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Policy Framework
Key aspects of the 1996 federal welfare reform law were presaged in the Family Support Act (FSA) of 1988. Chief among these were a quid pro quo in which the government was required to offer education, employment, and support services to people receiving cash welfare, while most recipients — the majority of them single parents — were required to participate in such services in order to qualify for benefits. Participation mandates became a cornerstone of many pioneering welfare-to-work programs operated at the state and local levels after FSA’s passage. A landmark study of 11 such programs, the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS) was conducted by MDRC under contract to the federal government from 1989 through 2002. NEWWS yielded a trove of hard evidence on the effectiveness of different approaches to helping people move from the welfare rolls to payrolls. Exceptional for its large scale, long follow-up period, and rigorous research design, NEWWS continues to shed light on important questions in the welfare policy debate, such as what level of work participation can be realistically required of welfare recipients.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
With an overarching goal to find out what welfare-to-work strategies work best for what groups of recipients, NEWWS was among the most ambitious employment studies ever undertaken. Its examination of 11 programs in seven locations entailed tracking more than 40,000 single-parent families over a five-year period.
Key research questions included:
- How much can welfare-to-work programs help reduce welfare dependency and increase employment? Can they improve the economic circumstances of even the most disadvantaged welfare recipients?
- How do the children of welfare recipients fare under welfare-to-work programs? Do increases in parents’ employment, participation in work-directed activities, and literacy levels benefit or harm their children?
- What do welfare-to-work programs cost, and are some program approaches more cost-effective than others? How can program funds be used most judiciously?
- How many welfare recipients can be expected to work or to participate in work-directed activities?
Three main program approaches were investigated in NEWWS:
- An employment-focused approach, which emphasized short-term job search assistance and encouraged recipients to find jobs quickly
- An education-focused approach, which emphasized the importance of recipients’ participating in longer-term skill-building activities (primarily basic education) before entering the labor market
- A "mixed" approach, which determined on the basis of recipient characteristics and caseworker judgments whether recipients would benefit more from job search first or education and training first
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
NEWWS rested on a complex and powerful random assignment research design. In each of the sites, some welfare recipients were randomly assigned to a welfare-to-work program — and were therefore eligible for its services and subject to its requirements — while others were assigned to a control group that was neither eligible for program services nor subject to program requirements. Because people in each site were assigned to the groups at random, they did not differ from one another at the outset of the study. Therefore, any differences between them that emerged during the five-year follow-up period can be viewed as effects of the NEWWS programs.
The NEWWS programs were located in seven sites in six states. The main policy variable under study was the type of activities that a program emphasized. Three sites — Atlanta, Georgia; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Riverside, California — each operated one employment-focused program and one education-focused program, allowing for assessments of their effects relative to one another as well as relative to the control group. Three other sites — Detroit, Michigan; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Columbus, Ohio — operated only an education-focused program. One site — Portland, Oregon — ran a mixed program combining the two approaches.
Two other policy variables tested in the study were the vigor with which employment mandates were enforced and the type of case management provided to recipients.
The NEWWS research team measured economic outcomes for all the study members over five years using administrative records of employment and public assistance. It also gathered a wealth of information about recipients’ program experiences, educational attainment, family composition, employment and wage progression, and total family income by interviewing a subset of study members two years and five years after random assignment. Some of the interviewees also took reading and math achievement tests and responded to a battery of questions concerning their children. Additional outcomes for elementary-school-aged children were measured on the basis of cognitive and social development tests and teacher surveys.
Findings
Findings from MDRC’s Evaluation of the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies Project Description can be found in Moving People from Welfare to Work: Lessons from the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies.
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