Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition

Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309171342
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.

Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition

Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309171342
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.

Poor Support

Poor Support PDF Author: David T. Ellwood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Examines the forms that poverty takes in American families and what can be done to remedy it.

Flat Broke with Children

Flat Broke with Children PDF Author: Sharon Hays
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195176018
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This text explores the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives. It also focuses on what welfare reform reveals about work and family life, and its impact on us all.

Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty

Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty PDF Author: Kathleen Ann Pickering
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271028774
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was enacted, policy makers, agency administrators, community activists, and academics from a broad range of disciplines have debated and researched the implications of welfare reform in the United States. Most of the attention, however, has focused on urban rather than rural America. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty examines welfare participants who live in chronically poor rural areas of the United States where there are few job opportunities and poor systems of education, transportation, and child care. Kathleen Pickering and her colleagues look at welfare reform as it has been experienced in four rural and impoverished regions of the United States: American Indian reservations in South Dakota, the Rio Grande region, Appalachian Kentucky, and the Mississippi Delta. Throughout these areas the rhetoric of reform created expectations of new opportunities to find decent work and receive education and training. In fact, these expectations have largely gone unfulfilled as welfare reform has failed to penetrate poor areas where low-income families remain isolated from the economic and social mainstream of American society. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty sheds welcome light on the opportunities and challenges that welfare reform has imposed on low-income families situated in disadvantaged areas. Combining both qualitative and quantitative research, it will be an excellent guide for scholars and practitioners alike seeking to address the problem of poverty in rural America.

Evaluating Welfare Reform

Evaluating Welfare Reform PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309066492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 fundamentally changed the nation's social welfare system, replacing a federal entitlement program for low-income families, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), with state-administered block grants, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. PRWORA furthered a trend started earlier in the decade under so called "waiver" programs-state experiments with different types of AFDC rules-toward devolution of design and control of social welfare programs from the federal government to the states. The legislation imposed several new, major requirements on state use of federal welfare funds but otherwise freed states to reconfigure their programs as they want. The underlying goal of the legislation is to decrease dependence on welfare and increase the self-sufficiency of poor families in the United States. In summer 1998, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) asked the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council to convene a Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs. The panel's overall charge is to study and make recommendations on the best strategies for evaluating the effects of PRWORA and other welfare reforms and to make recommendations on data needs for conducting useful evaluations. This interim report presents the panel's initial conclusions and recommendations. Given the short length of time the panel has been in existence, this report necessarily treats many issues in much less depth than they will be treated in the final report. The report has an immediate short-run goal of providing DHHS-ASPE with recommendations regarding some of its current projects, particularly those recently funded to study "welfare leavers"-former welfare recipients who have left the welfare rolls as part of the recent decline in welfare caseloads.

Managing Welfare Reform in New York City

Managing Welfare Reform in New York City PDF Author: Emanuel S. Savas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742549289
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Welfare reform was a spectacular success in New York under Mayor Giuliani despite the city's history of liberal social programs and its huge, entrenched welfare system. The city reduced the numbers on welfare from 1,120,000 to 460,000 by changing the organizational culture, protecting against fraud, insisting on 'work first, ' adapting information technology, and contracting for job placement. The organizational culture was transformed by bold leadership that changed the welfare agency's mission and goals, overcame internal resistance, and prevailed over politicians who had a vested interest in the status quo and the media that were opposed to welfare reform. Welfare fraud was largely eliminated by dropping from the rolls those who were working and could not appear for in-person interviews, by fingerprinting recipients to catch those enrolled under multiple identities and those receiving welfare checks from other jurisdictions, by uncovering hidden income, by enrolling new applicants only after thorough investigation, and by tightening controls to prevent fraud by corrupt employees. JobStat, a computer-based system modeled after the Police Department's system used to track precinct activity, was developed to track the status of welfare recipients and to monitor the performance of the 'Job Centers, ' which were formerly called welfare offices. JobStat focused the attention of department personnel on performance indicators rather than on minutely specified rules. The Giuliani administration's major contribution to national welfare reform was the creation of the only system in the country with large-scale, alternative work arrangements that was able to acculturate large numbers of the never-employed to the world of work.

Welfare Reform

Welfare Reform PDF Author: Jeff GROGGER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037960
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.

Selling Welfare Reform

Selling Welfare Reform PDF Author: Frank Ridzi
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814776337
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
The 1996 Welfare Reform Act promised to end welfare as we knew it. In Selling Welfare Reform, Frank Ridzi uses rich ethnographic detail to examine how new welfare-to-work policies, time limits, and citizenship documentation radically changed welfare, revealing what really goes on at the front lines of the reformed welfare system. Selling Welfare Reform chronicles how entrepreneurial efforts ranging from front-line caseworkers to high-level administrators set the pace for restructuring a resistant bureaucracy. At the heart of this remarkable institutional transformation is a market-centered approach to human services that re-framed the definition of success to include diversion from the present system, de-emphasis of legal protections and behavioral conditioning of poor parents to accommodate employers. Ridzi draws a compelling portrait of how welfare staff and their clients negotiate the complexities of the low wage labor market in an age of global competition, exposing the realities of how the new "common sense" of poverty is affecting the lives of poor and vulnerable Americans.

Managing Welfare Reform in Five States

Managing Welfare Reform in Five States PDF Author: Sarah F. Liebschutz
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780914341765
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Analyzes the responses of five states—Florida, Mississippi, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin—to the challenges of implementing welfare reform.

Evaluating Comprehensive State Welfare Reform

Evaluating Comprehensive State Welfare Reform PDF Author: Burt S. Barnow
Publisher: Rockefeller Institute Press
ISBN: 1438436343
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The recent delegation of authority for welfare programs from the federal government to the states has stimulated increasingly complex and comprehensive reforms which seek in part to generate social messages that discourage dependency on public assistance, promote work, and influence family formation decisions. The message-sending emphasis of the new reforms and their comprehensiveness often makes them hard to evaluate through conventional experimental designs using treatment and control groups. This book offers a lucid discussion of issues involved in evaluating the new reforms, and applies those issues to the evaluation of welfare reform in one state, Wisconsin, which offers a leading example of comprehensive welfare reform. The book opens with an overview of the different types of program evaluation and summarizes clearly the basic issues that are involved in their conduct. A discussion of general evaluation strategies for the new welfare reforms, such as the selection and use of counterfactuals, is followed by consideration of both implementation and impact evaluations of the Wisconsin program. The final section considers the evaluation of specific impacts of the Wisconsin program on economic well-being, family structure, child care services, child support, child welfare, and children with disabilities.