Ron Haskins

The new world of welfare

Congress must reauthorize the sweeping 1996 welfare reform legislation by October 1, 2002. A number of issues that were prominent in the 1995-96 battle over welfare reform are likely to resurface in the debate over reauthorization. Among those issues are the five-year time limit, provisions to reduce out-of-wedlock births, the adequacy of child care funding, problems with Medicaid and food stamp receipt by working families, and work requirements. Funding levels are also certain to be controversial. Fiscal conservatives will try to lower grant spending levels, while states will seek to maintain them and gain additional discretion in the use of funds. Finally, a movement to encourage states to promote marriage among low-income families is already taking shape. The need for reauthorization presents an opportunity to assess what welfare reform has accomplished and what remains to be done. The New World of Welfare is an attempt to frame the policy debate for reauthorization, and to inform the policy discussion among the states and at the federal level, especially by drawing lessons from research on the effects of welfare reform. In the book, a diverse set of welfare experts uliberal and conservative, academic and nonacademic uengage in rigorous debate on topics ranging from work experience programs, to job availability, to child well-being, to family formation. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of research on welfare reform, the contributors cover subjects including work and wages, effects of reform on family income and poverty, the politics of conservative welfare reform, sanctions and time limits, financial work incentives for low-wage earners, the use of medicaid and food stamps, welfare-to-work, child support, child care, and welfare reform and immigration. Preparation of the volume was supported by funds from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Contributors include Thomas L. Gais, Richard P. Nathan, and Irene Lurie (Rockefeller Inistitute, SUNY-Albany), Thomas Kaplan (University of Wisconsin), Lucie Schmidt (University of Michigan), Charles Murray (American Enterprise Institute), Hugh Heclo (George Mason University), Lawrence M. Mead (NYU), ), Julie Strawn, Mark Greenberg, and Steve Savner (Center for Law and Social Policy), Ladonna Pavetti (Mathematica Policy Research), Dan Bloom (Manpower Demonstration Research Corp.), Charles Michalopoulos and Gordon Berlin (Manpower Demonstraton Research Corporation), Jason A. Turner (Commissioner of Welfare, State of New York), Thomas Main (Baruch College of the City University of New York), Sheila Zedlewski and Pamela Loprest (Urban Institute), Robert Greenstein and Jocelyn Guyer (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities), George Borjas (Harvard University), Greg Duncan and Lindsay Chase-Landsdale (Northwestern University), Wade F. Horn (National Fatherhood Initiative), Isabel V. Sawhill (Brookings Institution, Irwin Garfinkel (Columbia University), Douglas Besharov and Nazanin Samari (American Enterprise Institute), Lynn A. Karoly, Jacob A. Klerman, and Jeannette A. Rogowski (RAND Corp.).

Public School Aggression among Children with Varying Day-Care Experience.

59 children with varying amounts and types of day-care experience were followed over their first 2 or 3 years of public schooling. Schoolteachers rated aggressiveness of several types and in several situations by these children, and also supplied information about managing the children, about childrens use of strategies to avoid conflict, and about several associated skills and behaviors. Multivariate analyses indicated that children who had attended a cognitively oriented day-care program beginning in infancy were more aggressive than all other groups of children who had attended day care. Aggression among these children, however, declined over time, the children were not considered difficult to manage, and they were well liked by teachers. It was speculated that the increased aggressiveness among children attending cognitively oriented day care may have been caused by several problems of adaptation to the school setting.

Immigrant Children: Introducing the Issue

Large numbers of immigrant children are experiencing serious problems with education, physical and mental health, poverty, and assimilation into American society. The purpose of this volume is to examine the well-being of these children and what might be done to improve their educational attainment, health status, social and cognitive development, and long-term prospects for economic mobility. The well-being of immigrant children is especially important to the nation because they are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. In 2008, nearly one in four youth aged seventeen and under lived with an immigrant parent, up from 15 percent in 1990. (1) Among children younger than nine, those with immigrant parents have accounted for virtually all of the net growth since 1990. (2) What these demographic trends portend for the future of immigrant children, however, is highly uncertain for several reasons. First, whether they achieve social integration and economic mobility depends on the degree of access they have to quality education from preschool through college. Second, these young immigrants are coming of age in an aging society that will require unprecedented social expenditures for health and retirement benefits for seniors. Third, large numbers of these youth now live in communities where few foreign-born residents have previously settled. That more than 5 million youth now reside in households of mixed legal status, where one or both parents are unauthorized to live and work in the United States, heightens still further the uncertainty about the futures of immigrant children. (3) Although nearly three-fourths of children who live with undocumented parents are citizens by birth, their status as dependents of unauthorized residents thwarts integration prospects during their crucial formative years. (4) Even having certifiably legal status is not enough to guarantee childrens access to social programs if parents lack information about child benefits and entitlements, as well as the savvy to navigate complex bureaucracies. In this volume, we use the term immigrant youth to refer to children from birth to age seventeen who have at least one foreign-born parent. Because an immigrant childs birthplace--that is, whether inside or outside the United States--is associated with different rights and responsibilities and also determines eligibility for some social programs, to the extent possible contributors to the volume distinguish between youth who are foreign-born (designated the first generation) and those who were born in the United States to immigrant parents (the second generation). U.S.-born children whose parents also were born in the United States make up the third generation. (5) The Problem Contemporary immigrant youth are far more diverse by national origin, socioeconomic status, and settlement patterns than earlier waves of immigrants, and their growing numbers coincide with a period of high socioeconomic inequality. (6) Recent economic and social trends provide cause for concern. On most social indicators, children with immigrant parents fare worse than their native-born counterparts. For example, compared with their third-generation age counterparts, immigrant youth are more likely to live in poverty, forgo needed medical care, drop out of high school, and experience behavioral problems. (7) At the same time, however, immigrant youth are more likely than natives to reside with two parents, a family arrangement generally associated with better outcomes for youth than is residing with a single parent. The benefits of this protective family arrangement, however, are weakened for immigrant youth whose parents are not proficient in English, are not authorized to live and work in the United States, and have only limited earnings capacity. The academic progress of the large majority of immigrant youth residing in households whose members speak a language other than English lags behind that of children whose parents were born in the United States. …

Negative Income Tax The Impact on Children from Low-Income Families

The general purpose of the four negative income tax (NIT) experiments was to evaluate the impact of a guaranteed income on labor participation. Beyond this general objective, certain subobjectives can be identified, three of which define the purpose of this analysis. The first is to determine what effect an income maintenance experiment program can have on the health and educational status of children from low-income families, the second is to examine the long-range effects of such a program, and the third is to complete a policy analysis using these results to consider the relative effectiveness of service programs and income maintenance programs in promoting child development and stability. The results show that the NIT experiments were effective in reducing a childs risk of being at poverty. The implications of this are discussed from several policy perspectives.

Kindergarten Children Prefer Same-Color Peers.

FINKELSTEIN, NEAL W., and HASKINS, RON. Kindergarten Children Prefer Same-Color Peers. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 502-508. 38 black and 25 white kindergarten children were observed during classroom instruction and during recess on school playgrounds in both the fall and spring. As compared with a random model of selecting same-color peers for social interaction, both black and white children showed same-color preferences in their social behavior. This tendency was greater during recess than during classroom instruction and was greater in the spring-after the first 7-9 months of schooling-than in the fall. Although neither black nor white children behaved differently toward other-color peers, as compared with same-color peers, white children talked relatively more than blacks, and black children emitted relatively more negative behavior and commands than whites. We conclude that black and white children indicate a preference for same-color peers at the beginning of kindergarten, that this preference increases over the school year, and that differences in behavioral style between blacks and whites may play a role in same-color preferences.

Parent education and public policy

This volume examines parent programs in the context of policy to support families, the disjunction between advocates of parent programs and federal policymakers, federal legislation for parent programs, and programs for parents of preschool children, school-age children, and children with special needs.

The Modification of Intelligence through Early Experience.

Abstract Infants judged to be at risk for subnormal intellectual growth were randomly assigned to an Experimental ( N = 27) or a Control ( N = 25) group. Infants in both groups received medical care and dietary supplements; their families received social work services on a request basis. Experimental children participated in an educational daycare program beginning before the third month of life. The daycare program was composed, in part, of curriculum activities designed to stimulate intellectual growth. Between 6 and 36 months of age, Experimental children maintained normal intellectual growth; Control children declined in IQ beginning between 12 and 18 months of age and remained significantly lower than Experimental children at 24 and 36 months. The mother-child IQ correlation for Control dyads was 43; for Experimental dyads the correlation was −.05. These two types of evidence are interpreted as support for the importance of early environments in the development of intelligence.

Congress writes a law: Research and welfare reform

This paper traces the development of the Family Support Act of 1988 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author, a Republican staff member, examines the impact of research on the policy environment that made welfare reform possible, on the arguments presented in committee hearings and bill-writing sessions, on the House debate, and on the final House|Senate Conference Committee approval. He concludes that social science research can and does play a useful role in formulation of public policy, although the domain of application is not as broad as many scholars think. However, given the partisan nature of policy formulation and the desire of social scientists to join the process, normal methods of quality control in social science research are too often forgotten, to the detriment of sound public decision-making.

Abstinence Education under Welfare Reform

Abstract As part of its 1996 welfare reform bill, Congress enacted a

Policies for America's public schools : teachers, equity, and indicators

50 million per year program to fund abstinence education. This chapter provides an examination of the legislative history of the program; a discussion of the characteristics of the program, especially the definition of abstinence education; and an account of how the program will be implemented by the federal government and the states.