care for children who would otherwise have been sent to orphanages or forced into work at an early age.11 Fast-forward to the welfare and policy debates of the 1980s and 1990s, when individuals from a wide swath of the political spectrum wanted to change the welfare system and move low-income single mothers into jobs.12 Welfare, many argued, had become a poverty trap. It contained strong disincentives to work and yet did not pay enough to lift people out of poverty.13 Politicians conjured up images of welfare “queens” living comfortable lives at taxpayer expense, and because the programs increasingly served African American and Hispanic women whose children had been born outside of marriage or who were divorced rather than widowed, public perceptions became increasingly negative and racialized.14 Given the dramatic social changes in family structure and women’s work in the country, many saw no reason for poor mothers to be offered financial support to stay home with their children. Mothers of all economic stripes were divorced or unmarried, and both married and single women were entering the workforce. Why should poor single mothers not be asked to do the same? What were the odds, however, that working would improve the situation of people such as Lakeisha, Inez, or Elena when many full-time workers were not earning enough to support themselves and their families? Even if they landed full-time jobs, they would in all likelihood merely move from welfare into the ranks of the working poor, and their children might suffer from inadequate child and health care. By 1992, increasing awareness of the plight of working-poor families and political pressures to curtail welfare converged in the familiar themes of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. People who were working, who were “playing by the rules” and doing their best to help themselves, deserved to have their basic needs met.15 They did not deserve to be poor. In line with this theme, the federal government quietly enlarged the earned income tax credit (EITC), which provided tax refunds on earnings of low-income workers. The maximum benefit available to a family with two or more children expanded from $1,384 per year in 1992 to $4,400 in 2005.16 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, legislation expanded both health insurance, through the Medicaid program, and child-care subsidies to children of working-poor parents outside the welfare system.17 Clinton’s other campaign theme, to “end welfare as we know it,” struck a responsive chord in a nation already primed for its message.18 Policy makers from both political parties pushed for reforms to move recipients into work. With the 1996 federal welfare reforms, cash assistance was no longer an entitlement, and almost all recipients could be required to 8

INTRODUCTION

work.19 At the same time, federal funding for subsidized child care almost doubled between 1991 and 2000,20 and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was established in the late 1990s to insure children in families whose incomes slightly exceeded the Medicaid eligibility limit. These changes have revolutionized the way that states provide cash assistance and services to poor families with children. Although these new policies slashed welfare rolls and almost certainly encouraged or forced millions of adults, particularly single mothers, to enter the labor force, most of these individuals do not earn enough to lift their families out of poverty. Nationally, during the first ten years of New Hope, the number of poor children fell from 15.7 million in 1994 to 12.9 million in 2004. In 2004, however, the number of children in working-poor families (in which at least one adult is working full time)—6.8 million—was virtually identical to what it was in 1994. Although fewer African American children live in working-poor families, the number of Hispanic children has increased.21 Under Governor Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin led many of these reform efforts. Even before the 1996 federal welfare reforms, Wisconsin had abolished its General Assistance program, put in place a “diversion” system in which applicants for cash grants were required to search diligently for work before being given cash assistance, and was sanctioning families for failing to comply with work requirements.22 By the late 1990s, the number of people receiving cash assistance had plummeted, with Wisconsin leading the trend.23 Wisconsin was also a leader in developing other policies that made working more attractive and feasible. By the late 1990s, Wisconsin had developed a health insurance program for low-income parents and children as well as generous child-care subsidies for which all low-income workers are eligible. These policy changes, coupled with a strong economy, pushed tens of thousand of families off the welfare rolls and into the labor force. Taken together, they set a high bar for judging the success of a program like New Hope. NEW HOPE DESIGN TAILORED TO U.S. ECONOMIC CONTEXT New Hope was created to fit the contemporary social, political, and economic context of the United States. Its package of benefits was not intended to cure all of the structural and institutional causes of poverty, or to replace a system of cash assistance for people who could not work. It was designed to address several significant barriers to work created by current conditions in the United States—low wages for people with few skills, the absence of universal health care, and the lack of universal 9

HIGHER GROUND

or low-cost child care. If the minimum wage had been higher, for example, the structural context of New Hope would have been different. If, as in most industrialized countries, the United States had universal health care, health insurance would not have been an issue. The program also took the existing national and state EITCs into account in establishing wage supplements. New Hope was also not designed to remedy individuals’ skill deficits by providing job training or education, nor was it intended to address serious personal problems. Some adults needed drug or alcohol counseling, mental health services, help with care for a disabled child or an elderly parent, relationship support, or aid in coping with domestic violence. People facing multiple problems were often unable to sustain fulltime work, and the program referred them to appropriate services. Although New Hope did not address the structural problems of labor markets and the economy or the individual characteristics that might affect skill and motivation to work, it did offer key supports that working individuals could use to cope with the world of work in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In this book, we use New Hope to address the question “Given the current structural problems, what policies can best assist working families in the United States today?” WOULD IT WORK? THE NEW HOPE EVALUATION All of those who created New Hope agreed that their goal was to provide a model for national policy, not simply to establish a local program. As Kerksick put it, “We haven’t spent all of these years of hard work just to deliver a program to seven hundred people. However proud we are of the program, we wanted to change policies for all low-income working families.” According to Tom Schrader, the support from both the business community and foundations was predicated on the idea that New Hope was testing a model that could be replicated in other states and communities. The only way to test the efficacy of the model, they all agreed, was to design a model program and evaluate it with rigorous methods. The founders formed a technical advisory group composed of nationally recognized policy experts and scholars from a range of disciplines and political perspectives. As a result of this group’s recommendations and funding constraints, a trial program ran for three years. To gauge program impacts in the most convincing way, the New Hope Board commissioned an evaluation that used random assignment and a control-comparison group. This technique of random assignment is the most stringent and demanding 10

INTRODUCTION

method to test a program. The board hired MDRC, a nonprofit research firm known for its high-quality evaluations of employment and welfare programs, to conduct the evaluation. Half of the individuals (678) who applied for the program were randomly selected to have access to New Hope’s benefits for three years. The other half (679) became a comparison group that was ineligible for New Hope. The members of both groups continued to be eligible for all other federal, state, and local programs—and to be subject to the rules of those programs—during a period of rapidly changing welfare and poverty policies in Wisconsin and across the nation. Both groups enjoyed the fruits of Milwaukee’s strong economy in the mid-1990s, and both could claim the increasingly generous federal and state EITC that supplemented earnings for workers with low incomes. The key evaluation question was whether people assigned to New Hope earned more, worked more, improved their well-being and parenting, and saw their children benefit more than people assigned to the comparison group. The evaluation was unusually comprehensive. With work, poverty, and welfare dominating the public debate, evaluators monitored how the program was implemented and tracked patterns of employment, earnings, and receipt of food stamps and cash assistance. Two years after participants entered the program, the evaluators collected detailed information about job histories, family changes, and economic circumstances from New Hope participants and from members of the comparison group. More than half of the applicants for New Hope had young children and most of the parents were single mothers. The evaluation therefore included assessments of the program’s effects on family life and children’s development among these parents in a substudy called the Child and Family Study. Although it was widely believed that adults would be better off financially after increasing their employment, there was less agreement about how children might be affected. In the raging debate over whether welfare recipients should be compelled to work, proponents argued that children would benefit because maternal employment provides a model of work, requires the family to operate on a regular schedule, and removes the stigma of welfare. Opponents worried that children would be left in dangerous child-care settings or at home with inadequate supervision, and that the stress of juggling a low-wage job with family responsibilities would leave mothers with little time or patience for their children’s needs. It would be a hollow and short-lived victory if welfare reform succeeded in moving parents into employment but undermined their children’s life chances. Some New Hope benefits were intended to buffer the potential stresses of parents’ employment for family life. Child-care subsidies would allow 11

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parents to select high-quality, reliable care for their children. Health insurance would relieve anxiety about medical expenses and encourage adults to seek treatment for themselves or their children when they needed it. The extra money provided by earnings supplements might help to keep the cupboards full until the end of the month as well as ease constant worries about money. To understand the effects of New Hope on children, the evaluators gathered extensive information about school performance, psychological well-being, and behavior problems from teachers, parents, and the children themselves. They also asked parents about their own levels of stress, depression, and hope for the future. Both children and parents reported on parent-child relationships and on children’s experiences in child care and activities outside school hours. For a close-up view of how the program was affecting families, part of the evaluation team conducted in-depth interviews during three years of periodic family visits to a representative group of forty-four parents and their children that included both families in the comparison group and New Hope families, including Inez, Lakeisha, and Elena. Rarely has so much effort been expended to understand how a program like New Hope affected the lives of both adults and children. DID IT WORK? NEW HOPE’S EFFECTS “If you work, you should not be poor” was the guiding principle for New Hope. The coalition of community and business leaders—conservative, independent, and liberal—that developed and implemented the program brought their passions, their interpretations of history, and their beliefs about current policy dilemmas to their vision of a program to maintain a social contract with the working poor, a contract that combined work with benefits that all workers should have and that parents could use to be both breadwinners and caregivers for their children. The results of this vision, as we outline in the remainder of this volume, are very encouraging. New Hope reduced poverty among participants, but certainly did not eliminate it. For adults who were, for various reasons, unable to sustain full-time work when they applied to the program, New Hope boosted work and earnings both during and after the program. For those already working full time, the program sustained their work by providing subsidized child care. The program also increased the employment of single men, provided access to health insurance for uninsured adults, and increased enrollment in child-care centers among young children. Many people for whom New Hope worked best faced just one or two important obstacles. A significant problem for Inez and Elena was the 12

INTRODUCTION

cost of child care for their young children. Health insurance also was a major concern for Inez. Community service jobs provided an opportunity for many with several strikes against them to demonstrate that they could be reliable, competent employees, thus increasing their employment prospects. Lakeisha found such a job. In short, the goals and life circumstances of working-poor adults vary, and the effects of any program are likely to be more positive for some groups than for others. Perhaps most important, children in New Hope families performed better in school, were more cooperative and independent, and had fewer behavior problems than comparison children. Many of these differences remained a few years after benefits ended. Because boys have a higher risk of school failure and behavior problems than girls do, it is noteworthy that New Hope was especially successful in improving boys’ school performance and behavior. The evaluation produced its share of puzzles. New Hope offered a cafeteria of benefits from which participants could pick and choose—a feature that allowed people with diverse family routines, needs, and circumstances to tailor the program to their situations. Although most people claimed wage supplements and other benefits at some point, few of the participants took advantage of all of the benefits all of the time. In any one month, fewer than half of the participants qualified for benefits. One in eight never used anything offered by the program. The survey and the family stories from our intensive interviews helped to solve some of the puzzles and to identify who was helped, who was not, and why. The New Hope offer made a big difference for some people but it was not a good fit for everyone. Some parents refused to entrust their children to the care of someone other than a family member. Many parents worked evenings and weekends, when few child-care centers or licensed home settings were available. The child-care subsidy was therefore of little use to them.24 Others had personal difficulties that kept them from regular work. The vagaries of low-wage jobs also made it difficult for some people to use the New Hope benefits. Some had irregular and unpredictable work schedules that did not allow them to meet the thirty-hour weekly work requirement.25 The lessons learned from the evaluation can help states and localities design public policies that support both work and family life in lowincome families. People have different needs and capabilities that good policies can accommodate; there is no panacea for the problems of poverty. People use public programs in the context of their existing resources, everyday routines, and family demands. No matter how well intentioned and otherwise well designed a policy is, it must fit the context of people’s lives to make a difference. Adults who applied for New Hope were already trying to make ends meet, to sustain a family routine, 13

HIGHER GROUND

and to provide some moral direction for their children and their lives. New Hope, if it were to make a difference, had to contribute to these family routines and goals. Our evidence suggests that it did so for most people, but not for all. New Hope was a small, experimental program run in a state with a booming economy and a culture of work-focused welfare reforms. Despite its considerable successes, one might doubt that a small program developed and run by a dedicated community coalition could serve as a model for state bureaucracies to replicate. We argue that it can be done. While New Hope was in operation, Minnesota and two Canadian provinces were testing welfare models that shared some of its key features, particularly earnings supplements. Minnesota’s program emphasized training caseworkers to support work efforts rather than simply to process assistance claims. Both Minnesota and Canada evaluated their programs using the same kind of lottery process as the one New Hope used. Both produced strikingly similar impacts— more work, less poverty, and higher child achievement.26 In an era when we require public programs to demonstrate that they are achieving program goals and to be cost-effective as well, a New Hope–type work-support program stacks up very well. It accomplished the goal of increasing full-time work while lifting workers out of poverty. Moreover, with its positive effects on children’s achievement and behavior, it shows real promise for breaking the cycle of poverty for a sizable number of families in the next generation.

14

Chapter 2 Creating New Hope

D

avid Riemer’s views on work and welfare, views that were at the core of New Hope, can be traced directly back to the revolutionary policies of Harry Hopkins and Franklin Roosevelt. He explained as follows: When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, he inherited a welfare system. You have to remember that his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, was a brilliant engineer, a very compassionate man, and had done a terrific job while in charge of famine relief in Belgium and northern France following World War I. When the Depression hit, his response was, “Well, let’s do something like that again.” So he created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which provided cash, chickens, and baskets of coal to poor people. Roosevelt became president in March of 1933. And he brings down this fellow from New York called Harry Hopkins, who’d been in charge of the New York state welfare programs when Roosevelt was governor. Hopkins hated welfare. It wasn’t just rhetoric. He hated what it did to people, and he wanted to replace it with a work-based system. So after checking to make sure that labor unions would not object too strenuously, Hopkins asks for a meeting with Roosevelt in October 1933. At this point Roosevelt had not yet done anything to rejuvenate the economy, crops were failing, and they were worried about massive starvation. At the meeting, Hopkins tells Roosevelt that he doesn’t like this welfare program and wants to get rid of it and put four million unemployed Americans to work. Roosevelt says, “All right, how long will it take you to get everyone off relief and into wage-paying jobs?” Hopkins says, “I can get it done by Thanksgiving!” In fact, Hopkins missed the deadline by only two weeks. By Christmas of 1933, and all the way through the spring of ’34, the Civil Works Administration, the CWA, took something like two-thirds of the families that had been getting relief and put someone in that family to work in a wagepaying job. So Franklin Roosevelt replaced welfare with work!

HIGHER GROUND

Fearing that he would be attacked for make-work programs, Roosevelt dismantled the CWA in the summer before the 1934 elections. But after surprising gains in that election, Roosevelt came back with much more ambitious programs like the WPA [Works Progress Administration], which again moved Americans into wage-paying jobs.

A deceptively mild-mannered, middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses, Riemer is passionate about his positions but measured in discussing them. He was raised in an academic family, attended Harvard as an undergraduate, and then entered Harvard Law School. As a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he interrupted his legal studies to perform community service with a law firm that advocated for the poor. One of his first assignments was to review evidence on the successes and failures of federal manpower training programs. To his surprise, people assigned to programs that emphasized skills training rarely earned more—and sometimes even earned less—than those who went right into jobs. Jobs themselves taught valuable skills, and taking a detour for more formal training often meant failing to catch up with others who went straight to work. At the same time, national studies were revealing how many working Americans were still poor. Even some full-time, year-round workers were poor, and many more people found themselves in poverty because there were not enough full-time jobs to go around. For Riemer, this was a revelation: One of the premises that I and a lot of other people shared—and not just left of center; these were widely shared in the United States at the time— was that if you got rid of racial discrimination and if you educated people, and if people had jobs, then poverty would be over. Well, I’d already discovered that these training programs didn’t make any difference. And other studies were showing a huge number of part-time workers who were poor. The notion that poverty was the result of not being in the labor market, and being in the labor market meant you weren’t poor, made no sense to me anymore.

In Riemer’s subsequent career, he had many opportunities to help advance legislation on behalf of low-income workers and their families. In Washington, during the Carter presidency, he was schooled in health care policy while serving as counsel to a Senate subcommittee. Working in various positions within and outside of Wisconsin state government, he helped create a public-defender program for the indigent, reform the 16

CREATING NEW HOPE

state’s Children’s Code, and fashion Wisconsin’s Earned Income Credit, health insurance, and child-care subsidy programs. Beginning in the late 1980s, he held various high-level administrative positions for the City of Milwaukee, helping design Milwaukee’s controversial school-voucher system and pushing for the wholesale replacement of Wisconsin’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with a New Hope–style set of work supports. Riemer’s connections to what would become New Hope started early, as he was finishing law school in 1975. His ideas on work and poverty brought him into contact with Julie Kerksick. If Riemer’s ideas provided the structure for New Hope’s eventual design, Kerksick put flesh on its bones. Her savvy, warmth, and tenacity were a potent combination in the service of New Hope’s ideals. Kerksick took on the role of New Hope’s concerned parent; indeed, her efforts might be described as a full-court parental press—as she planned, encouraged, strategized, doted, and reprimanded, never completely satisfied but loving and proud all the same. Kerksick’s worldview was shaped by her childhood in a traditional and politically conservative Chicago Catholic family. In college, she began to apply Catholic doctrine to social justice, horrifying her family by “defending my actions as a result of applying what they and others in the Catholic Church had taught me. ‘I owe it all to Mom and Dad.’ I was a complete rebel in their minds by the time I was eighteen.” Her social commitments were solidified during the 1970s, when she worked as an organizer in California for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW). The UFW was fighting for decent wages and working conditions for people who wanted desperately to work. “We very much came at this from outside the welfare system,” Kerksick said. “For us, work was not a four-letter word. Our whole perspective was shaped by people who wanted to work, so it wasn’t that people were saying, ‘Why are you making me do something I don’t believe in or don’t want to do?’ Instead, they were saying, ‘I want to work, but here are all of the reasons why working doesn’t make me better off.’” In 1979, Riemer, Kerksick, and a group of about twenty-five other former UFW organizers and community activists formed the Congress for a Working America, an organization with the wildly ambitious goal of ensuring that every person in the country had the right and opportunity for a decent and productive job. They hoped to generate the necessary political will by creating member-based constituencies in twenty congressional districts in the United States, with Riemer acting as insider lobbyist and the rest of them, as Kerksick put it, as rabble-rousing outsiders. The deck was stacked against them from the start. Deindustrialization 17

HIGHER GROUND

was ripping millions of manufacturing jobs from America’s largest cities. They were labor organizers talking about social policy—a mix that fit no one’s mold. Left-leaning foundations, advocates, and academics were focused on single mothers and their children and battling for the right of welfare recipients not to work. Even the name—Congress for a Working America—caused trouble with its focus on workers, which conjured images of socialism or communism in some people’s minds. As a result, the CFWA was forced to scale back its grand plans for a national organization and policy initiative to a handful of job clubs, worker cooperatives, and job-creation projects in four cities: Milwaukee, Providence, New York, and Detroit. Milwaukee was particularly appealing because of Wisconsin’s liberal tradition and congressional delegation and because Riemer had lived there, had worked for the Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services, and had local connections with politicians and activists. Running CFWA’s projects in Milwaukee and elsewhere reinforced the management skills Kerksick had acquired while working for the UFW, but these projects never came close to their ultimate goal of connecting large numbers of low-income people to jobs. Still, Kerksick saw the experience as critical for New Hope: New Hope was really born out of frustrated low-wage workers and their advocates—people who were constantly trying different programmatic models representing different levels of policy design, all with the goal of transforming a local labor exchange so that people who wanted to get in could get in. By the end of the 1980s, we were hopeful because we had learned a lot by trial and error and were honest about what worked and what didn’t. But we were frustrated because we were still this little gnat— not even a fly—buzzing around. And we were exhausted.

Two events in 1988 influenced the eventual creation of New Hope. First, Riemer’s professor father urged him to write a book that would become a blueprint for New Hope. Second, the CFWA formed a planning committee to develop and raise support for a demonstration project. Riemer’s book, The Prisoners of Welfare, summarized and drew policy conclusions from his analysis of the fundamental importance of work in eliminating poverty.1 It sketched out a system in which those unable to work—mainly the elderly and disabled—would be given cash grants. The able-bodied poor who could not find work would be given the opportunity for community service jobs. Full-time workers, including those in community service positions, would be entitled to earnings supplements that would raise family income above the poverty line. They would also be offered subsidized child care and health insurance. Riemer envi18

CREATING NEW HOPE

sioned a universal policy; he did not compartmentalize the poor into single mothers or adult men. New Hope also grew out of the hard-earned practical lessons that Kerksick and her colleagues had learned from running work-focused programs in Milwaukee. Their experiences gave them an understanding of the problems and potential of low-wage workers and jobs and of the vital need to include an array of community members at every step of program planning and operation. As The Prisoners of Welfare was being published, the CFWA was setting up a planning committee to develop a demonstration program based on the book’s ideas and on lessons gleaned from CFWA programs.2 The committee consisted of CFWA members and other activists as well as low-income members of the community. It operated on the premise that efforts to end poverty merely by correcting the skills deficits of poor adults were misguided. Any solution also must address some of the key problems of the labor market and the welfare system.3 The committee’s vision of New Hope, described in a proposal in July 1989, had all of the key elements of its eventual form: an earnings supplement, health insurance, child-care subsidies, and, if needed, a temporary community service job, all conditional on a participant’s willingness to work full time. Although the founders envisioned a system in which these supports were available for as long as people needed them, limited funding meant that during the demonstration program, any one person’s eligibility would be limited to three years. The plan won early endorsements from Milwaukee mayor John Norquist, Milwaukee County Health and Social Services director Howard Fuller, and the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee. THE POLITICAL SCENE Working to New Hope’s advantage were changes in the larger political arena, because politicians in both major parties were highlighting the deficiencies in the welfare system. In Wisconsin, the belief that the state was becoming a “welfare magnet,” attracting people from Chicago and elsewhere with its high benefit levels, was widespread. Shortly after his election in 1987, Governor Tommy Thompson made headlines by cutting benefits, instituting several work-focused reforms, and requiring welfare recipients to keep their children in school.4 Nationally, 1988 was the year when Representative Thomas Downey and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan persuaded their congressional colleagues to pass the Family Support Act, which required participation in education, job searches, and other activities for welfare recipients with children older than the age of three. 19

HIGHER GROUND

The surging interest in welfare reform posed a dilemma for Kerksick, Riemer, and their colleagues. From the beginning, the CFWA had sought a universal approach to making work pay. Its members were convinced that isolating groups of the poor into such categories as single mothers was diversionary at best and counterproductive at worst. Neglecting the employment needs of adults without children would only marginalize them further, and failing to provide programs for low-income men would probably increase the number of single mothers, fatherless children, and fathers who could not pay child support. At a more fundamental level, the CFWA believed that it was morally right to end poverty for everyone, not just for children. Casting New Hope as a model for welfare reform would almost certainly increase interest and support for the program, but it would also betray strongly held principles. CFWA compromised by calling the program the Welfare Replacement Project but designing it for all low-income individuals— male and female, with and without children. It did not hesitate to seek the support of people who were concerned only with single-parent welfare recipients. BUY-IN What New Hope lacked initially was significant support from business, Republican state politicians (particularly Governor Thompson), and private philanthropists. Most members of Milwaukee’s business community had never heard of the CFWA, and many of those who had regarded it as a group of left-wing troublemakers. Although the two groups shared the goal of a productive Milwaukee workforce, they battled publicly over the details of proposals and policies. In the midst of all of the changes wrought by corporate mergers and globalization, the Milwaukee business community retained a small-town flavor, with strong personal connections and an infrastructure provided by the Greater Milwaukee Committee. Established just after World War II by the city’s business leaders, the GMC is a voluntary civic organization of local chief executive officers of major corporations, Tom Schrader among them. Its membership is by invitation only.5 Its goal is to enhance the quality of life in Milwaukee. The group often promotes freeways, museums, and sports centers, but also takes a direct interest in Milwaukee’s social issues, with members serving on the boards of social-service organizations and community groups. Despite some frictions with Milwaukee business interests, members of the CFWA had several connections to the GMC. Riemer was a friend of Robert Milbourne, its executive director. New Hope’s steering committee was headed by Warren Sazama, a Jesuit priest with a long history 20

CREATING NEW HOPE

of community service,6 who arranged for Kerksick and Riemer to meet with Don Schenke, the chairman of the GMC. Under Schenke’s leadership, the GMC established a task force to consider the New Hope proposal. GMC member John McGiver had raised large amounts of campaign money for Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Tommy Thompson, and he was also a good friend of New Hope’s first director, Donald Sykes. He later played an invaluable role in securing state support for New Hope from prominent Republicans. Even with these personal connections, the GMC took nearly a year to endorse the New Hope demonstration plan. Notes taken during one of GMC’s first meetings on New Hope in 1989 included the warning, “Caution appears to be necessary at all stages of this process of establishing and paying for this model.”7 With guidance from Milbourne, who was an economist, the GMC commissioned a feasibility study headed by Robert Haveman, a prominent economist at the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin. Haveman assembled a group of national policy experts, liberal and conservative, as a technical advisory committee that ultimately evolved into a national advisory board, making recommendations about evaluation and giving New Hope national visibility throughout the life of the program.8 By the middle of 1990, the GMC was sufficiently convinced of New Hope’s merits to endorse the demonstration plan, with two stipulations: that funding come from both private and public sources and that, as Haveman’s group urged, the program be evaluated with a rigorous comparison of New Hope adults with a similar group of adults not participating in New Hope. Because the goal was to define a set of policies that could be replicated nationally, New Hope knew that a strong evaluation was crucial. Once they were on board, the GMC leadership asked Schrader, the CEO of the Wisconsin Gas Company, to represent them as the program was developed and operations got underway. Schrader served as chair of the New Hope board of directors over the next several years, devoting an enormous amount of time and energy to raising funds and building political and community support for the program. Schrader is a tall, friendly Midwesterner who appears perfectly comfortable in the CEO’s business suit and tie. He grew up in Indianapolis in a middle-class family with a strong work ethic. During his college years at Princeton, he was an atypical engineering major, taking as many courses as possible in economics and public policy. He worked with Robert Sokolow, a physicist turned environmentalist, who stimulated him to think about applying scientific knowledge broadly. He knew early that he wanted to do something more than just engineering when he graduated—he wanted to have a larger impact on the world. When 21

HIGHER GROUND

he joined the Wisconsin Gas Company in Milwaukee in 1978, Schrader’s youthful idealism was reinforced by his boss, Bob Hoffer, who worked untiringly behind the scenes for the community and served both as a mentor and as a model of a CEO who was also a strong community citizen. For Schrader, as for other members of the GMC, New Hope was appealing on both moral and economic grounds. “How many times in your life,” Schrader asked, “do you get to be part of something that would make that big a difference for individuals and for public policy?” For the GMC, according to Schrader, some of it was just outright human concern—that a significant portion of the Milwaukee population was not getting better and was in fact getting worse. Some of it was community pride—we don’t want to be labeled as a poor city or a city with social problems. Some of it was workforce. The Chamber of Commerce had done a study showing where the workforce was going to be ten years out, and the need for workers, and the idea that we want everybody in the workforce to be motivated to work to their highest potential, to get education, and advance themselves. We want a system that would encourage people to do those things, and those things all came together in different ways for different people. I don’t think the issue of Democrat-Republican ever came up in the business discussion.

Because the GMC insisted that the project have the political and financial support of state politicians, including Governor Thompson, Kerksick and her colleagues once again had to compromise. The CFWA had always thought that funding for a New Hope demonstration should come from private sources, principally foundations. This would free them from burdensome governmental regulations and provide the flexibility to change the program as needed to respond to problems and opportunities. But here the GMC was clearly right. If New Hope were to influence state and national policy, state and national policy makers had to gain a sense of ownership from the very beginning. Important to Kerksick and others, though, the state and federal support would be offered to a privately run program, eliminating the issue of government regulations and control. With New Hope’s price tag topping $15 million, much of Schrader’s early effort was devoted to mobilizing political support for the project from Governor Thompson and key Republican legislators. This process was tricky because the program had been endorsed by Milwaukee’s Mayor John Norquist, a Democrat with possible aspirations for governor. Fellow GMC member and Republican John McGiver was critically important to the fundraising effort, as was Roger Fitzsimmons, the president of Milwaukee’s largest local bank. Not only did the bank contribute 22

CREATING NEW HOPE

directly to New Hope, but Fitzsimmons also personally called on the governor, urging him to support the program and include it in the state budget. “People use those [relationships] sparingly,” Schrader explained. “You know you only have so many opportunities to call and ask for a favor. To take some time to talk about something that was not in their direct interest—that really says a lot.” State politics were treacherous. Although Governor Thompson’s vision of welfare reform shared New Hope’s work focus, his approach relied more on mandates than on the inducements envisioned by New Hope to achieve voluntary participation. Because New Hope’s comparison group would be subject to Thompson’s policies, any positive New Hope program impact would show that New Hope was better than Thompson’s programs. A 1994 political analysis commissioned by New Hope summarized the comments of one state official: “New Hope is not a policy direction [in which] we are headed and . . . we expect that voluntary approaches with high incentives will not outperform the control group, or not by a very large margin. . . . Voluntary programs are less effective than mandatory programs.”9 New Hope and GMC lobbying efforts eventually paid off, and the state lent its support to the project. Efforts by the two Democratic senators from Wisconsin and by U.S. Representative Jim Moody on behalf of New Hope won it some much-needed federal funding. The Helen Bader Foundation, a local philanthropy, offered an early grant of one million dollars, earmarked specifically for the evaluation, enabling the board to award a contract to MDRC, a respected research firm in New York City. MDRC was well known for high-quality, random-assignment tests of policies, and it brought both expertise and national credibility to the table. In part as a result of MDRC’s participation and the credentials of National Advisory Committee members, three national foundations—Rockefeller, Charles Stewart Mott, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur—subsequently contributed at least $1 million each to the project, and the Ford Foundation gave MDRC another $300,000. All in all, New Hope’s eventual cost was covered by state and federal funds, these private foundations, and a total of forty-one other foundations, Milwaukee-based corporations, and individual donors— but the process was never easy.10 FROM IDEA TO REALITY: GETTING NEW HOPE OFF THE GROUND Turning good ideas into a successful program poses many challenges. Donald Sykes, New Hope’s first director, oversaw the nuts and bolts of 23

HIGHER GROUND

translating New Hope’s earnings supplement, child care, health insurance, and community service job components into concrete policies and services that an office staff could deliver. With twenty years of experience directing Milwaukee’s Social Development Commission, a community action agency providing a multitude of programs and services for low-income residents, Sykes was a natural choice for the position. Before leaving in 1993 to serve in the Clinton administration, Sykes directed a New Hope pilot test with fifty participants, as recommended by the National Advisory Board, establishing that the program was feasible but needed some fine-tuning. The work-hour requirement for benefits was reduced from thirty-five to thirty hours per week so that participants could have time to receive additional training or search for better jobs while they were working. Those holding community service jobs for thirty hours a week could be paid the minimum wage for up to ten additional hours of education or training classes. The pilot program led to adjustments in the scales for earnings supplements and community service jobs as well as the participant copayments for health and child care. These adjustments took into account New Hope’s interaction with other programs for which participants might be eligible. These program interactions clearly matter. An income boost from New Hope could lead to reductions in benefits from cash assistance, food stamps, or housing subsidies because the generosity of all of these supports falls as income reaches certain thresholds. For example, increases in a family’s income from other sources reduce food-stamp benefits, generally by thirty cents for every dollar of additional income. To further complicate matters, some programs have sudden “cliffs.” When earnings exceed the cliffs, benefits end abruptly. It is also quite possible that a $1 increase from work plus the New Hope earnings supplement could result in more than a $1 loss of benefits from other sources, leaving the participant with less total income than before. Economists have nice graphs depicting these situations. Kerksick saw it firsthand. As she recalled, “I will never forget the experience of this incredibly irate participant barging into the office, shaking with rage. ‘I thought you were here to help me. Thank you very much; I am now going to be paying $350 for my rent instead of $35!’” Riemer, New Hope staffer Jennifer Phillips, and two academic experts, Rob Hollister and Michael Wiseman, worked very hard to design the benefit structure so that this would not happen when the full-scale version of New Hope was launched in August of 1994. When Sykes departed for Washington, his replacement was Sharon Schulz, a knowledgeable and approachable woman with a wry sense of humor. Schulz had headed the Milwaukee County agency that oversaw youth services, child protective services, and residential delinquency 24

CREATING NEW HOPE

programs. She was attracted by New Hope’s respectful approach to its participants, its comprehensiveness, and its potential for breaking the intergenerational cycle of disadvantage. Schulz immersed herself in efforts to secure federal and state funding for the project and to hire staff for the day, scarcely nine months away, when New Hope would open its doors to the public. Kerksick served as associate director under both Sykes and Schulz and was responsible for program implementation. She became director a few years later when Schulz moved to a position in another social service agency. Project Reps On the program side, Sykes, Schulz, and Kerksick believed strongly that how the program was delivered was critical to its success—a point that the National Advisory Board had also emphasized. As Kerksick put it, “The social contract is very clear and is framed as both New Hope and the participant bringing something to the table. We are not about assessing them and telling them what they can or can’t do. . . . New Hope’s premise is what we can offer you in return for your work effort.” That philosophy was reflected in the choice of language as well: individuals served by the program were participants, not clients, and the people serving them were project representatives, not case workers. Tom Brock, the lead researcher from MDRC, was struck by the atmosphere of the office. “The director’s office was right in front,” he recalled, “and they would come out and talk with staff and participants. I had been to many welfare offices. In welfare offices in Milwaukee, there were those two-inch-thick Plexiglas windows like in banks. It was so exciting and really grabbed me to see the qualitative differences in New Hope. The feel, the concern for community, the family atmosphere, were welcoming.” One of the biggest challenges was to select and train project representatives. Each was responsible for about seventy-five participants, and the “one-stop shopping” character of New Hope meant that project reps were responsible for explaining and, once a month, processing the benefits package. They provided help in finding jobs, locating child care, and dealing with other obstacles to employment. On occasion, they were allowed to bend program rules for a participant’s special circumstances. For example, after Inez had hunted for a job for a month or so, her rep was able to continue subsidies for full-time child care instead of the three hours a day that was officially permitted. This allowed Inez to keep her children in the setting they were accustomed to rather than forcing her to find another part-time child-care provider until she found a full-time job. For Kerksick, the key to hiring reps was finding people with experi25

HIGHER GROUND

ence in helping people get jobs: “I asked them to just tell me that they’d ever helped somebody get a job. Not that they actually got someone a job, but that they helped. I didn’t care if it was a cousin or a brother or if they did this while working for Milwaukee County. That was shared by everyone we hired. This meant they understood how the labor market worked.” Ethnic diversity among the staff also was important, both as a message to the community and to enable the program to match reps with participants of the same ethnic group as often as possible, particularly Hmong or Hispanics, whose first languages often were not English. That New Hope directors Sykes and Schulz were both African American was critical to creating trust in Milwaukee’s black community. Project representatives also had to deal with participants’ personal problems, hopes, and fears. They lent a sympathetic ear and acted as referral agents for educational programs, therapeutic services for adults and children, and other community services. At the same time, they tried hard to ensure that the participants decided for themselves what they wanted to do. Kerksick put it this way: “I wanted our reps to treat people with respect and compassion but never to confuse this with friendship.” The reps themselves were well aware of the balance needed to act as both confidant and counselor. As one rep said, “I don’t think I would ever want it to be a real friendship; that would take away from my effectiveness. For instance, I have a participant who has really serious selfesteem problems. . . . She would come in crying, real upset, when all she wanted was a hug. I didn’t want to get too close to that situation or I wouldn’t be able to help her anymore. . . . I pushed her to try to do more for herself.”11 By and large, the project reps did their jobs well. In focus groups, participants talked about being treated with respect, receiving helpful advice, and feeling that the office environment was friendly—often contrasting New Hope with their experiences in welfare offices. They mentioned that their records did not get lost, people returned their phone calls, staff remembered them when they came to the office, and reps applied the spirit and intentions of the program, not some arbitrary rule. As one woman said, “New Hope makes you feel good about yourself, and welfare dehumanizes you.” Another talked about the extra effort her project representative made: “My rep always returns my calls. . . . When I first came to New Hope, I didn’t have a GED. My oldest son wanted help with his algebra. I couldn’t do it. So I asked my rep where I could get a GED. He referred me to six places!” Participants often noted that it was their reps’ encouragement that built up their self-esteem and gave them the courage to try something new and unfamiliar. Of course, not all participants were seeking a per26

CREATING NEW HOPE

sonal connection with their project reps. Elena, who was already working full time when she signed up for New Hope, was simply looking for a child-care subsidy. Some people’s experiences were negative, with participants and staff just not hitting it off. Although the New Hope offer was easy to describe, it was not always easy to strike the right balance of emotional support and timely financial help. However, a comprehensive survey of New Hope participants showed that most were very pleased with the practical advice and emotional support they received.12 Work Supports One of New Hope’s major accomplishments was a management system that tracked work and delivered benefits efficiently.13 In traditional welfare programs, assistance levels are geared to family size and then adjusted for earnings. In New Hope, earnings drove the benefit calculations. Schulz and Kerksick aspired to a quick turnaround time: if a participant lined up a full-time job that started in a few days, New Hope had to be ready. To receive benefits, participants were required to bring in, mail, or fax their pay stubs once a month to show that they had worked at least the required average of thirty hours a week and to supply information about other earners in their household. The earnings supplement checks were issued in short order and soon became a monthly routine. Earnings supplements were widely used; more than 85 percent of participants received them at some point during their three-year period of eligibility. The supplement averaged about $125 a month, a 20 percent boost relative to the earnings of applicants who were working at the time they applied to the program.14 For Elena, the supplement “was a very big help.” For others, the monthly variation in earnings-supplement checks was confusing and often smaller than expected, as this woman, who gave up on the program in frustration, explained: “I think that’s how to get disappointed every month. I would think I was getting a certain amount, and I’d come pick up my check and my check was different from what I was told. . . . So I got fed up with that.” About one-half of the participants received the health insurance subsidy at some point during their three-year eligibility periods, and many of them said it was critically important, especially to people without children, who did not qualify for Medicaid. A participant could use the subsidy to cover part of the employee’s portion of premiums when a job provided health insurance, or he or she could choose from several HMOs, including the one provided by Milwaukee County to Medicaid recipients. Coverage was comprehensive, including dental care, prescription drugs, and mental health and drug abuse treatment. Participants 27

HIGHER GROUND

paid a monthly copay, which was deducted from the earnings supplement check according to a sliding scale developed to ensure that the total value of benefits did not fall by more than seventy cents for every added dollar of earnings. About half of the participants with children younger than age thirteen used the child-care subsidy, and it was by far the most expensive component of the program, at an average cost of about $700 a month per family (often covering more than one child) plus the parent’s copayment of about $67 a month. The rules were fairly simple: as long as a parent met the work requirement, New Hope would subsidize care for all children younger than age thirteen in any state-licensed or county-certified center or family child-care home. Parents chose their own child-care setting and were responsible for paying their share directly to the provider. New Hope paid the subsidy to providers directly at the rate set by Milwaukee County for subsidized child care, but the income level at which a New Hope parent lost eligibility for benefits was considerably higher than in the state program at that time. Although the parents’ copayments increased with their income, participants did not lose subsidies altogether until their incomes reached either 200 percent of poverty or $30,000 annually, whichever was higher.15 Participants with children were enthusiastic about the child-care benefit because it enabled them to keep enough of their earnings to live on and still have access to stable, quality care of their choice. As soon as Elena learned she was eligible for the program, she found the best childcare center available. “There are the sons of doctors, lawyers, policemen [there],” she said proudly, “and I wanted my children to be among those with [parents] of a higher social status.” Community Service Jobs During the planning phase, New Hope’s community service jobs were its most controversial element. National Advisory Committee members cited a number of studies showing that programs relying on such jobs were rarely successful; community service jobs often merely displaced existing jobs. But New Hope used them in a strategic way: CSJs (as they came to be called) were available to participants who were unemployed or whose jobs offered only part-time hours, but only after they had spent eight weeks searching for a regular job. CSJs were not guaranteed; participants had to interview successfully for them. They lasted no more than six months with the option of a second six-month CSJ, paid minimum wage, and did not offer sick, holiday, or vacation pay. Schrader contrasted this approach with community service jobs in the state welfare system: 28

CREATING NEW HOPE

In New Hope, the community service jobs were meant to have all of the features of real work. You did work, you had hours, you had things to do, and you got paid for it. . . . I think the idea that the community service job was a way to get people into work may be the simplest and best way to phrase it. . . . The [state of Wisconsin’s] community service jobs were not structured as being models, if you will, of private sector, or regular, work. They were set up more as something to keep somebody busy.

New Hope worked with community groups, including the local Job Corps, the Milwaukee Private Industry Council, and other organizations, to set up these jobs and handle the necessary administrative work. Many were office-support positions in nonprofit social service agencies, but people also worked in child-care settings, city offices, schools, nursing homes, and the city art museum. With about a third of New Hope participants using a CSJ at some point during the three-year program, hundreds of these jobs needed to be lined up. The collective experience of Sykes and Schulz proved invaluable; they knew which agencies could be counted on to provide community service job experiences that would truly help New Hope participants. Of course, not all the CSJs were happy experiences from the participants’ points of view. It is likely that some people were not ready for the very structure that Schrader points to, and others thought the jobs were “make work” (just to keep them busy) or offered no upward path. More often than not, however, CSJs served as bridges to more stable work.16 External Incentives Economic conditions in the Milwaukee metropolitan area could hardly have been more favorable for a work-based program.17 In 1995, during New Hope’s enrollment period, the unemployment rates in the city of Milwaukee and its collar counties were very low—4.8 and 2.5 percent, respectively. An employer survey taken around the same time showed more job openings (nearly 32,000) than workers looking for jobs (about 25,000) in the greater Milwaukee area, though the reverse held for the city of Milwaukee itself.18 The geographic mismatch is notable, because Milwaukee’s public transportation system is weak, and fewer than half of New Hope applicants reported even having access to a car, much less owning one. Also pushing people into the labor force were Wisconsin’s ongoing welfare reforms.19 Although full implementation of Wisconsin Works (W-2), the state’s welfare-reform program, did not occur until near the end of New Hope’s demonstration period, many changes were under29

HIGHER GROUND

way. As noted earlier, Wisconsin abolished its General Assistance program in 1995; other than food stamps, this program had been almost the only aid available to adults without children. A year later, the state set up diversion programs that required sixty hours of job searching before an applicant for welfare was permitted to receive cash assistance. At the same time, it began penalizing recipients for missing mandated training and work. Milwaukee caseloads, which had been slow to decline prior to 1996, dropped by nearly 30 percent between 1996 and 1997.20 Although the state was developing its systems for child-care subsidies and health insurance for working parents, neither was fully operational until after the end of New Hope’s trial period. Fifteen years after the founding of the Congress for a Working America, New Hope began offering a chance for a voluntary package of work-based supports to any low-income adult willing to work full time. Along the way, the program won the enthusiastic support of community residents, social service providers, Milwaukee’s business elite, and academic advisers. Support from state and federal politicians was sometimes enthusiastic and sometimes begrudging. With welfare policy changes and a booming economy creating both motivation and opportunity to work full time, some thought that New Hope’s success was virtually guaranteed, although state welfare changes, economic expansion, and low unemployment set a high bar for New Hope to make a big difference. But whatever the expectations, drawing people into the program would prove more difficult than the organizers had imagined.

30

Chapter 3 Participants

A

fter six years of planning, New Hope began operating in August 1994. Among those selected by the lottery to participate were Lakeisha, Inez, and Elena (see figures 3.1 to 3.3).

LAKEISHA In 1994, Lakeisha was a youthful African American woman with smooth, caramel-colored skin and light-brown freckles on her nose and cheeks. Her hair was relaxed, bone straight, and cut in a short bob, and her clothes were always starched and pressed. She had arrived in Milwaukee at age nine, sent by her mother from a state in the mid-South to live with her grandmother. After her grandmother died, four years later, Lakeisha was raised by her “Auntie,” who continues to be a central figure well into Lakeisha’s adult life. Lakeisha dropped out of high school in eleventh grade. School just wasn’t for her, she said, and one day she simply got tired of going, felt lazy, and stopped. She married Tyrone, her boyfriend at the time, and gave birth to her first child at age twenty. She had two more children in the next two years. Lakeisha lived with Tyrone for only two years. He stopped coming home regularly a few months after the wedding. “He would be gone all weekend—days at a time,” she said. “It was really hard for me, knowing that he was stepping out on me.” But she had no regrets that the relationship was over, blaming Tyrone for its failure. “The worst thing a woman could do to herself is take the blame. It was his fault. I loved him, he wasn’t good enough, that’s it. It wasn’t my fault.” When she signed up for New Hope, Lakeisha was a mother to three young children, had little work experience, and was receiving welfare. New Hope helped place her in one of its community service jobs, where she met Kevin, a bus driver. She told a coworker, “I got to get me some of that,” and passed Kevin a note saying that she liked him. They started going out and. more than a year later, began living together. Kevin had

HIGHER GROUND

Figure 3.1

Lakeisha

Partner Kevin

Lakeisha

Monesha b. 1991

(Separated) Husband Tyrone

Eric b. 1992

Rhea b. 1993

Source: Authors’ compilation.

a string of jobs and erratic work hours, but could be counted on for help with housework and child care. Kevin loved music, and he spent time away from home playing with a local jazz-funk band. But unlike with Tyrone, infidelity never appeared to be an issue. Kevin became an important coparent to Lakeisha’s children, a breadwinner for their household, and a stable partner for her. INEZ Inez—a stocky, dark-haired, attractive woman—was also a young mother when she applied for New Hope. Born in Puerto Rico, she spent most of her childhood in New York City. Her parents divorced when she was five, after her father, who had started using drugs, beat up her mother. Her mother kicked him out of the house and turned to welfare to support Inez and her siblings. Inez had a tough adolescence. When she was sixteen, her mother was seriously injured in an automobile accident and was temporarily unable to care for her children. With nowhere else to go, Inez came to Milwaukee to stay with her father. She never left. Their relationship was stormy, however, and when she was eighteen, after one too many fights, her father threw her out of the house, saying she was old enough to be independent. Although she had graduated from high school on schedule, the eviction sent Inez into a tailspin. She lived with boyfriends. She got pregnant. Some of her boyfriends and the men they hung out with were using and dealing drugs, and sometimes they turned violent. Some, including the father of her firstborn, 32

PARTICIPANTS

Figure 3.2

Inez

Vito

Jesus

Ex-Boyfriend Ex-Boyfriend Paulo

Jorge b. 1994

Fiance´ (2004) Inez

Ex-Boyfriend Marco

´ Martin b. 1996

Source: Authors’ compilation.

Jorge, ended up in prison. Inez readily acknowledged that she could have easily met with serious trouble herself. After getting pregnant, Inez moved in with a new partner, Marco, and worked at a number of jobs—as a teller in a bank and then clerking in a store, among others. She was grateful for Wisconsin’s cash assistance when Jorge was an infant because she believed a mother should be the one to care for her child during his first year of life. But she never intended to stay on welfare for long: “One year—that was it.” Going back to work wasn’t so simple, however. Marco wanted Inez to stay home. “He wanted me barefoot and pregnant,” she said. But staying home was driving her crazy. “The house was spotless, and I knew everything that was going on in all the soap operas. I was going out of my head.” So she took a first step back into the world of work, landing a part-time job in a drugstore while looking for something better. She heard about New Hope at a job fair and decided to give it a try. On paper, Inez’s life looks like a replay of her mother’s. But a few minutes with Inez made it clear that history would not dictate her destiny. She was feisty, energetic, and forever finding ways to improve her work and family life. She saw work as a central part of her life and brimmed with confidence about her future career. She attributed her strength to her mother, describing the confrontation 33

HIGHER GROUND

after her father started to use drugs and beat her mother. “My mom was like, ‘No. Get out of here. Leave. I don’t need this. ’Cause I can do it without you’. . . . I figure that since my mom didn’t take no bull from my dad or from any other man, I shouldn’t either. . . . My mom raised me by herself. . . . If she can do it, I sure can.” It is not surprising that Inez appeared to dictate the conditions of her relationships with the series of men who moved in and out of her life. Her feelings are well summarized on the T-shirt her brother gave her: “This is my universe. You are just living in it.” ELENA Elena’s story starts in Central America. When she was nine, her collegeeducated parents divorced. Shortly afterward, her father traveled to the United States, successfully applied for refugee status, remarried, and settled in Milwaukee. Elena was thirteen when she and her younger brother immigrated. Not speaking English, she had no contact with other young people and was afraid even to go into a store. Her mother soon came to Milwaukee as well, but had no money to establish a home for Elena and her brother. Elena lived first with her father and stepmother, then with a married brother who paid her to take care of his children, and finally with an older sister until she graduated from high school. Elena’s brother helped her get her first job. Around this time, she left her sister’s house to live with her boyfriend, Pedro, which turned out to be a mistake. Soon she was pregnant, putting an end, she said, to her dream of becoming a flight attendant and traveling the world. Throughout her pregnancy, she worked full time and attended a technical school in the evenings. Although she had a full-time job, her spending habits put her in debt. In 1992, when Caesar, her first child, was two months old, she graduated from technical school with a certificate as a travel agent and a large student loan to repay. She moved in with another boyfriend, Manuel, and in 1994 gave birth to their daughter Libertad. Manuel, however, was selling drugs and living the life of a “man of the street.” He was soon in prison, leaving Elena alone with her two young children. Her mother took care of the children in the mornings while Elena worked as a part-time receptionist, but when a chance opened up for her to work full time, she struggled to piece together child care because her mother worked in the afternoon. She could not afford to pay for full-time child care, she was heavily in debt, and her social network was already strained to the breaking point. In the first interview with her New Hope project representative, Elena repeatedly stressed that she just wanted child-care help only so that she could be sure her children were safe while she kept her full-time job. 34

PARTICIPANTS

Figure 3.3

Elena

Felipe

Fiance´ (2004)

Former Husband (Divorced 2001)

Ex-Boyfriend Elena

Pedro

Caesar b. 1992

Manuel

Libertad b. 1994

Manuel Junior b. 1996

Source: Authors’ compilation.

Lakeisha, Inez, and Elena were among forty-four randomly selected New Hope participants and control group individuals who were interviewed intensively over a period of three years. We chose to use their stories throughout this book partly because they had different work histories and different needs when they applied to the program. Unlike some participants, they all used benefits extensively, but in different ways. They came from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and had somewhat different family situations, but each exemplified common patterns in the larger New Hope group. Elena certainly had had many struggles and problems in her life, but she was working full time and (albeit often barely) making ends meet. She needed one thing from New Hope: help with child-care. Inez also had a work history, but she had cycled from one job to another more often than Elena. She had fewer work skills and less family support than Elena. Several aspects of Inez’s life made it difficult for her to get and hold jobs, and she made more use of New Hope benefits. Lakeisha was not working and used the community service job benefit from New Hope to get started. She had several issues in her life that could have prevented her from getting and keeping a job, including not having a high school degree. 35

HIGHER GROUND

ENROLLING NEW HOPE PARTICIPANTS After so much preparation and with a program offering a generous array of work supports, New Hope staff and organizers expected to have many takers, so they were dismayed and disappointed when there was no rush of people through the door. The slow enrollment led the staff to develop a variety of community outreach strategies to provide information and overcome reservations about an unknown program. They expanded the neighborhood areas from census tracts to easily-identified zip codes, and tried to remedy any features that might discourage people from applying. Race and ethnic groups were salient politically, as well as interpersonally, in neighborhoods and for recruitment. The New Hope office was located in a slightly rundown strip mall on a busy intersection near the heart of the north side, which was predominantly African American. “The place was nothing ritzy for sure,” evaluator Tom Brock explained. “Next door to them for a while was a prosthesis manufacturer that had limbs in the windows—kind of off-putting, maybe, but there it was.” Eligible south-side residents, who were more likely to be Hispanic, were often reluctant to cross the viaduct spanning a river, railroad tracks, and industrial buildings that divided the two areas. Eventually, the program opened a south-side office, and Hispanic recruitment improved, but it took eight months for enrollment efforts to hit their stride. By the end of 1995, a little more than a year after it began, New Hope had assigned 1,357 enrollees to either the program or the control group, slightly more than the original goal of 1,200. Nearly a third of all participants, half of whom were men, reported no children in their households and about one in eight was married (figure 3.4). Thanks to this diversity, program impacts can be assessed separately for parents as well as for men and women who had no children. Most participants (88 percent) were the only potential wage earners in their households; more than half were parents with children age ten or younger.1 Clearly, New Hope was not just about coaxing single mothers into the labor force. Fewer than half of participants were receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits when they signed up for the program. Four out of five had been employed full time at some point in the past, and almost a third were already working more than the thirty-hour weekly threshold. Throughout the months before and after the program opened, Brock and other MDRC personnel worked closely with New Hope staff to put the plan into practice. Although the original evaluation contract did not call for an implementation study, MDRC considered it an essential part of the evaluation. It makes little sense to evaluate the outcomes of a 36

PARTICIPANTS

Figure 3.4

New Hope Participant Living Arrangements Women Not Living with Children (14%)

Men Not Living with Children (14%)

Women and Men Living with Children (71%)

Source: Authors’ calculations.

program unless it is certain that the program is actually being delivered. Brock spent many weeks in the New Hope offices and neighborhoods observing, interviewing staff and participants, and adding his insight into how best to deal with implementation problems.2 Of course, the real goal was not simply to enroll people and randomly assign them; it was to engage as many program participants as possible in the New Hope supports. Some participants did not stay engaged. Some considered the program but decided that it was too much trouble, that they didn’t need the benefits, or that they didn’t understand the program. Brock felt that many participants were locked into the mindset of the welfare office and had little hope of receiving help. Education of participants was important, since it turned out to be a constant struggle to get people to realize that they could get help [that was] different from the old mindset of the welfare offices. Julie [Kerksick] beat her head against the wall for a while on this point. Even the staff sometimes had to be reminded that their goal was not just to determine eligibility but to offer a package of work supports to participants.

At the end of each visit, according to Kerksick, Brock “appropriately and tactfully gave feedback that what I thought was happening might not 37

HIGHER GROUND

be,” providing her and Schulz with a source of quality control and ideas for adjustments. The common images in America’s debate over poverty and welfare dependence are of black women whose grandparents or great-grandparents moved from the rural South to the urban North.3 Jason DeParle, in his important book on welfare reform, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare, describes three African American women who moved to Milwaukee from Chicago, descendents of “the great black migration” from the South beginning in the 1940s and lasting through the 1970s.4 These women and their ten children lived chaotic lives under the burdens of drug and alcohol addiction, insecure work and income, children with multiple problems, and inconsistent partners who were in and out of prison. DeParle describes such families as “paradigmatic” Milwaukee welfare recipients. Among America’s working poor, however, there are more Hispanics than blacks and more whites than either of the former groups.5 Although New Hope participants certainly did not represent all of America’s poor families, their racial and ethnic diversity is characteristic of the larger U.S. population. At the end of recruitment, half of all of the individuals who applied for New Hope were black, more than a quarter were Hispanic, and the remainder consisted of non-Hispanic whites, Asians drawn mainly from Milwaukee’s Hmong population, and some American Indians. Some of the Hispanic participants, like Elena, were immigrants, but others, like Inez, were born to U.S. citizenship. With a third of all participants growing up in households that received AFDC, New Hope did indeed offer its services to adults from multigenerational welfare families, but it is best to think of its participants, as well as America’s working poor, as much more diverse than that. Inez, Elena, and Lakeisha reflect some of this diversity.

SELECTIVE USE OF NEW HOPE BENEFITS New Hope was voluntary and it offered valuable supports. That some participants did not use the benefits extensively therefore came as a surprise. Many took advantage of New Hope more selectively than Elena, Lakeisha, and Inez did, and others simply dropped out. Overall, nearly nine of ten New Hope participants received at least one program benefit during their thirty-six-month eligibility period. But in a typical month, only about half of those chosen for New Hope received an earnings supplement, child-care assistance, or health insurance from the program.6 The average time during which participants used the three benefits

38

PARTICIPANTS

ranged from twelve to fifteen of the thirty-six months. In the first two years of the program, those who used benefits phased in and out an average of three times. In sum, most people used benefits selectively, and few used them continuously.7 Inez, Lakeisha, and Elena all took advantage of what New Hope had to offer because they stayed engaged. They exemplify four attributes typical of participants who used the New Hope offer extensively: first, they were not in seriously troubled or chaotic family or personal situations; second, they fundamentally understood the New Hope offer; third, they calculated that the benefits of getting and keeping services outweighed the costs; and, fourth, their schedules, personal goals and values, and family routines were in keeping with New Hope’s benefits and services.8 Chaotic family circumstances and personal or health problems made it difficult for approximately a fifth of the people we interviewed to take advantage of New Hope’s program. Some simply had too many problems to allow them to consider full-time work in a serious way. Some abused drugs or alcohol; others lived with domestic violence; still others had debilitating and disruptive mental health issues or physically disabling health conditions. With no partner or family support, Vanessa found it just too hard to care for a newborn baby, find a place to live, and hold a job. New Hope bent its rules and provided her with three community service job placements, but she stayed in none of them for long. There was just too much “stuff,” she said, that made it difficult to take full advantage of New Hope, including her own drug and alcohol abuse. Individuals such as Vanessa almost certainly needed supports and interventions that New Hope did not provide, such as treatment for addiction. Some who signed up for New Hope did not understand the program, despite its generally successful implementation. Roughly a fourth of the parents we interviewed were confused or mistaken about some of the benefits. One parent wanted to enroll in nurse training, but when such training was not offered, “just forgot about New Hope.” Some thought their earnings-supplement checks were too low or not in keeping with their earnings (supplements did fluctuate monthly based on earnings and estimated earned income tax credit payments and after health insurance copays were deducted). It was inevitable that the New Hope supplements and other benefits were not precisely in lockstep with employment, and the calculations were sometimes complex. Some participants did not understand this fully or became frustrated with the perceived inconsistency. Some people believed staff were cheating them and pocketing part of the money, suspicions that often reflected their beliefs (right or wrong) about other agencies and programs they had experienced.

39

HIGHER GROUND

Some parents calculated the costs of participating versus the benefits received in a given month. The child-care subsidies were crucial to many, but others already had acceptable child care or were reluctant to place their children in the care of strangers. Others found it difficult to sustain a job because few child-care providers were available during nonstandard work hours or on weekends.9 Some who signed up for New Hope cycled in and out of jobs because they worked through temporary agencies or because employers terminated workers to avoid paying benefits. Some had trouble holding any job, and others had demanding family responsibilities, including a few who bore sole responsibility for their elderly parents. Some quit community service jobs because they perceived them to be dead-end and demeaning work, even though these jobs entitled them to benefits and might have paved the way to better positions. One participant offered child care in her home and made enough money to exceed the New Hope limit. Finally, New Hope was not a good fit with some individuals’ goals or work and family routines. As a fieldworker noted, Alice “didn’t want to work at Taco Bell for five years and then look back to see that she hadn’t accomplished anything.” She wanted to get an education first, as a stepping stone to a “good” job. At the time, however, with four young children, she did not think it was realistic to work full time, as New Hope required, while attending school. The maximum ten hours a week of education allowed under New Hope was not enough, in her eyes, to make a difference. The fact that only half of the applicants selected for New Hope were using it at any point during the course of three years, despite its generous benefits and supportive project reps, is, by some accounts, a black mark against the program. On the surface, this low take-up rate might suggest that the program did not meet the ongoing needs of as many low-income working families as program designers had hoped. Selective use of program benefits, however, does not necessarily indicate administrative or other problems. Access to just one New Hope support, such as child care, may be critical but be needed only for a few months. A cafeteria-style program that people use sporadically and selectively may in fact be good public policy because it recognizes and accommodates those diverse circumstances and abilities. Participants can use the features that suit their needs and ignore those that do not. The New Hope philosophy was that there is not one paradigmatic working-poor adult (or household or family situation) and that motivation, family and work situations, and interests will change over time. As David Riemer put it, “If you’d like to take up this offer, we’ll help you. If not, that’s fine. You can always come back.” No program for the working poor,

40

PARTICIPANTS

even one as well defined and respectful of clients as New Hope, can help everyone who volunteers. Whether the selective nature of participants’ approaches to New Hope is a sign of the program’s success or failure is revealed, in part, by its impacts on their work, standard of living, work-family balance, and children’s well-being. New Hope’s unusually demanding evaluation provides an unbiased accounting of its successes and failures.

41

Chapter 4 The Evaluation

T

he random-assignment lottery method of selecting participants was critical in measuring New Hope’s impacts. Random assignment involved recruiting twice as many people as the program could afford and then, in effect, flipping a coin to determine who became eligible for benefits and who was assigned to the control group. Random assignment is the core method for medical trials and laboratory experiments in the sciences. Data collected from random-assignment studies are revered by most social scientists and policy experts—“nectar of the gods,” as National Advisory Board member Rob Hollister put it—most of whom have no choice but to conduct their own research using other, less convincing methods. Tracking the fortunes of the people selected for the program and those in the control group makes it possible to see how much better or worse off participants and their families were, relative to a virtually identical group of individuals who were not offered New Hope benefits but lived in the same communities, had the same levels of motivation, enjoyed the same booming economy, shared the same work ethic, and were subject to the same changes in welfare rules and poverty policies. It is not enough to find, for example, that New Hope participants were working more or enjoying higher living standards at the end of three years than when they signed up for the program, since economic conditions or the aggressive welfare policies put in place by the state of Wisconsin, rather than New Hope, could have produced these changes.1 What counts in assessing the success of a program in its particular time and place is whether its participants did better than a similar group of people who were not offered its benefits. This method of evaluation requires that New Hope’s impacts stand out over and above the variability in people’s work lives stemming from their job circumstances, family needs, and life crises. For Julie Kerksick and her staff, random assignment was a frustrating requirement of the evaluation. It meant marketing the program to hundreds of people and then telling half of them, after they had been at-

THE EVALUATION

tracted by New Hope’s offer of a better life, “Sorry, you lose.” Kerksick recognized, however, the importance of a random-assignment evaluation in policy making. Tom Brock described how they explained the lottery to participants and staff: We spoke about the need to learn whether or not New Hope was effective in helping people to work and lift themselves out of poverty and explained why random assignment was the best means of making this determination. If we could show New Hope produced positive effects, we said that policy makers in Wisconsin and other parts of the country might be persuaded to offer New Hope to many more people. . . . I think the surveys and qualitative interviews that were done later confirm that most individuals in the control group moved on with their lives and did not hold a grudge against the program or the study. My own sense is that there was a lot of uncertainty in the environment anyway because of welfare reform, and most people who applied to New Hope understood that they were taking a chance and had little to lose by going through random assignment.

People sometimes question the ethics of random assignment because one-half of the applicants are deprived of the potential benefits of the program. It was important, of course, to inform applicants from the very beginning that they had only a fifty-fifty chance of getting into the program. Moreover, despite slower than expected recruitment, some people would have been turned away because there were funds for only about 600 participants. Random assignment was a fair method of allocating scarce slots. In a larger sense, not only is random assignment ethical, but it would also be unethical not to assess New Hope’s impacts before promoting a program for widespread use. Furthermore, the control group was not deprived of any programs or services otherwise available in the community. These considerations did not allay the anger and suspicion of some applicants and the resignation of others when their lottery numbers put them in the control group. One woman was convinced that she had been turned down because she had no children after her sister, who did have children, had been selected. Still others had years of experience dealing with the exploitation and red tape of employers, contractors, and social service agencies and were understandably cynical. Recruiting was rendered more difficult when disgruntled would-be participants painted a negative picture of the program in discussing it with their relatives and neighbors. An objective evaluation requires an outside organization without a vested interest in the success of the program. Those who create and im43

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plement any program can learn a great deal from their experiences, but they cannot approach the ultimate evaluation task dispassionately, and they usually lack the expertise to conduct a high-quality assessment. The New York–based MDRC brought the necessary expertise and sophistication to every step of the evaluation, including Brock’s supervision and active advice while implementing the random-assignment procedure. To assure complete objectivity, eligible applicants’ names were sent to New York for random assignment. The Larger Evaluation 1,357 low-income adults applied. Half were randomly chosen to be eligible for benefits and services; the remainder composed the comparison group. All 1,357 responded to a survey when they applied for the program and gave evaluators permission to obtain information, past and future, on payroll earnings and welfare-program payments available in state administrative records. These adults completed a survey two years after they applied for the program. The Child and Family Study 745 adults who had young children (age one to ten) when they applied for the program, as well as teachers of these children, were asked to complete surveys two and five years after the end of the program. The Ethnographic Study Forty-four families with young children, chosen at random (half in the program group and half in the comparison group) from all families with young children, agreed to participate in the ethnographic study. Fieldworkers conducted frequent visits to these families; asked wide-ranging questions about life, work, and parenting from participants’ points of view; and observed families’ daily routines for three years during and after the program.

DEFINING SUCCESS: DESIGNING THE NEW HOPE SURVEY AND THE CHILD AND FAMILY STUDY The next step was to decide how to define success. Notes from a 1990 meeting of the Greater Milwaukee Committee’s review team reveal ambitious goals for reducing welfare (“by 33 percent over controls”) and increasing work (“increase income without subsidy by 50 percent over controls”), though Tom Schrader doubts that the committee really expected such large changes. More realistic targets might be suggested by 44

THE EVALUATION

a series of experiments testing welfare-to-work programs conducted in the 1980s. Even though most participants in these studies had been working very little when the programs began and therefore had nowhere to go but up, their average annual earnings exceeded those of the control groups by only $500 to $1,200 a year during the subsequent one to three years. Because these people were still quite poor, welfare payments were reduced by less than 8 percent.2 New Hope’s founders and its board shared the goals of increasing employment and income and also set the explicit objectives of reducing family poverty, increasing health insurance coverage, and improving access to reliable child care of acceptable quality. These goals formed the core of the initial evaluation plan. Just before random assignment, the evaluators asked all applicants to provide information about themselves and their families and to grant permission for access to future records of their employment, earnings, and welfare receipt from the state. The program had a broader set of goals as well. If participants gained steady employment and improved their economic situations, these successes might enhance their pride and self-esteem and reduce stress, which in turn could enable them to achieve personal goals, to maintain stable families, and, if they were parents, to provide better environments for their children. Of course, more work hours also might lead to more stress and more difficulties in managing children. Because family poverty is a well-documented risk for children’s development, reducing poverty might increase children’s chances for success in school and foster healthy physical and social development. Indeed, it was precisely these potential benefits for families and children that motivated Sharon Schulz to sign on as New Hope’s second director. However, in part because of budget constraints, these items were not included in the initial evaluation plan. MDRC conducted the first follow-up survey two years after random assignment, with additional follow-ups five and eight years afterward, to determine whether the effects lasted even after participants left the program.3 Both New Hope and control group adults provided detailed information on employment, family income, housing, medical care, use of child care, financial strains, psychological stress, and optimism about the future.4 At about the same time that New Hope began operations in 1994, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation established the “Research Network on Successful Pathways Through Middle Childhood.” Led by a prominent developmental psychologist, Jacquelynne Eccles, the network brought together fifteen scholars from a variety of research institutions and disciplines and gave them seven years and a substantial amount of money to design and carry out research that could inform 45

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policy and practice. The group had a great deal of latitude in choosing topics, with instructions to study successful development, not just deviance or pathology, and to produce insights that could be applied to important social problems affecting children from about six to twelve years old. Be adventurous and creative, they were told. Use methods and test ideas that are innovative and even a little risky. The network members included Robert Granger, then senior vice president at MDRC, and the authors of this book. When Granger offered the network an opportunity to add assessments of children’s development and family life to several ongoing MDRC studies, everyone leaped at the chance to study New Hope. We all knew that children in lowincome families did not do as well in school and had more health and behavior problems than children in higher income families, but there were many possible reasons for the disadvantages they suffered.5 Here was an opportunity to find out whether improved family income, better health care, and better child care would make a difference. It could help us to understand why and how poverty impaired children’s development in order to better identify effective policies that would improve their chances to succeed. New Hope could be a model for effective policies if the program participants were in fact successful compared to controls. The MacArthur Foundation funding, along with grants from the W. T. Grant Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Development, enabled the project to add a Child and Family Study to the New Hope evaluation.6 The study collected information from 745 parents and children, as well as from teachers, about the physical and mental health of both adults and children and about children’s school performance, self-esteem, anxiety, ability to get along with others, aggression, and behavior problems. As much as possible, the study used tests and questionnaires that were well validated and would allow comparisons between the New Hope children and those in other surveys and policy studies. First, however, the study leaders had to win the trust and approval of the staff and participants, the New Hope board, and the National Advisory Board. People from low-income minority groups are understandably suspicious of researchers. Too often, scientists collect their data and leave without giving anything back to the community. In the worst cases, they exploit vulnerable people. In our first discussion, Schulz and several of her staff expressed concerns that questions about family life and children would invade the privacy of participants’ lives and that such questions might be insensitive to racial and ethnic differences in values and practices. They also saw a real possibility that the

46

THE EVALUATION

results might be used to reinforce stereotypes about the poor. As researchers, we were well aware of these pitfalls. To fine-tune the child and family evaluation, the research team met with the New Hope board, chaired by Schrader, which included staff, participants, and representatives of the Milwaukee community, as well as with the National Advisory Board. Aletha Huston participated in MDRC’s focus groups to gain perspectives on how the program was affecting their children and their family lives. Early in the conversations, it became apparent that most people were happy to talk about their children and the issues they faced as parents. They often found those topics more interesting and engaging—and less intrusive—than questions about their incomes and employment histories. For the most part, staff and participants thought the assessment tools were on target, with a few notable exceptions. One questionnaire designed to measure children’s positive social behavior (for example, cooperating, getting along with other children) elicited laughter from two people. When asked why they were laughing, they pointed to statements about answering the phone appropriately or cleaning up your room without being asked, saying, “This kid is a wimp.” Needless to say, we found another measure. More serious was the issue of discipline, which struck at the heart of differences in cultural values. One of the questions about the child’s home environment posed a hypothetical situation: “Suppose your child hit you, what would you do?” People looked at us in astonishment. “It wouldn’t happen,” they all agreed. “What about hitting a brother or sister?” we asked. “How would you judge our answers?” they asked. Parents who say they would spank or hit the child are described disapprovingly in many academic studies. But many of these parents firmly believed that using physical punishment for serious misbehavior was a necessary part of good parenting, especially because misbehaving in Milwaukee’s dangerous neighborhoods could expose a child to violence or contacts with the police.7 Ultimately, the question was eliminated because the answers had such different meanings. The evaluation called for interviews with parents and children, but knowing about children’s school performance also was important. When it was first proposed to send a questionnaire to the children’s teachers, the New Hope staff again had reservations. Teachers are biased against minority children, they argued. Grades and achievement tests will make our children look bad. Eventually, after pointing out that the study would compare children in New Hope families with those in control families, not with the general population, the board agreed that including the teacher questionnaire was a good idea. This turned out to be a

47

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critical part of the evaluation. Some of the most striking effects of the program were improvements in teachers’ reports of children’s classroom performance and behavior, and we almost missed knowing that.

BEYOND IMPACTS TO THE HOWS AND WHYS: THE ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY The evaluation was intended not only to test New Hope impacts, but also to discover how and why program successes or failures came about. The study found, for example, that teachers reported higher levels of achievement for children in New Hope families than for those in control families. Something about the program made a difference. But what? The program provided supports for working parents but offered no direct services to children; therefore, the impacts on children must have been indirect. Did the earnings supplement enable parents to buy books, provide outside activities, and in other ways create more stimulating environments? Did the child-care subsidy lead parents to choose higher quality center-based child care or after-school programs? Perhaps the health insurance coverage enabled parents to engage in more preventive care and reduce the number of times their children were absent from school. Or maybe the community service jobs and supportive project representatives boosted participants’ self-esteem and sense of control in ways that helped them become models of success and more effective parents. It is likely that New Hope worked in all these ways but took different pathways for different types of families. Understanding how the program effected (or failed to effect) changes for parents and children is critical for drawing lessons that can be generalized to public policy more broadly. Hence, the survey asked about family processes and children’s activities, even though these things were not directly the target of the intervention, because they might reveal indirect pathways through which New Hope made a difference. For that reason, the survey included measures of parenting practices, child care, children’s activities outside of school, and children’s access to health care. Equally important for understanding how New Hope worked was an intensive ethnographic study of New Hope and control families, led by the anthropologist Tom Weisner. It involved repeated visits to the homes of the forty-four families from 1998 to 2001 and again in 2004, six years after the program ended. The ethnographic interviews provided valuable information about how New Hope benefits did or did not fit into different families’ needs and daily routines and enabled us to view the program from the participants’ points of view. 48

THE EVALUATION

Ethnographic in this sense means understanding the ways of life of a family or community—the everyday contexts and meanings of life of people themselves. Unlike the surveys, these interviews and conversations were open ended, with opportunities for participants to tell their own stories. Of course, there were topics the researchers wanted to cover, but parents would usually bring them up spontaneously once they were comfortable and saw that the researchers were there for exactly that purpose—to learn about their story and what it meant to them. Interviewers talked with parents about their experiences with the New Hope program. They asked about work life—money, budgeting and debt, employers, hassles at work, job and career goals, juggling work and family. They also talked about parenting, including child monitoring, school, child care, their social supports, and goals and fears about their children. They did not shy away from talking about sensitive, sometimes difficult topics that can influence work and parenting: partners, domestic abuse, drugs and alcohol, family supports and conflicts, and health. They asked parents’ opinions on race, job discrimination, politics, and the welfare system. In 2004, they conducted separate interviews with children, discussing school, family, aspirations for the future, and problems they were dealing with. In addition to conducting interviews, our ethnographic fieldworkers participated in family routines. They went to lunch and dinner with the parents and children, accompanied them to the shopping mall, attended birthday parties, and gained a valuable understanding of the everyday contexts of the families’ lives. Choosing the families proved critical. The New Hope leaders knew immediately whom to pick: families that were good examples of program successes, and perhaps a few failures for contrast. But Greg Duncan, as economist and methodologist, argued successfully for random selection from both the program and control groups in the larger sample. Weisner and Huston agreed. Only by using this method would the study be able to say that the forty-four families represented the group. Although we may have missed several of the more dramatic cases, random selection proved to be a good decision. Inez, Elena, and Lakeisha are three examples of people who used New Hope in different ways to improve their lives and the lives of their children, and stories from many of the other forty-four families, including controls, appear throughout this book. The cases represent the wide range of family circumstances and pathways experienced by low-income people. Random selection allowed insights into how New Hope contributed to work and family gains without overattributing every improvement to the program because we knew about the gains made by control group families. The random selection included families who did not use the program much, 49

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an important group for understanding which families fit and did not fit in terms of engaging with the program offer. Collectively, the stories illustrate the key lessons emerging from the broader evaluation. Inez, Elena, and Lakeisha exemplify people who made use of New Hope’s benefits, who enjoyed increased incomes and job stability, and who used the program to promote their children’s wellbeing. Their stories illuminate the processes through which the program affected families and children. Nearly two decades after Reimer, Kerksick, and their colleagues conceived of the program, and some seven years after it ended, we now have a clear verdict on how much better or worse Inez, Elena, Lakeisha, and other New Hope participants fared relative to those who volunteered but were not selected.

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Chapter 5 Work and Poverty

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he was raised by a mother on welfare and had received welfare herself before applying to New Hope, but Inez does not fit the profile of a hard-to-employ single mother. She graduated from high school on schedule, went to work in a bank, and could not wait to get back to work when Jorge, her first-born, reached his first birthday. Two years into New Hope, our fieldworker asked her what jobs she thought she might be able to get. “I can get any kind of job I want to if I just try hard enough,” she replied. “If I don’t have a skill, I will learn it. I can do anything if I set my mind to do it.” When Inez applied to New Hope, she and Jorge were living with Marco, and Inez was working part time. Although she met New Hope’s thirty-hour a week requirement, she was still making only $6 an hour. Shortly after applying to New Hope, she issued her boss an ultimatum: “Give me $7 an hour or I’ll quit.” Her boss told her to give him a month to arrange it. Six weeks later, with no sign of the raise, she told her boss to “take the job and stick it where the sun don’t shine.”1 Although Inez did not think that all of the New Hope project representatives assigned to her were helpful, she hit it off with Tonya and knew that she could count on Tonya’s help in finding her next job. Tonya directed her to a temporary agency that quickly found her a job at a big specialty retail store. For Inez, the contrast with her Wisconsin Works (W-2) caseworkers could hardly have been starker. “In W-2,” she said, “they don’t have any feelings. . . . They don’t try to help you. They want you out of the system but they don’t try to help.” In the dismal world of low-wage work, Inez’s retail store job was better than most. It is hard to know how much of her good relationship with her boss stemmed from her energy and positive attitude and how much was simply a matter of luck in finding a relatively understanding employer and a job in a business with some genuine opportunities for advancement. She began at the bottom rung of the ladder—as a temp earning $6.50 an hour—but her wage rate quickly rose to $7.50 as she took on a permanent job with more responsibilities. By 1999, more than

HIGHER GROUND

a year after New Hope ended, she was earning the equivalent of $12.50 an hour in a salaried position in the company. When we talked to her two years into the job, her boss had mentioned the possibility that she might one day manage one of the store’s divisions. Her employer was also unusually understanding about her family crises, crises that all working parents face at some point. When her childcare arrangement fell through at the last minute, Inez asked if she could bring Jorge with her to work until noon. Her boss agreed, but it turned out to be difficult to get any work done. “Every minute Jorge would say, ‘Look at this Mommy! Look at this Mommy!’” Inez used New Hope well, in part because it served her goals and her strong need for self-reliance. After she entered New Hope, she gave birth to a second child, Martı´n, but soon split up with Marco. This time she did not stay home. Shortly after Martı´n’s birth, she made a special trip to the New Hope office to make sure that the child-care subsidy for the new baby was in place. Inez spent her scarce resources on things she thought would be good for her children. She saw the New Hope benefits as enabling her to provide good child care and offer a little added financial security. Even when she was stressed by the day-to-day demands of work, bills, and difficult and changing relationships, she somehow found an inner reserve of parenting energy on which to draw. She was strict with her children, but clearly concerned with their well-being. She played with them, read to them, and kept a sharp eye on their activities and whereabouts. She was diligent about finding educational experiences, good child care, and recreational programs for both boys, and she worked to get Marco to spend time with her two sons and pay child support. All in all, New Hope was tailor-made for a person with Inez’s work history, family circumstances, and personality. She liked Tonya and, most important, felt respected by her and the people who ran the program. New Hope did not coerce Inez into one path and exclude her from others. She had choices. New Hope’s importance to Inez was painfully apparent when her fieldworker talked with her several months before her benefits were to run out. Wisconsin had not yet fully implemented its child-care and health insurance programs. With Jorge in school, child care for her younger son, Martı´n, was the key problem. She would be unable to keep him in a child-care center without New Hope subsidies. By this time, she had met and moved in with Vito. With a three days on and three days off work schedule, Vito provided substantial, if intermittent, help with the housework, cooking, and child care. Vito’s flexible work schedule meant that he could help out some of the time, but Inez trusted no one in her neighborhood to care for Martı´n when Vito was unavailable. 52

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Health insurance was also going to be a problem. When New Hope ended, her children qualified for Medicaid, but she was not sure she could afford the $80 monthly premium for herself that her employer’s policy demanded. Although she managed to patch together a set of arrangements that enabled her to sustain full-time work at the store, her balancing act was much more precarious than it had been when New Hope was there to offer stable, reliable supports. Nevertheless, by the end of New Hope, both her children were doing well and had no apparent emotional or behavioral problems. She worked at fairly good jobs, had a reasonably reliable car, and was not seriously in debt. TRACKING THE EFFECTS OF NEW HOPE ON EARNINGS, EMPLOYMENT, AND POVERTY Inez entered New Hope as a part-time worker earning low wages. A few years later, she had full-time work at a much higher wage and a family income above the poverty line. Did New Hope cause Inez’s success? How typical is Inez’s work history of the employment patterns of the hundreds of other people—both women and men—selected to be part of the New Hope program? Here we give answers to these questions, using information gathered from payroll and welfare records and from interviews conducted with more than a thousand New Hope and comparison group adults. We attempt to provide an accessible text description of New Hope’s impacts without extensive statistical documentation. The interested reader can find tables summarizing the quantitative results in the appendix. More complete documentation about the program and its impacts is provided in program reports.2 Effect of New Hope on Employment and Earnings for Those Not Working Full Time To understand New Hope’s effects on the employment of participants, we first examine the employment histories of the large group of individuals who, like Inez, were not working full time when they applied for New Hope.3 Almost half of both New Hope and control group members had work histories when they applied for the program. However, the part-time and sporadic nature of this employment is evident from their low earnings—an average of about $3,500 in the previous year.4 Two years later, more than 60 percent of the control group were employed, a jump of about a third, and their annual earnings more than doubled, to $8,200, all without any help from New Hope. Their employment and earnings 53

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continued to improve in the third program year as well. These increases should not be surprising, given that control group members said they wanted to work full time when they applied for the program; jobs were plentiful in Milwaukee’s strong economy; and the drumbeat from Wisconsin’s state policy makers was sending the message that work was going to be a part of everyone’s future. New Hope impacts on work and earnings depended on the situation of the participant: • For individuals working little or not at all when they signed up for the program, New Hope led to more work and higher earnings while the program was in operation. After the program ended, New Hope and control group individuals worked and earned similar amounts. • For individuals already working full time when they signed up for the program, there were no discernible effects on employment and earnings, and slight declines in second jobs and overtime work. • Individuals with just one barrier to employment worked more during and after the program.

With such dramatic increases in employment for individuals in the control group, the test of New Hope’s effectiveness is a tough one, and yet another example of the high bar set for demonstrating New Hope’s success. Could it do even better by its participants than Wisconsin’s economy, W-2, and other policies did by similar people who were not selected for the program? In the first year of the program, employment rates for participants were more than 10 percentage points higher than for control adults—a substantial program impact.5 Although the rates for New Hope participants continued to climb during the second and third years, the difference between the treatment and control groups fell to 6 percentage points because employment among control group members climbed even faster, narrowing the gap. Those program participants who were not working full time when they signed up—a key group for understanding New Hope impacts—also outearned their control group counterparts by approximately $2,400 over the three program years, an advantage of about 13 percent. We also tracked employment for five years after the end of the program to determine whether it had lasting effects.6 In every year, New Hope participants were more likely to be working and were earning more than control group members. Most of the differences were smaller 54

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than they had been during the three years of the program, and most were not significant in a statistical sense.7 All in all, among those who were not working full time when they applied, the program increased employment substantially, but its advantage tended to fade out over time. By and large, the designers had expected this: increased work during the program but smaller, if any, effects after it ended. Given the substantial work impacts during the three-year trial and much weaker impacts afterward, it is tempting to conclude that effects would have persisted had the program been permanent. It is also possible, however, that the three-year limit on its generous benefits led participants to work more than they would have in a perpetual program. Unfortunately, the evaluation does not allow us to test these competing ideas. Effects for Those Working Full Time Elena was already working full time as a receptionist in a social service agency when she signed up for a chance at the New Hope program. Almost a third of New Hope applicants were in Elena’s shoes, working full time and attracted by New Hope’s promise of making their work more rewarding and manageable. As noted earlier, Elena’s child-care arrangements for her two young children were so precarious that she was not sure she would be able to keep the job. She had no intention of changing either her job or her work hours, and was not interested in re´sume´-writing classes or other activities to help participants find good jobs. Soon after being selected into New Hope, she started looking for the best child-care center she could find. With New Hope supports, she was promoted from secretary to caseworker and then hired away by a competing social service agency at a considerably higher salary. She had her share of stressful times and was sometimes on medication for depression, but was proud that she was helping her clients, keeping the best case records, and enjoying the support of coworkers. She was eventually promoted to a supervisory position, and her salary increased steadily both during and after New Hope. When we spoke to her in 2004, her annual salary was more than $35,000. With such organizational skills, family support, and career success, one might have expected that New Hope would not make much difference for Elena. Elena’s employment and family life, however, were far more fragile than they appeared. After several visits from our ethnographer-interviewer, himself a Mexican immigrant with graduate training in sociology, Elena began to open up about ongoing domestic violence. Shortly after the birth of Caesar, her first child, Elena left his father and eventually began living with Manuel, who had immigrated with the Cuban boat people and was the father of her second child, Libertad. Manuel 55

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was pimping and dealing drugs when he first met Elena. He vowed to get his life back on track, and step by step he did, though he was doing time in prison when she applied for New Hope. With the help of Elena’s brother, Manuel ultimately landed a job in the post office, and he worked fairly steadily for several years thereafter. At home, he did much of the cooking and some of the cleaning. But both Manuel and Elena had trouble controlling their tempers. Their frequent arguments would escalate into physical violence. Our fieldworker summarized Elena’s account of their stormy relationship: Their arguments started three months after their wedding. Before being married they had not had a fight for over a year, but after the first three months of marriage Manuel changed a lot, in part due to drug use; Manuel has been smoking a lot of marijuana. Their first fight was one day when Elena came back from work very tired and went to bed after dinner without straightening up the house. Manuel reprimanded her for that and Elena told him he could do it himself. Since he had done it before why couldn’t he do it that day? Manuel said she was the woman and that it was her obligation. Elena had never heard him say this before. This made her very upset. She then said that if he was defining job obligations, well then, as the man of the house he was to provide for her and the children. . . . Right now, the provider at home was really her, and she earned more than him. Manuel responded by hitting her on the mouth. Then they started fighting.

Violent couples stay together for various reasons. During our fieldworker’s many visits, Elena spoke by turns of Manuel’s good behavior; his substantial contributions in cooking, cleaning, and arranging his work schedule to be home at the end of the school day; the importance of his paycheck to the family’s precarious finances; sympathy for his difficult Cuban childhood; and her love for him. Whatever the reason, Elena rarely separated from Manuel and never for very long. Not long after the violence began she called her health insurance company and secured a referral to a Hispanic therapist who was willing to come to their house and teach Manuel and Elena techniques for conflict resolution. This worked for a while, but the screaming and hitting soon began to cycle in and out of their lives again. She received support from her coworkers, who sympathized when she arrived at work with cuts and bruises, but some of her supervisors were less empathetic; one of them added a memorandum to her personnel file criticizing her for requesting time off to deal with domestic problems. Although Manuel was apparently not violent with the children, he had little patience, often yelling and threatening them. The children witnessed 56

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their parents’ fights. Caesar appears to have been especially affected. He was expelled from some of the child-care centers he attended and was constantly getting in trouble for fighting once he started school. Elena was often called in during work hours for teacher conferences and had to plead with her supervisors to avoid being penalized for missing work. The turmoil in Elena’s personal life makes it more complicated to answer the question of whether New Hope made a difference for her. To what extent did the program enable her to provide a better life for her children, cope with her personal problems, and sustain her successful career? Elena herself was convinced that New Hope was critical. She spoke of having been “chosen” by New Hope—that it was a “life change” that enabled her to get the child care she wanted. She was convinced that New Hope had saved her job. A friend of hers also applied for New Hope but was not selected. Unlike Elena, her friend was unable to accept a job offer because she had no one to take care of her son. In Elena’s mind, that could just as easily have happened to her. Perhaps New Hope did matter for Elena. Knowing her full family story—one of an immigrant struggle cushioned by a strong family network of supports—we can imagine the various ways in which the program supports, her full-time job, and the assistance of people like her brother, and even Manuel, despite his volatility, combined to help her through a variety of difficulties, including near bankruptcy. After her third child, Manny Junior, was born, Elena was able to maintain her job, in part because of the New Hope child-care subsidy. The subsidies were one piece of a tenuous framework; without them, the whole structure might have collapsed. Comparing the work and earnings of participants and control group members who were working full time when they applied for the program, however, shows that Elena’s experience was not typical.8 Both groups sustained high and roughly equal rates of employment throughout the evaluation period. In fact, during the first two years of the program, fewer New Hope than control participants worked more than fifty hours per week, suggesting that some full-time workers used program benefits to finance reductions in overtime or multiple jobs. Although we do not have information about whether people spent more time with their children, the ethnographic evidence suggests that some New Hope mothers were more able to be at home with their children and were more selective in the jobs they took, waiting for those with better pay and the right work hours. Being at home for their children after school was important to some parents of adolescents as well as to those of young children because they worried about their sons and daughters getting into trouble if they were left on their own. As one mother said in comparing her situation before and during New Hope, “I wasn’t able 57

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to be home with my children, to spend time with them. Even though they’re older, still you think of the influences . . . and we have three girls. I’m glad to say none have children. . . . So far, I haven’t seen any drugs or smoking or anything that could cause harm to them . . . so I could say that New Hope has helped me to be there for them.” For many policy makers, reductions in work hours signal the failure of a program, but they are usually thinking about people who are either not working or working very little. Should we value work increases for people working fifty or sixty hours a week? It seems more reasonable to consider thirty to forty hours a week an optimal level of work that allows individuals to strike a good balance of work, family, and individual needs.9 New Hope’s goals were to support families and reduce poverty. Like most workers, some parents used supports to re-balance their breadwinner and caregiver roles toward the care side. New Hope did improve overall family resources for people already working full time, by providing more child-care assistance. Because they worked full time, many participants’ incomes probably fell just above the thresholds for the child-care subsidies offered by the county. Only about a fifth of those in the control group received the subsidies, even though they worked just as much as the program group did. With New Hope, nearly half had child-care benefits.10 These subsidies are not counted as part of family income, but they can make a big difference in a family’s budget, especially for a parent who is working full time. New Hope’s designers had broader and more ambitious goals than merely increasing employment. They hoped to establish a voluntary contract with full-time workers that would enable them to make ends meet, secure health care and decent child care, and, more generally, strike a reasonable work-family balance. One might well argue that children would profit from additional time when parents reduce long work hours as well as from improvements in child care. As we will see, evaluation evidence supports this argument. Just One Barrier from Success: New Hope’s Biggest Impacts New Hope was designed to reduce some of the barriers to employment faced by people with low skills. Using the information gathered when people first signed up for the program, we counted potential obstacles to finding work that New Hope supports might help to reduce, such as a spotty employment history, lack of a high school degree, arrest record, and presence of many children or very young children in the family.11 About a fifth of the total participant pool had several such problems, making it less likely that a package of economic benefits would be 58

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enough to boost their employment. At the other end of the spectrum were workers with none of these employment barriers, who appeared able to sustain employment on their own. Within that group, those not selected for the program could be expected to do as well as New Hope participants in finding and holding jobs in Milwaukee’s hot job market. In both cases, we were correct. Adults without serious problems outearned those with multiple problems, but New Hope did not change the employment rates or the earnings of either group significantly relative to their comparison group counterparts. A third group falls in the middle—those like Elena and Inez who faced only one or two significant but not insurmountable barriers to fulltime employment. They appeared poised to profit most from its package of benefits. And indeed they did. The impacts on employment and earnings for this group—who collectively made up nearly half of the applicants—were both large and enduring. New Hope boosted employment by 9 percentage points during the three years of program operations, and continued to make a difference. Indeed, five years after New Hope ended, the employment rates of the program group were 14 points higher than those of the control group. Earnings were significantly higher as well. These remarkably long-lasting results show the important niche that a program such as New Hope can fill. The employment successes of Inez and Elena were no fluke. Nearly half of those attracted to New Hope’s voluntary work supports were like Inez and Elena, already nearly able to sustain higher levels of employment and earnings. Moreover, their need for child care was by definition limited, because children grow older, so the benefits may have come at a particularly critical time in their employment histories. In the absence of program supports, they would probably have increased both work and earnings modestly. With New Hope, these work and earnings increases were much larger and longer lasting. Community Service Jobs New Hope did, of course, help some people, like Lakeisha, who had numerous barriers to full-time work. She and Inez could hardly be more different. Where Inez is feisty and talkative, Lakeisha is quiet and reserved. Where Inez had one young child, Lakeisha had three, all under age five. Both were receiving welfare when they applied for the program, but Inez’s future work plans were concrete and ambitious. In contrast, apart from some part-time jobs in high school, Lakeisha had no real work experience and decided to try New Hope only because its approach to full-time work seemed more appealing than Wisconsin’s 59

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emerging W-2 program. Inez spoke repeatedly of her hopes and plans for career advancement. When we asked Lakeisha where she saw herself in five years, however, she laughed and asked us in return, “Why does everyone keep asking me questions like that?” Lakeisha got her first community service job from New Hope in 1994, and worked for six months until that job ended. She was precisely the kind of person Julie Kerksick, David Riemer, and the other New Hope designers had in mind when they built community service jobs (CSJs) into the program model. A high school dropout with virtually no work experience except for a few part-time jobs in high school, Lakeisha needed work to build up confidence and job-related skills and habits. Her first CSJ was low-level clerical work for a nonprofit community organization, and her experience revealed her unrealistic expectations about employment. She complained that her supervisor and another woman would always “tell” people what to do, never “ask” them, and that they “always tried to act like they had the upper hand.” She couldn’t stand being watched all day and wished that her supervisor would just let her do her work. Sometimes she found her job so stressful that she would make up excuses to stay home. So that she could miss work, she even asked her child-care provider to call the supervisor and claim that one of Lakeisha’s children was sick. Nearly a third of New Hope participants held a community service job at some point. These jobs were designed to be temporary—six months maximum—skill-building bridges to regular employment and were available to participants only after a two-month job search. Participants were not automatically entitled to these positions but had to apply and interview successfully for them. The jobs paid the minimum wage because they were designed to be less attractive than unsubsidized jobs, virtually all of which paid more than that in Milwaukee.12 New Hope fashioned CSJs to be different from the temporary employment positions offered as part of Wisconsin’s W-2 program. One of the mothers who had taken a W-2 job reported, I don’t know what it was about those . . . jobs, but it definitely wasn’t what I wanted. . . . I didn’t like that bus aide job, you just sat in an office most of the time. The next one, I didn’t like it either. Training on computers, but the trainers were hardly ever there. That was boring. . . . It was nothing that I really wanted. I never liked none of them. . . . I felt like I wasn’t doing anything.

Unlike most New Hope community service jobholders, Lakeisha could not find a regular job after her first CSJ, perhaps in part because of her approach to work. If a first community service job followed by 60

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diligent job search failed to secure a private-sector job, as happened to Lakeisha, participants were then eligible for a second CSJ. About one in three New Hope participants who worked on a first CSJ went on to a subsequent one. In the case of people already working part time, CSJs were sometimes a way to raise work hours above the thirty-hour threshold required for benefits. Lakeisha’s New Hope rep lined up a second CSJ for her, also in a nonprofit agency, this one involving more face-to-face contact with lowincome clients. It was also a turning point for her. She performed well in this job, which suggests that her attitudes and work habits had changed, and shortly afterward, the agency offered her a permanent receptionist position. Although she also felt stress and pressure in that position, particularly because of a difficult supervisor, she continued to work for the agency for the entire six years of our visits. What Lakeisha liked most about her two community service jobs was the training. “It was OK if you didn’t have skills,” she said, “because they let you develop skills on the job. . . . New Hope got me the job and then I got the skills to get hired there regular, and not just work cleaning or sorting stuff at a warehouse.” Her job was also stable and offered regular hours. She used the childcare assistance steadily, and when the program ended, she said, “I really miss not being in . . . the child care. I really liked the child care, and my old child-care provider, but I can’t afford it now . . . I got some wage supplements, but they weren’t a lot and I can do without it just fine.” She did not use the health-care subsidy because she was covered through her employer. For people working full time in a CSJ, New Hope offered minimum wages for up to ten additional hours a week in education and training. Lakeisha used the education benefit to take GED classes, which were conveniently close to her first CSJ. When she moved on to another job, however, she was unwilling to take a lengthy extra bus ride after work and dropped the classes. Lakeisha’s path to permanent employment was not an easy one. As a full-time receptionist, she was on the front line of abuse from both her supervisor and the clients her agency served. Her childless supervisor showed no sympathy for the problems of balancing work and child rearing. She had to fight to get time off for medical appointments or to care for sick children. The pressures of dealing with calls and clients ebbed and flowed, however, and Lakeisha became good friends with some of her coworkers and enjoyed helping new hires learn to get along with their supervisor. Although the job paid rather poorly, around $19,000 a year for full-time work (forty hours a week) in 2000, it did provide health insurance, a paid vacation, and other benefits. Therefore, despite the many days when she felt depressed and exhausted, Lakeisha kept at it 61

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and eventually earned a promotion that took her off the stressful front lines into the upstairs management office. Although not all people liked the CSJs—some participants thought that they were boring or demeaning; others disliked the fact that they were temporary and did not lead directly to better jobs—CSJs figured prominently in the employment and earnings effects of the program. Indeed, without them, New Hope participants’ rates of employment and earnings were not significantly higher than those of people in the control group.13 Does this mean that New Hope’s impacts would have disappeared had CSJs not been part of its package of benefits? Probably not. We do not know what would have happened to Lakeisha had CSJs not been an option for her, but quite a few individuals already held parttime jobs and were using their CSJ to bring their work hours above the thirty-hour threshold for benefits. All told, more than 90 percent of the New Hope participants who worked in CSJs secured some unsubsidized employment in the first two years of the program. And most of their earnings eventually came from regular jobs. Effects on Employment and Earnings for Men and Women without Children In 2003, more than 8 million adult men were poor—a number that has changed little since the 1994 launch of New Hope.14 Men and women who are unable to work because of serious disabilities unrelated to drug addiction are entitled to monthly payments from the Supplemental Security Income program. Many states used to provide cash assistance through General Assistance programs, but most of these were scaled back or eliminated in the 1990s, and in Wisconsin’s case in 1996.15 Various types of job training programs have been conceived over the past thirty years, with all but a handful of the most intensive ones failing to boost the employment and earnings of adult men appreciably.16 New Hope was available to all low-income men and women regardless of family circumstances. Program impacts on work and earnings differed between men and women: • For men who were not living with children when they signed up for the program, New Hope boosted work and earnings sporadically. • For women who were not living with children when they signed up for the program, New Hope had no impact on work and earnings.

New Hope included men because the designers believed that all adults deserved the opportunity to escape poverty by work, but policy 62

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makers also direct attention to men because many poor, single men are fathers. Whether or not they live with their children, their incomes are important sources of support, and few are in full compliance with their child support orders (if such orders have ever been issued), at least in part because of their own poverty.17 Although virtually none of the men applying for New Hope had any connections with the mothers who signed up for the program, many of them were fathers. They did not fit any single demographic profile. Most were in their twenties and thirties and had never married, but many were living with partners or other family members. Their work efforts were often handicapped by an assortment of employment barriers: more than a third had been arrested, only half had a high school diploma or GED, and only a third had access to a car. A brief description of three of the men in the New Hope program illustrates some of the problems they faced. Mike was thirty-one years old and living with his mother when he applied for the program. An African American father, Mike did not live with his children but did pay child support to their mother. During his New Hope years, he worked in a series of low-wage jobs that qualified him for benefits most of the time. Robert, a twenty-seven-year-old Hispanic, lived with his sister and worked enough as a nurse’s aide to qualify for benefits. He has no children. Two years into the program, he expressed hopes of getting a GED and eventually gaining certification as a licensed practical nurse. Bruce was white and forty-two years old when he applied for the program. He was divorced and lived alone in a house that he co-owned with his mother. He did accounting work for a social service agency at approximately $9 an hour and hoped to stay in that position. During our survey two years into the program, Bruce made vague reference to having some kind of disability. About the only characteristic shared by these men was their desire to be able to support themselves with full-time work. During the three years of New Hope, the employment rate of New Hope men was an average of 8 percentage points higher than that of control group men. Five years after the program had ended, their employment advantage was a consistent 8 percentage points, but this difference did not prove statistically significant. The employment boost was greater for men who were not working full time when they signed up for the program. For them, the participants’ employment advantage in the five years after the program—10 percentage points—proved large enough to be statistically significant. We did not conduct in-depth interviews with many men, and thus cannot paint a detailed picture of their experiences. Of the two in the ethnographic sample,18 one faced serious drug problems and spent time in prison, and the other used almost no New Hope benefits. We do know from our surveys that the vast majority of men were favorably impressed 63

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by New Hope and thought that it would be beneficial for their careers. Given the often unpromising results from past training and employment programs directed at men, the fact that the program caused enduring employment gains for some of the men who applied for it is surprising and noteworthy. About a fifth of the applicants for New Hope were women who had no children or whose youngest children were teenagers or adults. Judy was a forty-three-year-old black woman who had separated from her husband some time ago. Two years into the New Hope program, she was living with her adult son. She met the thirty-hour requirement working as a certified nurse’s assistant at a nursing home for $7.50 an hour. In our survey, she said that she loved the program and took advantage of the wage subsidy, health insurance, and advice and support. Helen was a forty-seven-year-old white woman who appeared to be struggling more than Judy with her finances. After her seventeen-yearold daughter had a baby and moved out to start her own household, Helen was evicted and moved in with her sister and her sister’s child. She worked as a mail clerk at $7.40 an hour but her hours varied, so she qualified for New Hope benefits only intermittently. Joyce was a twentyfive-year-old African American who lived with her spouse, her spouse’s children, her sister-in-law, and her sister-in-law’s children. Even though for five years she had supervised thirteen people who cleaned buildings, she made only $7.50 an hour. She worried significantly about finances and had recently borrowed money from relatives. Taken together, the employment and earnings of women who had no children or were not living with younger children were not greatly affected by New Hope. We found no significant program impacts on either the employment rates or the earnings of these women during the three program years, and even some sign of negative impacts on their earnings a few years after the program ended. Because we did not conduct intensive interviews with any of these women, we know very little about their experiences in the program. New Hope’s Impact on Poverty New Hope sought to help people use full-time work to end poverty and meet basic needs. We have seen that the program boosted work and earnings for people, such as Lakeisha and Inez, who were either not working at all or working part time. For full-time workers, such as Elena, being assigned to the program rather than to the control group had no detectable impact on the amount they worked—they sustained high levels of employment with or without New Hope. But regardless of their

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initial levels of employment, New Hope participants were earning higher hourly wages and had more continuous, stable employment patterns five years after they entered the program.19 Employment gains also showed up among men who were accepted into the program. The program designers worked very hard to craft its earnings supplement and other benefits so that net income would never decline as a result of increased work or better wages. They intended for it to increase people’s incomes and material well-being. Did the earnings gains enjoyed by Lakeisha, Inez, and other similar New Hope participants in fact translate into higher family incomes and less poverty and material hardship? Our study provides only a partial answer because earnings and earnings supplements are only part of family income. Earnings from informal jobs are not included, nor are the earnings, formal or informal, of partners and other adults in their households. New Hope health insurance and child-care subsidies were additional resources that probably freed up some money for other needs, but they are not counted as income because we cannot assign a specific dollar value to them. The most complete accounting of income and poverty is available for the group of 745 families with young children who were in the Child and Family Study.20 For them, New Hope boosted annual family income by between $900 and $1,900 a year during the three years of the program, and by a total of $5,800 across the three program years and the two years afterward. Poverty rates were dramatically lower for New Hope than for control families—17 percentage points lower in the first year, 12 points lower in the second and third years, and 8 points lower in the two years after benefits stopped. Although New Hope failed to eliminate poverty among all of its families, it was clearly more successful in lifting families out of poverty than was the collection of programs otherwise available in Wisconsin.21 We view New Hope in the context of an unsettling national picture of single parents leaving welfare. Surveys of women who left welfare soon after the 1996 reforms showed that typical family incomes one to three years later were around $1,000 a month, and about half of these families had incomes that fell below the government’s poverty line.22 In Wisconsin, researchers tracked the economic status of women leaving the Wisconsin cash assistance program in the mid-1990s.23 Drawing on the same source of state employment data that we used, they found high rates of employment—more than 80 percent showing up in the payroll records at least once in the year after the welfare exit—but annual earnings totaled less than $9,000. Total family income actually fell from the year before to the year after the exit, from approximately $12,000 to $10,000.24

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New Hope accomplished its key goal of reducing poverty • New Hope reduced poverty substantially during the program and modestly afterward.

What explained the higher incomes of New Hope participants? The earnings supplements accounted for about a third of the higher income during the three program years, but that money of course disappeared when the program ended. The New Hope group earned more per hour than the control group and had higher total income from work, which in turn led to somewhat higher earned income tax credit payments. Cash assistance from welfare fell precipitously for both groups, but the difference between the two was too small to be a factor in the total income advantage for program participants. Higher family incomes of New Hope adults could improve family life in many ways.25 At the most basic level, more income can help families avoid severe hardships—hunger, utility cutoffs, crowding, homelessness, and unmet medical needs. It might enable them to move to a better apartment or safer neighborhood, to buy clothes and school supplies for their children, or to relieve some of the unrelenting stress of having to decide which bills cannot be paid in a given month. An index of material deprivation, constructed from survey reports of these kinds of hardships two years into the program, showed significantly fewer of them among New Hope than among control families. Not unexpectedly, the biggest impacts were on New Hope families with the biggest income boosts—in particular those with just one obstacle to full-time employment. New Hope’s impacts on family life are detailed in chapter 7. INCOME, WORK, AND POLICY The moral core of New Hope contained the principle that a full-time working mother should not be poor, uninsured, or forced to entrust young children to unsafe or uncaring child-care providers because she cannot afford to pay for better child care. New Hope succeeded in reducing poverty among its participants to a greater degree than Wisconsin’s programs and economy did among the control group. For families with young children, poverty reductions were smaller, but still apparent, two years after the end of the three-year trial. New Hope’s full-time work requirement boosted employment and earnings among some but not all of the people who volunteered for the program. Those with a full-time job coming into New Hope saw fewer 66

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employment and earnings gains than did those working part-time or not at all. They did, however, benefit from the child-care subsidies. For the most part, earnings and employment gains dissipated after the program ended, except for the relatively large group of people who faced just one or two significant hurdles, such as lack of a high school degree or work experience or affordable child care. This group showcases New Hope’s biggest and most enduring labor-market effects. New Hope structured its benefits to solve a problem that has long bedeviled social policy planners—how to provide support to low-income families without discouraging work. The old Aid to Families with Dependent Children system guaranteed a basic level of assistance if a family had no other source of income, but then reduced assistance if family members began to work. In most cases, an extra dollar of earnings led to a reduction by a full dollar in cash assistance. New Hope provided no benefits unless the participant could document full-time employment in the previous month. On the one hand, for people not working full time at the outset of the program, the incentives for full-time work are strong and obvious. It is therefore not surprising that the program boosted employment among this group. On the other hand, the lack of additional incentives for those already working full time is equally obvious. With the earnings supplement, New Hope makes their current work arrangement pay better, so it is hardly surprising to see some people cutting back on second jobs and long overtime hours. Despite New Hope’s positive effects on employment, it would be a mistake to judge its success using only the politically appealing focus on reducing welfare and boosting work among the poor. Although productive employment is certainly a key social goal, so too are high-achieving, well-behaved, healthy, and happy children, and adults who are able to balance work with family and caregiving and attain the economic and moral goals they set for themselves. Most people would expect improvements in income, health care, and child care to promote children’s healthy development. These advantages from New Hope might be enhanced if they were achieved without very long hours of parental employment, so perhaps we should not regret reductions in overtime work. Although difficult to measure and evaluate, reductions in stress and depression among adults, or improved relationships with partners, or a sense that one’s goals are being met, or increased hopes for the future are worthy social objectives as well. To address these possibilities, we need to know more about how New Hope affected children and family life.

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Chapter 6 Children

W

hen Inez enrolled in New Hope, her oldest child, Jorge, was not yet two years old. He started life with a number of strikes against him. His mother was an unmarried teenager who conceived him with a man who was dealing drugs and ended up in prison. She was soon receiving welfare and living with Marco, who fathered Jorge’s younger brother, Martı´n. When we first met Jorge in 1998, Inez was in her third year of New Hope. Jorge was a small, dark-haired, lively four-year-old with big brown eyes, who, according to his mother, acted like a seven-year-old. Marco and Inez had split up before Martı´n’s birth, and she was living with a new boyfriend, Vito, whom she planned to marry sometime in the next year. Jorge attended a pre-kindergarten program with the support of Milwaukee’s Choice program. He was a good student. “His teacher has been real proud of him,” Inez boasted. Sometimes he was a little too talkative, she said, but otherwise he seemed to be handling school well. At a later visit, Inez bragged that Jorge was the best student in his class. Our assessments when he was in first grade supported her view: his performance was well above the national average. Inez retained a bond with Marco’s family even though Marco had told her he did not want to see the boys anymore. Jorge and Martı´n spent every other weekend with Marco’s mother for their regularly scheduled visitation but rarely saw Marco. Inez believed that Jorge felt Marco’s rejection strongly. He sometimes cried that he missed his father. She told the children that their dad needed to work a lot of hours and that he “loved them very much.” It was difficult to maintain this fiction, however, when Marco refused to buy anything for either boy and had recently forgotten Martı´n’s birthday entirely. Inez encouraged the children to think of her live-in boyfriend, Vito, as part of their family. When Jorge said that he missed Marco, she told him he was lucky because he had “Papi” (which was what they called Vito) as well as Marco and his girlfriend to love them, that they “had four parents” . . . “a special family [to] have.” Jorge was not quite so sure.

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Later in the same year, when they were planning to move, Jorge asked, “Mama, when we move, can we leave Papi behind?” When she asked why, Jorge said that Vito was mean. Inez was fairly confident that Vito had never hurt the boys. She wondered if Jorge was just pushing everyone away because so many people in his life had already left him. Marco no longer wanted to see him, and his maternal grandmother had recently moved back to Puerto Rico. A year later, when Jorge was five, Inez and Vito separated. Researchers and the public alike worry about the negative effects on children of living with a single mother, but we now know that children in a stable family headed by a single mother are less likely to have problems than those in single-mother families where things keep changing and “churning” as people move in and out.1 Although the instability in his family appeared to be unsettling to Jorge, he also worried when Inez was without a boyfriend. At age five, he constantly told her, “You need to get a boyfriend.” At one point he approached a stranger in the grocery store and asked him if he would be his mommy’s boyfriend. By the time Jorge was six, a new partner, Matt, had become a central part of Inez’s life and that of her children, but he too would soon be gone. New Hope was not designed to address Inez’s episodic relationships with men. It was, however, intended to help provide the resources to stabilize other important parts of family life. For Inez, New Hope made a big difference in the quality and reliability of child care for Jorge and Martı´n during their early years. When Inez entered New Hope, Jorge was not yet two and already with his third child-care provider. With the New Hope child-care subsidy, Inez could afford to place the children in a child-care center that she liked. It was not just a place where children go and play, but a “learning center.” In one of our visits, she noted proudly that Martı´n could recite the alphabet. “He can sing the song, and he skips a few letters, but for a three-year-old, he is doing really well.” Inez thought he was going to be smart. Good child care is a source of stability amid the continuing family changes that her children have experienced. When we talked to him in the summer of 2004, Jorge had grown into a friendly and articulate ten-year-old with dark hair and eyes who is a little small for his age. He liked to listen to rhythm and blues, rap, and hip hop music. Having gone to summer school earlier, he was “on vacation,” spending his time watching television and playing video games. He had finished fourth grade, earning Bs and Cs and often getting help with his homework in an after-school program. His achievement was still above the national average. He liked his fourth grade teacher and thought his school was good because they gave enough homework and pay attention to the children. He had friends at school, loved re69

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cess, and said that math was his worst enemy (even though he had high math scores). Jorge seemed to be engaged and was doing fairly well academically. The only sour note was an incident the previous spring. While playing percussion in the band, he got into a fight with another student and was suspended for a day. He feared he might not be allowed back in the band. Lakeisha’s oldest child, Monesha, was three years old when Lakeisha enrolled in New Hope. Monesha’s school experience got off to a bad start when the school required her to repeat first grade because she had not learned to read. A year or two later, it became apparent that she needed glasses. Once that problem was rectified, her school performance improved. During our visit to the family in 1998, when Monesha was eight, Lakeisha proudly announced that Monesha had made the honor roll. Asked what that meant, Monesha responded that it meant that she “done really good” in all her school work. The only thing she still wanted to work on was reading. As she said, she needed to read more, but she preferred copying sentences out of books. In second and third grades, she continued on the honor roll, and her mother bragged that “she’ll just sit down and write stories.” A year later, when Monesha was nine, she talked about the fun she had visiting her father during the summer. Almost every day she and her brother and sister went to the pool. She also went to the library every week and joined a book club that gave her stickers for every book she read. Her skills in reading and math were near the national average and better than those of the average girl in families applying to participate in New Hope. Five years passed and Monesha became a tall, willowy thirteen-yearold. She reported getting good grades in school and felt that her mother was happy with her progress. Her favorite subject was math, because it was challenging. She could not think of a subject she did not like. Monesha attended a charter school and liked both the way she was taught and the access she had to computers. Her classroom had one computer for each of the twenty-six students, and they could generally use them twice a day. She attended an after-school program offering help with homework and the opportunity to use the gym. Monesha appreciated having somewhere else to go than the streets and felt “pretty safe” in her school because there was always someone (a teacher) to make sure things were all right. She was a cheerleader but was not involved in any other extracurricular activities. Lakeisha’s three children had only sporadic contact with their father, Tyrone, but her long-term boyfriend, Kevin, had been with them from the time they were very young. Monesha said she felt closer to Kevin 70

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than to her father. Over the years, Kevin had provided child care and transportation for the children, and was often the one handling contacts with teachers. Both mothers and daughters in our families believed strongly in the need for female independence. Monesha emphasized that she expected to go to school and find a job. She would consider marriage if she found the right person, but she did not think it was essential to happiness. In our sixth-grade interview she said, “You can do better things with your life instead of marriage, like get a great job. Then you don’t have to worry about trying to satisfy your husband.” CHILDREN’S BEHAVIORAL AND HEALTH PROBLEMS Jorge and Monesha were well within the national averages for achievement and behavior among children their age, but many of their contemporaries were faring less well. Parents living in poverty face a multitude of hazards as they try to maintain their children’s interest in school and prevent them from getting into serious trouble. Nearly half of the families in our ethnographic sample had at least one child with a significant health or behavior problem. These included Down Syndrome, asthma, communication difficulties, hearing or vision problems, special education placements, aggressive and impulsive behaviors, attention problems, expulsions from school, referrals to child protective services, and low achievement in school.2 The majority of the children in the ethnographic sample who had significant problems were boys, and almost half of them were assigned to some form of special education in their schools. Many who were not placed in special education were performing below grade level and falling through the cracks—neither receiving special services nor learning in regular classrooms. Nearly all parents were keenly aware of their children’s problem behaviors and health issues and addressed them as best they could. When we first met Caesar, Elena’s oldest son, he was a healthy, strong, good-looking five-year-old boy who was big for his age. Appearances mattered to Elena. She always ensured that her children had clean clothes and looked well cared for. During our visits, Caesar was very active, rarely able to sit still or to keep quiet. Elena reported that he had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Elena said that he had had attention and behavior problems from very early in life, which she attributed to multiple causes: his father, Pedro, was on drugs when Caesar was conceived; she knew little about caring for an infant and often neglected him; and he repeatedly witnessed vio71

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lence and abuse between his parents. When Caesar was three, Elena took him to several doctors to find out why he was not talking. One doctor told her that the lack of speech was normal. A second suggested that hearing both English and Spanish was causing confusion. Both were wrong. Fortunately, Elena insisted on consulting a hearing specialist, who inserted tubes in his blocked ears. He was enrolled in a special school for children with speech problems. At four, he had the language skills and behavior of a two-year-old. By second grade, he had caught up intellectually—his basic reading and math skills were slightly above the national average—but still had serious attention and behavior problems, often getting into fights with other children. At the time of our final visit in 2004, Caesar was almost twelve years old, overweight, and tall for his age. His short curly dark hair was dyed blond, almost orange, on top. He was in the sixth grade, and though his grades were average, his performance was somewhat lower than it had been a few years earlier. He still had serious problems with attention and behavior. Elena had discontinued his medication for ADD because of the negative side effects she had noticed. He got into trouble at school both for fighting with teachers and other kids and for not finishing his work. He reported that he had had thirty-five detentions that year. Other kids made fun of Caesar and called him fat, which made him angry and led to fights. He was on the basketball team at school, and wanted to play football in the fall. He liked sports, but sometimes his behavior prevented him from playing. He could not participate in a kickball tournament at the time of our final visit because he had not finished his science assignment. Caesar had a few friends he played with after school, and he also watched television and played video and computer games. He liked to send computer viruses to people who had been “mean” to him. EFFECTS OF NEW HOPE ON CHILDREN’S SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT Despite the problems that some children faced, New Hope’s greatest success was in increasing school achievement and positive behavior among children like Jorge, Monesha, and Caesar. Although both boys and girls profited from the program to some degree, the positive impacts were especially great for boys. To gauge how the New Hope program affected children, we selected all parents with children who were age one through ten when their parents applied for New Hope. Two years later, we visited these families— both the participants in New Hope and the comparison parents. We interviewed parents and children to assess how the program was affecting their lives. On average, children in New Hope families were doing better 72

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in school than children in control families, both during the program and after it ended. We documented the effects of New Hope by sending questionnaires to teachers (after receiving parents’ permission) asking about the child’s academic performance and classroom behavior. The teachers knew nothing about New Hope; they simply gave us the kind of information that usually goes on report cards. Teachers rated how well the child was doing compared with other children in the class on reading, math, overall intellectual functioning, motivation to do well in school, oral communication, classroom behavior, and parental encouragement. The average child in a New Hope family scored higher than the average child in a comparison family. The differences were modest, but important. About 60 percent of New Hope children scored higher than the average child in a control group family. On an SAT-type exam, the difference is equivalent to about twenty-five points.3 Three years after the first visit, we went back to the families to find out whether the effects had lasted after New Hope ended. By that time, the children ranged in age from six to sixteen. This time we not only sent questionnaires to the teachers, but also gave a standardized test of achievement to the children and asked the parents and teachers more detailed questions about the children’s performance. Remarkably, some of the positive effects of New Hope persisted. Teachers of New Hope boys continued to report better achievement than the teachers of comparison group boys did. About 55 percent of New Hope children scored higher on a nationally standardized reading assessment than the average comparison child. Parents also reported better grades in reading and writing; about 58 percent of New Hope children scored above the average comparison child. We saw no advantages in math. Although both reading and math matter, we consider the advantage in reading particularly important, because reading is such a core skill. A child with reading difficulties faces serious barriers to learning all subjects in school.

New Hope improved children’s school performance, especially in reading. For boys, New Hope led to increased engagement in school and higher educational aspirations. New Hope increased positive social behavior and reduced behavior problems for boys. For girls, it had mixed effects. Girls saw improvements in positive behavior as reported by parents, but their behavior in school worsened, as reported by teachers.

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Keeping a child interested, motivated, and engaged in school may be as important as teaching academic skills. New Hope not only increased school performance, but, for boys, it also increased engagement in school and aspirations for higher education. Although children’s expectations for their future are not always met, those who expect to attend college are more likely to value school, work hard, and stay involved. At age ten, Jorge told our interviewer that he planned to attend college right after high school, and that he was very sure he would graduate. Boys in New Hope families were more likely than boys in control group families to say that they felt close to people at school, they were a part of their school, they were happy at school, teachers were fair, and they felt safe at school. There were no positive effects for girls, although there were no negative effects either. Jorge’s motivation to do well in school had been evident when he was in kindergarten. He proudly showed our interviewer his math papers and explained how he had connected the dots on a worksheet to make a butterfly. He also went through his flash cards showing letters of the alphabet, and identified each one. He dismissed his addition problems, however, as being “too easy.” In contrast, although Monesha liked school and was proud of her achievements, she had no concrete plans for college or a specific job, perhaps in part because she was unaware of any particular expectations that her family had for her. She did not know what her mom thought about the idea of her attending college or what kind of job her parents would like for her to have. (Lakeisha, however, did mention to us that she hoped Monesha would go beyond high school.) Jorge’s mother, Inez, on the other hand, was acutely aware of the need to keep school interesting and fun. When he was very young, she was concerned that Jorge might get bored with repetitious work. She liked his after-school program because the children did a variety of things, including homework, arts and crafts, and athletic activities. She worried that he might disengage from school when he was older because it provided too little variety and challenge. These worries are realistic. Most children begin school bright-eyed, excited, and eager to be there, but that enthusiasm often dissipates as they spend more time in school.4 Some get so disengaged that they stop trying and eventually stop attending. One major accomplishment of New Hope was to slow this trend, at least for boys, perhaps in part because program group children more often succeeded in the classroom. Children, like adults, are more motivated when they do well than when they have difficulty with a task. Mastering the basic academic skills in the first few years of school helps to sustain their motivation and inter-

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est, especially when they reach the upper grades where these skills are increasingly taken for granted. EFFECTS OF NEW HOPE ON BEHAVIOR Growing into a responsible, productive adult involves more than school. Social and emotional competence can be as important as academic skills. Being able to control one’s behavior, limit troublemaking in school, gain an inner sense of well-being, make friends, and get along with adults and other children smooths the path to growing up. We therefore asked both parents and teachers to describe positive behavior and behavior problems. We asked the children about their worries and relationships with adults and other children. We found that New Hope produced some of its largest and perhaps most important benefits for boys in these areas of social and emotional development. During the program, teachers rated the boys in New Hope families much higher than the boys in control families on a set of questions about “positive social behavior”—such things as obeying rules in school, being admired and well liked by other students, and being self-reliant. They reported fewer disciplinary problems and less frequent behavior problems—less arguing, disturbing others, social withdrawal, or sadness. Almost 70 percent of New Hope boys scored better than the average boy in the comparison families.5 After the New Hope program ended, some but not all of these advantages remained. Teachers still rated New Hope boys higher on compliance, social competence, and the ability to work independently. The teenage boys in New Hope families, compared with their control group counterparts, said that they had more friends and were less likely to react aggressively when someone provoked them. Inez’s son Jorge is an example of a boy whose behavior may have been helped by New Hope. Although his family situation was tumultuous at times, Jorge was generally a well-behaved child with solid social skills. Our questionnaires from his mother and his teacher show that he was cooperative, got along well with other children, followed the teacher’s directions, worked well on his own, and had few behavior problems. A climate of family obligation and responsibility can promote positive development in children.6 Inez encouraged Jorge’s positive behavior at home. She made sure Jorge watched out for Martı´n, telling him, “You’re brothers. That’s the type of things that brothers do.” She also emphasized the importance of doing household chores so that Jorge could learn not to expect someone else to do it all for him. Jorge took on mature roles willingly. Inez described an evening when she wasn’t feeling well,

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and seven-year-old Jorge volunteered to fix dinner. He got out frozen pizza rolls, heated them in the microwave, and then made up three plates of food. Despite the fact that others saw him as well adjusted, during our interview when he was ten, Jorge said he worried whether his family would have enough to eat or to live. He talked frequently about his family’s financial problems and expressed some sadness. When asked about the best things in his life, he pointed out that his mom and dad [Inez’s live-in boyfriend at the time, Jesus] had both found jobs. The biggest problem in his life, he said, was that the family lost a lot of money because his mom quit her job to go back to school and Jesus was out of work. He said that this was a problem “when we’re hungry and there’s hardly nothing to eat.” Asked what he would do if he were rich, Jorge said he would buy groceries and other things he needed and then give some of his money to orphans and the poor. Jorge’s worries might not have showed up in behavior that his mother or teachers would notice. He said that he thought about it, but didn’t talk about it with anyone. When he got worried or stressed, he would lie down. Lakeisha’s son, Eric, had serious cognitive problems that were diagnosed in infancy, but he was generally well behaved and got along with his friends. His severe learning problems made him eligible for federal disability payments under the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, and he was placed in special education when he entered kindergarten. When Eric was seven, his slow development was obvious to our interviewer. She wrote: “He said he liked school, but really couldn’t tell me a reason why, or what he liked most about school. He went on a field trip to a play today on the summer fest grounds. I asked him if he liked it, and he did. He could not remember what it was about, who was in it, what colors people wore, or anything at all about the play.” Our individual tests around that time indicated that his reading and math skills were well below average. Eric was good-looking, friendly, and outgoing at age eleven, in the sixth grade. But he continued to have serious delays in achievement, which were beginning to generate behavior problems. Lakeisha said that he sometimes got “real angry” at the teacher. She was concerned that his teacher did not understand his special needs. Eric described his grades as “not pretty good” when they had gone down to Cs and Ds. He was playing basketball at school, however, and felt that things with his friends were fine because they talked to each other and did things like walk around the neighborhood. Eric’s best friend lived across the street, and they had been friends for three years. They played video games and basketball as well as riding bikes together. 76

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Opportunities to learn social skills are especially important for children like Jorge, Caesar, and Eric who live in stressful family conditions. They all had fathers who were unavailable or inconsistent, and their families were always on the edge financially. Their mothers provided consistent care (more consistent than any of them had received from their own parents), but all of them lived with financial worries and job demands as well as tensions in their relationships with male partners and other family members. Parents in New Hope families reported more positive behavior for both boys and girls than parents in the control group did for their children.7 The New Hope parents, compared with control parents, said their daughters and sons had higher levels of responsibility, were more able to be independent, and were more likely to obey adults. Lakeisha generally thought that Monesha was a good, well-behaved child. At eight years old, Monesha talked proudly about keeping the house clean during the summer when her mother was at work. “You can’t have a dirty house. What if you have company and they see a dirty house?” Monesha said that they, she and her brother and sister, made their beds and that she usually washed the dishes and vacuumed. They made sure everything was put away and sometimes did the laundry. But teachers’ perceptions of boys and girls were very different. Although teachers rated New Hope boys higher on positive behavior than control boys, they reported worse behavior for the girls from New Hope families, especially in the follow-up after New Hope ended. During the program, teachers rated New Hope girls as more disobedient and aggressive. About 60 percent of the New Hope girls were rated higher on problems than the average comparison group girl.8 After the program ended, teachers still saw more behavior problems among New Hope girls, but by that time the problem behaviors were not so much disobedience and aggression as being sad and socially withdrawn, getting distracted from their work, and having poor study skills.9 These differences between parents’ and teachers’ perceptions are puzzling. Is it possible that girls in New Hope families became more disobedient and aggressive, more anxious, and more likely to get into conflicts with teachers even when behaving well at home? There are hints of this possibility in our conversations with Monesha. Although her teacher generally had positive comments about her, she occasionally got into trouble at school. During one visit, Monesha told our interviewer she was bad because she talked back to the teacher. The teacher called Lakeisha, saying that Monesha’s behavior was modeled after her “chumming buddy” in school who got in trouble frequently for talking back. In our interview with her at age thirteen, Monesha said that she was prone to “catch an attitude real quick. If somebody says something I 77

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don’t like, I catch an attitude.” Monesha realized that this tendency was “not going to get me anywhere in life.” She tried to cope with it by ignoring things that made her mad. Perhaps parents see the kinds of cooperation and helpfulness that Monesha displayed at home more than teachers do. Perhaps they are less concerned about occasional outbursts of temper or defiance. To better understand why boys and girls responded differently to New Hope, we look to the comparison families.10 In these more typical families, boys are considerably more vulnerable to low achievement and behavior problems than girls are. According to their teachers, compared with their sisters, boys in these control families performed less well academically and had more problems with study skills—attending to their work, resisting distraction, and completing assignments on their own.11 On average, they were less skilled at getting along with others and complying with adult instructions, and they were more likely to be aggressive and defiant. Although boys at every socioeconomic level have more learning and behavior problems than girls, boys growing up in low-income areas face a particularly potent set of challenges and temptations.12 They have few adult male models who have succeeded in the larger world of work or who are responsible, reliable fathers and partners. They often face a choice between navigating a poorly marked path to conventional success in work and family life and emulating the deviant adult males they see every day in their neighborhoods, who appear to be making significant amounts of money dealing drugs and stealing.13 The comparison families showed us that boys had much more room to gain from an intervention than did girls. Nonetheless, girls had plenty of room for improvement. It was therefore puzzling why New Hope led to consistent improvements for boys, but not for girls. One possible reason was suggested by our in-depth interviews with parents. Parents worry about their boys, especially when the boys reach early adolescence. They know that the boys are vulnerable, and they use any resources they have to counteract negative influences. As one mother said, “It’s different for girls. For boys, it’s dangerous. [Gangs are] full of older men who want these young ones to do their dirty work. And they’ll buy them things and give them money.”14 New Hope boys were more likely than girls to be in organized after-school programs where they received help with homework and had opportunities for recreation. One analysis of national survey data also demonstrated that parents invested more time and resources in their boys than in their girls.15 If that is the case, New Hope parents may have used their extra resources disproportionately to provide for their sons, but that pattern could also have made their sisters feel resentful. 78

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Girls, too, may see their mothers’ lives as previews of their own. Although New Hope increased parents’ employment and earnings, most of the mothers worked in low-wage jobs that provided a mix of rewards and stress and did not fit the glamorous aspirations their children expressed. Monesha’s view of the work world might have been colored by her mother’s fatigue and frustration with her supervisor, and by her mother’s pride in bringing home a paycheck.16 We wondered if girls had to take more responsibility at home when mothers worked longer hours, but that was not the case. Both boys and girls in New Hope families were slightly less likely than their counterparts in control families to have responsibility for caring for siblings, even after the program ended, probably because those brothers and sisters were more often in organized child care. Whatever the reasons, we do know that our survey results for boys are straightforward and consistent: boys in New Hope families are behaving much better according to parents and teachers as well as the children’s own reports, so much so that they caught up with their sisters. Given the hazards to boys in low-income families, it is especially important for their future prospects that New Hope improved both their school performance and their behavior in significant ways. For girls, New Hope appeared to help in some areas and hurt in others, particularly their interactions with their teachers. NEW HOPE: THAT EXTRA BOOST Most of the children in the three families we have described were doing reasonably well despite the odds against them, but is that because of New Hope or because they have competent mothers or other sources of strength? They all have mothers who are consistently present in their lives and who give them strong support and love. Inez said, “I can’t imagine where I would be without my kids. I mean, everything I do I do for them. I bust my butt at work for them.” Elena told us simply, “My kids are my life.” A field worker once complimented another mother, Marina, on how well behaved her older boys were. Marina believed that their good behavior was the result of her efforts to provide structure and stability. “You got to reinforce structure,” she said. “Well, I think that—even though I haven’t been so good at this—I would say stability [is needed for well-behaved children].”17 Both Inez and Elena spent significant time and energy finding opportunities and services for their children. Elena sought parenting classes when Caesar was very young because she realized she did not know much about caring for a baby. She visited several child-care centers before selecting the one she believed treated children kindly and with love 79

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and provided educational experiences. Lakeisha’s investment in her children’s lives is evident in her consistent expectations for them, her success in sticking with her second CSJ job when at times she really did not want to keep going, and her repeated moves to better neighborhoods. One might argue that these competent women would find a way to rear healthy children without a program such as New Hope. We expect they would certainly try, and their success would depend on the resources they could muster. However, there were just as many highly motivated and competent individuals in the control group who were trying to make the best life possible for their families. They just did not have New Hope available to them. Certainly, strong motivation led Inez, Lakeisha, and Elena to take advantage of those resources, but New Hope gave them something to work with. Political dialogues about social policy often revolve around fundamental issues of personal responsibility versus structural or societal causes for the problems associated with poverty. Some argue that the problems of poor people result from their lack of skills, low motivation, or immorality, concluding that all they need is individual effort and hard work. Others blame social conditions and the economic and social structures in society, calling for structural solutions such as full employment, living-wage policies, increased efforts to reduce sex and race discrimination in the workplace, and universally available child care and health care. Our evidence suggests some truth in both. Individual effort, goals, and talent make a difference. Inez, Elena, and Lakeisha are strong women with initiative and determination. What society offers them, however, is also critical. The more structural barriers they face, the less likely it is that their motivation and energy will be enough. If better resources are available, people can use them, but if they are not, then individuals have that much less to work with. New Hope’s philosophy fit the view that both individual initiative and societal supports are important—a positive social contract. Indeed, Americans appear to favor a “fair social exchange” where a concern for equity leads to support for replacing “welfare” with expanded social benefits.18 The New Hope program provided resources but was clearly based on the premise that individual participants also had to bring something to the table: effort, motivation, and the willingness to work. After all, New Hope and control group parents both applied for the program thinking they could work full time. The political scientist Lawrence Mead argued some years ago that the American public supports policies that fit this mold, policies that prevent severe poverty and want, at the same time expecting poor individuals to accept responsibility for helping themselves by working.19 80

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Social policies for families at all income levels provide supports that individuals can use to attain goals that society has deemed desirable. Some people use them, others do not. A few did not take any advantage of New Hope’s benefits, and many others used them selectively. From the standpoint of society, we can never expect a policy to work for everyone. The important question is whether it improves the odds of success. As we have seen, New Hope did that for many of the children in its families. The program had to exceed a high bar set by the policies available to control families because it was evaluated against existing state and federal policies. That is, we were not comparing it with “no services,” but with a system of work supports, health care, and child-care subsidies available in Wisconsin that was considerably more comprehensive than those in many other states. It is especially notable that New Hope did better than the existing, relatively strong system of supports, especially in promoting boys’ school achievement, school engagement, and social behavior. New Hope shows some of the potential benefits of a new social policy for working poor adults that will also help their children. If parents had had access to the earnings supplements, health insurance, and child-care supports provided by New Hope throughout their children’s lives rather than for only three years, we might have seen even more improvements for children. One cannot help but wonder whether Caesar’s behavior might have been less troubled if he had had consistent, quality child care in his early years, or if Caesar, Eric, and Monesha might all have fared better in their early school years if someone had detected and treated their hearing and vision problems earlier. The immediate goals of New Hope were to promote adult employment and reduce family poverty. However, the rationale for most of our nation’s welfare and poverty policies is to help children. That is why we provide many basic supports to parents, but not to other adults. The ultimate success of New Hope, or any other policy affecting families, rests on its ability to improve children’s lives and raise their prospects for the future.

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Chapter 7 Families

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o understand how New Hope affected children and their families, we begin with a snapshot of Lakeisha’s life, showing how family and work played out in her daily routine. Our imagined bus ride is based on Lakeisha’s descriptions of her daily life and her thoughts about her job, Kevin, the children, and how she managed their competing demands to meet her goals. It is a story woven from the many conversations we had with her during a period of several years and our own observations, but it is entirely true to the accounts that Lakeisha and the fieldworker who knew her well gave. The end of a typical work day in Lakeisha’s life finds her walking to her bus stop on a gusty October day, taking small comfort in the fact that Milwaukee had been spared yesterday’s rain. She was exhausted by her long and difficult day at work and could barely bring herself to think about all she needed to do when she got home. The day had started well enough, when Kevin, her live-in boyfriend, awakened her at six thirty. As Lakeisha was ironing her blouse for work, Kevin was already helping the children with their breakfasts and getting them ready for school. Then, while seven-year-old Eric and six-year-old Rhea waited for their school bus, Lakeisha and her older daughter, Monesha, hopped into Kevin’s car. Lakeisha knew what it was like to have no car and to depend on the bus to get her kids to three different places and then herself to work. Too often the damn bus was late or didn’t show up at all. After they dropped off Monesha, Kevin took Lakeisha to the downtown social service office where she worked as a receptionist. “Receptionist! Humph, more like general flunky,” she thought. Lakeisha remembered the day, two years earlier, when she had interviewed for the job. Her New Hope representative had helped her look for a place that would give her enough hours to qualify for New Hope benefits. With little work experience and three preschool children, she had barely hung on during her first days on the job, and things at work hadn’t gotten much easier.

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Thanks in part to her current family situation—with a supportive and helpful boyfriend and generally well-behaved children who were all old enough for public school—family life was rarely as stressful as it used to be. Work was another story. This morning, as she arrived shortly before eight o’clock, she was already dreading the day to come. It took two people to handle the reception and clerical work, but her coworker would be out on vacation all week. As a receptionist, she was on the front line of abuse from the clients her agency served. They were at her all day, begging, yelling, and demanding services. An unkempt woman who regularly wandered in and helped herself to “anything that is open” had swiped Lakeisha’s bag of chips when her back was turned. Dealing with all these people left her little time for her other duties. She was expected to answer the phone whenever it rang, but that pulled her away from the piles of paperwork waiting for her attention. She also had to fold the laundry that had been left by the night shift, bedding mostly. The work was OK—she could handle it now. But some of the supervisors were a pain. She had it out with them once in a while. But overall—she had to remain calm and courteous. Her supervisors were bossy and always seemed to be on a power trip. Even though she had worked at the agency for two years, they didn’t seem to have any confidence in her. They never said please or thank you, just “do it now!” Today was no exception. The printer needed toner, so a supervisor ordered Lakeisha to call a technician to come out and replace it. Then he stood there and watched her make the call. “And he wasn’t even my boss! Just a supervisor who wants to feel like he has power, so what else is new,” she thought. Didn’t she deserve some trust by now? She was all too aware that her job offered little of the flexibility that any working mother needs. Just recently Monesha had come down with the flu. When Lakeisha called in to say that she couldn’t come to work, her boss gave her some “attitude,” telling her that her children needed to be at school and that she needed to be at work. Lakeisha stayed home that day, but didn’t dare miss work twice in a row, so Kevin called in sick the next day, hoping that his absence would not jeopardize his job. Now, on the bus going home, Lakeisha thought again about quitting her job. But she liked having some money to buy things for the kids and she knew she had a pretty good situation and had learned a lot about working there. Quitting would make her wholly dependent on Kevin, and although he was great in most areas, she didn’t like the occasional comments he kept making about her spending. And how can you depend on a man? “Nope, I got to keep working . . . the kids need me and we need some sense of financial independence.” It’s not the best job in the world, but maybe it will get better. She knew that sometimes she could be short with the kids, snapping at 83

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them for even the smallest thing. “I’ve always had this tendency, though, of feeling tired and down pretty often.” Although she knew she would be tired that night, she felt up to spending at least a little time with her kids. No one had called her at work, so things at home must be okay. Her thirteen-year-old niece was there to keep an eye on things after school. If her niece had to run an errand, the neighbors would keep an eye out. The arrangement worked. Lakeisha had felt better about child care last year, when New Hope was still giving her some help. At least then she could afford a regular arrangement and knew that her kids were being well cared for while she was at work. She trusted her niece, but the girl was young. Still, it was the only workable arrangement she could afford. And it meant the kids were at home waiting for her; she didn’t have to pick them up somewhere else. Only Monesha had any homework at this point, and she always seemed to have it finished when Lakeisha got home. Eric didn’t really have homework in his special education classes. Thank goodness for Kevin. It was time for fall parent-teacher conferences, and Rhea’s kindergarten teacher had scheduled an afternoon meeting. There was no way Lakeisha’s supervisors would let her off early to attend. Kevin volunteered to leave work early so that he could go. And then there was Monesha’s summer school. Lakeisha would sign the letter for that, but Kevin had to go and talk to the people at the school about the schedule and all, since Lakeisha could not get off work. She hoped that the news from Rhea’s teacher would be good. They had enough on their hands with Monesha having to repeat first grade this year and Eric being diagnosed as mentally retarded and having to go to a special school. At least all the kids were well behaved for now, she thought. But she worried about what would happen as they got older. Lakeisha wondered if she might be in part to blame for Monesha’s and Eric’s difficulties in school. Maybe the stress from her job was keeping her from being a good parent. She needed to spend more time with the kids. But she was almost always too tired when she got home. Most nights lately, she would just watch a movie on television or read some and relax before going to bed. But she always managed to check in with them about homework and plans. As the bus approached her stop, Lakeisha began to think about dinner. She was glad that she had enough cash on hand to pick up some hamburgers at McDonald’s so she would not have to cook dinner. Kevin contributed enough so that they could buy dinner out a few times a week. Well, she does like to stop at the mall sometimes too, either on her way home or with the kids. “Kevin’s on me about the money sometimes, but what’s it for if you can’t be out like any other working person and enjoy a few things? Makes me feel good!” 84

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After dinner, as they did every weekday night, the kids took their baths at seven and were in bed by eight. Kevin went out to practice with his band. Lakeisha was able to spend a few quiet moments alone before going to bed herself.

Maintaining their families, raising kids, finding a partner, keeping their households safe—these were the ends for which work was the means. Balancing breadwinning, caregiving, and individual needs—that was the overarching goal for most people, whether or not they had children at home. Lakeisha was no exception. For her to engage with New Hope, the program had to fit her life circumstances, and it did. Over time, with changes in supervisors, she advanced to a higher-paid staff position and became more comfortable and positive about her work situation. Her ability to use New Hope was affected by her partner, her budget, and her children; she stayed with a job because it contributed to her family and personal situation. New Hope offered three benefits to working parents that could help them maintain that balance: increased income, child care, and health care. We use the information about how families used these benefits to understand why New Hope affected not only adults but their children as well, why children in program families did better in school, and why boys behaved better. Although ethnographic families’ conversations were filled with accounts of how that extra $100 or so a month made a difference, New Hope adults did not report higher living standards than comparison group adults in their survey responses. Child-care subsidies produced some of the largest differences for families, as revealed in both surveys and the ethnographic accounts, and health insurance was important to some. The benefits often accompanied increased employment, which might create stress and reduce time with parents, in addition to the positive consequences for families. Effects of the combination of benefits depended on the contexts of the participants’ families, particularly the roles of men as fathers and partners. “JUST BEING NORMAL AND DOING WHAT EVERYONE ELSE DOES”: THE BENEFITS OF HIGHER EARNINGS AND INCOME The higher earnings and incomes that New Hope produced should improve family life. At the most basic level, more income can help families to avoid some of the hardships associated with poverty, such as hunger, utility cutoffs, crowded housing, and unmet medical needs. Most of the 85

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families in the ethnographic study reported at least a few episodes when there was not enough food in the refrigerator, when the gas or electric company either stopped or threatened to shut off the utilities, when the rent did not get paid and a possible eviction loomed, or when the phone was disconnected. One mother reported that she “had to go down to the food pantry to get food for the kids to eat for the week. . . . [I] hadn’t been to the food pantry in a long time, but [I] had no other choice.” Another commented that her family had “enough food, but not always the kinds of food we want to eat.” In the survey of all families, about 10 percent reported not having enough food at least once in the past month, and about 40 percent reported utility shutoffs. New Hope succeeded in reducing some areas of hardship, but not others. Two years into the program, fewer participants reported unmet medical and dental needs and periods without health insurance than control group parents, although these differences are probably attributable as much to the health-care benefit as to the earnings supplements. There were no differences, however, between New Hope and control group families in housing problems, loss of utilities, or neighborhood conditions.1 New Hope earnings supplements, community-service jobs, and work threshold boosted family income and reduced poverty but led to few detectable differences in living standards. New Hope child-care subsidies increased children’s participation in centerbased child care and after-school programs. New Hope health insurance benefits led to fewer episodes of unmet medical and dental needs, and some improvement in adult mental and physical health.

Individuals talked about how having enough money to keep the family routine going helped them to carry out their responsibilities as parents.2 Participants pointed out that even small earnings supplements coupled with child-care subsidies enabled them to provide learning opportunities and activities for their children. From the time her children were very young, Inez gave them an allowance. They could spend part of it, but she required them to put one-half of it in a savings account to learn about handling and saving money. Lakeisha made sure her children had school uniforms and supplies and that they participated in after-school and summer programs, which cost money. Parents and children generally took great pride in being typical consumers—going to the mall or a fast-food restaurant, buying new clothes 86

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instead of thrift store specials, buying furniture, or purchasing a reliable used car. Many mothers echoed the sentiments of one woman who described shopping as “just being normal, doing what everybody does.” Some parents believed that giving their children the things a consumer society values was important to keeping them out of trouble. One mother put it, “[the earnings supplement] gives me money to do other things, and having [male] teenagers, it would take so much to compete with the streets and try to keep them on the right track, and that takes money. I [try] to provide them with enough of the basic things that kids really want so they won’t be tempted to really go out and do the wrong things.” Some parents were able to select schools they thought were better for their children. Inez took advantage of the Milwaukee Choice program for Jorge’s prekindergarten, and Lakeisha’s children attended a charter school. Two years into New Hope, about 9 percent of the program children, compared with 4 percent of the control group children, attended parochial schools. The numbers were small, but the difference was statistically significant.3 The conversations with the families in the ethnographic sample led us to conclude that New Hope produced greater sustainability—more resources and stability in the daily routine, less conflict, and less sense of stigma.4 It equipped families to handle the incessant drumbeat of cultural expectations that a caregiver or breadwinner should provide material goods and experiences to children. Although increased income should be beneficial to families and children, the requirements to work full time may come with consequences to children. On the one hand, children might profit from parents’ employment because it presents them with a model of self-sufficiency and striving and because parents’ experiences in the world of work may expand their social networks and interests. On the other hand, the value of work to child well-being may dissipate when parents put in long hours, often in more than one job.5 When Jorge was five, Inez took a second part-time job on weekends to earn extra money, and Jorge began to have behavior problems. He was refusing to listen to anyone and “pretending like he was the boss.” Inez was getting frequent calls from his teacher about problems in school. She tried to explain to him that part of the reason she was gone was so that he could have nicer things, but nothing was working, so she quit her job. As soon as she quit, Jorge’s behavior started to improve. CHILD CARE: A KEY SUPPORT The New Hope child-care subsidy enabled parents with children to work steadily and to choose a safe, reliable setting for their children. We heard 87

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these sentiments repeatedly: “New Hope was a lifesaver for me for the day care. . . . If it hadn’t been for that, I couldn’t really work.” The New Hope staff provided referrals to both centers and county-certified homebased providers (who could be relatives), but they advised parents to use center care because it was more reliable, and reliability would help people to keep their jobs. Center care does not fall through at the last minute because a caregiver is ill, and it does not become unavailable when a single caregiver’s schedule changes. The New Hope subsidy enabled parents to choose from a range of options because it paid most of the cost. Although both the control and program families had access to Wisconsin’s evolving subsidy system, the New Hope subsidy reached more families and had a higher maximum income limit for eligibility. New Hope paid providers directly and more promptly than the state did, and parents qualified automatically when they documented their work hours, rather than having to go through a separate and time-consuming application that might or might not be successful. As a result, more program than comparison group parents received subsidies.6 Child care is expensive for any parent, but it takes a major bite from the budgets of people with low incomes—from 18 to 33 percent of a family’s total income.7 The high cost limits choices. As one mother put it, “I was so limited. . . . Because if I had to pay, I was short of money and I needed to sacrifice other things, just to pay child care. If I was paying what I used to pay for her, I’d be spending more than 50 percent [of my income]. I’d be better off not working and staying at home.” Child-care settings are important for children’s developmental needs. The best national studies show that center-based care, on average, offers more educational advantages for young children after infancy than home-based care. Children who attend child-care centers have more advanced language and other cognitive skills when they reach school than children who have been in home-based care.8 New Hope parents chose care in centers rather than in someone’s home more often than control parents did. During the first two years of the program, 59 percent of the children in New Hope families had some experience in centers and after-school programs compared with 49 percent of children in control families. In control group families, children were more likely to be cared for in home settings by relatives or other adults, and older children were more often left without adult supervision.9 Overall, the child-care experiences made possible by the New Hope subsidy were almost certainly positive, because participants continued to use more center-based settings than control families did, even one to two years after the program subsidies ended. As one New Hope mother put it, “Educational-wise, the school child-care center where the 88

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kids are is excellent. They teach the kids a lot of writing. They talk to the kids. They teach them manners, not to fight. A lot of the home day cares, the kids don’t really learn anything.” Of course, high-quality care, whatever the setting, not only promotes children’s intellectual skills but also helps them learn to get along with one another and to be responsible for their own behavior.10 Centers vary greatly in quality, but the odds of a program with an educational focus, trained caregivers, and planned learning opportunities are greater in centers than in the informal arrangements often used by low-income families.11 Elena enrolled her three children (including Manuel Junior, who was born in 1996) in a child-care center rather than home-based care, in part because of a bad experience with a provider who put the children in a small room to watch television all day. When her son returned home, “he was quiet, did not play, did not do anything. . . . [He] would return as if hypnotized from watching too much television.” She was also worried about safety. “In a child-care center it is difficult for a teacher to mistreat the children because there are other parents and teachers going in and out, but in a house where somebody takes care of children, it is difficult to know what happens.” She also valued the educational and social opportunities her children had at the child-care center. She was surprised one day when one of her children said, “Thanks, mom”— something she had not taught them. Sometimes the experience of center care led reluctant parents to change their beliefs. One of our fieldworkers wrote: Evelia remained ambivalent. She worried that her daughter might also get sick or get lice from other children. Sometimes she felt that her daughter might be healthier in the care of trusted relatives. After a few months of this [center] arrangement, however, Evelia was thrilled with her child’s experiences in the day-care center. Evelia believed her daughter had really learned a great deal in the day-care center in just a short amount of time, lessons she could never have provided at home. Evelia even remarked that her daughter would be the smartest of all her children as a result of having been placed in a formal care setting.12

Center care is not the best option for all children, of course, and for many parents, it does not fit work schedules. Most centers and licensed home child-care settings do not operate in the evening or on weekends, when nearly 40 percent of low-wage earners work.13 Some parents worried that center-based care exposed their children to values they did not share. Marisa told of her daughter inviting a little boy from the center to 89

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her church, “because he did not know that there was a God.” She did not blame the center or the teachers, but she worried that the center staff did not share her devout Christian faith. Franco and Marta believed strongly that they should take care of their children. Franco said, “We will suffer taking care of our children. They are our responsibility. We bring them to this world, then we will suffer for them.” Nevertheless, New Hope helped stabilize child care for families, despite the fact that the monthly certification requirement meant losing the subsidy if average weekly work hours dropped below thirty for two consecutive months.14 Lakeisha used one licensed home-based provider for her three years in New Hope. When the program ended, she had to move her children because she could not afford the increase from 90 to 380 dollars per month. She then patched together sporadic care between Kevin, when he was off work or between jobs, a neighbor in her apartment building, and the daughter of a friend.

GETTING INVOLVED: AFTER-SCHOOL AND YOUTH PROGRAMS Young children in New Hope families spent more time than did young children in control group families in child-care centers and after-school programs, and older children and teenagers participated in organized activities more often than youth in control families did.15 They were more likely to play team sports, belong to clubs and youth groups, take music and art lessons, go to community centers, and participate in religious activities. All of these activities are designed to offer young people the opportunity to expand their skills in a supervised setting. The coaches, group leaders, clergy, and counselors who run them are often good mentors who encourage young people to expand their horizons, and group experiences provide opportunities for friendships and healthy peer relationships. Children and youth who are active in extracurricular activities are more likely to stay in school, achieve more, and avoid getting into trouble as they reach adolescence, and recent evidence shows that involving young women in volunteer activities is one of the more successful means of preventing teen pregnancy.16 Inez was an enthusiastic fan of her children’s activities. When Jorge was five, Inez enrolled him in the tee-ball program offered by his school. The games were on Saturdays, and Inez made sure that someone always went, even on the weekends when Jorge was at his grandmother’s house. Eric played on his school’s basketball team, and Lakeisha was glad that he would be at practice every day after school. Sometimes outside activities for older children involve work and 90

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learning a useful skill. For example, Alvin, a teenager of a New Hope participant, was interested in a career in computers. He helped out a relative who repaired computers and in return received a share of the payment. Another child of a New Hope participant, Anthony, belonged to a boxing club at a local gym because he liked the sport and could attend for free; the owner believed in giving kids a place to learn to box. Shanika went to the Y for sports programs and to church at least once a week, where she could “learn about Jesus” with her aunt. Elsie did community service work, which was a part of her school’s volunteer programs, by taking care of young children at a community center after school, where she felt safe and got credit. These activities were organized by community groups, schools, clubs and religious institutions, although relatives also played a role.17 They helped to develop skills and brought young people together with others with like interests, in safe surroundings, with some structure and goals— all demonstrated characteristics of programs that provide positive settings for youth.18 Participation in these activities was an indirect outcome of New Hope; the program did not provide youth activities. Yet higher participation by youth suggests that stabilizing and increasing income for parents contributed to increased participation.

HEALTH INSURANCE The health insurance offered by New Hope provided coverage for working adults and their families. During the first two years of the program, 87 percent of the adult participants compared with 74 percent of the control group had health insurance for some of the time. Probably as a result, fewer participants than control group members said they had gone without needed medical or dental care. After the end of the program, participants reported better physical health for themselves and their adolescent children than control group members did. As long as everyone in a family was healthy, parents did not consider the health insurance benefit to be as important as child care and income. But it was vital for people with acute or chronic health problems. This was especially true for the relatively high number of parents in the ethnographic sample who had a child with a disability that required ongoing care and special services. Katie, who lived with her son and daughter, reported that “what interests me most in New Hope is the health insurance. My daughter Erin has been very sick ever since she was about eight months old. I am always taking Erin to the hospital for her ear infections. . . . They put tubes in her ears, so pressure won’t build up in there and she won’t get 91

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many infections.” Although Katie’s job offered health insurance, it was too expensive—$130 every two weeks, not counting the copayments for doctor visits and prescription drugs. Having insurance sometimes made it possible to meet important social needs as well. As one mother said, “I got both of my sons contact [lenses]. They been wanting contacts for the longest time. I couldn’t even dream about it. But with that insurance, I paid just twenty dollars for each one. In that age group, you know, it’s important how they look and all that. . . . I couldn’t afford to buy them the kind of glasses they would have wanted.” Once New Hope ended, participants with children were no more likely than control group parents to be insured, but two years after the end of the program, between 85 and 90 percent of both New Hope and control parents were insured, reflecting the expanded public and employer coverage that had become available in Wisconsin.19 Nevertheless, many people lost coverage at least for some periods of time, making life that much more precarious. “My life became hardest after the help ended,” one mother said, “because now I don’t have health insurance.” Another reported that she and her husband had continued their coverage because health insurance was available through his work, but after he lost his job, they were again uninsured. A subsequent surgery left them with a significant family debt. NEW HOPE FOR THE FUTURE: EFFECTS ON INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING Because New Hope led to more stable employment, less poverty, fewer problems with children, and better family circumstances, we thought it might improve parents’ sense of psychological well-being as well. Many New Hope participants in focus groups reported that they had developed greater self-esteem and more courage to try new experiences. As one participant put it, “New Hope gives you self-esteem, when you’re depressed and you’re down and you can’t look to your friend or your neighbor or nobody.” Another said, “My self-esteem was higher, my productivity with my job is much better. Thank God I found a job in which I am doing very well and I like it very much . . . and this has to do with. . . . I wasn’t under pressure to find a job. I was able to go from one interview to another, and it gave me enough self-esteem to go to a place where I feel comfortable.” Others described reduced anxiety. “To me,” one participant explained, “New Hope was . . . a security net. You could make that step [leaving AFDC] without having to be afraid. You knew if things didn’t 92

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[go well], if the transition wasn’t real smooth, if anything unexpected happen, you’d have something there to catch you, for you to fall into so you don’t kill yourself.” Although the program had scattered impacts on adult psychological well-being, the effects were not as strong as we had expected. During the program, participants had a greater sense that they could control their lives and achieve their goals, giving them more hope for the future. They reported lower levels of general stress in their lives, despite experiencing more time pressure.20 After the program ended (but not during it), New Hope parents reported somewhat fewer symptoms of depression (for example, frequent crying spells and chronic fatigue).21 Favorable family situations and support from partners as well as improved financial and work situations appeared to contribute to people’s improved sense of well-being.22 Parents’ anxieties are one avenue through which poverty affects children’s well-being. Parents living in poverty report worrying about unpaid bills, chronic debt, and such daily hassles as fending off bill collectors, dealing with landlords who will not fix the roof or the plumbing, and fighting with bureaucracies for benefits. As a result, some parents can become insensitive and impatient with their children. The consequences are often seen in children’s problem behavior— aggression, disobedience, social withdrawal, and high anxiety.23 If New Hope supported improved parental self-esteem and reduced stress, parents may have been warmer and more consistent with their children. We found only scattered evidence of changes in parent-child relationships, but the program did lead to fewer problems with disobedience, less need for punishment, and less stress associated with parenting, especially for boys and especially as children got older.24 Parents affect their children’s lives not only by warmth and discipline, but by “family management”—decisions about child care, schools, neighborhoods, and activities.25 Organizing daily routines was an important part of many parents’ efforts to create family stability. We have already seen that New Hope influenced selection of child care and after-school activities, and some parents explicitly mentioned the importance of having more opportunity to change their household situations for the better. THE MEN IN THEIR LIVES Scholars and politicians point to unmarried childbirth and single-mother families as a major cause of poverty. The 1996 welfare reform legislation was designed to reduce the rate of unmarried births and to require fathers to be financially responsible for their children, whether or not they lived with them. New Hope was not intended to modify family structure 93

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or to enforce child support obligations, but our interviews with families made clear the salient roles that men played. Men often provided resources and child care for the families in the study, although they were rarely married to the mothers, frequently were not biologically related to the children, and were not always living with the mother. Children had complicated relationships with their fathers and stepfathers. Inez’s succession of male partners rarely provided strong and continuous support, whether emotional or financial, to her family. Lakeisha split up with Tyrone, the father of her children, before signing up for New Hope, and started living with Kevin about a year later. For the entire seven years of our visits, Lakeisha and Kevin stayed together, sharing expenses, child care, and housework, and helping each other with family or health problems. In part because she could not afford a divorce and in part from inertia, she remained married to Tyrone. Lakeisha described Kevin as a “strong uncle” to her children. He disciplined them and provided a male presence. Having a father figure in the house was very important to her. Some fathers were absent entirely, but many had intermittent, rather unpredictable contact with the children and their mothers. Mothers and children alike were ambivalent about the men’s sporadic visits and gifts. Tyrone reentered his children’s lives by initiating visits when Monesha was eight and Eric was seven. He invited the children to spend part of the summer at his home in another state. The kids were all packed and waiting for him, but he failed to show up. When Lakeisha called him, his girlfriend answered and promised to come the next weekend. Again, no one showed up. Lakeisha and her children were furious. “They get their hopes up so high,” she said, “and then they just get torn up when he’s not there.” Eventually, they did go and had a good time. In later years, they sometimes spent the entire summer with him. On balance, Lakeisha welcomed the renewed contact because the children enjoyed the visits, which also gave her a break from the responsibilities of motherhood and the need to find and pay for child care when the children were not in school. Public policies center on establishing paternity and enforcing child support, sending the implicit message that mothers need only economic support from fathers to rear their children successfully.26 Virtually all of the forty-four mothers with whom we talked took a much broader view. Certainly, they wanted financial support, but they emphasized the importance of a father or father figure as a cultural ideal, even when they had turbulent and unstable relationships with men. One of the mothers poignantly summed up her ambivalence: “I wish [the father] wasn’t involved with my kids, because he drank and beat me up, and he disappoints my kids, but I want them to have a father.” As did Lakeisha, most 94

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mothers tried to help their children sustain a connection with their fathers, even when they had a new husband or partner. Inez maintained a regular schedule of visits for her sons with Marco’s mother, although Marco refused to have contact with the children. She valued her children’s relationships with their grandparents, and the visits gave her some time to herself. Some single mothers wanted nothing to do with the biological fathers of their children, often for good reason.27 When Jorge was about six, Inez ran into his biological father, Paulo, on the street. It took a moment for them to recognize one another. She knew he had been in jail for several years. When Paulo asked Inez where she was going, she replied that she was going to pick up her son (Jorge). “You mean, my son,” he said. “No, my son,” Inez replied. Paulo threatened to go to court and try to get visitation rights. That was fine with her, she said, he could try if he liked. But if he took her to court, she would sue him for six years of back child support. She never heard from him again. Fathers played widely varying roles in the families. Five years after the start of New Hope, only one in ten of the children were living with their biological fathers, and one in three had no contact. For the rest, involvement ranged from substantial—participating in decisions about schooling, providing transportation to and from school or other activities—to occasional gifts on birthdays and Christmas and visits in the summer.28 Few fathers paid formal child support, but more than half made occasional informal contributions, including buying groceries, fixing the car, buying clothes and toys, paying for classes or summer programs, giving the mother cash at intervals, or paying an occasional bill in an emergency. MARRIAGE New Hope was not designed to influence marriage or cohabitation, but there were reasons to expect that it might. Boosting employment, earnings, and family income could alter the terms under which people enter into partnerships or marriage. Marriage might be either more or less likely.29 Higher earnings might make individuals more attractive to potential partners, making marriage more likely, or financial independence might enable people to be choosier about a partner, making marriage less likely, but perhaps more likely to succeed when it did occur. Some mothers in the ethnographic sample with more earnings and job stability said they gained the ability to separate from partners they had tolerated before. Inez’s strong employment history, which was bolstered by New 95

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Hope, gave her bargaining power that was evident in her relationship with Vito. As she said, “He knows that if I ain’t happy, he ain’t happy.” In fact, New Hope led to more women being married two years after the program ended, but only for those who had never been married when they applied for it.30 Among these women, 21 percent of the program group was married, compared with 12 percent of the control group, a difference greater than could be attributed to chance alone.31 A parallel study of the Minnesota Family Investment Program, a work- and income-boosting experiment, produced a similar result: mothers who participated in the program were more likely to marry than their counterparts in the comparison group.32 Although there were small increases in marriage, the great majority of mothers in our sample remained unmarried. This fact would seem to confirm stereotypes that poor adults do not value marriage and monogamy. However, both our ethnographic study and abundant research on other low-income adults show that they hold ideals and high standards for marriage that often place it beyond their reach.33 Before marrying, they want financial stability for themselves and their partner, and they want adequate assets—a house, a car, and money in the bank. In our last interview with Inez, she was once again planning to marry the man she was living with, but not until “next year” when they could afford a house of their own. Lakeisha thought that she would eventually like to marry Kevin. But, near the end of our visits, she still needed to finalize the divorce from Tyrone, after which she and Kevin wanted to have a nice wedding and a party. Unlike many others, they already had a house. The women wanted to find someone they could trust not to leave them, not to cheat on them, and not to get involved in illegal activities. They wanted a stable relationship with someone who merits long-term commitment. These are not easy criteria for anyone to satisfy, poor or affluent. They are even rarer when a person is poor, has children, has a history of unstable or abusive relationships, and lives on the financial edge in the low-wage labor market. Women in our sample described men who contributed little to the household budget, did no child care or housework, cheated on their partner, and showed favoritism to children born to other women. The same men, however, were sometimes home to watch the children, pick them up after school, help them with homework, provide transportation, and cook the meals. Many women in the ethnographic study said they stayed with their partners at least in part for financial reasons or for support with household work and child care.34 About half of the women in our study reported abuse and violence, excessive drinking, and drug use among the men they lived with. Elena stayed in her violent relationship with Manuel for many years, in part 96

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because her continuing money management problems made his income essential and in part because he provided needed household support. When she returned to Central America to visit relatives, Manuel took vacation time to care for the children. He paid for household expenses, cooked, cleaned, and supervised the children. “He does everything in the house,” she said, “I don’t do much of anything.” We did not ask about domestic violence and partners’ substance abuse problems in our surveys of the entire New Hope sample, thus cannot know whether these experiences were affected by the program. Women in two similar experimental programs designed to increase employment in Minnesota and Atlanta, however, did report significantly less domestic violence than women in the comparison groups did.35 NEW HOPE PARENTS: EXCEPTIONS OR THE RULE? New Hope contributed to parents’ and children’s lives by providing benefits and work supports, but one might wonder whether those who succeeded in using the program were typical parents living in poverty. Elena, Inez, and Lakeisha demonstrated strong commitment to their children, providing them with love and attention, homes, monitoring and supervision, connections to extended family and community, and some values and goals for the future. Their lives were not trouble free. Each had periodic conflicts with partners, family, or people at work, worries about money, and bouts of depression or feeling discouraged—but they managed. Their competent parenting contrasts with popular images of poor families. In his book American Dream, published in 2004, Jason DeParle described the lives of three Milwaukee women, their partners, and the ten children in their households during the same period as the New Hope program. One fought drug addiction and all had chaotic lives.36 Even Angie, the woman who worked hardest and achieved the greatest independence from welfare, had children who stopped going to school and found themselves pregnant at an early age. During her long hours away from home at work, they had little direction or supervision. DeParle’s sympathetic account shows family turbulence and risky life pathways for children before, during, and after welfare reform, despite the parents’ many hours of hard work. A few in our sample had family lives like those DeParle described. Some had physical and mental health problems that affected their ability to work, remain in relationships, and care for their children. About half the women reported abuse and violence, excessive drinking, or drug use by the men in their lives, or described their own problems with alcohol 97

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or drugs. They worried about their children being placed in foster care. One couple experienced chronic periods of violence and homelessness, and their children ultimately moved out onto the streets, some into prostitution. The majority of our families, however, were more like the working poor families described by other authors. In a detailed portrait of the incomes, expenditures, and family life of more than 400 working and welfare-reliant mothers, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein found that most people managed money carefully and used a range of strategies to find resources and services, juggle contributions from boyfriends, and work “off the books.”37 Katherine Newman’s portrayal of working poor life in New York City describes the strong “family values” parents tried to convey to their children, albeit sometimes undermined by their own flaws, their neighborhoods, and their jobs.38 Because they volunteered for a work-based program, New Hope applicants may not have been typical of all poor adults in Milwaukee, but the differences should not be exaggerated. Most applicants had been unemployed, had low earnings, and had received welfare at some point in their past; most had never married and were living with their children.39 There is no single emblematic low-income adult, and the New Hope sample includes a wide variety of people who share many of the characteristics of working poor adults in the United States. SUCCESSFUL FAMILIES “I want what everyone wants—a steady job, a house, a husband, and a family.” At every turn, parents like this woman juggled work and income concerns with caregiving, household management, and partnerships in an attempt to achieve these goals, even though the vagaries of the low-wage job market often thwarted their efforts. They made a complicated series of decisions about whether using New Hope would assist them in providing for their families, caring for their children, and making their relationships with partners work. Because each person used New Hope differently, it is difficult to identify any one reason why the program affected children’s school performance and behavior so consistently. In chapter 5, we showed that New Hope boosted work and earnings for people who were not working full time when they applied for the program, but not for people who were already working full time. Program impacts on family life and children, however, were similar across families with different employment histories, suggesting that parents’ work and earnings were not the only (or perhaps not even the major) factors leading to higher-achieving and better-adjusted children. We suspect that families with different employ98

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ment backgrounds and obstacles found different ways of using program benefits to promote their children’s well-being.40 Both child-care subsidies and health-care insurance, resources not reflected in earnings or family income, may have contributed directly to children’s well-being, and may have freed up cash for other purposes. Perhaps the single most important benefit, at least for families with young children, was assistance with child-care costs. Parents used the subsidy to obtain care they considered higher quality; they more often used centers that provided some educational activities; and they were able to maintain more stable child care for their children. As children grew up, they were more involved in community and school activities that may have offered supervision, learning experiences, and contacts with nondeviant peers. For some families, good health insurance, more sustainable family routines, and parents’ marriages may also have contributed to children’s well-being. Our best guess is that “all of the above” were important in various combinations for different families.

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I

n 2004, a full decade after she became eligible for New Hope’s benefits, Lakeisha, at age thirty-three, was still with Kevin, and they had purchased a small, well-kept house in a quiet, safe northside Milwaukee neighborhood. She and Kevin were planning to marry since Lakeisha had filed for divorce from Tyrone. She worked at the same agency that provided her second New Hope community service job, at an annual salary of a little more than $17,000 with fringe benefits. She did data entry and office coordination work, and still found time to lend an ear when the people coming into the agency needed someone to talk to. About a year earlier, she was finally able to buy a car. Her eight-to-five schedule allowed her to drop the children off at school and pick them up afterward (they attended an after-school program), though it did not leave her as much time with her children as she would have liked. Her two daughters, Monesha and Rhea, were doing well at school. Lakeisha hoped that both would earn college degrees but had not explicitly encouraged them to think along these lines. Her son, Eric, continued to struggle with his learning disability, but he was doing fine in school and remained engaged. He was in a combination of regular and special education classes. Lakeisha, however, worried about his future. Kevin’s job as a driver paid more than Lakeisha’s but required a variable combination of both early morning and evening work. With their combined incomes, making ends meet was less of a problem than it once was. Apart from mortgage and car payments they had few outstanding debts. Her emotional health had been up and down, but she reported feeling “really positive” lately. Lakeisha still had fond memories of the New Hope program, but if it were resurrected, she would not apply because “other people should have a chance to get it.” Our 2004 visit found Elena, at thirty-three, in her eighth year as a caseworker for a human services company. She still liked her job and her coworkers, earned more than $35,000 a year, and enjoyed a full range of fringe benefits. Despite her relatively high salary, she continued to struggle with managing her money. Her electricity was cut off just a

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month before our visit and not restored until she made a $600 down payment on her substantial debt with the utility company. Elena’s financial situation was precarious because of her spending habits and debts. In late 1998 (about a year after the end of New Hope), her debts totaled more than $20,000, not including money she owed to members of her family. In 1999 she was forced to declare bankruptcy. At the time of our visit in 2004, five years beyond that bankruptcy filing, she still had trouble avoiding impulse purchases. About two years earlier, after years of a chaotic relationship, she had separated from Manuel. Even after he moved out, however, he visited her apartment almost daily, and their fights and his abuse continued for some time. The big surprise in Elena’s life was that she was about to marry Felipe, whom she had met in the Caribbean two years ago. They had seen each other a few times since then, and he arrived in Milwaukee two weeks before our visit on a ninety-day “fiance´” visa. Manuel had since stopped coming to her apartment, much to Elena’s relief. “Since Felipe arrived I feel that I have a home, I have a family,” she said. “It’s different. Everything was a fight, screaming, hitting. Felipe is not aggressive and doesn’t scream. He wants to resolve things through talking.” She said she was “figuring out” how to communicate in this way. Elena had high hopes that her relationship with Felipe would mark the end of constant arguments and domestic abuse in her family, but she was cautious. “The fact that we are getting along so well may be a honeymoon period. I’m very used to living alone and I’m still trying to adjust to living with someone.” Although college-educated, Felipe faced possible difficulty finding a job until his English improved, but he was looking and ambitious to succeed in the United States. He had taken over managing Elena’s household—cooking, cleaning, repairing, looking after the children, and helping her to get her finances under control. “Before Felipe came,” she explained, “we ate out almost every day. Now he cooks, and we eat out like once a week. I have $150 left from my last paycheck, which never happens.” Her son, Caesar, had recently confided to Elena how happy he was that there was no more violence in the household. According to his teacher, eight-year-old Manuel Junior could not stop talking about his new stepfather. Only her daughter, Libertad, worried about her father being sad now that he came over less often. At age twelve, Caesar still had attention deficit and behavior problems. Elena reported that he “is not an A student, but his grades have gone up in the last year or so to around a B+ when he used to get Cs and Ds.” Libertad, who was ten, did well in school, and was usually in charge when the children are 101

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alone. Elena noted that “Caesar is very immature and Libertad is smart and more responsible.” Inez, at twenty-nine, had quit her job at the end of 2003 to attend school full time, hoping to fulfill her dream of a college degree. To make ends meet, she and Jesus, who had moved in with her about a year earlier, lived with her mother and stepfather. Jesus earned $1,200 a month, and Inez received about $500 from the Wisconsin Works (W-2) cash assistance program and food stamps as well as health insurance from the BadgerCare program. The W-2 program stipulated twenty hours of clerical work in exchange for her benefits, a requirement she was happy to fulfill because she likes the fact that W-2 prevents people from “just sitting at home. You have to earn [the benefits].” Even with some income and no rent to pay, Inez’s finances were tight. Her credit needed “fixing” and her son, ten-year-old Jorge, still remembered times when there was not enough food in the house. She had decided to go back to work; she wanted to have an independent income. She was fairly sure she would start a new full-time job at $14 an hour in two weeks, but expected to continue in school and finish her degree by 2008. Inez and Jesus had been dating for a few years, and they planned to marry. But not yet. As with many low-income couples, they were waiting until their economic prospects improved. “We will probably get married next year, and we will have our own house before we do it,” she says. Inez’s two boys were doing well at school. She monitored their homework closely and volunteered in their classrooms. Her mother and stepfather looked after the children while she was at work, and her mother did most of the cooking and cleaning for the family. The ten years since New Hope began had done little to dent Inez’s optimism about life’s opportunities. She still believed that people could get ahead if they really wanted to. NEW HOPE IS ONE OF MANY NEEDED SUPPORTS In the decade since they were accepted into the New Hope program, Lakeisha, Elena, and Inez had each managed almost continuous employment and some advancement in wages. All had provided more stable homes for their children than their own parents had for them. In 1994, when New Hope opened, all were single mothers with very young children. Only Elena had a full-time job. Lakeisha was not working, Inez worked part time, and both were collecting welfare. Each of these women profited from the program’s benefits, but in 102

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different ways. Community service jobs enabled Lakeisha to move into full-time work despite having no high school degree and little work experience. Eight years later, she said, “New Hope came along and really helped me out. I got a job and make enough money.” For Inez, the child care, health care, and counseling were critical in helping her to secure and maintain full-time employment and provide satisfactory care for her children. Elena described her experience with New Hope as a “life change. My job was on the line because I didn’t have any child care.” All three said that the New Hope child-care subsidy enabled them to use secure, stable child care in a setting they felt was safe, where people were kind, and that offered educational and social benefits to their children during their crucial early years. Lakeisha, Elena, and Inez represent the New Hope participants who took advantage of the program to varying degrees, but theirs are not the only stories. Sandra, an immigrant from Mexico who was trapped in an abusive marriage, literally escaped from her husband after he beat and raped her and abused her young son when they were working in migrant agricultural jobs. When she entered New Hope in her late thirties, she used the community service job option, but later quit a full-time job after her supervisor hit her in the face with a bottle. With limited English skills, she took a long time to find other work. In 2004, at age fortyseven, she was working full time in a nursing home, earning $8.50 an hour in a job with health benefits. Of her $850 a month in take-home pay, she pays rent of about $375 for a subsidized apartment. The job is stressful, and she had some conflicts with her supervisors after they refused to let her go to the hospital when she fell and broke four ribs. She had had one brief and unhappy relationship with a man in the previous ten years and had no family or social support system nearby. She was often depressed. Her twenty-year-old son had dropped out of school in tenth grade, and was in jail again after a series of convictions for drug use and drunk driving. Her daughter, age sixteen, reported that she had a B average, but Sandra was concerned that the girl was skipping school. New Hope’s social contract of work supports in exchange for fulltime employment was never expected to solve all of the problems of the working poor. The founders designed the program to address some of the economic barriers that low-income adults faced: the inability to find a job, jobs that failed to provide an income that lifted them out of poverty or offered affordable health insurance, and lack of affordable child care.1 New Hope left unaddressed many structural and societal problems facing the working poor. It did not raise the minimum wage; it did not provide universal health care; it did not bring new jobs any closer to Milwaukee’s inner-city neighborhoods; and it could not remedy the problems of poor job quality, discrimination, or harassment on the job. 103

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It did not attempt to organize the poor in Milwaukee into a political force.2 Nor did New Hope seek to solve a number of serious personal obstacles that many low-income adults face—mental illness, physical abuse, substance abuse, children with physical and behavioral disabilities, or criminal behavior—although the staff frequently talked with participants about these issues and referred them to agencies and institutions that might help. The program did provide some assistance in remedying deficiencies in education by offering wages for ten hours a week of schooling when participants were working thirty hours in a community service job, but it did not support full-time school attendance. Although the program did not provide all of the services needed by people with serious personal barriers to employment, New Hope–type benefits may still be part of the solution for them. The program did not appear to hurt people like Sandra. In fact, in 2004 she was working full time and might well have been worse off without the boost from a community service job and other New Hope benefits. Yet it was not enough to enable her to escape poverty or to alleviate the many other life stresses she faced. The New Hope contract, “If you work, you should not be poor,” obviously does not imply that if you do not work, you should be poor. Rather, the evidence from both the experimental and ethnographic findings suggests that other supports beyond the New Hope model are needed for those who, for a variety of other reasons, cannot or are not working. THE IMPORTANCE OF PROGRAM FLEXIBILITY New Hope offered a package of work supports and services intended to serve as a model for state and national policy. Stories about individuals’ experiences help us to understand how it affected people’s lives, but it is only through an evaluation of the program that we can determine how much better New Hope participants did, compared with people who had access only to the welfare and work support policies available in Wisconsin during the middle to late 1990s. This comparison sets a high bar, at least for parents with resident children, because Wisconsin was implementing W-2, a vigorous welfare-to-work program, and both state and federal earned income tax credits (EITC) and child-care assistance were expanding rapidly to support work by low-income parents. These federal and state policies affected both program and control groups, and New Hope had to show that it could do even better than existing programs. The test was perhaps less stringent for adults without resident children because the control group was ineligible for most state pro104

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grams, with the notable exception of food stamps and, if their earnings were very low, a modest federal EITC payment. Past efforts to promote work among low-income men, however, have demonstrated that it is not easily done. The fundamental premise of New Hope was a social contract based on work. The cafeteria-style benefit package boosted employment for individuals seeking full-time work but, if anything, led people who already had full-time employment to cut back on overtime hours and second jobs. New Hope participants were more likely to hold fairly highwage jobs, and more of them had stable employment, even after the program ended. New Hope increased the work effort of single men somewhat, a rare achievement among work-focused policies. Although many of the impacts on employment disappeared when the three-year eligibility period ended, they persisted for nearly a decade for people like Elena and Inez, who faced just one or two initial obstacles to steady employment. Unlike many welfare-to-work programs, New Hope’s primary goal was to reduce poverty. Here again, the bar was high for demonstrating a program impact, because poverty rates among single-mother families fell substantially during the late 1990s.3 And yet here again, New Hope succeeded: substantially fewer program than control group members were poor during the three years of benefits. To be sure, not all participants were lifted out of poverty, but on balance New Hope was considerably more successful than Wisconsin’s emerging collection of programs that focused on reducing poverty. Many participants reported that they had gained confidence and selfesteem and received help in meeting their employment goals. These indirect consequences may have led to some of the employment gains, but they paid off in other ways as well: participants reported less stress, more optimism about the future, and fewer financial worries. Two years after the program ended, they enjoyed better physical health and were less likely to be depressed than members of the comparison group. They also knew more about the EITC and community resources, such as where to find assistance with energy costs or housing problems. Child well-being is rarely mentioned in discussions of work-based programs for parents, but improving conditions for the next generation is an important goal of national and state antipoverty policies. That is why most poverty programs are limited to children or to families with children. We expected New Hope to improve children’s well-being because it would raise family income, lead to better and more stable child care, and provide health care. Even we were surprised, however, at how much difference it made. New Hope led to large and persistent changes in children’s school 105

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achievement, with the strongest effects for boys. Boys in New Hope families not only performed better, but were also more motivated and engaged in school, had higher aspirations for the future, and were better behaved than their counterparts. The differences are large enough to merit the attention of policy makers. Because boys in low-income families are more vulnerable than girls to school failure and antisocial behavior, a program that arrests these trends has real social value. We are not sure which components of New Hope were primarily responsible for its beneficial effects on children, but child care and out-ofschool programs are likely candidates. New Hope increased children’s time in formal center-based care and after-school programs, and it increased the stability of their child-care arrangements. Even after eligibility for New Hope child-care subsidies had ended, program group parents continued to place their children in center-based care and after-school programs rather than using home-based or unsupervised care. Apparently, parents had come to value organized programs, and New Hope’s income boost may have allowed them to choose the care they preferred. Child-care centers and after-school programs are more likely than informal settings to offer educational activities, reinforce school involvement, and provide help with school work, all of which may have contributed to children’s improved school performance.4 New Hope also increased children’s and adolescents’ participation in structured out-of-school activities—sports, lessons, religious and youth groups, and clubs—which may have offered alternatives to hanging out with peers in the neighborhood without supervision.5 Additional resources may also have contributed to children’s wellbeing. Our interviews suggest that New Hope parents sometimes channeled extra money to provide goods or activities for their boys, whom they often viewed as especially vulnerable to the gang influences so prevalent in their neighborhoods. The program benefits enabled the many parents whose children had significant behavioral, learning, and developmental troubles to have a more sustainable family routine. Our intensive conversations with forty-four randomly selected program and control families shed light on how New Hope helped, or failed to help, families with children. From these conversations, we saw that the cafeteria model of supports allowed parents to meet critical but diverse needs. No single program feature in isolation made the difference. Rather, it was the fit of the varied combinations of benefits with the different people, family situations, and needs that helped them stem the often overwhelming problems parents faced. New Hope helped families by providing more income and employment stability, secure and stable child care, and health insurance for the whole family, as well as helping

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them find a sense of purpose toward goals and, in some cases, more stable partners and marriage. Supports in just one area enabled some people to get better jobs and work more steadily, others used the entire package to balance breadwinning with family responsibilities, and still others did not use the program successfully. Despite the boost in average levels of employment, substantial numbers of participants did not sustain full-time work. Despite the reductions in the percentage of families in poverty, many participants remained poor. Even in this well-implemented program, some adults opted out, did not understand the program, or could not manage fulltime employment for a variety of reasons. Although New Hope improved the lives of many adults and children, it was far from being a cure-all. But no policy works for everyone. The real questions are simple. Did the odds of success improve? The answer is clearly yes. If so, did the benefits exceed the costs? THE BOTTOM LINE: COSTS VERSUS BENEFITS New Hope’s successes in improving the lives of low-income working families did not come cheap. The administration and the benefits package for participants with young children were estimated at costing $6,600 more per participant per year than Wisconsin was spending for the comparison group in the mid-1990s.6 Given Wisconsin’s increased spending on child care and health insurance for its low-income families since then, New Hope might run $3,300 more per participant per year than Wisconsin’s programs. Many states, however, currently spend considerably less than Wisconsin does, which would drive up the program price tag were a similar program to be implemented elsewhere, although lower living costs in many of those states would help reduce costs as well. However, with child-care subsidies accounting for nearly a third of New Hope’s total annual expenditures, program costs for individuals without childcare needs would be correspondingly lower. The total cost of implementing a full-scale version of a New Hope– style program also depends on how many people would participate. Recall that fewer people than expected volunteered for New Hope when it opened its doors in 1994, and the organizers were forced to expand outreach activities and extend the geographic boundaries of eligibility to enroll the target set of about 1,400 individuals.7 A state-run version of New Hope might attract more attention and participation, especially once it became a regular offering, more like the EITC, or unemployment insurance, or BadgerCare.8 Before New Hope began, evaluators conducting a survey of the individuals living in New Hope’s neighborhoods

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explained the idea to respondents and asked whether they would enroll if they were given more thorough information about it.9 Only about half of the eligible individuals said they would be “somewhat” or “very” likely to apply; that is, it appears that the number enrolling in a state or national program would probably be considerably lower than the number eligible. If the New Hope bundle of benefits were to be offered in Wisconsin today, would the benefits from the additional $3,300 expenditure exceed the costs? Added earnings and reduced welfare spending are relatively easy to measure from New Hope’s trial run. New Hope participants earned an average of about $400 more per year than control group members did during the program period, with program-paid community service job earnings accounting for about a third of this difference. For applicants who were not employed full time when they signed up for the program, the annual earnings advantage was about $800. Among applicants who reported a limited number of obstacles to full-time employment—the kinds of problems that New Hope could address—the earnings advantage was $1,900 a year. Although these earnings impacts are noteworthy, they do not exceed the program’s total costs.10 Nor do the reductions in welfare program spending balance program costs, because the dramatic drop in the use of these state programs for New Hope families was nearly matched by families in the control group. More difficult is putting a dollar value on the large program impacts on children’s behavior and school achievement, and on the reductions in health problems, stress, and depressive symptoms reported by New Hope adults. Programs that prevent grade failure or reduce the number of students in special education programs can save school districts thousands of dollars per child. If positive behavior persists through the teenage and young adult years and results in less crime and incarceration, then the savings can amount to tens of thousands of dollars per child, exceeding program costs several times over.11 It is noteworthy that New Hope’s positive impacts on achievement and behavior persisted two years beyond the study, when many of the children had reached adolescence. A permanent New Hope–type program might be even more likely to perpetuate these achievement and behavior gains, especially if it were available from the preschool years on. Even more difficult to quantify is enhanced quality of family life— saving enough money for a down payment on a house, finally having a car that is reliable, taking children to a family reunion, or being able to buy those contact lenses that increase a child’s self-esteem, for example. These nonmonetary outcomes can be deeply important to a family’s ability to succeed or to a child’s sense of self. Society is also better

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off when it values the contributions of low-wage, full-time workers and their families.12 GOING TO SCALE: CAN NEW HOPE WORK NATIONALLY? New Hope shows that it is possible to do better by working adults and their children than we as a nation have so far. But is New Hope a viable model for a state or national approach to improving the lot of low income workers? After all, the program was community initiated and served fewer than 1,000 adults—all of whom had volunteered for it, knowing that it meant working full time. It operated for a few years in only two Milwaukee neighborhoods. Even if New Hope could somehow be replicated at the state or national level, what are the odds that the improvements it fostered at one particular time and place would happen again? Perhaps most worrisome for generalizing to other settings, it was run by people who were dedicated to its mission and who, in turn, created a climate of respectful, user-friendly services to participants. Wouldn’t this approach to program administration be more difficult to implement in city, county, and state bureaucracies? Encouraging evidence comes from neighboring Minnesota. When New Hope was operating in Milwaukee, the state of Minnesota was experimenting with its own version of welfare reform. Like New Hope, the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP) sought to alleviate poverty and encourage work by offering earnings supplements and ensuring child-care assistance and health care. Minnesota’s program was designed to reward work by incorporating earnings supplements into the welfare system. Instead of losing almost a dollar of welfare for every dollar earned, parents kept part of their welfare grants; their combined earnings and welfare checks always exceeded what they would receive if they were not employed. The MFIP program paid child-care providers directly and streamlined bureaucratic paperwork. Like New Hope, it trained caseworkers to provide information and supports for people striving to take advantage of the program’s work-based benefits.13 It sought to transform the culture of the welfare offices from a preoccupation with minimizing application and payment errors to providing comprehensive counseling and other supports that would facilitate transitions to full-time work.14 Like New Hope, it was evaluated with a random assignment experiment. Unlike New Hope, the Minnesota program was developed and implemented by the state, it was limited to parents receiving or applying for AFDC, and individuals were required to take part in the program as a

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condition of receiving state aid. This mandatory feature is important, because New Hope volunteers are undoubtedly a select group with more motivation, skills, or ability to sustain work than those who did not volunteer. Our comparisons of New Hope program participants with control group members remain valid because the same types of people were in both groups. But it is possible that a New Hope–type program would have different effects—either larger or smaller—for adults who were required to participate. Was Minnesota’s new system effective? For single mothers who were long-term welfare recipients, the answer is clearly yes. The improvements were similar to those found in New Hope: work and earnings increased sharply, and the increases were maintained for the three years of the program. Family income rose and poverty dropped. Children performed better in school and exhibited fewer behavior problems than children in the AFDC comparison group. Marriages increased and women’s reports of domestic abuse dropped. The picture was more mixed for people newly applying for welfare. Those in the Family Investment Program worked more but, because they sometimes took part-time jobs, earned less than their comparison-group counterparts. Their incomes were higher and poverty was reduced because of the earnings supplement, but their children were not doing better, and, on some measures, were performing less well in school.15 As a whole, MFIP showed that a state-initiated and state-run system of work supports could produce many of the same kinds of benefits for families and children as New Hope, at least for long-term welfare recipients. This group is important because its members consume disproportionate amounts of aid and are usually the most disadvantaged, having suffered deeper and more enduring poverty than short-term recipients. Still other welfare reform experiments conducted in the 1990s shed light on what it was about New Hope that may have made the difference.16 The Self-Sufficiency Program tested a model that provided large earnings supplements without additional services as well as a program combining earnings supplements with employment services in two Canadian provinces.17 Parents were required to leave welfare and to work at least thirty hours weekly to qualify. The average increases in employment were large, but only about one in three program group members left welfare, found a full-time job, and collected the supplement. Coupling the earnings supplement with employment services boosted participation in the program relative to offering just the supplement and helped more participants to secure stable employment. Other U.S. states were experimenting with changes in welfare programs during the 1990s, testing policy models that coupled generous financial incentives with a strict time limit (for example, Connecticut), or time 110

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limits with a very modest financial incentive (for example, Florida). Additional experiments involved training and employment programs (for example, the National Evaluation of Welfare to Work Study). Virtually all of these programs boosted single mothers’ employment relative to that of mothers in the control groups. Not surprisingly, only the programs that offered financial incentives (New Hope, Minnesota, and the Canadian program) increased family income and reduced poverty. Families exposed to the other experimental policies saw welfare payments fall by about as much as earnings increased, leaving little change in their total income.18 Young children’s school achievement improved in such programs as New Hope, MFIP, and the Canadian experiment that raised income as well as employment, but not in programs that left income unchanged. As in New Hope, child care appeared to be a key reason for these improvements; most of the programs that boosted achievement also increased the amount of time children spent in center-based care.19 Programs that simply required participation in employment-related services (for example, job search or job training) without boosting family income had no consistent effects, positive or negative, on the achievement of preschool and elementary school-age children.20 For the most part, these other programs also increased the use of home-based child care but not center-based care.21 It is less certain how these programs affected infants and teens. In some of the other experiments, children who were adolescents when their mothers were assigned to these programs did not fare as well. Even with increased income, they had slightly lower school achievement and slower progress through school than adolescents in the control-group families, though there were no systematic differences in suspensions, school dropout, or childbearing. The lower school achievement may be because adolescents were often left unsupervised while their parents worked, but they were also more likely to be caring for younger siblings or to work more than part time themselves.22 The results for preschool and school-aged children answer a number of questions that arose in the heated debate over welfare reform. Skeptics feared that work mandates and time limits would harm young children by forcing their mothers to work and pushing many families even deeper into poverty. These experiments suggest that children were no worse off when work mandates without earnings supplements were imposed, but they were also no better off. Their average school achievement remained well below national norms. These very children are those targeted by large allocations of public funds for Head Start, pre-kindergarten, and No Child Left Behind because of national concern over their low performance. “Doing no harm” to this vulnerable population is not 111

HIGHER GROUND

enough to serve our national policy goals of improving their prospects for the future. On the other side, many argued that work itself would boost child well-being by structuring family life in productive ways and providing children with positive parental role models. No systematic evidence from the experiments supports these hopes. Maternal work per se does not improve children’s achievement or school motivation. What does boost achievement is work that pays off in the form of more resources, including earnings supplements, child-care subsidies, and health care that workers would otherwise be forced to buy with their modest earnings. New Hope’s appealing reformulation of a social contract requires fulltime work, but in exchange it provides the supports needed to obtain and sustain that work, and it supplements earnings so that even jobs that pay little provide a decent standard of living. Although many states use welfare reform to bolster their supports for less-skilled workers, none has come close to fashioning a New Hope package of supports. Few states extend any work-related benefits to adult men and women who are not living with children. None has structured a bureaucracy to place caseworkers and participants in a voluntary partnership similar to New Hope’s. None links extra benefits to full-time work or provides health insurance to all young or middle-aged low-income adults. Few have developed a system of wage-paying, but temporary, community service jobs. Few have fully funded their child care and health insurance programs. Taken together, national and state programs in 2004 left approximately 6 million full-time working adults and their 6 million children in poverty, and 2.6 million children in full-time working families without health insurance. The New Hope trial shows that it did better by its workers and their families than the programs offered by Wisconsin in its early stages of welfare reform. Minnesota’s test of a system resembling New Hope in key ways proves that such a program can be implemented by a state in a manner that promotes work, reduces poverty, and boosts children’s achievement. Although further tests are clearly warranted, particularly in states with less generous benefits and less effective bureaucracies, it is worth devoting some thought to how states might go about implementing a New Hope–style program. We do so in our concluding chapter.

112

Chapter 9 New Hope and National Policy

I’m here to offer you some tools that will connect you to the labor market. If you’re not interested in the labor market, then there’s not much I can do for you. But if you’re interested in . . . getting out of poverty through work, here’s what I have to offer. . . . And if there are other things you’re interested in, I can . . . refer you to those. . . . It wouldn’t be hard for a state to do that. —David Riemer

F

orged by a coalition of community activists and local business leaders, New Hope’s core principles reflect widely held views on what America’s social contract with low-skilled workers should be. It is demanding, requiring people to work full time to be eligible for its benefits. In return, the package of benefits empowers less-skilled workers by supplying them with the resources they need to provide for themselves and their families. New Hope was not designed to be a comprehensive solution to all of the problems of low-income adults and families. Nor did it seek to refashion the nature or conditions of low-skilled work. However, the rigorous test of its efficacy, as well as tests of similar programs conducted elsewhere in both the United States and Canada, proves its value in reducing poverty and promoting child well-being among low-income individuals who volunteered to give it a try. It provides an evidence-based model for public policy. Here we offer a number of practical ideas about how any state or the federal government might implement a program that embodies the principles of New Hope. DRAWING ON NEW HOPE LESSONS A New Hope–style approach to empowering less-skilled workers requires that its benefits be consistent and guaranteed. Consistency entails

HIGHER GROUND

offering a common procedure and common criteria for receiving earnings supplements, health insurance, and child-care assistance. Benefits are guaranteed in the sense that they are available to all adults whose incomes fall below a specified level, just as anyone who meets the legal criteria can claim all benefits available through the tax system, including the earned income tax credit (EITC). It is striking that home mortgage deductions and child tax credits—supports that accrue primarily to middle- and upper-income families—are consistent and guaranteed by being incorporated into the tax system, but most supports for low-income families, including child-care subsidies, are neither guaranteed nor fully funded. Once the money runs out, eligible people can be (and are) turned down. A state or national New Hope–type program would differ from the Milwaukee demonstration in one important respect. It would not end after a set time. Funding for the New Hope trial dictated that participants’ eligibility be limited to three years. The program designers, however, envisioned a package offered perpetually to all low-income working Americans. Again, the tax system offers a model—individuals at all income levels can claim credits and exemptions as long as they qualify for them. The case for a program without time limits is supported by examining what happened to participants after New Hope ended. Although some program effects did indeed continue beyond the end of eligibility, lasting gains for adults proved the exception rather than the rule. Many employment and earnings gains disappeared by two years after the program’s conclusion.1 Many people felt stranded without program work supports. Elena and Inez were forced to remove their children from child-care centers where their children’s language development and learning problems were being addressed. The basic philosophy of New Hope–type programs is to offer structural supports, not a one-time “inoculation” expected to last forever. Removing time limits on eligibility would not mean that everyone would receive supports for a lifetime. Many participants did not meet the thirty-hour threshold all the time, and some who did secured benefits such as health insurance through their employers. Others were so successful in the labor market that their incomes rose above the income eligibility limit. And, of course, children eventually grow up, so childcare assistance is not needed indefinitely. A final key element of the New Hope philosophy is universal access: all full-time workers, men and women, with and without children, should be entitled to a decent income, health insurance, and, if needed, job access. Some of the men who volunteered for New Hope enjoyed employment and earnings gains that rivaled those of women. The pro114

NEW HOPE AND NATIONAL POLICY

gram’s successes argue for extending job access, earnings supplements, and health insurance to men and women without children. Only an income ceiling would limit eligibility. THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF IMPLEMENTING A STATE- OR NATIONWIDE NEW HOPE How might a state- or nationwide New Hope program be structured? The core of such a program would be an earnings supplement. New Hope’s earnings supplement was carefully designed to reward full-time work and to ensure that the total incomes of full-time workers always increased with their earnings. The United States already has a large earnings-supplement program, the EITC, paying up to $4,300 annually. The EITC, however, gears its benefit to worker earnings rather than work hours. Therefore, individuals can receive it for part-time work. The program may discourage work among higher-wage workers.2 The New Hope–type earnings supplement would be an explicit bonus for fulltime work (beyond the EITC) and, as is the EITC, would be available to people without children. A state- or nationwide New Hope program would provide automatic eligibility for subsidized health insurance to participants and their families. Since the early 1990s, federal health insurance programs have expanded to cover children in low-income families who are not receiving welfare. Few states cover parents, however, unless their incomes are well below the poverty line. There are also very few options for adults under age sixty-five who are not parents, regardless of their incomes.3 In 2004, most states offered health insurance to children in families with incomes of about $31,000 or less, though the income threshold varied considerably, and some states had capped enrollment and set limits on what services were available.4 Despite these expansions, in 2004, about 4.7 million children in poor families did not have any health insurance.5 Child-care subsidies are a critical component of any New Hope–type program. Parents in New Hope used center-based care and organized, out-of-school programs for their children—one likely reason for their children’s improved achievement in school. Although federal and state expenditures for child care and early education increased considerably from the early 1990s through 2001, federal funding had leveled off by 2004.6 In 2004, nearly half of the states either had a waiting list for subsidized child care or had closed enrollment and were not even maintaining waiting lists. Most children whose family incomes meet federal eligibility guidelines still do not receive subsidies.7 In a state or national New Hope–type program, community service jobs would be available to people who could not find work. Nearly one 115

HIGHER GROUND

in three New Hope recipients took a community service job (CSJ) at one time or another. Because the hours spent in these jobs counted toward benefits and the EITC, community service jobs played a significant role in the income advantages enjoyed by participants. By design, CSJs were less attractive than regular jobs: they paid only minimum wage and lasted for a maximum of six months. Past job creation and work experience programs have a decidedly mixed record of success, but many of the earlier programs differed from the New Hope model.8 Its CSJs were real jobs for which participants must apply. They paid real wages and required people to meet the demands of the workplace, as Lakeisha found out. As Tom Schrader described them, “It’s not just showing up. You did work, you had hours, you had things to do, and you got paid for it.” The participants certainly knew the difference between a real community service job and demeaning or make-work situations. Although these positions are costly to set up and run, the New Hope experience and the experience in a growing number of state and local efforts show that it is possible to implement an effective CSJ program.9 Well-trained and helpful project representatives were important to New Hope’s success. By and large, the program succeeded in realizing its vision of offering the services of supportive reps to participants. Respect was critical. Reps greeted the person by name, delivered the benefits advertised, did not lose files, provided a place for children to sit and be safe while parents talked, and referred clients to service and support agencies that were actually open and where the phones were answered. Respect is contagious in an organization. Project reps were supported and trained, and the criteria for their evaluation were aligned with the goals of the organization. Delivering benefits was a sign of success for a New Hope rep, in contrast to many welfare departments where success is defined by diverting applicants and “catching” those who are ineligible. Can existing systems integrate delivery of the New Hope package? One major principle is consistency of eligibility requirements and administration of benefits in one location, but most states administer components of this package through different offices and bureaucracies, which often operate independently of one another. Obviously, different states and localities might find different means of incorporating New Hope into their existing structures. With earnings supplements similar to the EITC, one option—not ideal in our view—would be to operate a New Hope–type program through the tax system. Although the tax system offers consistent and relatively easy access, it has no way of verifying that employment is full time, and tax refunds are not a useful way to cover child-care and health-care costs because they reimburse out-of-pocket costs only long after these 116

NEW HOPE AND NATIONAL POLICY

are incurred. Nor do state tax agencies have networks of local offices with experience in the type of job search and access counseling that a New Hope program requires. Paying earnings supplements through a state’s cash benefit programs, as Minnesota and a number of other states do, is also not ideal because doing so ties earnings supplements to welfare receipt.10 Many working poor adults proudly eschew welfare, finding it demeaning and stigmatizing. The cash assistance system is limited primarily to single mothers, which overlooks many two-parent working-poor families and all adults without children. The current cash assistance system, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), is not guaranteed, and federal law imposes a lifetime five-year limit on its receipt. Perhaps most detrimental, embedding earnings supplements in the time-limited welfare system sends mixed signals. On the one hand, caseworkers are rewarding fulltime workers with larger cash assistance checks than before because earnings are no longer producing dollar-for-dollar reductions in cash assistance. On the other hand, caseworkers are telling parents that the ticking limit clock makes it imperative for them to leave welfare altogether.11 All in all, it may be best to keep New Hope–type work supports distinct from both cash assistance and tax credits. The New Hope demonstration shows that it is possible to operate a program for all low-income adults outside both the tax and welfare systems. EXISTING PROGRAMS THAT MIGHT SERVE AS MODELS States might find a variety of administrative solutions, depending on existing structures. One of the trickier administrative details is verifying work hours. A foolproof system is critical to avoiding fraud and maintaining public support. New Hope allowed participants to fax, mail, or drop off copies of their pay stubs or some other evidence of their work hours, and it had a system for verifying self-employment. It verified work hours every month. Although this system reduced the likelihood that people would collect benefits when they were ineligible and kept New Hope reps in close touch with participants, it created some instability in adults’ and children’s lives, and was costly to administer. Julie Kerksick and others have suggested that verification every three months might be more feasible. In states that require employers to include hours as part of the payroll reporting systems, verification of hours would be a much easier task.12 Another suggestion has been to tie child-care subsidies to the regular school calendar; once eligibility was verified, the child could continue in a program for the year and thereby reduce moves into and out of care.13 Housing the program in a state Workforce Development Board or a 117

HIGHER GROUND

network of comprehensive job centers is an appealing solution because it would help to convey the message that the program is voluntary and work-based. These agencies often have the capability to develop a system of community service jobs that would provide real skill-building opportunities. Potential employers are likely to be more enthusiastic about taking on workers who are voluntarily seeking a chance for fulltime work than those who are merely complying with work requirements to receive cash assistance. In some states, these boards already administer child care subsidies. A related model for administering a New Hope–type program is represented in One-Stop Career Centers, which were established under the federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998. Such centers have been used primarily to help those without jobs find them, but four demonstration programs currently under way are extending their services to help those who hold low-wage jobs climb the economic ladder. These new Work Advancement and Support Centers provide both services to help workers keep their jobs or find better ones and simplify access to work supports, including child care subsidies, food stamps, Medicaid, and the EITC. The demonstration centers combine personnel from workforce investment agencies, whose tasks are typically focused on helping the unemployed find work, with staff from welfare agencies, who typically administer work-support programs.14 This one-stop model appears well suited to deliver New Hope–type benefits. If such centers were adapted to incorporate all the features of New Hope, adult applicants who were working full time could set up a plan to document full-time work and continued income eligibility and possibly to search for a better job. Adults seeking full-time work could use the available employment services. In both cases, staff would connect job-seekers to any public supports for which they were eligible (child care subsidies, food stamps, or Medicaid, for example), and these benefits would be available to all who qualified. A temporary community service job would be considered only after a person had searched diligently for a regular job for sixty days. If an applicant appeared to have serious problems—mental or physical illness or disability, substance abuse, domestic abuse, or other major obstacles—the staff member would make appropriate referrals. RECREATING THE CULTURE OF RESPECT IN NEW HOPE Could a client-oriented, respectful culture be replicated in a state-run, scaled-up version of New Hope? Wisconsin’s own welfare reform program, W-2, approaches case management very differently, but we should 118

NEW HOPE AND NATIONAL POLICY

keep in mind that W-2 has responsibility for the entire welfare caseload rather than just the subset volunteering for a work-based program.15 New Hope strove to connect its participants to as many community services as possible, but W-2 instructs its caseworkers to provide a “light touch,” “only as much service as an eligible person asks for or needs,” according to its training manuals. When we asked Tom Schrader, who was the CEO of a major company, whether the New Hope environment could be replicated, he equated it with the fundamentals of good management: That’s a challenge in every organization. How do you keep it so it doesn’t become gray, bland . . . [so that employees don’t have the attitude that] “we follow the rules and do our job?” That’s really good management, whether it’s in state government or a corporation, or anywhere else. It takes some perseverance or an attitude by at least some senior managers that we’re not here just to do the process. We’re here to accomplish the end result for our clients.

These comments underscore the importance of a management system designed to encourage staff to treat clients with respect and make the client’s success their goal. The reward system for the staff must be designed around the goals of the program: helping clients find and keep jobs, making sure that participants gain access to the benefits to which they are entitled, providing referrals to agencies that actually offer the needed services, returning client phone calls, and following up on requests for assistance. The setting matters as well—the way the office looks, how children coming in are treated, how participants are greeted. The Minnesota experiment offers encouraging evidence that good client services are not beyond the capabilities of state bureaucracies.16 The program had financial specialists, who explained the rules, handled the paperwork and processed welfare grants, and caseworkers, who worked more intensively with long-term recipients to develop and implement employment plans. Both groups understood and communicated the “make work pay” focus of the Family Investment Program. THE POLITICAL WILL TO SUPPORT LOW-WAGE WORKERS States and localities may have the administrative capability to run a New Hope–type program, but is it politically and economically feasible in today’s United States? Both a lack of political will and financial constraints stand in the way of further progress in government efforts to 119

HIGHER GROUND

reduce poverty among working adults and their families. Concerns about poverty, equity, and the working poor are not high on the national political agenda, and funding for all domestic social programs has been declining. Yet New Hope does address issues that concern many Americans. People care about improving children’s opportunities for a decent education and to grow into responsible citizens. The disadvantages associated with poverty begin in early childhood. Children from poor families are already behind when they reach school, a fact that is the driving force behind major federal, state, and local initiatives to improve preschool education, extend pre-kindergarten programs, fund expansions in afterschool programs, and hold schools accountable for improving achievement. One cannot dissociate children’s poverty from that of their parents. New Hope was a program for adults that also led to clear and lasting improvements in children’s school achievement and involvement—and that feature may be an important lever to increase its political appeal. Building work requirements into cash assistance for poor adults also resonates with many Americans. The 1996 welfare reform legislation marked a sea change in social programs for poor parents. Gone were the days of an open-ended commitment of meager cash payments, a system that both the general public and many welfare recipients had grown to loathe. Work was the cornerstone of the new system; many poor parents began to see hope for their futures in jobs and career development. Millions of welfare recipients, Elena, Inez, and Lakeisha among them, eagerly bought into the new regime. For many, however, work was not enough to escape poverty. The paycheck barely made up for the lost welfare check and, once commuting time and work-related expenses were factored in, working parents who left welfare often had no more money and a lot less family time than they had had. The 1996 law did little for the millions of people who were already “playing by the rules,” working full time in low-wage jobs without resorting to welfare. Ten years later, despite serious efforts of many states to develop work-based strategies to help parents make ends meet, millions of working Americans and their children remain poor, uninsured, and without decent child care. New Hope offered one avenue for low-income, full-time workers to do better. It reduced poverty, increased employment, put children in better care situations, and improved their school achievement and behavior. It enabled parents to establish more sustainable family routines and to accomplish their family goals. New Hope’s broad vision of helping all low-income adults even proved successful at boosting work

120

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among single men, at least some of whom were parents with obligations to support their children. New Hope did not replace the need for government to provide for individuals who are unable to work or too burdened by physical problems, mental health, or drug abuse problems to hold a job, nor does it eliminate the need for food stamps, housing assistance, and health insurance for people who are not employed. It did not address such larger structural issues as the conditions of less-skilled work and job discrimination. It did offer tools for helping adults find full-time work and work supports for those whose full-time employment leaves them struggling with too little money, inadequate child care, and no health insurance. New Hope is a concrete expression of the American promise that “If you work you should not be poor.” The New Hope experiment is proof that fulfilling this promise can improve family life and children’s wellbeing.

121

Appendix New Hope Program Impacts

I

n our attempt to provide an accessible text description of New Hope’s history and impacts, we have relegated details about program impacts to this appendix. More complete documentation about the program and its impacts is provided in Bos et al. (1999) and Huston et al. (2003). WORK, EARNINGS, AND POVERTY In table A.1, we document New Hope program impacts on employment, income, poverty, and material deprivation at three time points: during New Hope, two years after program group members’ eligibility ended, and five years after eligibility ended. For each period, the first column shows conditions prevailing among control group families who signed up for the chance to participate in the program but were not chosen for it. The second column repeats this information for families selected by lottery to be eligible for the New Hope program. Differences between these two groups constitute program impacts, which are shown in the third column. Statistical tests were conducted to assess whether the impacts were positive and statistically significant.1 An asterisk beside a difference indicates that the probability that the difference is really zero is less than 5 percent—a conventional academic standard for statistical significance. Most of our information comes from administrative records of employers’ payrolls and state food stamp and cash assistance program records. We call this official employment and income in the tables. When this kind of information was available, we averaged it over the three program years to obtain the data shown in the “During New Hope” columns and drew data from the second and fifth year after the program ended for the numbers presented in the remaining columns. Dollar amounts have been inflated to 2005 price levels using the Consumer Price Index. Although the dollar amounts obtained from administrative records

NEW HOPE PROGRAM IMPACTS

are measured with little error, they are not without problems. The earned incomes of participants who were self-employed or worked off-thebooks are not recorded in the payroll data. Participants moving away from Wisconsin will show up as zeros in these data sources. Most notably, the official tally of family income omits earnings and other income of partners and other family members, severely understating total family income.2 Although this omission undoubtedly leads to smaller income amounts for both program and control group members, it is not likely to affect our estimates of New Hope impacts—the difference between New Hope and control group averages. Some of the information is drawn from surveys of both New Hope and control families during the program and two years after the program ended. The first of these surveys was conducted with as many New Hope and control individuals as possible. In the case of the second survey, funding limitations forced us to attempt interviews only with the Child and Family sample, which consisted of New Hope and control group families living with a child under the age of ten when the study began. The Child and Family sample is labeled “All Adults with Young Children” in the tables. CHILDREN’S WELL-BEING Table A.2 shows New Hope program impacts for measures of children’s achievement, motivation, and social behavior for two time periods: during New Hope (assessed in the survey conducted two years after the beginning of the program), and two years after New Hope eligibility ended. Because most of the instruments used to measure children’s behavior are scored on scales that are not familiar to most readers, we present only the program-control differences and omit the program and control group averages. The first column in each period shows the differences between all children in the program and control families. Because many of the program impacts were different for boys and girls, the second and third columns show impacts separately—program boys are compared with control group boys, and program girls are compared with control group girls. Also owing to the unfamiliar scales on the measures, we present the program impacts as effect sizes. Effect sizes are the difference between the scores of program and control children divided by the standard deviation of the control group. They indicate how large the difference is relative to the variation in the entire group of children measured. For example, the effect size for teacher-rated achievement is .25, which means that about 60 percent of the children in the program group had higher scores than the average child in the control group. An effect size of .50 means 123

HIGHER GROUND

that about 70 percent of the children in the program group have higher scores than the average child in the control group. If the effect size has a minus sign, as is the case for the -.51 for externalizing behavior problems for boys, it means that about 70 percent of the program boys scored lower than the average control group boy. As with the other tables, asterisks beside a number indicate that there are less than five chances in a hundred that the difference could have occurred by chance.

FAMILY CONTEXTS The format of table A.3 is similar to that of table A.1. It contains information drawn from surveys conducted during New Hope (two years after the program began) and two years after eligibility ended about parents’ use of community resources, neighborhood conditions, child care and children’s activities, health and health care, parent well-being, parenting, and marriage. Within each period, the value for the control group is shown in the first column, and the value for the program group appears in the second. The third column shows the difference between the groups, and asterisks indicate statistical significance. In all tables, we show measures for which there were not significant program impacts as well as those for which the impacts were statistically significant in order to give the reader a fair picture of the overall pattern of results.

124

Two Years After New Hope

Five Years After New Hope

73% 68% 83% 75% 77% 70% 71%

$9,756 $8,142

67% 61% 82% 68% 67% 62% 70%

$9,259 $7,178

$965*

$497

0%

8%*

9%*

7%*

1%

7%*

5%*

$10,045

$11,795

62%

61%

68%

71%

75%

63%

67%

$10,615

$11,961

60%

63%

73%

71%

73%

64%

67%

$570

$9,415

$11,031

58%

−3%

$166

39%

52% 2%

5%

58%

63%

−2% 0%

50%

54% 1%

0%

$10,066

$11,319

50%

47%

66%

63%

62%

54%

56%

$652

$288

−7%

8%

14%*

5%

−1%

3%

2%

New New New Control Hope Control Hope Control Hope Group Group Differ- Group Group Differ- Group Group DifferAverage Average ence Average Average ence Average Average ence

During New Hopea

New Hope Impacts on Work, Income, Poverty, and Material Hardship

Percentage of quarters spent working in an “official” jobb All Not working full-time when New Hope began Working full-time when New Hope began All adults with young childrenc One employment-barrier adults with young children Men not living with young children Women not living with young children Annual earnings from “official” jobs All Not working full time when New Hope began

Table A.1

Continued

Working full time when New Hope began All adults with young childrenc One-barrier adults with young children Men not living with young children Women not living with young children Participant’s “official” family incomed All Not working full time when New Hope began Working full time when New Hope began All adults with young childrenc One employment-barrier adults with young children

Table A.1 Two Years After New Hope

Five Years After New Hope

$13,355 $10,227 $11,635 $9,671 $8,843

$14,934 $13,635 $17,797 $17,033 $18,169

$13,952 $9,292 $9,089 $8,674 $9,695

$13,885 $11,970 $18,230 $15,605 $14,976

$3,194*

$15,445

$15,878

$18,091

−$433 $1,428*

$12,719

$1,666*

$14,371

$11,394

−$852

$1,049*

$10,485

$12,313

$12,470

$15,735

$997

$2,546*

$935*

−$597

$17,852

$16,536

$17,120

$13,479

$14,584

$10,330

$11,051

$14,667

$13,063

$15,011

$2,407*

$658

−$971

$760

$214

−$1,064

$566

$2,354*

$594

−$724

$13,157

$14,849

$16,924

$11,707

$13,285

$12,777

$7,049

$10,572

$11,865

$14,727

$17,464

$16,218

$16,165

$12,465

$13,595

$9,391

$8,815

$14,988

$13,334

$14,188

$4,307*

$1,369

−$758

$758

$311

−$3,386*

$1,766

$4,416*

$1,469

−$540

New New New Control Hope Control Hope Control Hope Group Group Differ- Group Group Differ- Group Group DifferAverage Average ence Average Average ence Average Average ence

During New Hopea

Men not living with young children Women not living with young children Not poor: participant’s “official” total income is above the poverty line All Not working full time when New Hope began Working full time when New Hope began All adults with young childrenc One employment-barrier adults with young children Men not living with young children Women not living with young children Number of material hardships (maximum = 8)e All Not working full-time when New Hope began Working full-time when New Hope began All adults with young childrenc $12,320 $12,469

42% 35% 56% 48% 54% 33% 38%

1.9 1.9 1.7 2.0

$10,313 $13,370

34% 25% 53% 34% 29% 27% 39%

2.1 2.2 1.8 2.1

— —

— — — 1.1

−1%

−0.2* −0.3* −0.1 −0.2

39%

40%

—

—

—

$13,641

$11,505

6%

25%*

14%*

3%

10%*

8%*

$901

$2,008*

1.0

—

—

—

—

—

54%

48%

—

—

—

$12,211

$12,245

−0.1

—

—

—

—

—

16%*

8%*

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

34%

39%

—

—

—

$14,368

−$1,431

—

$8,226

$739

—

—

—

—

—

—

49%

44%

—

—

—

$11,317

$9,920

—

—

—

—

—

—

15%*

5%

—

—

—

−$3,051*

$1,694

Continued Two Years After New Hope

Five Years After New Hope

1.8 1.8 1.7

2.3 2.1 2.1

1.2 — —

−0.5* −0.2 −0.4* —

—

1.0

—

—

−0.2

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

New New New Control Hope Control Hope Control Hope Group Group Differ- Group Group Differ- Group Group DifferAverage Average ence Average Average ence Average Average ence

During New Hopea

Source: Authors’ calculations. Notes: Due to rounding, values in the “Difference” columns do not always equal the difference between the figures provided for the New Hope and control group averages. See Bos et al. (1999) and Huston et al. (2003) for a more complete presentation of results. — denotes no information available for a given measure at the given time point. a The numbers recorded in the “During New Hope” columns for official data are annual averages over the three program years. b An “official” job is one recorded in Wisconsin’s payroll records. “Fraction of time spent working in an ‘official’ job” refers to the fraction of quarters that an individual appeared in Wisconsin’s official payroll records. c “All adults with young children” refers to families in the Child and Family Study and consists of families with at least one child under the age of ten when they signed up for the program. d “Official” family income includes the participant’s earnings as recorded in Wisconsin’s payroll records, cash assistance from Wisconsin’s AFDC program, the value of Food Stamps paid out by Wisconsin’s food stamp program, state and Federal Earned Income Tax Credits, and New Hope earnings supplements. It omits earned income from self-employment or informal employment as well as any income received by spouses, partners, and other family members. Survey reports of total family income two years after the program ended averaged 64 percent higher than the administrative-based data. Poverty rates based on the survey reports were correspondingly less—32 percent instead of 73 percent. e Material hardships include: unmet medical needs, unmet dental needs, periods without health insurance, food insufficiency, overcrowding, utility shutoffs, and other housing problems. Material hardships were reported in the surveys conducted two and five years after the program began. *denotes a statistically significant difference between New Hope and control averages at p < .05 (one tailed test).

One-barrier adults with young children Men not living with young children Women not living with young children

Table A.1

NEW HOPE PROGRAM IMPACTS

Table A.2

Effect Sizes of New Hope Impacts on Children’s Achievement, Motivation, and Social Behavior During New Hope

Achievement Teacher report Overall achievement compared to others in class Mock report card: reading Mock report card: math Classroom behavior (study skills, attention) Parent report (based on report cards) Total achievement Reading and writing Math Woodcock Johnson achievement tests Total reading and math Reading Math Motivation (child report) Education aspirations and motivation Expects to finish college School engagement Occupational expectations Expected job prestige Child well-being Satisfaction with friendships Hope and optimism about reaching goals Social behavior Teacher rating Positive social behaviora Externalizing behavior problemsb Internalizing behavior problemsc

All

Boys

.25* — —

Two Years After New Hope

Girls

All

Boys

Girls

.33* — —

.12 — —

.06 .08 −.02

.30* .13 .07

−.17 .04 −.12

.15

.38*

−.04

.02

.30*

−.27*

.09 — —

.09 — —

.05 — —

−.01 .19* .05

−.01 .20* .01

.02 .16* .07

— — —

— — —

— — —

.12 .12* .08

.11 .18 .02

.14 .11 .14

.23* —

.46* —

.01 —

.22* .10

.39* .25*

−.06 −.08

.19*

.24*

.05

.04

.07

.03

.12

.24*

.01

.02

.09

−.04

—

—

—

.10

.19

−.09

.25*

.50*

.05

.01

.24*

−.26*

−.10

−.51*

.27*

.05

−.04

.18

−.10

−.22

.07

.05

−.07

.24*

129

HIGHER GROUND

Table A.2

Continued During New Hope All

Parent rating Positive social behaviora .03 Externalizing behavior problemsb −.05 Internalizing behavior problemsc −.04 Child social problem solving Hostile response to provocation — Delinquent behavior (age twelve and older) — Peers engage in conventional behavior (age twelve and older) —

Boys .22*

Two Years After New Hope

Girls

All

Boys

Girls

−.17

.15*

.13

.15

−.15

.06

−.13

−.13

−.06

−.13

.09

−.08

−.10

−.05

—

—

−.12

−.25*

0

—

—

.11

.12

.10

—

—

−.02

.12*

−.20

Source: Authors’ calculations. Notes: — denotes no information available for a given measure at a given time point. a Positive social behavior includes compliance, social competence, and autonomy. b Externalizing behavior problems include aggression and disobedience. c Internalizing behavior problems include sadness and social withdrawal. *denotes a statistically significant difference between New Hope and control averages at p < .05 (one-tailed test).

130

NEW HOPE PROGRAM IMPACTS

Table A.3

New Hope Impacts on Family Contexts During New Hope

Two Years After New Hope

New New Control Hope Control Hope Group Group Differ- Group Group DifferAverage Average ence Average Average ence Community resources Aware of helping resources in community (1 = low; 5 = high) Aware of EITC Used EITC in last year Used private nonreligious schools Neighborhood good place to raise kids (percentage good or excellent) Employment Parents reporting unpaid work experience Parents engaging in education or vocational training Commuting time oneway (minutes) Transportation in own or other’s car to work Child Care and activities Currently receiving child care subsidy Child care—used centerbased care Children age six and older participated in structured out-ofhome activities (1 = never; 5 = about every day)

— 86% 61%

— 90% 64%

— 4% 3%

1.9 90% 67%

2.0 95% 70%

.1* 5%* 3%

4%

9%

5%*

5%

4%

−1%

81%

83%

2%

70%

68%

−2%

9%

6%

−3%*

—

—

—

37%

32%

−5%

33%

35%

2%

29

31

2

27

26

0.0

58%

58%

−1%

69%

67%

−2%

41%

59%

18%*

16%

16%

0%

49%

59%

10%*

31%

42%

11%*

2.2

2.4

0.2*

2.3

2.4

0.1 131

HIGHER GROUND

Table A.3

Continued During New Hope

Two Years After New Hope

New New Control Hope Control Hope Group Group Differ- Group Group DifferAverage Average ence Average Average ence Health Parent currently has health insurance Parents without health insurance at some point in last two years Parents with unmet medical needs Parent self-rated health (1 = poor; 5 = excellent) Child health rated by parent (1 = poor; 5 = excellent) Parent well-being Depression score (scale of 0 to 60) Stressed much or all of time Hope and optimism about future (scale of 1 = low; 5 = high) Feels time pressure Received economic or practical advice Received emotional support Parenting Warm and structured parenting (1 = low; 5 = high) All

132

86%

94%

8%*

88%

86%

−2%

54%

44%

−10%*

—

—

—

20%

17%

−2%

13%

13%

0%

—

—

—

3.4

3.5

0.2*

—

—

—

4.2

4.3

0.1

16.9

16.9

0.0

15.9

14.3

−1.5*

54%

47%

−7%*

36%

39%

3%

2.8 3.7

2.9 3.8

0.1* 0.2*

3.0 —

3.0 —

0.0 —

15%

24%

9%*

—

—

—

15%

32%

17%*

—

—

—

3.6

3.7

0.1

3.9

3.9

0.0

NEW HOPE PROGRAM IMPACTS

Table A.3

Continued During New Hope

Two Years After New Hope

New New Control Hope Control Hope Group Group Differ- Group Group DifferAverage Average ence Average Average ence Parents of boys Parents of girls Has control, child obeys parent (1 = low; 5 = high) All Parents of boys Parents of girls Child reports positive relations with parent (1 = low; 5 = high) All Boys Girls Marriage and partner relationships Married All Women never married at baseline Cohabiting All Women never married at baseline

3.5 3.6

3.6 3.8

0.1 0.2*

3.9 3.9

3.9 3.9

0.0 0.0

3.1 3.0 3.2

3.2 3.2 3.2

0.1 0.2* 0

3.7 3.6 3.8

3.8 3.8 3.9

0.1* 0.2 0.2

4.4 4.4 4.4

4.5 4.5 4.4

0.1 0.1* 0.0

4.4 4.4 4.4

4.4 4.5 4.4

0.0 0.1 0.0

—

—

—

21%

23%

2%

—

—

—

7%

18%

11%*

—

—

—

23%

20%

−4%

—

—

—

31%

23%

−7%

Source: Authors’ calculations. Notes: Due to rounding, values in the difference columns do not always equal the difference between the figures provided for the New Hope and control group averages. —denotes no information available for a given measure at a given time point. *denotes a statistically significant difference between New Hope and control averages at p < .05 (onetailed test).

133

Afterword

S

ince the publication of Higher Ground, we have completed an eightyear follow-up analysis of the New Hope evaluation experiment and launched an initiative to promote a national demonstration of the New Hope program.1 Both efforts reflect a growing national consensus that work support programs are a critical component of policies to combat poverty. IMPACTS REMAINED AFTER EIGHT YEARS First are the long-term effects: eight years after entering New Hope, parents and their children continued to be better off than control group families in many respects, though some of the initial effects of the program had faded. In the book, we report that effects on employment and income were observed primarily during the three years when the program benefits were available, but that the impacts for a group of moderately disadvantaged individuals who had only one barrier to employment were more lasting. This group showed higher employment rates and earnings than the control group over the entire period. The difference actually increased over time—a striking effect considering that the program’s benefits were limited to three years. Study children ranged from nine to nineteen years old during our last contact with them. The adolescent years are fraught with considerable risks for school failure and socially deviant behavior, but the positive impacts on achievement and social behavior set in motion by the New Hope program continued to some degree. Among minority youth from low-income families, the overall trend with age is downward—declining school performance, disengagement from school, reduced motivation, and ultimately alienation from the world of work. We saw many of these outcomes among youth in the control group families: their achievement test performance declined sharply, they disengaged from school, and their rates of school failure rose as they grew older. New Hope partially stemmed this tide. New Hope youth were less likely than their control-group counterparts to show signs of serious school failure, that is, were less likely to have received poor grades, repeated a grade, or been placed in special educa-

AFTERWORD

tion classes. Perhaps because they were somewhat less likely to fail, they felt more involved in school and expected to do better in English and math. Despite New Hope’s successes, however, the program failed to boost its children into the upper ranges of academic achievement. A number of scholars have emphasized the importance of persistence, responsibility, and the ability to relate to others for adult success in work and family life. At the eight-year follow-up, New Hope had shown lasting effects on young people’s social skills, parent-child and peer relationships, and emotional well-being, though there were no enduring impacts on delinquency or problem behavior. Both school involvement and noncognitive skills may have contributed to the development of more positive work attitudes and behavior: New Hope youth viewed work more favorably and were more optimistic about their educational and occupational prospects. They were also more likely than control-group youth to be gainfully employed and learning the rudiments of money management (by having a bank account, for example). Overall, we find it impressive, and somewhat unexpected, that parents’ participation in New Hope led to any long-term changes in the economic well-being of families or in the trajectories of the young people in the program. Recall that participation in New Hope over the entire three years of the program was rare, and that parents selected certain benefits, seldom using all of them all the time. Given that other research has demonstrated negative effects for adolescents when parents enter welfare and employment programs, it is especially noteworthy that some positive effects remained when New Hope children reached adolescence.2 Our best explanation is that increased family income, along with early experiences in center-based child care and structured out-of-school activities, provided important developmental opportunities during these children’s formative years. New Hope was not intended to demonstrate a time-limited policy, nor was it conceived as a program to support children, at least not directly—yet it did so. If its benefits had been available for the full eight years, or for as long as people’s incomes made them eligible, it might have had an even stronger impact. Although overall effects on employment faded for most of New Hope families, parents were still somewhat more likely than their control group counterparts to achieve stable employment combined with increasing wages. For their children, the most positive impacts on school achievement and social behavior were observed at the two- and fiveyear assessments. Parents who used New Hope to achieve more stable job situations and higher wages described strategic decision making as they moved from one job to another—leaving one job only after they

136

AFTERWORD

had found another, moving within a field of work (such as auto services, clerical or financial, and child care), and taking advantage of network resources. Other families benefited from stable employment, even if their wages did not go up dramatically.3 This sort of thoughtful approach to decision making and relatively stable daily routines may have had a positive effect on children as well. CAN NEW HOPE BECOME NATIONAL POLICY? In response to our contention that New Hope offers a model for policy at the state and national level, some have suggested that many New Hope benefits have, since the mid-1990s, already become part of federal and state policy. Some components of New Hope have indeed become more available from other sources, but the same is not true for all aspects of the program, nor do supports come in the kind of integrated package New Hope offered, which was combined with an approach that emphasized mutual respect. Spending on two critical work supports—wage supplements and child-care subsidies—increased substantially during the 1990s, but federal investment stagnated and then declined slightly from 2001 to 2005.4 The inflation-adjusted maximum value of the federal earned income tax credit (EITC) remained constant, but a number of states instituted state-level EITCs and wage supplements during the period, raising the overall amount that residents in those states could receive. Child-care assistance to poor parents actually declined after about 2002, a particularly troubling trend in view of the fact that only about 25 percent of income-eligible children ever received child-care subsidies even at higher funding levels. Direct funding through the Child Care Development Fund leveled off and then began to drop after 2002, and the percentage of TANF dollars allocated to child care also declined.5 There are wide discrepancies among states in levels of funding, income thresholds for eligibility, and reimbursement rates for providers. For example, in 2005, South Carolina spent $96 per capita on child-care subsidies whereas Massachusetts spent $581.6 Reimbursement rates are supposed to be determined by biennial market surveys of child-care fees, but delays in conducting surveys and making adjustments often result in rates that are well below current market levels in certain localities. As a result, center care, which is arguably more beneficial than home-based care for school readiness as well as a more reliable work support, has become almost inaccessible for some low-income parents. Finally, in many states, subsidies are available either exclusively or primarily to parents who have been or are in the welfare system—a policy that works

137

AFTERWORD

against encouraging those who want to make it on their own without welfare, like many of New Hope’s participants.7 Despite recent policy changes, the number of working poor adults, many of whom are parents, remains stubbornly high. Poverty among children in single-parent households declined substantially in the late 1990s, no doubt thanks to the combination of a booming economy and policy changes, but leveled off and rose slightly after 2000, again influenced by both economic and policy trends.8 Clearly, the policies in place since 2000 have not succeeded in making major inroads on family poverty. In “The Next Generation of Anti-Poverty Policies,” Ron Haskins and Isabelle Sawhill proposed extending both incentives (such as EITC) and work requirements to men, an approach consistent with New Hope’s. Mark Greenberg has proposed a federal guarantee of child-care assistance, using both subsidies and tax credits, for every family with an income below 200 percent of the poverty threshold.9 Evidence that childcare supports promote parental employment and increase child-care options is ample. Again, note that New Hope increased employment among male participants. Although most of them did not care directly for children, many had nonresident children who could benefit from their earnings. Furthermore, connections between fathers and children often continued, whether direct or indirect, or on a regular or an irregular basis.10 None of these proposals, however, is as comprehensive as New Hope’s offer of integrated, respectful services and opportunities for temporary subsidized employment. Despite the promise of New Hope’s approach, doubts persist about the feasibility and effectiveness of a similar program in different states and regions of the country, and in less favorable economic conditions than prevailed in Milwaukee during the 1990s. The best way to determine whether New Hope could be replicated on a national scale would be to launch a set of demonstration experiments. In conjunction with the Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institution, Hans Bos and his colleagues proposed a five-state national demonstration of New Hope and recalculated the related costs, taking into account changes in the states’ supports for low-income working families.11 As outlined in chapter 8, New Hope’s collection of benefits and administrative expenses was estimated to cost each participating family $6,600 per year. This figure was based on a comparison of New Hope’s earnings, child-care subsidies, and health insurance subsidies with the collection of benefits the state of Wisconsin offered in the mid-1990s. Overall, despite reversals in the past five years, Wisconsin and virtually all other states have increased spending on work supports such as child

138

AFTERWORD

care, health insurance, and, in some cases, state supplements to the federal earned income tax credit over their mid-1990s levels. This narrows the gap between what New Hope provides and what states are now offering, which means that the additional cost of a New Hope model program would be lower as well. Taking these changes into account, Bos and his associates calculated that the current annual cost of New Hope would be $3,300. This includes earnings supplements at $284 per year per participant, health insurance subsidies at $875 per year, child care subsidies at $470 per year, and administrative costs at $1,700 per year. Do New Hope’s benefits come close to exceeding these costs? The annual earnings advantage of New Hope participants relative to the control group participants amounted to $497, which is our best estimate of the productivity gains associated with a national New Hope policy (see table A.1). New Hope also lowered spending on social programs such as Wisconsin’s cash welfare assistance program and the federal Supplemental Security Income program, but the total value of these savings— $78 per year—is modest. But society also stands to benefit from New Hope’s positive impacts on child achievement and behavior, particularly among boys. It is difficult to assign a dollar value to these impacts, but school achievement can boost career prospects and improve behavior, which reduces crime and generates very large taxpayer benefits. Bos and his colleagues estimated an annual value of the future earnings gains associated with the higher achievement of New Hope children to be about $1,300.12 Behavioral improvements may be even more important. Using published estimates of the dollar value to taxpayers of saving a youth from serious crime and drug abuse and from becoming a high school dropout, we conclude that it would be necessary to “save” only one in sixteen New Hope boys from high risk behavior to cover the entire taxpayer cost of the program. What if New Hope were offered nationally? Approximately 17 million U.S. families and single adults would be eligible. Based on reasonable assumptions about what fraction would actually participate, New Hope’s annual national program cost could range from $14 to $22 billon. We continue to view New Hope as a good model for national and state policies, but it is important to remember that its work supports and related services cannot solve the problem of poverty for all families. Individuals with serious physical or mental health problems, addictions, or overwhelming family responsibilities need other types of programs and services. Furthermore, work supports for adults are no substitute for early interventions, good schools, and community programs for chil-

139

AFTERWORD

dren from low-income families. Direct services to children and work supports for adults are not alternatives, but complementary. For many adults with low incomes, a comprehensive set of work supports could provide the boost that lifts them out of poverty and offers their children a better shot at a decent life. New Hope is one strong contender in the quest for efficient and effective public policies that achieve those goals.

140

Notes

CHAPTER 1 1. Riemer (1988). 2. All of the names of New Hope participants used in the book are pseudonyms. Other information about families is changed occasionally so as to represent their overall situation but not the exact details of it. 3. Unless noted otherwise, all dollar figures in this book are expressed in 2005 dollars. The poverty line is adjusted only for inflation from one year to the next; therefore, when expressed in 2005 dollars, the poverty line for a family of three in both 1994 and 2005 has remained constant at $15,800. For details on poverty thresholds, see the historical poverty tables at the U.S. Bureau of the Census: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hst pov3.html. 4. We calculated these and other national data from the 2004 and 1994 Current Population Surveys. We are most grateful to Galo Falchettore of the Russell Sage Foundation for his assistance. Adult data apply to individuals between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four. We use the official definition of poverty and define working-poor adults as those who report working thirty or more “usual” weekly hours in the work weeks of the previous calendar year and who live in a family with total income below the poverty line. Child data apply to individuals younger than eighteen. We define a child as living in a working-poor family if family income is below the poverty line and either the head of the family or the spouse of the head of the family reports thirty or more usual weekly hours in the work weeks of the previous calendar year. 5. Blank and Schmidt (2001). 6. Rebecca Blank (1997, chapter 2) provides a good summary of these trends. 7. From 1980 to 1995, unemployment rates for low-skilled people hovered around 15 percent; rates were approximately 20 percent for African Americans and slightly less for Latinos (Blank 1997, chapter 2). 8. See Blank (1997, chapter 2) for a discussion of wages in the early 1990s. Even in 2005, women working full time were earning about $80 for every $100 earned by a white man; black and Hispanic women earned $68 and $55, respectively. The 2005 data apply to full-time workers between the ages

NOTES

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 142

of twenty-five and fifty-four and are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, available online at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t02.htm. In 1993, 57.7 percent of households headed by black females with children had incomes below the poverty threshold. The figure for households headed by Hispanic females was 51.6 percent. See http://www.census. gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov4.html for more information. John Gurda (1999, 386–87) documents historical trends in Milwaukee’s population. Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugees came to Milwaukee as well during the 1980s and early 1990s, sponsored by church groups. Their numbers tripled to approximately 12,000 from 1980 to 1990, and some entered the New Hope lottery as well. Katz (2001); Chase-Lansdale and Vinovskis (1995). Gilens (1999); Strauss (2002). Most Americans also supported assistance for those who worked, who “did something,” and wanted their government to do more to help the poor (Gilens 1999). Ellwood (1988); Edin and Lein (1997). Quadagno (1996). An adviser to Clinton, David Ellwood popularized the phrase “If you work, you shouldn’t be poor” following the publication of his 1988 book Poor Support. In 2005 dollars, the $1,384 translates to $1,953. Lykens and Jargowsky (2002); Fuller et al. (2002). Jason DeParle (2004, 3–4) credits the phrase to Bruce Reed, a speechwriter, who coined the phrase for Clinton in a speech Clinton gave in October 1991 during the presidential campaign. See Joel Handler (1995), Ron Haskins (2001), and DeParle (2004) for political histories of welfare reform and Mark Greenberg et al. (2002) for a summary of changes in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which contains fundamental restructuring of the federal welfare system. Fuller et al. (2002). The data are from our tabulations using the 2004 Current Population Survey. The overall population increased between 1994 and 2004. Therefore, although the number of working poor remained roughly constant, their population share declined slightly. Mead (2004). Mead (2004). Nationally, about 40 percent of low-income workers are employed during nonstandard hours—that is, evenings and weekends. The most frequent nonday occupations are cashiers, waiters, truck drivers, cooks, janitors, and cleaners (Presser 2004). Benoit (1996, 29). Gennetian and Miller (2000), Foley et al. (2002).

NOTES

CHAPTER 2 1. Riemer (1988). 2. Our account of the evolution of New Hope draws heavily from Tom Brock et al. (1997) as well as from extensive interviews with David Riemer, Julie Kerksick, Tom Schrader, Tom Brock, Donald Sykes, Robert Haveman, and Sharon Schulz. 3. New Hope did not address such labor-market structural problems as low pay, the absence of union coverage, lack of employer-provided fringe benefits and health-insurance coverage, and the location of new jobs far from Milwaukee’s inner city. These were recognized by the committee and others, of course, but their focus was improving the odds for working-poor adults within the existing structural constraints. 4. Mead (2004). 5. Miner (2004). 6. Also beneficial was the fact that Sazama was a high school teacher and had taught some of the children of the business leaders. 7. GMC committee notes from a meeting held on August 30, 1989. 8. Brock et al. (1997) documents the composition of New Hope’s various committees. The National Research Advisory Committee was an important part of New Hope’s strategy to be connected to national social policy makers. It included people with both liberal and conservative perspectives: Rebecca Blank, Lynn Burbridge, Gary Burtless, Tom Corbett, Walter Farrell, Roberto Fernandez, Robinson Hollister, Lawrence Mead, Joan Moore, Demetra Nightingale, Lois Quinn, Deborah Weinstein, William Julius Wilson, and Michael Wiseman. 9. Sherwood (1994). 10. A complete list of funders appears in Brock et al. (1997, appendix B). 11. Brock et al. (1997, 136). 12. Brock et al. (1997, chapter 8). 13. The elements and implementation of the New Hope package are detailed in Brock et al. (1997). Data on benefit take up and costs are drawn from Hans Bos et al. (1999, chapter 3) and Aletha Huston et al. (2003, chapter 2). 14. Inflation since the middle 1990s would increase this and other dollar figures cited in this section by about 25 percent. Health insurance copays were subtracted from these checks, so the average gross-earnings supplements were a little higher than $125. 15. Brock et al. (1997, chapters 7 and 8). 16. The role of CSJs in leading to private-sector employment is described in chapter 5. 17. This discussion draws heavily from Brock et al. (1997, chapter 3). 18. The survey was conducted by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s 143

NOTES

Employment and Training Institute under the direction of John Pawasarat and Lois Quinn. 19. Mead (2004). 20. Katz and Carnevale (1998).

CHAPTER 3 1. The 745 individuals with children aged one to ten were selected for the Child and Family Study, designed to evaluate impacts of New Hope on children and families. 2. Brock et al. (1997, chapter 2). 3. Lemann (1991); Sheehan (1976). 4. DeParle (2004). 5. Our tabulations from the 2004 Current Population Survey show 6.8 million children residing in poor families with an adult working at least thirty hours per week. Of the 6.8 million, 2.6 million were Hispanic and 1.2 million were black. In 1994, the respective Hispanic and black figures were 2.0 and 1.8 million children. Among the 5.7 million adults who worked thirty or more hours per week and yet lived in poor families, 1.7 of the adults were Hispanic and 1.2 million were black. For welfare receipt, the latest data are from 2001 and show a fairly even split of individuals receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash benefits among blacks (39 percent), whites (33 percent), and Hispanics (23 percent). For more detailed information, see http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/ pdf/greenbook2003/Section7.pdf. 6. Data on program use are presented in Huston et al. (2003). 7. Gibson and Weisner (2002). 8. Gibson and Weisner (2002). 9. Presser (2003); Hsueh (2006); Lowe and Weisner (2003).

CHAPTER 4 1. Haskins and Primus (2002). 2. Percentages are averaged from information about eleven studies listed in table 1.1 of Judith Gueron and Edward Pauly (1991). Dollar figures from that table are inflated to 2005 prices using the Consumer Price Index. 3. At the time this book was written, we had access to eight years of data from administrative records, although data from the eighth-year survey were not yet available. Although certainly useful in tracking program impacts five years after the model program ended, the eighth-year survey results say little about the impact of the kind of perpetual program that designers always had in mind. 144

NOTES

4. Details of the evaluation appear in Hans Bos et al. (1999) and Aletha Huston et al. (2003). 5. Although everyone agrees that children living in poverty did less well than their counterparts, there is some dispute among researchers about whether income is the critical factor (Blau 1999; Duncan and Brooks-Gunn 1997; Mayer 1997). Some argue that such characteristics as little education, fewer abilities, mental health problems, and the like account for the differences associated with poverty. Others argue that income itself plays an important role. 6. Details of the Child and Family Study appear in Bos et al. (1999) and Huston et al. (2003). 7. There is ample evidence to support the belief that misbehavior has serious consequences in dangerous neighborhoods (Goldstein 2003; Kling, Liebman, and Katz 2005) and that working-poor families differ in their attitudes and practices in this regard (Lareau 2003).

CHAPTER 5 1. Our accounts of the lives of Inez and the other mothers in the ethnographic sample come from our many conversations with them. Sometimes their own recollections of events differ from one visit to the next. Inez did not tell a consistent story about quitting this job, saying in one visit that she was about to be laid off. 2. Bos et al. (1999) and Huston et al. (2003). 3. Employment results two years into New Hope are detailed in Bos et al. (1999, chapter 4). Five-year results are presented in Huston et al. (2003, chapter 3). We have supplemented these sources with our own calculations based on earnings and employment data extending eight years beyond the point of random assignment. Employment rates are based on a definition of employment as appearing in payroll records in a given quarter. They differ from rates given in Bos et al. (1999) and Huston et al. (2003), which define employment as appearing in payroll records in a given year. 4. Dollar figures cited here are inflated to 2005 price levels and differ from the uninflated figures given in Bos et al. (1999). 5. Here again, employment is defined as showing up on the payrolls of Wisconsin employers. In the first three months after applying to the New Hope program, some 67 percent of the individuals chosen for the program who were not working full time when they signed up appeared on payrolls, compared with 60 percent of control group participants. Averaging the first four quarters of employment just after entry into the program shows employment rates for New Hope individuals (68 percent) that were 11 percentage points higher than the 57 percent employment rate of control group members. Appendix table A.1 shows that employment rate differences av145

NOTES

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

146

eraged over the entire three years of the program amounted to 7 percentage points. Payroll records are only available for individuals working in the state of Wisconsin, so we have no precise way of knowing whether someone not appearing in the records was living in Wisconsin and not working or was working in another state. This is more likely to affect our calculations of the amount of employment and earnings for individuals who applied for New Hope than the differences in employment and earnings between New Hope and control group members. Because the evaluation tracked the employment histories of everyone who signed up for New Hope (regardless of whether they were picked to be eligible for program benefits), the employment advantage of program participants over controls was a very real one. If we consider all the people who signed up for New Hope to be a sampling of a larger, hypothetical group of people who would have signed up for a program such as New Hope, then we can conduct statistical tests to determine the likelihood that the differences observed between New Hope and control group participants would hold in the larger, hypothetical group. This sampling perspective is the basis for our characterization of results as being statistically significant or insignificant. The work hours analysis is reported in Bos et al. (1999, chapter 4) and Huston et al. (2003, chapter 3). The employment and earnings information was calculated from program records. Frazis and Stewart (2004). Child-care assistance impacts were much greater for those employed full time at baseline than for people not employed full time at baseline, for two reasons. First, among those in the program group, full-time employees were more likely to receive New Hope subsidies (34 percent versus 27 percent), probably because they more often met the requirement of full-time employment (Bos et al. 1999, 88–89). Second, in the control group, people employed full time at baseline were less likely to receive subsidies from the welfare department (of those working full time at baseline, 21 percent received them; of those not employed at baseline, 42 percent did). Because New Hope had a higher income threshold for eligibility than the state did, it is possible that those working full time at baseline were more likely to have earnings that exceeded the state threshold. This work on barriers is detailed in Katherine Magnuson (1999). See also Hirokazu Yoshikawa et al. (2003) for a comparable analysis of data from other experiments and a somewhat different pattern of program impacts across subgroups defined by difficulties in securing employment. Notably absent from the list of barriers is depression, which was not measured when

NOTES

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

individuals signed up for New Hope. Consequently, we do not know whether New Hope’s work supports and incentives are enough to overcome serious mental health problems. The hourly wages of CSJs increased from $4.25, to $4.75, to $5.15 during New Hope’s trial, all well below the going wage for unskilled work in Milwaukee. The average total cost to New Hope of CSJ wages was $1,443 (uninflated) for those ever placed in these jobs. The more general role of CSJs is analyzed in Bos et al. (1999, chapter 4). Bos et al. (1999, 118–20). Based on the U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2004 Annual Social and Economic Supplement, http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032004/ pov/new01_100_01.htm Mead (2004, 203). Heckman, LaLonde, and Smith (1999). Several recent evaluations suggest that less-intensive employment programs may be successful for immigrant men (Bloom, Riccio, and Verma 2005; Freedman et al. 2000). Garfinkel et al. (1998); Johnson, Levine, and Doolittle (1999); Monson (2002). Recall that the ethnographic sample was drawn from the Child and Family Sample of parents with children aged one through ten at baseline, and there were few men in the CFS heading households of young children. See Huston et al. (2003, 61). The wage rate comparison is based on New Hope and control group individuals who had jobs at the time of our twoyear survey. Because the chances of having a job were themselves affected by the program, the wage rate comparison is not as purely experimental as comparisons involving all members of the New Hope and control groups. This is detailed in Huston et al. (2003, chapters 3 and 4). Income and poverty data for all New Hope participants, regardless of family status, are presented in table A.1. It is difficult to provide definitive poverty counts for the New Hope and control samples because not all sources of family income are compiled in the administrative records. But if this is roughly equally likely for both New Hope and control families, then estimates of the differences between New Hope and control groups should not be biased very much. Acs and Loprest (2001); see also Moffitt (2002). The Wisconsin data are summarized in Cancian et al. (1999) and have not been inflated. Cancian et al. (1999). A study of Wisconsin’s child support evaluation undertaken later in the 1990s produced a somewhat different picture, with mothers reporting modest gains in family income from 1998 to 1999 (Mead, 2004, 200). Mistry and Lowe (2006).

147

NOTES

CHAPTER 6 1. Cavanagh and Huston (in press). 2. Bernheimer, Weisner, and Lowe (2003). 3. All of the differences described were statistically significant. See table A.2 for a summary of New Hope impacts on children. Detailed findings are reported in Bos et al. (1999, chapter 7) and Huston et al. (2001). Technically speaking, the difference is about one-quarter of a standard deviation. The kindergarten test-score gap between poor and nonpoor students is one-half of a standard deviation, so New Hope closed about half of a gap that size. 4. Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele (1998). 5. Bos et al. (1999, chapter 7) ; Huston et al. (2001). 6. Weisner (2001). 7. The two-year findings are reported in Bos et al. (1999). The five-year results are reported in Huston et al. (2003, chapter 6; 2005). 8. Bos et al. (1999, chapter 7); Huston et al. (2001). 9. Huston et al. (2003, chapter 6; 2005). 10. Susan Golombok and Robyn Fivush (1994) summarize a large amount of research showing gender differences in behavior problems. 11. Because we assessed two children in many families, we could literally compare brothers and sisters. 12. Golombok and Fivush (1994). 13. Coley (1999); Coley, Chase-Lansdale, and Li-Grining (2001). 14. Gibson-Davis and Duncan (2005). 15. Romich and Weisner (2000). 16. Ripke, Huston, and Mistry (2002). 17. Lowe and Weisner (2003). 18. Strauss (2002, 65–66). 19. Mead (1996).

CHAPTER 7 1. 2. 3. 4.

148

Bos et al. (1999, chapter 5) details these findings. Mistry and Lowe (2006). Bos et al. (1999, chapter 7). Thomas Weisner (2002) provides a detailed discussion of the concept of family sustainability. Two years into New Hope, we found some suggestive evidence that more New Hope families had this sense of sustainability than did control families. We prepared some survey questions based on this and used those questions in the survey at five years. Comparing New Hope and control families, however, we did not see any differences in how parents responded.

NOTES

5. In an analysis of a nationally representative survey, Toby Parcel and Elizabeth Menaghan (1994) found that children’s verbal abilities were lower when mothers or fathers worked more than forty hours a week than when they just worked full time. 6. Gina Adams, Kathleen Snyder, and Jodi Sandfort (2002) describe the bureaucratic hassles and barriers that many parents face when trying to qualify for subsidies. 7. Council of Economic Advisers (1997); Hofferth (1995). 8. Loeb et al. (2004); NICHD Early Child Care Research Network and Duncan (2003). 9. The pattern for New Hope parents is consistent with other research showing that subsidies for child care result in more parents choosing centerbased care (Fuller et al. 2002; Crosby, Gennetian, and Huston 2005). 10. Lamb (1998). 11. Coley, Chase-Lansdale, and Grining (2001); Fuller et al. (2002). 12. Excerpts drawn from Lowe and Weisner (2003). 13. Presser (2003). 14. Lowe and Weisner (2003); Lowe et al. (2005). 15. Bos et al. (1999, chapter 6); Huston et al. (2003, chapter 5). 16. Mahoney, Larson, and Eccles (2005); Manlove et al. (2002). 17. Weisner et al. (2001). Children engaged in after-school activities with relatives, whether or not specifically literacy or school-related, were also doing somewhat better in school. Kin involvement and family obligation seem to play a role. 18. Eccles and Gootman (2002); Harding (2005). 19. The survey included only the Child and Family sample. Because they were all parents, respondents were probably more likely than adults without children to be eligible for state-subsidized insurance. We do not have information about insurance rates for sample members who were not in the Child and Family sample. 20. Bos et al. (1999, chapter 5); Huston et al. (2003, chapter 4). Depression scales were included in the surveys beginning at 24 months, but were not assessed at baseline, when participants signed up for the random assignment lottery. 21. Huston et al. (2003, chapter 4). 22. Weisner et al. (2002). 23. Vonnie McLoyd (1998) is a good review of this research. 24. Huston et al. (2005). 25. Furstenberg et al. (1999). 26. Garfinkel et al. (1998). 27. There is a basis for some mothers’ concerns. In a large sample in Great Britain, children whose fathers were engaged in high levels of antisocial behavior were more likely to develop problems themselves if their fathers lived with them than if they lived only with their mothers (Jaffee et al. 2003). 149

NOTES

28. Davis and Weisner (2005). 29. England and Folbre (2002); Carlson et al. (2004); Carlson, McLanahan, and England (2004). 30. Data were not gathered for most of the male participants after the two-year evaluation, so we do not have information about effects on marriage for men. 31. Gassman-Pines, Yoshikawa, and Nay (2006). There was not a corresponding program effect on cohabitation; it was equally likely for program and control group members. 32. Gennetian and Miller (2004). 33. Gibson, Edin, and McLanahan (2005); Edin and Kefalas (2005); Huston and Melz (2004). 34. Gassman-Pines, Yoshikawa, and Nay. (2006). 35. Gennetian and Miller (2004); Gibson, Edin, and McLanahan (2005). 36. DeParle (2004, 321). 37. Edin and Lein (1997). 38. Newman (2000). 39. Bos et al. (1999, 80–82). 40. Yoshikawa, Weisner, and Lowe (2006).

CHAPTER 8 1. This list of work and economic barriers (not to be confused with the six barriers identified that individual participants faced, such as no high school diploma, no work history, and so forth) comes directly from a “lesson learned” memorandum written by New Hope staff and directors (New Hope Project, Staff and Board of Directors 1999, 14). 2. Goode and Maskovsky (2001); Morgan and Maskovsky (2003). Some of these structural and work problems are addressed in the edited volume on New Hope (Yoshikawa, Weisner, and Lowe 2006). 3. Haskins (2001). 4. A body of evidence shows that center-based care contributes to children’s school-readiness and academic success. See, for example, Gennetian et al. (2004), Loeb et al. (2004), and NICHD Early Child Care Research Network and Duncan (2003). 5. For evidence about contributions of structured activities to child and adolescent development, see Mahoney, Larson, and Eccles (2005). 6. The $6,600 applies to families with children under the age of ten when they signed up for the program and is documented in Huston et al. (2003, table 2.5). We have inflated the $5,300 figure in the table (as well as other cost and benefit figures) to 2005 dollars using the consumer price index. After the program ended, child-care benefits from the Wisconsin Shares program and health insurance from BadgerCare have become available to nearly ev150

NOTES

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

eryone who would have qualified for New Hope’s benefits (an exception is health insurance for men and women who are not parents). New Hope’s annual child-care costs amounted to nearly $2,500 per year, whereas annual health insurance cost approximately $750. Presumably there would also be some saving in benefit administration and general program administration if these two components were not part of the New Hope package. Subtracting these expenditures from the $6,600 cuts it roughly in half. Brock et al. (1997, chapter 4) estimate that roughly 30,000 individuals eligible for New Hope lived in its target neighborhoods. Mead, personal communication, September 19, 2005. Brock et al. (1997, chapter 4). New Hope’s earnings impacts among families with children are similar to those found in several other welfare-reform and work-support programs, some of which cost considerably less that New Hope (see Bloom and Michalopoulos 2001). The most famous long-term study of child impacts is the Perry Preschool program, which provided enriched early education to low-income African American children. It found large differences in rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration between the children who attended Perry Preschool and children in the comparison group. The economic value of these differences amounted to nearly $200,000 per child (Schweinhart et al. 2005). It is unlikely that New Hope’s benefits will begin to approach this sum, however, given that New Hope supports work and Perry Preschool provided education-focused services to children and their families. Moreover, New Hope’s short-term impacts on children are considerably smaller than Perry Preschool’s. Neckerman (2004). Dave Hage (2004) provides a comprehensive history of the development of the Minnesota program and its evaluation. For an evaluation of MFIP’s implementation, see Auspos et al. (1997). Gennetian and Miller (2004, chapter 5). Other studies also found less positive effects of welfare reform policies that require work among recent applicants for welfare compared with those who were long-term recipients. Among the many possible reasons are that recent applicants are often in a crisis from divorce or job loss that may interfere with their ability to be employed, and many will find jobs and leave welfare, whether or not it is tied to work requirements (see Zaslow et al. 2002). Bloom and Michalopoulos (2001); Morris et al. (2001); Morris, Gennetian, and Duncan (2005). Because Canada has universal health insurance, this was not a component of the Self-Sufficiency Program. The Canadian results are detailed in Winston Lin et al. (1998) and Kelley Foley et al. (2002). Bloom and Michalopoulos (2001). 151

NOTES

19. In the Canadian Self-Sufficiency Program, young children in program families were more likely than control group children to attend both formal and informal child care (Morris and Michalopoulos 2000). The Minnesota program boosted formal but not informal child care use (Gennetian et al. 2004). 20. Morris et al. (2005); Zaslow et al. (2002). 21. Gennetian et al. (2004). 22. Gennetian and Miller (2000). We searched for such evidence in the New Hope ethnographic sample but failed to find it.

CHAPTER 9 1. Program impacts also faded out in the Minnesota and the Canadian programs, both of which provided benefits for a total of thirty-six months (Michalopolous 2004). 2. MaCurdy and McIntyre (2004). 3. Medicaid covers people with disabilities, those aged sixty-five and over, and, in some states, people with certain illnesses. 4. Based on a national survey taken for the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured (Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured 2004). 5. Health insurance coverage estimates come from the 2004 Current Population Survey. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (2006), 8.3 million children from all income groups were uninsured in 2005. See Angel, Lein, and Henrici (2006) for a comprehensive look at health care and poor families. 6. Federal budget numbers and projections from 2003 to 2011 show a continuing decline in the number of children served by the Child Care Development Fund (Ewen and Matthews 2006). A GAO report issued in 2003 indicated that twenty-seven states had taken steps to reduce or limit enrollment in their child care subsidy programs between 2001 and 2003 (U.S. Government Accounting Office 2003). 7. Child-care data come from Liz McNichol and John Springer (2004) and Bruce Fuller et al. (2002). Of course, waiting lists include families with unsubsidized care who would prefer subsidized care, so it is not the case that all families on the lists lack care (Besharov and Samari, 2001). 8. Ellwood and Welty (2000); Johnson, Schweke, and Hull (1999a). Gretchen Kirby et al. (2002) describe recent attempts to implement transitional jobs programs. Lawrence Mead (2004) describes efforts by Wisconsin to fashion workfare jobs with real tasks and discipline. 9. Molina and Howard (2003). 10. The discussion in this section draws from Gordon Berlin (2000). 11. Some states have devised ways of getting around the mixed-message co152

NOTES

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

nundrum. Michigan has eliminated time limits completely by paying cash benefits from state rather than federal TANF funds to families who exceed the time limit. Illinois keeps the time limit for nonworking families, but effectively removes it for working families by using state funds to stop the clock for such families. The cumbersome nature of these systems argues for the wisdom of earnings supplements handled separately from cash assistance payments. A more ambitious scheme would require employers to provide quarterly data on the hours worked by each employee when they file the quarterly earnings reports required by the Unemployment Insurance and Social Security systems. Virtually all employers report work hours on worker pay stubs, so they would simply have to add information they are already collecting to a report of earnings they are providing. Minnesota, Washington, Alaska, and Oregon are among the states that already do this. With such a reporting system for work hours in place, the bulk of the eligibility and payment process could be largely automated. Manual verification would still be needed in the case of self-employed workers or workers with earnings from out-of-state sources. Lowe and colleagues (2005). The demonstration Work Advancement and Support Centers are described in Jaquelyn Anderson, Linda Kato, and James Riccio (2006). For information about one-stop centers funded by the Workforce Investment Act, see http://www.doleta.gov/etainfo. Mead (2004, chapters 6 and 7), and DeParle (2004). See also a discussion of the differences between the New Hope and W-2 case management approaches in http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/irp/wiwelreform/newhopefinal.pdf. Auspos et al. (1997).

APPENDIX 1. Because we hypothesized beneficial effects of the program, we conducted “one tail” significance tests. 2. The survey conducted two years after New Hope ended asked the most comprehensive question about total family income for families with young children. The survey reports averaged $19,400 compared with administrative data totals that averaged $11,800—64 percent more. Poverty rates based on the survey reports were correspondingly less—32 percent instead of 73 percent.

AFTERWORD 1. Miller et al. (2008), Bos et al. (2007). 2. Gennetian et al. (2004a, 2004b). 153

NOTES

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

154

Yoshikawa, Weisner, and Lowe (2006). Zedlewski and Zimmerman (2007). Zedlewski and Zimmerman (2007); Schulman and Blank (2008). Stebbins and Knitzer (2007). Huston (2008). Forum on Child and Family Statistics (2008). Haskins and Sawhill (2007). Roy, Buckmiller, and McDowell (2008). Bos et al. (2007). Bos et al. (2007).

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Index Numbers in bold refer to figures and tables. abuse, domestic, 39, 55–57, 96–98 achievement, children’s school: methods and data, 72–73, 123–24; New Hope’s effects on, 1, 13, 48, 72–75, 106, 129–30; and quality child care, 69–70; welfare reform’s effects on, 111–12 ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), 71–72 adolescents, 57–58, 87, 90–91, 106, 111 adults with children, 4, 5, 37, 52, 82– 85. See also family context; mothers; parent-child relationships adults without children: eligibility for New Hope, 3; employment and earnings effects, 62–64; and health insurance benefit, 27; importance of support for, 62–63, 104–5, 114–15; as share of participants, 36, 37 AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), 3, 7–8 African Americans: employment and earnings effects, 64; and ethnic diversity of project representatives, 26; fathers and child support, 63; participant profile, 31–32; as share of working poor, 9, 138n5; and single mothers in poverty, 7 after-school programs, 70, 78, 88, 90– 91, 106, 143n17 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 3, 7–8 alcohol and drug addictions, 32–33, 39, 96–98

American Dream (DeParle), 38, 97 anxiety reduction from New Hope program, 92–93 Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), 71–72 balancing of family and work: and domestic violence, 55–56, 96–98; New Hope’s effects on, 11, 57, 58, 67, 82– 99, 108–9; parents’ focus on, 52, 82– 85; and use of New Hope benefits, 39; for working poor, 1, 5–6 behavior, children’s: and domestic violence, 57; and economic benefits of early support, 145n11; New Hope’s effects on, 13, 71–72, 75–79, 106, 123–24, 129–30; and parental wellbeing, 93; and parental work hours, 87, 143n5 blacks. See African Americans boys in school: behavior problems for, 71–72; New Hope’s effects on, 13, 71–74, 75, 77–79, 106 Brock, Tom, 25, 36–38, 43 business community, support for New Hope, 10, 20–23 Canada, welfare model in, 14, 110, 146n19 center-based vs. home-based child care, 88–89, 111 CFWA (Congress for a Working America), 2, 17, 19 Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, 23

INDEX

Child and Family Study, 44–48, 65 child-care support: administration of, 117; and costs of New Hope, 28, 107; effects of, 8–9, 69, 86, 106, 140n10; and evaluative goals of New Hope, 45; and need for employer flexibility, 13, 52, 89, 136n24; and New Hope structure, 4; participants’ use of, 40, 52–53; and standard of living effects, 67; value of, 5, 11–13, 55, 57–58, 85, 87–90, 99, 103, 111, 115; Wisconsin’s subsidies, 9, 104 children: domestic violence impact on, 56–57; and family well-being, 82– 99; full-time employment’s consequences for, 79, 87, 111–12, 143n5; New Hope’s effects on, 1, 13, 53, 68–81, 105–6; New Hope’s legacy for, 100–102; and nonresident fathers, 63, 77, 94–95, 143n27; and poverty, 120, 139n5; and struggles of single mothers, 31, 33, 34; survey complications for researchers, 47– 48; and welfare programs’ focus, 11–12, 18; in working poor families, 6, 9, 58. See also achievement, children’s school; behavior, children’s; child-care support; parent-child relationships child support payments, 63, 94 Civil Works Administration (CWA), 15 Clinton, Bill, 8 community outreach strategies, 36 community service jobs: cost of, 60, 116, 141n12; effects on participants, 13, 59–62, 103; and national implementation of New Hope, 115–16, 118; and New Hope structure, 4, 28–29; participant use of, 5, 40 Congress for a Working America (CFWA), 2, 17, 19 166

consumers, participants’ freedom to be, 86–87 control group and random assignment method, 43 cost-benefit analysis: child-care supplement, 28, 107; community service jobs, 60, 116, 141n12; and New Hope’s development, 21; and New Hope’s results, 107–9, 144–45n6; and verification of work hours, 117 criminal justice system, men’s encounters with, 33, 34, 63 culture of New Hope, 4, 25, 26–27, 109, 116, 118–19 CWA (Civil Works Administration), 15 deindustrialization, 17–18 demographics of New Hope participants, 4–6 DeParle, Jason, 38, 97 development, child, and well-being, 1, 53, 68–81, 105–6. See also behavior, children’s disabilities and challenges for New Hope participants, 39, 62, 71–72, 76 domestic violence, 39, 55–57, 96–98 Downey, Thomas, 19 drug and alcohol addictions, 32–33, 39, 96–98 Duncan, Greg, 49 earned income tax credit (EITC), 8, 66, 104, 114 earnings and wages: and cost-benefit analysis of New Hope, 108; erosion of wages, 1, 6–7; and evaluative goals of New Hope, 45; and fulltime work requirement, 66–67, 105; gender gap in, 7; methods and data, 122–23; New Hope’s effects on, 12, 51–64, 65, 125–28, 141n19; and stress reduction, 85–87

INDEX

earnings supplement: importance for participants, 12; and income levels, 66; national implementation of, 115, 117, 146–47n11; New Hope’s management of, 4, 27; and school achievement effects, 111–12 Eccles, Jacquelynne, 45 economic context for New Hope development, 17–18, 22, 29–30. See also employment; income levels Edin, Kathryn, 98 education: as detour from work progress, 16; and employment prospects, 7, 35, 60; expanded choices for parents, 87; and New Hope’s limitations, 10; New Hope’s use of, 24, 61; participants’ focus on, 40; working poor’s deficits in, 60, 63. See also achievement, children’s school EITC (earned income tax credit), 8, 66, 104, 114 employers: and child-care arrangements, 13, 52, 89, 136n24; participant experiences of, 51–52 employment: challenges of improving men’s, 105; and child care’s importance, 87–90; and education level, 7, 35, 60; effects on children, 79, 87, 111–12, 143n5; and evaluative goals of New Hope, 45; historical shifts in, 6–7, 17–18; and language skills, 103; methods and data, 122–23; New Hope’s effects on, 12, 51–64, 65, 66–67, 105, 125– 28; vs. other factors in family wellbeing, 98–99; participant requirements, 3, 4, 40, 105, 112, 139– 40n5–7; scheduling irregularities and New Hope, 13, 40; welfare reform programs’ effects, 111. See also skills, work engagement in school, New Hope’s effects on, 74

ethnicity, 1, 7, 36, 38. See also African Americans; Hispanics Ethnographic Study, 44, 48–50 evaluation of New Hope, 10–14, 21, 23, 42–50 family context: and ability to use New Hope benefits, 39; instability of, 68–69, 70–71; and marriage, 95– 97, 102; methods and data, 124; mothers’ influence vs. New Hope, 79–81; New Hope’s effects on, 82– 99, 131–33; nonresident fathers’ effects on, 68–69, 77, 93–95; and welfare reform, 8, 93. See also balancing of family and work; children; parent-child relationships Family Investment Program, 110, 119 Family Support Act (1988), 19 fathers: and children, 63, 77, 94–95, 143n27; and family context, 68–69, 77, 93–95 Federal Emergency Relief Administration, 15 Fitzsimmons, Roger, 22–23 Ford Foundation, 23 Fuller, Howard, 19 full-time employment: consequences for children, 79, 87, 111–12, 143n5; New Hope participant requirements, 3, 4, 40, 105, 112, 139– 40n5–7; New Hope’s effect on, 53– 58, 66–67, 105 funding for New Hope, 21, 22, 23 Gardner, John, 2 GED as primary education goal, 63 gender factor, employment and earnings, 7, 62. See also boys in school; girls in school; men; women General Assistance program, Wisconsin’s, 30, 62 167

INDEX

geographic mismatch between jobs and working poor, 6, 7, 29 girls in school, achievement-behavior, 73, 74, 77–79 Granger, Robert, 46 Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC), 3, 20–21, 22 hardships, New Hope vs. control families, 86, 125–28. See also poverty Haveman, Robert, 21 health insurance: and evaluative goals of New Hope, 45; expansion of, 8, 115; importance for participants, 12, 13; and New Hope’s effects, 12, 53, 86, 91–92; and New Hope structure, 4; participants’ use of, 27–28; poor children’s lack of, 6; Wisconsin’s, 9 Helen Bader Foundation, 23 high-skilled workers, demand for, 7 Hispanics: fathers and child support, 63; participant profiles, 32–35; reluctance to visit New Hope office, 36; as share of working poor, 9, 38, 138n5; and single mothers in poverty, 7 Hoffer, Bob, 22 Hollister, Rob, 24 Hoover, Herbert, 15 Hopkins, Harry, 15 hours of work, 57–58, 117, 147n12. See also full-time employment Huston, Aletha, 47 immigration and erosion of wages, 7 income levels: and children’s wellbeing, 139n5; and incentives for marriage, 96; New Hope’s effects on, 65, 66, 125–28; and stress reduction, 85–87. See also earnings and wages; poverty

168

individual characteristics. See personal characteristics inequities in labor market, 7 instability in working poor families, 68–69, 70–71, 77, 96–97 intergenerational poverty, 32, 38 job searching, welfare program requirements, 30 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 23, 45, 46 John D. Rockefeller Foundation, 23 Kerksick, Julie: and New Hope development, 2–3, 10, 17, 18–19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26; and participant recruitment, 37–38; and random assignment requirement, 42–43; on verification of work hours, 117 language skills and employment, 103 Lein, Laura, 98 low-skilled workers, 1, 6–7, 58–59, 60–61 Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), 11, 23, 36– 37, 44, 45 manufacturing employment, declines in, 6–7, 17–18 marriage, New Hope’s indirect effects on, 95–97, 102 McGiver, John, 21, 22 MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation), 11, 23, 36– 37, 44, 45 Mead, Lawrence, 80 Medicaid, expansion of, 8 men: employment and earnings effects, 12, 62–64, 105; and family context for participants, 31–35, 68– 69, 77, 93–95, 143n27; New Hope’s

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support of working poor, 4–5, 20; as share of participants, 36. See also fathers mental health issues, 39, 71–72 methods and data: employment, earnings, and poverty, 122–23; evaluation structure, 11–14, 42–50; family effects, 124; random assignment issue, 10–11, 23, 42–44, 49–50; and school achievement-behavior, 72– 73, 123–24 MFIP (Minnesota Family Investment Program), 96, 109–10 Milbourne, Robert, 20, 21 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1, 2, 7, 18, 29 Milwaukee Choice program, 68, 87 Minnesota, welfare model in, 14, 109– 10, 119 Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP), 96, 109–10 minority groups, 1, 7, 36, 38. See also African Americans; Hispanics Moody, Jim, 23 morals and values: and child care choices, 89–90; and fair social contract concept, 1, 80, 113; importance of psychological well-being, 67; and motivation to help working poor, 22; New Hope’s commitment to all adults, 62–63; and nonresident fathers’ roles in families, 94–95; and random assignment method, 43; strong family values among working poor, 98; and support for single mothers, 8, 66; work ethic, 66–67, 120 mothers, impact on children vs. New Hope, 79–81. See also single mothers motivation, participant, 45, 74, 129– 30 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 19 multiple jobs, reductions in, 57, 67

National Advisory Board, 21, 24, 47 National Advisory Committee, 28 National Institute of Child Health and Development, 46 national level, New Hope as model for, 10–11, 113–21, 146–47n11 New Hope Project: children’s wellbeing effects, 68–81; culture of, 4, 25, 26–27, 109, 116, 118–19; development of, 1–14, 15–30; employment and earnings effects, 51–64; evaluation of, 10–14, 21, 23, 42–50; family well-being effects, 82–99; importance of program flexibility, 104–7; lessons for future programs, 100– 112; and national policy, 10–11, 113–21, 146n11; participant profiles and recruitment, 31–41; poverty effects, 1, 12, 64–66, 86, 105, 125–28; and values about work, 66–67. See also methods and data Newman, Katherine, 98 Norquist, John, 19, 22 One-Stop Career Centers, 118 one-stop shopping for benefits, importance of, 116, 117–18 overtime work, reductions in, 57, 67 parent-child relationships: instability in, 68–69, 70–71; New Hope’s effects on, 86–87, 93; and parental work hours, 87, 143n5; and parents’ desire for more home time, 57–58; and parents’ perceptions of behavior, 77, 78; and personal characteristics of parents, 75–76; quality of participants’, 97–98 parents as participants, 4. See also adults with children; fathers; mothers participants: culture of respect for, 4, 25, 26–27, 109, 116, 118–19; demo-

169

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participants (continued) graphic overview, 4–6; enrollment of, 36–38; individual situation context, 31–35, 54, 55–56, 58–59, 66–69, 77, 93–95; profiles of, 31–35; recruiting challenges, 30; and researchers, 46–47, 48–49; scope of, 3, 5, 19, 20, 62–63; selective use of New Hope benefits, 5, 13, 27–28, 38–41, 52–53; shifting needs of, 40–41; typicality level of, 97–98. See also personal characteristics part-time employment, 53–55 Perry Preschool program, 145n11 personal characteristics: and career progression, 55; and children’s academic motivations, 74; and community service jobs’ role, 59–61; disabilities, 39, 62, 71–72, 76; mothers’ influence vs. New Hope, 79–81; and New Hope experience, 51–52; and New Hope’s limitations, 10; and parental treatment of children, 75–76; participant profiles, 31–35; and use of New Hope benefits, 13, 39 Phillips, Jennifer, 24 policy issues: and awareness of working poverty, 1, 8; and community involvement in New Hope, 22; economic vs. psychological focus of, 94; and employment-poverty effects of New Hope, 66–67; importance of program flexibility, 13–14, 104–7; New Hope as model for national level, 10–11, 113–21, 146n11; and work supports, 2–3 politics: and awareness of working poverty, 1; challenges of New Hope development, 20–21, 22–23; individual vs. societal responsibility for well-being, 80–81; and welfare reform, 19–20; and will to support working poor, 119–21 170

poverty: and children’s prospects, 6, 9, 58, 120, 139n5; and evaluative goals of New Hope, 45; individual vs. societal responsibility for, 80–81; intergenerational, 32, 38; methods and data, 122–23; New Hope’s effects on, 1, 12, 64–66, 86, 105, 125– 28, 141n21; and single parenthood, 93; welfare reform’s effects, 111 The Prisoners of Welfare (Riemer), 2–3, 18–19 prison time for male partners of single mothers, 33, 34 project representatives, 25–27, 119 psychological well-being. See wellbeing psychotherapy, New Hope’s referrals to, 56 racial and ethnic groups, 1, 7, 36, 38. See also African Americans; Hispanics random assignment and New Hope evaluation, 10–11, 23, 42–44, 49– 50 Republican politicians, garnering support from, 22–23 “Research Network on Successful Pathways Through Middle Childhood,” 45 respect for participants, 4, 25, 26–27, 109, 116, 118–19 Riemer, David, 2–3, 15–19, 20–21, 40– 41, 113 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 15–16 Sazama, Warren, 20–21 schedules, work, and child care availability, 13, 52, 89, 136n24 SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program), 9 schools, more choices for parents, 87. See also education

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Schrader, Tom: on community service jobs, 116; on evaluation, 44; on national implementation of New Hope, 119; and New Hope development, 3, 10, 20, 21–22, 28–29 Schulz, Sharon, 24–25, 29, 45 segregation in cities, 7 self-esteem of participants, cultivation of, 26–27, 45, 55, 92–93 Self-Sufficiency Program, Canadian, 110, 146n19 single fathers. See fathers single mothers: extra burden of providing stability, 77; and instability challenge for children, 68–69; and moral framework for welfare reform, 8, 66; participant profiles, 31– 35; and relationships with men, 31– 35, 93–95, 143n27; as share of working poor, 1; welfare’s focus on at-home, 7–8, 18; and work-family balancing act, 5–6 skills, work: community service jobs as practice ground for, 60–61; limited effectiveness of improving, 19; low-skilled workers’ disadvantages, 1, 6–7, 60–61; and New Hope’s effects on employment, 58–59; and New Hope’s limitations, 10 social and emotional development. See behavior, children’s social contract: as American value, 1, 80, 113; and existing supports for workers, 137n3; New Hope as, 1, 2, 4, 12, 25, 58, 103–4, 112 Social Security Act (1935), 7–8 Sokolow, Robert, 21 SSI (Supplemental Security Income) program, 62, 76 stability in families, importance of, 68–69, 70–71, 77, 96–97 standard of living, 67, 85, 86. See also employment; income levels

State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), 9 state governments, 9, 115–17 stress reduction and work supports, 85–87, 92–93 suburban location of new service jobs, 6, 7, 29 Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, 62, 76 Sykes, Donald, 23–24, 29 TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), 117 tax system as model for worker support, 114, 116–17 teachers, perceptions of student behavior, 77–78 technological change and increase in working poverty, 6–7 teenagers, 57–58, 87, 90–91, 106, 111 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), 117 Thompson, Tommy, 9, 19, 22, 23 training and education. See education unemployment rates in Milwaukee area, 29 unions, erosion of protections for workers, 7 United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW), 17 universal access to worker supports, 3, 19, 20, 62–63, 114–15 values and morals. See morals and values voluntary structure of New Hope, 3–4, 13, 23, 110 W. T. Grant Foundation, 46 wages, erosion of, 1, 6–7. See also earnings and wages Weisner, Tom, 48 171

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welfare programs: AFDC, 3, 7–8; Canadian, 14, 110, 146n19; Depressionera foundation for, 15–16; disrespectful relationship with participants, 26; effects on working poor, 65, 111–12; focus on mothers and children at home, 7–8, 18; importance of children’s well-being in, 11–12, 18; in Minnesota, 14, 109–10, 119; moral framework for, 8, 66, 93; vs. New Hope, 1, 3–4, 24, 27, 28–29, 51, 81; new programs, 96, 109–11; participants’ suspicions of, 37; politics of, 19–20; reform movement (1980s-1990s), 7–9; stereotyping of recipients, 38; in Wisconsin, 9, 18, 29–30, 62; work vs. welfare attitude, 17. See also Wisconsin Works (W-2) Welfare Replacement Project, 20 well-being: and chaotic personal relationships, 55–56; child, 1, 11–12, 18, 53, 58, 68–81, 105–6, 139n5; family context for, 82–99; individual vs. societal responsibility for, 80–81; New Hope’s legacy for, 100–102; and New Hope’s limitations, 104; as primary goal of social programs, 67; self-esteem, 26–27, 45, 55, 92–93; stress reduction, 85–87, 92–93 whites: employment and earnings effects, 64; as share of working poor, 38 WIA (Workforce Investment Act) (1998), 118 Wisconsin: Milwaukee, 1, 2, 7, 18, 29; welfare in, 9, 18, 29–30, 62 Wisconsin Gas Company, 22 Wisconsin Works (W-2): community service jobs vs. New Hope, 60; employment improvements under, 54;

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impact on New Hope, 9, 29–30, 104; and post-New Hope effects on participants, 102; treatment of participants, 51, 118–19 Wiseman, Michael, 24 women and working poverty, 1, 7. See also adults without children; mothers Work Advancement and Support Centers, 118 work ethic, American, 66–67, 120 Workforce Development Board, 117–18 Workforce Investment Act (WIA) (1998), 118 work hours, 57–58, 117, 147n12. See also full-time employment working poor: balancing of family and work, 1, 5–6; context of, 6–7, 103; education deficits of, 60, 63; ethnic mix among, 1, 7, 9, 38, 138n5; geographic mismatch in job availability, 6, 7, 29; importance of consistent support for, 113–14; increased awareness of, 1, 8; mixed results of training for, 16; moral framework for support, 1, 22; perceptions of parenting skill among, 97–98; political will to support, 119–21 work schedules and child care availability, 13, 52, 89, 136n24 work supports for poor workers, overview of, 2, 27–28. See also employment; New Hope Project work vs. welfare attitude, 17 youth after-school programs, 70, 78, 88, 90–91, 106, 143n17