 |
- Following TANF's enactment, most
states devoted additional resources to services, monitoring,
and case management activities and engaged a wider range
of recipients in work-related activities than ever before.
Nonetheless, if caseload reductions had not occurred, few
states would have been able to meet simultaneously the hours
requirement and the participation rate established in TANF.
Arguably, welfare reform's toughest
test is occurring in big cities. But here, too, both participation
rates and expenditures on welfare-to-work programs have increased
steadily since 1996. Findings from the Project on Devolution
and Urban Change - MDRC's ongoing evaluation of welfare reform
in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia - shows
all four cities and their surrounding counties increasing
use of case management services to encourage and enforce TANF's
work requirements. As a result, these large urban areas made
substantial progress in increasing the percentage of welfare
recipients who were working or participating in welfare-to-work
activities. For example, in Cleveland-Cuyohoga County, 10
percent of the adult caseload were participating at all in
a welfare-to-work activity during 1996/1997, while nearly
50 percent were participating by 1999/2000. In Miami-Dade,
the corresponding figures were 18 percent and 53 percent.
Furthermore, all of the cities invested increasing amounts
of their TANF funds into their welfare-to-work programs, despite
the fact that the number of people on welfare was in a nearly
continuous decline throughout this period. For example, expenditures
in Cleveland rose from $14 million in 1996/1997 to $18 million
in 1999/2000 (an increase of about 30 percent), while spending
in Miami-Dade increased sevenfold, from nearly $9 million
in 1996/1997 to nearly $64 million in 1999/2000. And these
figures do not even include program expenditures for child
care.
Nevertheless, without the point-for-point credit for caseload
reductions, none of the Urban Change sites would have met
TANF's participation requirements. Although a substantial
proportion of the caseload was engaged, a much lower fraction
participated continuously for an average of 30 hours per week.
During the state fiscal year 1999/2000, the percentage of
adult welfare recipients in the Urban Change counties who
met this inclusive definition of participation ranged from
nearly 30 percent to slightly more than 50 percent. Reinforcing
this point, detailed data from several successful programs
in the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS)
were used to calculate what these programs' participation
rates would have been had they been required to meet only
a 20-hour-per-week participation standard. Though all of them
vigorously enforced the participation mandate, increased employment,
and reduced welfare, their monthly participation rates did
not exceed 10 percent by this definition. The rates rise to
only about 15 percent if one takes account of changes in the
law that allow people with earnings to continue collecting
welfare, removes those who are sanctioned from the calculation,
and factors in an employment credit (for three subsequent
months) for people who left welfare for work. Only if participation
criteria are relaxed such that any activity in which recipients
participated in a month is counted, regardless of the number
of hours, do these same sites reach participation rates around
50 percent. Back
to participation and mandates summary
- However much effort states invest,
achieving high rates of participation in program services
will be a challenge because a significant percentage of
recipients will be unable to participate in any given period.
Programs must seek to engage almost everyone targeted by
a mandate to reach the required participation level.
Even in a tightly managed program,
a substantial number of recipients will be unable to participate
at any given time - for instance, because they are waiting
for an activity to begin (having recently completed program
orientation or another activity), temporarily ill or disabled,
caring for an ill or disabled family member, awaiting the
outcome of an application to the Supplemental Security Income
program, or in the midst of a noncompliance review process
that may lead to sanctions for failure to comply with program
requirements. Thus, to engage 50 percent or more of the adult
caseload in 20 or more hours of activity or work a week, programs
must involve nearly everyone on the caseload, not just the
most employable or the most
interested. Back
to participation and mandates summary
- Programs that actively enforced
mandates by reducing the welfare grants of those who did
not participate produced higher participation rates than
did low-enforcement programs. Beyond a threshold level,
however, increases in sanctioning rates were not associated
with higher participation rates.
The best evidence on the relationship
between participation rates and enforcement of participation
rules comes from NEWWS. Each of the 11 welfare-to-work programs
under study was categorized as "high enforcement"
(imposing sanctions on more than a quarter of its caseload,
on average) or "low enforcement" (imposing sanctions
on less than 5 percent, on average). The high-enforcement
programs produced higher participation rates than did low-enforcement
programs, and they also had larger impacts on employment,
earnings, and welfare savings. Still, one cannot readily separate
out the effects of mandates above and beyond the effects of
the services that accompanied the mandates, and there was
no difference among the high-enforcement programs in participation
rates. In other words, sanctioning was effective up to a point,
but increases in sanctioning beyond that point did not raise
participation further.
There is other evidence that aggressive enforcement of sanctions
may be counterproductive. Sanctioning rates are much higher
among the most disadvantaged welfare recipients - those with
long welfare stays, low levels of education, or a high incidence
of severe, persistent, and multiple barriers to employment.
There is also scattered evidence that some recipients do not
comply with requirements because they are unclear about what
they are required to do. Back
to participation and mandates summary
|
|
