|
In recent years, single mothers on welfare have gone
to work in unprecedented numbers. But with limited skills
and work histories, they usually get low-paying jobs
and remain in poverty. The situation is especially acute
for the half of the caseload that does not graduate
from high school. Since recipients with higher skills
tend to get better jobs, it seems logical that education
and training should play a central role in welfare reform.
But what kind of role?
Alternative Strategies in
Welfare-to-Work Programs
Welfare policy reflects an ongoing effort to balance
two objectives-reducing poverty and ending dependency.
Reformers on all sides favor these goals, but disagree
on which should receive priority and on the most effective
strategy for achieving them. As a result, states have
used variants of three broad approaches to structure
the welfare-to-work component of welfare reform.
Education or Training First Adherents of putting
adults on welfare into education or training programs
before requiring them to find work stress antipoverty
goals and view reforms that substitute work for welfare
as insufficient if there is no increase in income. Before
looking for work, they argue, welfare recipients need
to improve their skills so they can get a job-especially
one that is relatively stable, pays enough to support
their children, and leaves them less vulnerable during
an economic downturn. For those who lack a high school
diploma or GED (high school equivalency) certificate,
this view translates programmatically into referral
to basic education courses, including remedial instruction
in reading and math, English as a Second Language classes,
or preparation for the GED test (much less common are
programs that mix adult education and vocational training).
For those with a high school diploma or GED, the education-or-training-first
approach usually means assignment to vocational training,
rather than to degree-producing, post-secondary academic
courses.
Job Search First Others place greater emphasis
on reducing the welfare rolls and saving money. They
advocate strategies that move people quickly into jobs,
even if the jobs pay low wages. Some, focused on welfare
reduction, see work as the most direct route to ending
what they view as the negative effects of welfare on
families and children. Some focus on the savings to
be attained by both diminished caseloads and the relatively
low cost of job search services themselves, reasoning
that, given fixed budgets, they can serve more people
using this strategy. A job-search-first strategy can
also reflect antipoverty goals. Some hold that getting
a job, even a low-paying one, is the best way to build
skills that can eventually lead to better jobs. Others
believe that, in any labor market, most welfare recipients
will inevitably get low-wage jobs and that the best,
most realistic way to reduce poverty is through more
generous subsidies and services to working families.
In job-search-first programs, virtually everyone must
start by looking for a job independently or through
a job club, which teaches such skills as résumé-writing
and interviewing. After several weeks, participants
typically get aided in their search by program staff.
Job search first is usually not, however, job search
only. People who fail to find work may be referred to
education or training.
Mixed Strategy Some reformers favor a more flexible
approach, allowing staff and participants more choice
in the initial and subsequent activities. Some participants,
usually those lacking a high school diploma or GED,
are assigned initially to basic education or training,
while others are most often assigned first to job search.
Subsequent activities vary for those still on welfare.
Some mixed programs strongly emphasize employment: staff
urge participants to find work and permit only short-term
education or training activities. Others emphasize skill-building:
participants may enter long-term education or training
programs, and getting a job quickly is not paramount.
Education and Training in the
Context of Welfare Reform
Since 1971, federal welfare legislation has required
that an increasing share of welfare recipients participate
in some form of work-directed activities as a condition
of receiving full (or, more recently, any) welfare benefits.
Even without any special welfare-to-work program, however,
many low-income people enroll in school, training, community
college, or some other program to help them gain skills
and find work. This voluntary activity may have a big
payoff, but it is not due to welfare reform and cannot
reliably be captured in studies of reform programs.
Thus, asking about the value of education and training
as part of welfare reform has a special meaning: does
requiring education or training for people who may or
may not want to participate have the intended positive
results relative to what people would have achieved
on their own or to other approaches such as job search?
This question is particularly relevant to mandatory
basic education, since few welfare recipients (only
8 percent in some studies) state that they want to go
back to school to study reading and math; they have
had poor experiences in school in the past and prefer
to get specific skills training (around 60 percent)
or help looking for a job (about 30 percent).
The Studies
The research on these three strategies, based on programs
that operated between 1985 and 1999, is unusually reliable
because it:
- covers programs representing
a variety of specific approaches and conditions;
- includes results from
almost 100,000 single parents, a sufficient number
for reliably assessing the programs' effects;
- follows people for five
years, long enough to determine whether an up-front
investment in education or training pays off;
- measures what the three
strategies produce when implemented under real-world
conditions; and
- uses random assignment,
the most powerful research design, in which welfare
recipients are placed through a lottery-like process
in a mandatory welfare-to-work program or in a control
group. Control group members are not required to participate
in any activities but can (and very often do) seek
out such services in the community.
The last factor is the most fundamental. By assigning
people randomly to either a welfare-to-work program
or a control group, the studies can safely attribute
any subsequent difference in their or their children's
behavior to the particular program strategy. These differences
are called the program's "impacts." Throughout
this brief, saying that a program increased some outcome-for
example, earnings-does not refer to how people's behavior
changed over time, but to how people subject to a particular
welfare-to-work strategy performed relative to the study's
control group.
The findings come primarily from comparing results
across twenty programs in five of the largest welfare-to-work
studies-the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies
(NEWWS; 11 programs), the evaluations of California's
Greater Avenues for Independence Program (GAIN; 6 programs),
Los Angeles's Jobs-First GAIN, Florida's Project Independence,
and San Diego's Saturation Work Initiative Model (SWIM)-and
from a head-to-head test in NEWWS of the first two approaches.
Thus, this brief builds on the work of many people,
especially researchers at the Manpower Demonstration
Research Corporation in New York City who conducted
these studies and analyzed the results.
The studies were launched prior to the 1996 welfare
reforms (some of the programs continue today with modifications)
and thus assessed the impact of different pre-employment
strategies before there were time limits on welfare
receipt, more generous limits on what people can earn
and still receive welfare, and larger penalties (sanctions)
for noncompliance with the program. The implementation
of the 1996 welfare reforms might change somewhat the
magnitude of the impacts, but would be unlikely to affect
the relative success of the three strategies.
The Findings
Summary All three strategies increased single
parents' work and reduced welfare receipt compared to
what would have happened in the absence of the programs,
but they did not increase people's income or have many
or consistently positive or negative effects on children,
except for adolescents.
People in job-search-first programs took jobs sooner.
Those in education-or-training-first programs eventually
caught up, but the larger up-front investment had no
clear payoff in higher wages or income, or in improved
outcomes for children, relative to job-search-first
programs.
The best results came from programs that used a mix
of initial activities, where some people started with
job search and others with short-term, work-focused
education or training. These findings hold true for
high school graduates and nongraduates alike.
Twenty-Program Comparison Figure
1 shows the impact, over the five years after a
person enrolled, of programs that used different variants
of the three strategies. Each bar represents one program
and shows the difference between the average total earnings
(top panel) or welfare payments (bottom panel) of all
single parents required to participate in the program
and all those in the study's control group. The top
panel shows that all the programs increased earnings,
with almost all differences reaching statistical significance,
but those that used a mixed strategy tended to have
the largest impacts. The bottom panel shows that welfare
savings were largest in job-search-first and mixed programs
that focused on employment.
The mixed-strategy programs that were employment-focused
(Portland and Riverside GAIN) emerged as clear winners,
producing unusually large earnings gains and taxpayer
savings and, for Portland (not shown), more stable employment
and higher wages. The Florida results in figure
1 show, however, that this approach does not guarantee
success. Other features of the Florida program-limited
child care funding, weak job search activities, and
a rigid method for determining who received education
or training-probably compromised its success.
Although most programs increased earnings, they reduced
welfare and food stamp payments by a similar amount.
Over five years, people derived more of their income
from earnings but were generally not better off financially
as a result of the program compared to control group
members. These findings hold even when estimates of
Earned Income Tax Credits, state and federal taxes,
and Medicaid are included in the calculations.
Figure
1 is persuasive because it shows patterns replicated
over a number of locations. But there is always a question
as to whether such cross-site comparisons reflect differences
in the value added by the welfare-to-work strategy itself,
the characteristics of the people studied, the local
economy, or the welfare and community context.
Three-Site Test of Two Approaches To eliminate
this uncertainty, NEWWS fielded a highly unusual study
in Atlanta, Georgia; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Riverside,
California. In each of these sites, welfare recipients
were assigned at random to one of three groups: a job-search-first
program that allowed short-term education or training
only for those who did not initially get work through
job clubs (an approach labeled "Labor Force Attachment,"
or LFA, in this evaluation); an education-or-training-first
program that assigned most people to education or training
before requiring job search (called "Human Capital
Development," or HCD); or a control group. A comparison
of results for the LFA and HCD groups, presented in
figure
1, reveals few differences: the HCD approach did
not produce the expected added benefits. Any differences
for particular years or measures or subgroups that did
occur favored the LFA programs.
The five-year results shown in figure
1 mask a strong difference in the pattern of impacts
over time. People in the LFA programs found jobs and
got off welfare sooner, a clear advantage when welfare
is time limited. People in the HCD programs caught up
with those in the LFA programs some time after leaving
education or training, but did not end up in higher-paying,
more stable jobs, even though the HCD programs ultimately
cost 40 to 90 percent more to operate. Finally, there
was no difference in the effects of the two approaches
on the well-being of children, despite some hope that
the HCD parents' greater attendance in education or
training might lead their children to do better in school.
In NEWWS, both types of programs had few effects or,
in the case of adolescents, some negative effects on
a few outcomes such as grade repetition.
Looking at different subgroups within the welfare caseload,
this basic pattern held true for most groups, including
those with different skills, work history, and race/ethnicity.
The findings were particularly disappointing for those
without a high school diploma (or GED) and for other
highly disadvantaged groups who were expected to benefit
most from the initial investment in basic educa-tion.
Whether because of the quality of the services or the
short time that most people stayed in them, people without
a high school diploma in the HCD programs did not measurably
improve their reading or math literacy or end up with
better jobs than those in the LFA programs. Quite the
contrary: where differences showed up, it was the LFA
programs that led to higher earnings and income. In
a nonexperimental analysis, however, Johannes Bos of
the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation finds
some evidence that the small number of women in the
HCD programs who obtained a general equivalency degree
may ultimately have had higher earnings, particularly
if they went on to vocational skills training. But he
also found that staying longer in general equivalency
degree test preparation classes would not have appreciably
increased the proportion of women who obtained this
credential.
The findings on training for welfare recipients with
a high school diploma or GED are somewhat more mixed.
The most relevant data, again from the HCD/LFA comparison,
show no added impact from the HCD strategy. Two major
evaluations of voluntary programs suggest some reasons
why the training-focused programs did not perform better.
The National Job Training Partnership Act Study (JTPA),
led by Larry Orr of Abt Associates, found that, on average,
classroom skills training did not increase the earnings
of welfare recipients, although other JTPA activities
that included a combination of on-the-job training and
job search did. In the Minority Female Single Parent
Demonstra-tion, John Burghardt at Mathematica Policy
Research studied four remedial education and skills
training programs for single mothers, most of whom were
on welfare. One program, the Center for Employment Training
in San Jose, increased earnings and wages. Researchers
attributed this success to the program's strong connection
to the job market, its integration of education and
training curricula, the absence of entry tests, and
easily accessible child care. These findings suggest
that the unimpressive results from past training programs
may derive, in part, from the inflexible structure of
the courses (education preceding skills training), the
people enrolled, the support services, or the types
of training women are placed in. However, the evidence
is thin and, importantly, does not encompass rigorous
studies of training provided by community colleges or
of degree-granting, post-secondary academic programs.
Characteristics of the Most
Successful Programs
The welfare-to-work programs that were the most successful
overall for both high school graduates and nongraduates-Portland
and Riverside GAIN-were flexible about initial activities.
Both programs strongly enforced participation requirements,
had experience operating job search programs, stressed
the importance of finding jobs (a message that permeated
all aspects of Riverside's operations), and used job
developers. In Portland, however, job search participants
were counseled to wait for jobs that paid well above
the minimum wage and that offered the best chance for
long-lasting, stable employment, whereas Riverside participants
were advised to take the first job offered, since any
job was viewed as a good job.
Regarding education and training, staff in both programs
communicated that improving people's employability was
the goal-assignments were limited in duration (usually
six months or less), and people were not allowed to
"languish" in these activities without making
progress. Most people not ready to enter the labor market-based
on such factors as work history, education, and literacy
test scores-were first assigned, in both programs, to
basic education or, in Portland, to three- to five-week
life skills classes or occupational training. The others-usually
those who had a high school diploma or GED-were most
commonly assigned first to job search or, in Portland,
to life skills, vocational training, or work experience.
Finally, the small number already enrolled in degree-granting,
post-secondary academic programs when they entered the
program were allowed to continue, provided they could
obtain their degree in a short time.
The two programs differed, however, in how they provided
education and training. In Portland, program administrators
took the unusual step of partnering with the community
college system to design and implement the courses and
provide comprehensive case management. In contrast,
the Riverside welfare department solely administered
its program and, while using some community colleges
to provide education and training, relied primarily
on adult education schools, offering payments based
on measures of student performance to several of the
schools.
|
