Preface

The New Chance Demonstration, and this report, focused on a population of great concern as the nation implements the new welfare law: young women who have children as teenagers and are high school dropouts. New Chance was a voluntary demonstration project that provided comprehensive education, training, and other services intended to increase the long-term self-sufficiency and well-being of these mothers and their children. While this approach is very different from that expressed in various large-scale welfare reform strategies, its lessons on the complexity of young lives lived in poverty challenge all who are interested in change.

The demonstration was developed in the mid-1980s, when the problem of unwed teenage childbearing was growing, but solutions were lacking. Research showed that young mothers who were high school dropouts constituted the group at highest risk of long-term welfare receipt, and like many older welfare recipients they were unlikely to be able to earn more than they received on welfare unless they acquired more skills. A number of funders and program operators embraced the New Chance approach as one that promised to address both the needs of young families and society’s concern with the increasing rates and costs of out-of-wedlock births. The findings presented in this report speak to that concern and also to the related issues of targeting scarce welfare reform dollars, preparing young school dropouts for work, and assisting highly disadvantaged children of teen mothers.

The study of New Chance is one of the few large-scale, rigorous evaluations of programs designed to change the outcomes for this population. This is the last in a series of reports from that study. Earlier reports described a mixed picture of effects. A variety of community-based organizations implemented the program well in 16 diverse sites, yet participation by the program’s enrollees was uneven. Some came and stayed, but others attended sporadically or dropped out after a brief period.

At the 18-month follow-up point, the program had created a substantial increase in educational attainment (acquisition of a GED, which is frequently a prerequisite for occupational training programs), greater use of good-quality child care, and a modest improvement in participants’ parenting skills, balanced against high rates of repeat pregnancy, inconsistent program attendance, and the fact that more than 80 percent of the young mothers were still on welfare.

A monograph based on in-depth interviews with 50 former New Chance enrollees pointed to some of the circumstances behind this behavior: jobs found and lost, unplanned pregnancies, ambivalence about the balance between work and parenting responsibilities, and the important role played by family members, partners, and peers in supporting or undermining the young women’s efforts to move forward. It offered moving testimony that behind the statistics is a group of young women who are determined to build a better life for their children but who, with few resources and little support, are frequently stymied in their progress.

This report extends the story to 42 months of follow-up. The young mothers are now 22 years old, on average, and their children range from infancy to schoolage. The report addresses the question of whether the 18-month effects have translated into gains in employment, reductions in time on welfare, and improved outcomes for the children of program participants.

On many of these measures, the outcomes for the mothers have improved since they enrolled in New Chance. The sobering news is that the absolute levels of progress leave these young families far from self-sufficiency, and for most outcomes the New Chance program did not improve progress over and above that shown by an equivalent group of young women who did not attend New Chance. Furthermore, the New Chance experience has created some unplanned, small, but troubling effects for some of the most fragile families in the study. For example, mothers at high risk of clinical depression at the outset were, at follow-up, at greater risk of depression and reported higher levels of parental stress than their counterparts in the control group. They also believed that their children were doing less well on measures of social behavior.

Taken together with the results from studies of other approaches to improving the lives of young, poor mothers who are dropouts, these results speak to the importance of developing earlier interventions that succeed in preventing the constellation of poverty, academic failure, and nonmarital teen births. They also speak to the continued progress, striving, and tenacity of the young families, and their need for support as they struggle.

The New Chance Demonstration has been a remarkable partnership of many funders, states, and local programs. We are greatly indebted for their support and the cooperation of the young women in the New Chance study.

Judith M. Gueron
President

New Chance, a national research and demonstration program that operated between 1989 and 1992, was developed in a policy context marked by intense concern about teenage childbearing. That concern reflected the public's distress about three developments: the dramatic increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing over the past three decades, the long-term welfare costs incurred by young, poor women who become mothers, and the negative life prospects faced by their children. Little was known, however, about what kinds of programs and policies could help young mothers on welfare attain economic independence and could foster their children's development as well.

The recent enactment of a federal welfare law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, is likely to alter the welfare policy environment in several important respects. For one thing, it has the potential to sever the connection between early childbearing and high expenditures for public assistance by imposing time limits on the use of federal funds to support cash grants to most needy families, including those headed by mothers age 19 (or age 18, if they are not enrolled in school) and older. For another, it provides financial incentives to states that reduce their rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Against this changed backdrop, the New Chance Demonstration provides findings—about the behavior of young mothers who are receiving welfare, the problems they face, and their efforts to move toward self-sufficiency—that are highly relevant to the new welfare scenario. The evidence suggests that states will continue to confront substantial challenges in helping young mothers find jobs and move off welfare before the time limits on their receipt of aid have been reached.

The New Chance Demonstration was a rare and important opportunity to test the value of comprehensive services in assisting a disadvantaged group of families headed by young mothers who had first given birth as teenagers, who had dropped out of high school, and who were receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).¹ The program, which operated in 16 locations (or "sites") in 10 states across the country, sought to help the young mothers acquire educational and vocational credentials and skills so that they could secure jobs offering opportunities for advancement and could thereby reduce, and eventually eliminate, their use of welfare. It also sought to motivate and assist participants in postponing additional childbearing and to help them become better parents. Finally, New Chance was explicitly "two-generational" in its approach, seeking to enhance the cognitive abilities, health, and socioemotional well-being of enrollees' children. The program was, for the most part, voluntary; that is, young women were generally not required to attend in order to receive public assistance. Instead, most joined it because they wanted to earn their General Educational Development (GED, or high school equivalency) certificates and the program offered free child care to enable them to participate.

The program model was spelled out in guidelines developed in consultation with academicians, program operators, and other experts. The experts' recommendations reflected the prevailing view that earlier programs with a limited focus (for example, perinatal health care or education) had been largely inadequate and that a comprehensive intervention was needed to respond to the complex problems that young mothers commonly face. Accordingly, the model called for participants to receive a wide array of services addressing the young women's multiple roles and needs as students, prospective employees, mothers, family members, and partners. The services included instruction in basic academic skills and in subjects covered on the GED test, career exposure and employability development classes, occupational skills training, work experience, job placement assistance, health and family planning classes and services, parenting workshops, and "life skills" classes on communication and decision-making skills. These components were intended to reinforce and complement one another; together they were to convey a consistent set of messages about education, work, childrearing, and personal empowerment.²

The program model and demonstration were developed by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), a private nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that develops and studies initiatives to improve the well-being and self-sufficiency of poor people. MDRC designed and carried out the research agenda, provided initial training and ongoing technical assistance to the demonstration sites, helped them secure modest amounts of supplemental funding, and monitored their compliance with the program model and the research.

To evaluate the program's effectiveness, young women who applied and were determined to be eligible for New Chance were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the experimental group, whose members could enroll in the program, or the control group, whose members could not join New Chance but could receive other services available in their communities. To ascertain both short- and longer-term program effects, comparable information was collected from each member of both groups through in-home survey interviews conducted approximately 1½ and 3½ years after the individual had been randomly assigned. The measured average differences between the two groups' outcomes over time (such as their differences in rates of GED attainment, employment, or subsequent childbearing) and between the outcomes for their children are the observed results (or impacts) of New Chance. This, the final report on the New Chance program and its impacts, examines the trajectories of 2,079 young mothers who responded to the 3½-year survey.³

The Impact Findings in Brief

At the time of the 3½-year interview, the young women were, on average 22.4 years old, and most had children who were still toddlers. Contrary to the common stereotype of these young mothers as immobilized by—or content with—their circumstances, the evaluation found that over the 3½-year follow-up period the young women in the research sample—experimental and control group members alike—were moving forward in many ways. At baseline (that is, random assignment), fewer than 10 percent of sample members had a high school diploma or a GED; by the 3½-year point, almost half the sample had earned one of these credentials. Sixty-three percent of sample members did not work at all during the year prior to random assignment; in contrast, over half were employed at some point during the 12 months before the 3½-year interviews, and the large majority of those who worked did so for 30 hours a week or more. These rates of employment are surprisingly high given the young age of the mothers and the fact that most had very young children. Over the follow-up period, the proportion of sample members receiving AFDC dropped considerably (although the majority were still on the rolls at the 3½-year interview), the proportion of women who used a reliable method of birth control rose steadily, and fewer women were at risk of depression. Nevertheless, the large majority remained poor and on welfare after 3½ years.

Although experimental group members received more varied services in greater quantity than did their control group counterparts and received them sooner, the differential was not large, especially with regard to education- and employment-related services. This is partly because during the period of the demonstration many education and training programs were available in the New Chance communities, and members of the control group participated in these in unexpectedly high numbers. At the same time, because of absenteeism and early departures from the program, members of the experimental group received on average a much lower intensity and duration of services than had been anticipated, and many never participated in skills training, work experience, or job search—the activities in the program model most closely related to employment.

The New Chance evaluation is not, therefore, a test of extensive services compared with no services or minimal ones. Rather, the evaluation measures the effectiveness of a particular mix and level of services that were relatively easy for those in the experimental group to obtain against another mix and level of services that individuals in the control group could secure only if they displayed somewhat greater initiative.

The findings indicate that while experimental and control group members both advanced in many ways, experimental group members did not advance further than control group members in most respects. New Chance did boost participants' levels of GED receipt above those of the control group. The added services provided by the program, however, did not help participants secure skills training credentials, get and maintain employment, or reduce their rates of welfare receipt or subsequent childbearing relative to outcomes for control group members. The program did not improve their children's preschool readiness scores, and it had unexpected small but negative effects on participants' emotional well-being and their ratings of their children's behavior.

These results are puzzling, for MDRC observers judged all the sites to offer some high-quality services, and the large majority of young women in the experimental group said that they liked the program and benefited from it. It is likely that many factors, sometimes working in combination, account for the absence of impacts and for unanticipated impacts; different explanations may hold for different outcome areas. The possible factors include the slender differential in service receipt between experimental and control group members, the low absolute amount of services received by those in the experimental group, the possibility that some direct program effects produced unanticipated side-effects, and constraints on the magnitude of impacts imposed by larger social and environmental forces. It may also be that the program model itself was inappropriate for many young women.

These findings, unfortunately, are consistent with the results of other evaluations of programs serving young mothers on welfare who do not have a high school diploma or a GED, and the unsuccessful records of these programs highlight the importance of continuing to seek effective ways to assist these young women in improving their lives. But the impact results do not mean that the services New Chance provided (and that control group members received on their own) were of no value. Additional analyses were conducted to estimate the effects of service receipt for experimental and control group members together. While less definitive than the analyses undergirding the impact estimates, the results suggest that young women who received more than 18 weeks of education were far more likely to earn GEDs than those who did not and that young women who received skills training and attended college earned higher wages than their counterparts who did not receive postsecondary education or training. These findings held true even after other differences between those who received more or fewer weeks of education, and those who attended training or college and those who did not, were controlled statistically.

Thus, the findings indicate that the combination and quantity of services that New Chance participants received, on average, did not result in improved outcomes vis-à-vis those achieved by control group members. But they also suggest that receiving adequate amounts of specific kinds of services can make a difference in the mothers' lives—a finding of considerable importance to program operators and policy makers.

The remainder of this Executive Summary describes the young women who came forward for New Chance, their progress, and the issues they faced. It outlines the New Chance model as conceived and as put in place. It reports the impacts for the research sample as a whole and for particular subgroups of sample members. Finally, it comments on the lessons and cautions that the findings suggest for program operators and policy makers.

The Program's Service Structure

The 16 local New Chance sponsors shown in Table ES-1 were, in the main, community service organizations and schools and school districts. They also included a community college, a family service center overseen by the county government, a collaboration between the school district and the Job Corps, and a Private Industry Council (the local entity that distributes federal job training funds allocated under the Job Training Partnership Act). Although most sites selected for the demonstration had some previous experience serving young mothers, none was operating a program with all the elements of New Chance; all had to supplement their existing services and integrate them in a single program.

The program model, summarized in Table ES-2, shows that New Chance unfolded in two phases. At most sites, Phase I centered on education, career exposure, and a number of services falling under the general rubric of "personal development" (for example, parenting, family planning, and life skills). During this phase, services were delivered mostly at the program site—a "one-stop shopping" approach designed to facilitate participation. Typically, the program ran from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. five days a week, with daily attendance at all classes expected. Local programs were intended to be small in size, enrolling 100 participants over 12 to 18 months and serving about 40 participants at any given time, in order to promote an intimate and personal environment in which participants and staff could establish close bonds.

Phase II services encompassed occupational skills training and work experience (both of which were generally off-site) and ultimately job placement assistance. Although college was not a formal part of the New Chance model, staff members at some sites encouraged participants to enroll in college, especially in two-year programs with a vocational focus.

Enrollees were permitted to remain in the program for 18 months, throughout which time case managers were expected to counsel them and monitor their progress. For as long as they remained active, participants also had access to child care at no cost to themselves; often, the care was provided at the program site.

As the preceding description suggests, New Chance services were directed primarily toward the young mothers and (in the form of child care and pediatric health care) toward their children. Local programs made efforts to reach out to the young women's parents and partners (for example, by inviting them to "graduation" ceremonies and other festivities), but the focus was on individual participants rather than on their extended families or the broader environments in which they lived.

Findings Regarding Research Sample Members

• The New Chance sites recruited a diverse but generally very disadvantaged group of young mothers.

Upon entry into the study, the young women averaged just under 19 years of age and, on average, had first given birth at age 16. Most (78 percent) were members of minority groups; fewer than one in ten had ever been married. About one third already had two or more children, and over half (53 percent) had a child under a year old. Indicative of their disaffection from school was the fact that 38 percent had dropped out before their first pregnancy and that applicants had typically been out of school for more than two years when they were randomly assigned to the experimental or control group. While over three quarters of sample members (79 percent) had some work experience, 63 percent had not worked at all in the 12 months before they applied to New Chance. Importantly, over half registered scores on a widely used scale indicating that they were at risk of clinical depression.

In short, the young women applying to New Chance had characteristics that for many would suggest difficult progress toward a GED and employment. They were also mostly adolescents, unsure of themselves and their goals. And they were responsible for the care of very young children.

Nonetheless, there was also considerable diversity within the research sample. Thus, while almost one quarter (24 percent) read at the 6th-grade level or below, 30 percent read at the 10th-grade level or above. And while 17 percent grew up in families that had always received welfare, 36 percent grew up in families that had never done so. These differences point to the possibility of different effects for different subgroups of the New Chance population.

• During their stay in New Chance and afterwards, participants faced many barriers to steady participation and stable employment.

Some of the problems that interfered with the young women's participation were ones experienced by working mothers in all income categories: children's illnesses (as well as their own) and breakdowns in child care arrangements. Other problems, however, were exacerbated by participants' poverty; for example, nearly half of an early group of enrollees were homeless or at high risk of homelessness during their stay in the program.

Case managers became aware of some problems over time, as they learned more about participants' lives or as these problems hindered attendance. Thus, for example, between 10 and 20 percent of the early cohort of experimental group women were known by the case managers to be physically abused by their partners, to use drugs or alcohol to such an extent that it interfered with their program participation (or to have partners or relatives who did so), or to be discouraged by important people in their lives from attending New Chance or otherwise advancing toward self-sufficiency.

• Despite these problems, over time members of both research groups moved forward in many areas of their lives.

When they entered the research sample, almost 94 percent of the sample members held neither a high school diploma nor a GED; by the 3½-year point, just under half (49.3 percent) had received one of these credentials. Employment rates also rose steadily throughout the follow-up period. In the year prior to entering the study, only 37 percent worked at all; during the last year of follow-up, in contrast, 52 percent were employed at some point. There was also substantial growth in average monthly earnings, both because of an increase in the proportion of sample members who were employed and because those who did work earned more. The rate of AFDC receipt remained high—nearly three quarters of the young women were receiving welfare at the 3½-year point. Nonetheless, this fraction represents a sizable drop from the 95 percent receiving assistance at baseline.

Time brought positive changes in the young women's personal lives as well. For one thing, they were doing more to plan their childbearing. Although the majority of young women experienced a repeat pregnancy and birth during the follow-up period, at the 3½-year point over half were using a reliable method of contraception. Also, there was a significant drop in the percentage of young mothers who were at risk of depression, although that proportion remained distressingly high (53 percent at baseline versus 44 percent at the 3½-year point).

Findings on Program Implementation, Participation, and Costs

• The demonstration sites put in place all the early components and were, with only a few exceptions, able to offer the hours of each service prescribed by the program guidelines; some components, however, were easier to implement than others.

The sites were all able to mount the early components of the New Chance model and to provide a relatively uniform treatment. Building the program infrastructure required a great deal of effort, however, especially given the multiple activities to be put in place in the compressed start-up period, which was only about six months long.

At all sites, education—both instruction in basic academic skills and GED preparation—was a central activity during Phase I, usually scheduled for about 12 to 15 hours a week. Parenting and life skills classes were each scheduled for about two hours weekly during this phase as well. Education proved to be one of the easiest components to implement, in part because experienced instructors were widely available and in part because enrollees were themselves interested in getting their GED certificates.

Other activities posed greater difficulties. The implementation of career exploration and preemployment skills instruction was slow and often unsystematic, because sites lacked experience with these components and ready-made curricula in these areas were unavailable. And because of time constraints, personal discomfort, or lack of expertise, case managers did not consistently use the individual counseling sessions to follow up on the young women's family planning practices, as prescribed by the program model.

• Later activities—skills training, work internships, college and job placement, and ongoing case management—were more difficult to implement and were less uniform across sites.

Phase II activities, mostly delivered off-site, were much more individualized than the earlier components. For each participant, staff had to find an activity in the community that was not only appropriate to her needs, interests, and abilities but also accessible and available when she was ready to enter it. Because skills training and employment resources varied from site to site, there were considerable differences among the sites in the way this phase of the program model was implemented. Moreover, because of the demands of their on-site caseloads, case managers were seldom able to maintain the biweekly contact with off-site participants that was specified in the program guidelines.

• The quality of child care at the on-site day care centers was fairly good— higher than that typically provided by centers serving primarily low-income families, although below the level of care in facilities that have been found to improve children's developmental outcomes.

Regular on-site child care was provided to New Chance participants at 9 of the 16 sites; 2 additional sites offered child care on a temporary, drop-in basis. (Programs without on-site facilities helped participants with their child care arrangements, sometimes through linkages with nearby child care centers.) Information from staff at the on-site centers indicated that the New Chance child care centers generally met or exceeded experts' standards in terms of such structural characteristics as group size and child-to-staff ratios. Furthermore, observers who were trained to rate various aspects of child care visited 11 centers (4 of them off-site) and found that they were providing care that compared favorably with the care provided in centers serving low-income families, as reported in two major studies of child care centers. The observers rated the care as being of reasonably good quality. The quality of care, however, was not as high as that which characterizes child care programs that have been found to foster children's development.

• In general, participation was much less intensive than had been planned, although members of the experimental group varied considerably in the regularity and duration of their program attendance.

About 89 percent of experimental group members participated in some New Chance activity. (The remaining 11 percent dropped out between the time they were randomly assigned and the actual start of program activities.) On average, the young women participated for 296 hours in activities other than counseling, for which hours of participation were not counted, within 18 months after random assignment. This average conceals a great deal of variation, however; along with the 11 percent who did not participate at all, another 25 percent participated for 100 hours or fewer, while 22 percent registered more than 500 hours.

In part, low participation hours reflect erratic attendance, which was a serious problem at many sites, and in part they reflect early departures from the program. Although young mothers were permitted to stay in New Chance for 18 months, the average number of months (not necessarily continuous) they actually were active in the program was only 6.4—roughly one third of the maximum.

High absenteeism and early departures, taken together, made for a program treatment that was considerably more attenuated than planners had intended. In fact, on average, participants got only between 30 and 40 percent of the quantity of services planned for Phase I. The majority of enrollees who were unsuccessful in earning a GED while in New Chance (who constituted the majority of those in the experimental group) never moved on to Phase II activities at all, having dropped out of the program first. Consequently, only about one third of the members of the experimental group received the skills training that program planners envisioned as critical to their obtaining good jobs. Sites tried to improve participation in various ways—by stating requirements and expectations more clearly, by following up on absentees promptly, and by developing rewards for good attendance—but with inconsistent results.

• Members of the experimental group received a greater quantity of services, as well as more varied services, than did their control group counterparts, and they also received them sooner.

As Table ES-3 shows, a higher proportion of experimental than of control group members received each type of service; experimental group members also received a greater quantity of these services. For example, 84 percent of the experimental group members attended adult basic education or GED classes during the 3½-year follow-up period, and they averaged 26 weeks in these classes; 63 percent of the control group members participated in such classes, for an average of 16 weeks.

In accordance with the program's intent to deliver a wide array of services, those in the experimental group also received more kinds of services than those in the control group. The average experimental group member received five different services, while the average control group member received only three.

Finally, experimental group members received services sooner after random assignment than did control group members.

• Levels of service receipt by control group members in the New Chance Demonstration greatly exceeded expectations and were higher than those found in previous demonstration programs for young mothers.

Although it was expected that New Chance, as a voluntary program, would draw applicants who were motivated to take part in the kinds of activities New Chance offered, the level of service receipt among control group members was much higher than anticipated. Education- and employment-related services outside of New Chance were generally readily available in the communities where research sample members lived, and members of both research groups made extensive use of them. (Experimental group members mostly availed themselves of other service provider agencies after they had left New Chance.) Thus, while over the 3½ years 94 percent of the experimental group women participated in employment-related services—that is, education, skills training, or organized group job search activities that could be expected to provide access to the skills and credentials necessary for getting jobs—so did 85 percent of the women in the control group.

This level of service receipt by control group members can be put into perspective by comparing it with the findings of other studies. New Chance control group members received more services than control group members in several other demonstration programs enrolling disadvantaged young mothers and, indeed, received more services than did the experimental group members in other programs for this population that required participation as a condition of receiving welfare. This fact must be borne in mind when the impacts of the various demonstrations are compared.

• Both experimental and control group members continued to participate in education and skills training throughout the follow-up period.

Experimental group members who participated in education and skills training tended to do so earlier than control group members; nonetheless, some 30 percent of the members of both groups were attending an education program, and about 16 percent were attending a skills training program, at some point during the last year of the 3½-year follow-up period. In fact, the average sample member was enrolled in education or training for one quarter of the follow-up period.

This extended participation in education and training resulted in deferred entry into employment. Participation in education or training was the single most important reason that respondents to the 3½-year interview who were neither working nor looking for work gave for their absence from the labor force. One implication is that both experimental and control group members can be expected to work more as they move out of these activities into the labor market.

• The cost of providing New Chance services to a young woman assigned to the program was approximately $9,000, with child care, recruitment, and case management services accounting for almost two thirds of the cost.

The majority of New Chance expenditures were for child care and case management, services that were considered necessary to support participation in New Chance. By contrast,

education, skills training, and other classes and workshops accounted for a much smaller share of the costs of implementing New Chance.

• Comparing the total cost of all services provided to members of the experimental and control groups, the net cost of New Chance was estimated to range from $6,197 to $7,445, depending on the estimation method.

Outside of New Chance, many members of the control group received services that were similar to those received by members of the experimental group and that involved substantial costs. Members of the experimental group also received services outside of the New Chance program. A range of possible net costs is presented because the costs of services to control group members, and of services provided to experimental group members outside of New Chance, could not be measured with the same level of precision as New Chance program costs. The cost of services provided to control group members is estimated to be between $5,555 and $9,024, depending on the method used. Estimates of the corresponding total cost per experimental group member (including New Chance and non–New Chance services) range from $13,000 to $15,221. As a result, estimates of the program’s net cost range from $6,197 to $7,445. As with the New Chance program costs, most of the net costs were accounted for by the provision of child care and case management to New Chance participants, with education and training services accounting for less than a third of the net costs.

Program Impacts on Education and Training Credentials

• Experimental group members were more likely than control group members to receive a GED and to earn college credits.

As the program intended, New Chance raised experimental group members' GED attainment above that of control group members (see Table ES-4). At the 3½-year point, 45 percent of the experimental group members and 33 percent of their control group counterparts had attained this credential. The difference was statistically significant—that is, unlikely to have arisen by chance. (Statistically significant differences between outcomes for experimental and contr