Download or read book Evaluating Welfare Reform written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1999-11-04 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book National Welfare Reform written by National Governors' Conference. Committee on Human Resources. Welfare Reform Task Force and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Government Matters written by Lawrence M. Mead and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-18 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was the achievement of legislators and administrators who were unusually high-minded and effective by national standards. Their decade-long struggle to overhaul welfare is a gripping story that inspires hope for better solutions to poverty nationwide."--Jacket.
Download or read book National Welfare Reform written by National Governors' Conference. Welfare Reform Task Force and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform written by Sanford F. Schram and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's hard to imagine discussing welfare policy without discussing race, yet all too often this uncomfortable factor is avoided or simply ignored. Sometimes the relationship between welfare and race is treated as so self-evident as to need no further attention; equally often, race in the context of welfare is glossed over, lest it raise hard questions about racism in American society as a whole. Either way, ducking the issue misrepresents the facts and misleads the public and policy-makers alike. Many scholars have addressed specific aspects of this subject, but until now there has been no single integrated overview. Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform is designed to fill this need and provide a forum for a range of voices and perspectives that reaffirm the key role race has played--and continues to play--in our approach to poverty. The essays collected here offer a systematic, step-by-step approach to the issue. Part 1 traces the evolution of welfare from the 1930s to the sweeping Clinton-era reforms, providing a historical context within which to consider today's attitudes and strategies. Part 2 looks at media representation and public perception, observing, for instance, that although blacks accounted for only about one-third of America's poor from 1967 to 1992, they featured in nearly two-thirds of news stories on poverty, a bias inevitably reflected in public attitudes. Part 3 discusses public discourse, asking questions like "Whose voices get heard and why?" and "What does 'race' mean to different constituencies?" For although "old-fashioned" racism has been replaced by euphemism, many of the same underlying prejudices still drive welfare debates--and indeed are all the more pernicious for being unspoken. Part 4 examines policy choices and implementation, showing how even the best-intentioned reform often simply displaces institutional inequities to the individual level--bias exercised case by case but no less discriminatory in effect. Part 5 explores the effects of welfare reform and the implications of transferring policy-making to the states, where local politics and increasing use of referendum balloting introduce new, often unpredictable concerns. Finally, Frances Fox Piven's concluding commentary, "Why Welfare Is Racist," offers a provocative response to the views expressed in the pages that have gone before--intended not as a "last word" but rather as the opening argument in an ongoing, necessary, and newly envisioned national debate. Sanford Schram is Visiting Professor of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Joe Soss teaches in the Department of Government at the Graduate school of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, D.C. Richard Fording is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky.
Download or read book Immigrants and Welfare written by Michael E. Fix and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2009-11-25 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America's collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants' ability to integrate into American society. Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform's ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants' propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants' use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants' benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants' use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare. Even though few states took the federal government's invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law's most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare. Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute
Download or read book Administration s welfare reform proposal written by United States. Congress. House. Welfare Reform Subcommittee and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book National Problems Local Solutions Welfare reform is working a report on state and local initiatives written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Reform and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ending Welfare as We Know It written by R. Kent Weaver and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000-08-01 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Clinton's first presidential term was a period of extraordinary change in policy toward low-income families. In 1993 Congress enacted a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working families. In 1996 Congress passed and the president signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This legislation abolished the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and replaced it with a block grant program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It contained stiff new work requirements and limits on the length of time people could receive welfare benefits.Dramatic change in AFDC was also occurring piecemeal in the states during these years. States used waivers granted by the federal Department of Health and Human Services to experiment with a variety of welfare strategies, including denial of additional benefits for children born or conceived while a mother received AFDC, work requirements, and time limits on receipt of cash benefits. The pace of change at the state level accelerated after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation gave states increased leeway to design their programs. Ending Welfare as We Know It analyzes how these changes in the AFDC program came about. In fourteen chapters, R. Kent Weaver addresses three sets of questions about the politics of welfare reform: the dismal history of comprehensive AFDC reform initiatives; the dramatic changes in the welfare reform agenda over the past thirty years; and the reasons why comprehensive welfare reform at the national level succeeded in 1996 after failing in 1995, in 1993–94, and on many previous occasions. Welfare reform raises issues of race, class, and sex that are as difficult and divisive as any in American politics. While broad social and political trends helped to create a historic opening for welfare reform in the late 1990s, dramatic legislation was not inevitable. The interaction of contextual factors with short
Download or read book The New World of Welfare written by Rebecca M. Blank and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004-05-13 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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—liberal and conservative, academic and nonacademic—engage 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.
Download or read book Government Matters written by Lawrence M. Mead and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Good government" is commonly seen either as a formidable challenge, a distant dream, or an oxymoron, and yet it is the reason why Wisconsin led America toward welfare reform. In this book, Lawrence Mead shows in depth what the Badger State did and--just as important--how it was done. Wisconsin's welfare reform was the most radical in the country, and it began far earlier than that in most other states. It was the achievement of legislators and administrators who were unusually high-minded and effective by national standards. Their decade-long struggle to overhaul welfare is a gripping story that inspires hope for better solutions to poverty nationwide. Mead shows that Wisconsin succeeded--not just because it did the right things, but because its government was unusually masterful. Politicians collaborated across partisan lines, and administrators showed initiative and creativity in revamping welfare. Although Wisconsin erred at some points, it achieved promising policies, which then had good outcomes in terms of higher employment and reduced dependency. Mead also shows that these lessons hold nationally. It is states with strong good-government traditions, such as Wisconsin, that typically have implemented welfare reform best. Thus, solutions to poverty must finally look past policies and programs to the capacities of government itself. Although governmental quality is uneven across the states, it is also improving, and that bodes well for better antipoverty policies in the future.
Download or read book Highlights of Welfare Reform written by Domestic Council (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2001-08-10 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Evaluating Food Assistance Programs in an Era of Welfare Reform written by National Research Council and Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1999-06-10 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report was prepared in response to a request from the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It summarizes the discussions at a February 1998 workshop convened by the Committee on National Statistics; the Board on Children, Youth, and Families; and the Food and Nutrition Board. The fiscal year 1998 (FY1998) appropriations bill for USDA gave ERS responsibility for all research and evaluation studies on USDA food assistance programs. The bill provided $18 million to fund these studies, an increase from $7 million in FY1997. ERS asked the Committee on National Statistics for assistance in identifying new areas of research and data collection and in further improving the evaluation studies of food assistance programs. By bringing together many who work on evaluation of food assistance programs, policy analysis, survey methods, nutrition, child nutrition and child development, outcome measurement, and state welfare programs, the issues presented and discussed at the workshop provided ERS with information that could be used to develop a framework for their research program.
Download or read book From Rhetoric To Reform written by Anne Marie Cammisa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By framing the dilemma in American politics in terms of helping the poor or reducing dependency, this book examines the question of what government assistance can do. It explains why some people believe that focusing on dependency moves us away from the real problem of welfare reform.
Download or read book Welfare written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Finance. Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Welfare Reform written by Kristin S. Seefeldt and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After reprinting the issue of the CQ Researcher that summarizes current policy debate surrounding welfare reform (originally published in August, 2001), additional material is presented in three sections exploring politics and policy in the United States, the role of domestic businesses and non-profit organizations, and related international issues. The section on policy and politics pays particular attention to the variations at the state and local levels, often summarizing the experiences of individual states. Similarly, the section on organizations offers brief sketches of important businesses and organizations that have affected the debates. The international section focuses mostly on the experiences of developed European nations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
