This document examines the effects of welfare-to-work programs
on the children of the adults (almost all single mothers) mandated to participate
in such programs. Synthesizing the results from two recently completed reports
from a large-scale evaluation — the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies
(NEWWS Evaluation) — the two-year effects of 11 welfare-to-work programs that
operated in seven sites in the early to mid 1990s are summarized. The sites included in the evaluation are Atlanta, Georgia; Columbus, Ohio; Detroit
and Grand Rapids, Michigan; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Portland, Oregon; and Riverside,
California. While the programs operated under the federal Job Opportunities and
Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program that preceded TANF, and thus did not invoke
a time limit on eligibility for welfare, they shared TANF’s primary goal of moving
welfare recipients into paid work and off assistance, and they reflect a range
of approaches, implementation features, and environments: Some were strongly employment-focused
while others emphasized basic education; they varied in how broadly the program
participation mandate was applied to the welfare caseload and how strictly it
was enforced, in the amount of child care support provided for program participation
or employment, and in methods of case management; and the programs served different
welfare populations and operated in a variety of labor markets. Although the NEWWS
evaluation was designed to address the effects on children of requiring parents
to participate in welfare-to-work programs, there are many other policies — for
example, child care and health insurance policies — that can affect children,
and those policies can be examined only indirectly in this evaluation.
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