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June 2008 THE OTHER HALF OF THE STORY The 1996 federal welfare overhaul certainly has "ended welfare as we know it," as I concluded in a recent Governing story looking back at the law 12 years later. But the changes made by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act don't mean that those being served by social-service systems are all significantly better off, or that states and localities aren't struggling to help children and families in need.
The assumption behind welfare reform was, of course, that states and localities given the flexibility to apply a broad range of help--whether skills training, transportation, child care, or simply things like the purchase of clothes--would be moving hoards of clients off of welfare and on to independence. And at first that's what seemed to be happening as caseloads plummeted nationally. But that was only half the story. The other half was that many of those who left welfare did so for low-paying jobs that were anything but a path to independence, and that if it weren't for a host of other services and benefits wrapped around these working poor--health care, child care, housing subsidies, the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit--they wouldn't be making it. And so the focus in states and localities shifted from simply getting people off welfare and into work and toward helping them move upward on the income and career ladder, personal progress that is absolutely critical to the ultimate success of welfare reform. Efforts to help people move up occurred more or less haphazardly in the early years. And the whole push was complicated significantly by the fact that every time a client achieved some significant improvement in economic status, access to those other wraparound services they'd enjoyed as part of their dubious status as "working poor" was subject to reduction. As a result, economic advancement was often viewed as a step backwards, as either benefits (such as food stamps) were reduced or increased wages were garnished to pay for those benefits. DEMONSTRATING THE IMPACT The venerable Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation--a New York City-based research nonprofit devoted to studying social and education policy nationally--has been examining this phenomenon and gauging its impact on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families clients through its Work Advancement and Support Center. To help people move up the pay and career ladder, and to get a better idea of how increases in wages or hours might affect a client's benefits (and, not incidentally, a client's inclination to make a move up), the MDRC is currently working through four demonstration sites--in Dayton, Ohio; San Diego; Tarrant County, Texas (Fort Worth); and Bridgeport, Connecticut--to figure out how to help people move up, how to quickly calculate the overall impacts of benefits that will occur due to an income increase, and how the income-increase/benefit-impacts equation affects clients' attitudes toward advancement. Through a lottery system, those sites are now diverting some clients into a new and more intensive level of coaching when it comes to pay and career advancement (including helping them sign up for other benefits, where applicable, as well as calculate potential adverse impacts of increased income on current benefits), leaving a control group that's being served through traditional services. Preliminary findings from those demonstration projects were recently reported in "From Getting By to Getting Ahead; Navigating Career Advancement for Low-Wage Workers." It's early yet, but what the study found isn't altogether encouraging: · Establishing integrated career advancement and work support services as part of the day-to-day operation of a welfare office isn't easy due to other workload demands. · The plug-in formula for establishing the impact of increased wages on benefits hasn't been used consistently across the four centers. · Clients are interested in and willing to move up--even in the face of reduced benefits--but opportunities for advancement are frequently limited absent an increase in education and training. · The intensive, multi-lateral and personal approach to effective coaching has been hamstrung by staff turnover, shortages and vacancies.
But the tactics being employed at the WASC sites do seem to hold promise, and the MDRC will be releasing another report this year updating the experiences in the four demonstration sites. Which is exactly the sort of outcomes-based research--in programs, policies, use of technology, funding, personnel management and partnerships--that this newsletter will be monitoring in hopes of helping those in the field figure out new and better ways to negotiate the huge and tremendously difficult and complicated world of human services. In the months to come, Human Services Monthly will be covering some of the latest goings-on nationally in areas from TANF (and related support services), to foster care and child protective services and beyond--what seems to be working and what doesn't--and how states and localities are responding to the continuing challenges presented by children and families who need society's help. WELFARE, PERFORMANCE AND MANAGEMENT The chance to do this newsletter is one that I jumped at immediately because it feeds into three of my direct interests as a reporter. First, I was lucky enough to be asked to cover state and local action in the wake of the 1996 federal welfare reforms, which was a great beat to pick up given the massive changes the law wrought--changes that continue to play out across the country. I've been following those changes ever since. And those changes fed directly into two of my other interests: performance measurement in government and personnel management. The new law required much closer monitoring of state and local performance in social services, and it demanded a significant change in the way state and local welfare workers were being asked to view and do their jobs. Caseworkers were no longer glorified clerks who established eligibility and sent out checks; they became mentors, coaches and problem-solvers, as they took on the new--and much more fulfilling--job of actually helping move individuals and families off of welfare and into work. While I will be spending a good deal of time looking for topics of interest for the newsletter myself (my extensive "kitchen cabinet" of human-services experts and practitioners is already on notice), I look forward to hearing from all of you who wish to weigh in on this subject--after all, you live it every day. So don't be shy about making suggestions about things to cover, and don't be shy about commenting on what you read here. Above all, I want this newsletter to be useful to you. E-mail me at humanservices@governing.com.
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