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THE CENTER FOR NEW YORK CITY AFFAIRS NEXT STEPS: Transcripts: This is part one of a three-part series of miniconferences for practitioners, policymakers, researchers and communities to share their visions for the future of social welfare policy in New York. Presented by The Center for New York City Affairs and The Community Development Research Center, Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy
Dr. Wendell E. Primus is the Director of the Income Security Division at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. He has expanded the Center's research in areas including social security, unemployment insurance, child support enforcement, child welfare, income and poverty trends and federal policy related to the new welfare law. Dr. Primus has also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, as well as chief economist for the Committee on Ways and Means and Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the U.S. House of Representatives. Lawrence M. Mead is Professor of Politics at New York University, where he teaches public policy and American government. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Wisconsin. He has also been a visiting fellow at Princeton and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Professor Mead is an expert on the problems of poverty and welfare in the United States, and the politics of these issues. The books he has published set out much of the theory and practice for recent welfare reform in the United States. They have also influenced welfare reform in foreign countries. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. Jason A. Turner serves as Commissioner of the New York City Human Resources Administration. He is the chief executive officer of the nation's largest municipal cash assistance and Medicaid system. From 1993 to 1997, he managed the statewide Wisconsin JOBS program after which he was appointed by Governor Thompson to develop an alternative to AFDC for the state. Mr. Turner also served as the director of the Federal AFDC and JOBS program at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington. Steven Banks has been a community lawyer at the Legal Aid Society for 20 years. Currently, he is the Deputy Attorney-in-Charge of the Society's Civil Division. He is also the Coordinating Attorney of Legal Aid's Homeless Rights Project and Counsel to the Coalition for the Homeless. He is lead counsel in litigation in which court orders require the City to provide emergency housing and services, including permanent housing assistance, for low income New Yorkers. Lilliam Barrios-Paoli is the Senior Vice President and Chief Executive Officer for Agency Services of the United Way on New York City, a nonprofit fundraising organization that distributes over $88 million annually to New York City nonprofits. Ms. Barrios-Paoli formally served as the Executive Director of Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center, and as a Commissioner of several public agencies in both the Giuliani and Koch Administrations. She has also taught at the City University and the Bank Street College of Education in New York City, and Rutgers University and Montclair State College in New Jersey. Tom Sanzillo is the Director of Fiscal Research and Policy Analysis for the New York State Comptroller. He advises the Comptroller on a broad array of policy issues including welfare, job training, housing and the state's economy. Prior to this assignment he worked in the Office of the State Deputy Comptroller for New York City overseeing the City's finances. Mr. Sanzillo also served as Assistant Deputy Commissioner for New York City overseeing the office of Policy Management. Dr. Hector R. Cordero-Guzman is an Assistant Professor at the Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy and an Affiliated Faculty in the Graduate Department of Sociology at The New School in New York City. Dr. Cordero-Guzman received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Currently he is writing a book on the role of community based organizations in the socio-polotico-economic incorporation and adaptation of immigrants and is directing a project that examines the impacts of changes in immigration and welfare laws on families and children and on community based social service providers. Taina Gonzalez is an active member and leader of Make The Road By Walking's organizing campaign to protect the civil rights of non-English speakers within New York City welfare centers. She is currently working toward a B.A. in education at Medger Evers College in Brooklyn. Ms. Gonzalez recently graduated from the Minority Activist Apprenticeship Program at the Center for Third World Organizing. Commissioner JASON TURNER, New York City Human Resources Administration: I want to challenge those who approach the subject of welfare and the subject of what we should do to help poor families, challenge some of the assumptions that some of those folks have and see if we can kick off a lively debate over some of these issues. But let me first start by talking about the tremendous decrease in the proportion of people who are dependent on cash assistance in New York City over the past….well, really over the past two or three decades. If you look at the chart that has been handed out called City of New York HRA Public Assistance Recipients in New York City, you can see on the bottom the years beginning in 1955 going up through the present and you can see the caseload increases and decreases over that period. Beginning in about 1965, the beginning of the Lindsay Administration and ending a little bit after the end of the Lindsay Administration the caseload went from about 350,000 people to about 1.5 million people in September of 1972. That's a tremendous increase in dependency in New York City and one has to ask one's self, during this period of a run up, whether the economy was responsible, because the economy was strong. Or whether there was a thoughtful understanding of what the implications for substituting unearned low transfer income, in the form of welfare for what had been low wage working income from these same families. Starting in 1972 and running right through 1995, the caseload never dropped below 800,000 again. In fact, no matter what the economy did, recession or boom, we had a situation where essentially in New York dependency on the welfare system was a common thing. About one out of seven New Yorkers were dependent on welfare during this period of time. A tremendous cost in human life as well as financial assets to carry that much of the city. But beginning in 1995, you see the caseload reduction and the sharp reduction has continued. This chart goes through September 2000, but the figures through February 2001, our most recent figures, show the same thing. Namely that the caseload has continued to decline at a very, very rapid pace so that at this point we are about back to where we were roughly in late 1966 and every month our caseload declines here in New York City, we are moving the clock back in terms of the run up. But perhaps this tremendous caseload decline has to do with individuals not receiving assistance but not working either. In fact, that's not the case, as Professor Mead will describe a little bit in somewhat more detail. A very extensive study that was done by the Rockefeller Institute that looked at people who had left welfare in 1997 and looked at them a year later found that about 83% of the families who left public assistance, were not on welfare a year later and 75% of those had found employment at some time during the twelve month period, while 60% showed continuous employing during all four quarters. That's a strong showing and one that I think is consistent with the following notion: welfare dependency is not merely a factor that has to do with underlying economic problems. Welfare dependency has a lot to do with the kind of system that we set up to help families and in the old system we thought we were helping families by redistributing income through the welfare system. Now we are redistributing income through the earned income tax credit and through earned income from families who are employed. That's a much healthier system. How did we do that in New York City? What I'll do now is touch on some of the various initiatives that we had. When Mayor Guiliani came into office he felt that there was an imbalance in the obligations of those receiving welfare and the benefits welfare recipients received. He felt that what we should do was restore a balance whereby New York City, being a generous city, offers income assistance and an array of social services, and in exchange expects that individuals who can work will perform some kind of work, if not in the private economy, then for the city at large. The mayor increased the program called Work Experience that most of you are all familiar with, such that in December of 1994 there was an extensive increase in the WEP program and I'll show you how much a little bit later, but to the point where we have welfare recipients performing major improvements in the quality of life for all New Yorkers through their contributions through work, if they are not privately employed. The second thing we did moving into the second half of his administration, is we opened job centers which are intended to take people who are coming in the front door and help them find immediate assistance through employment, primarily. But also this offers other alternatives rather than coming into the welfare system and staying on welfare. What we have found is that it is much easier to help someone who is asking for welfare, at the front door, help them with employment and other options, than it is to help somebody who has been on welfare for an extended period, get off of welfare. So job centers are an attempt to help people right away when they come in the front door. Many of you, from reading the newspapers, are familiar with the lawsuit that was filed, that temporarily stopped job centers from reopening on the grounds that applications weren't being processed properly. But you should know, because you wouldn't have necessarily picked this up from reading those same newspapers, that the plaintiffs in that case dropped that assertion ten days before the trial was about to begin and job centers went ahead. The remaining job centers will be opened between now and 60 and 90 days from now. So throughout the city, job centers will be operating and helping people who come right in the front door. The next thing we did was we went for full engagement, meaning we wanted to be sure that people were engaged in activities that are designed to help themselves move to private employment and you can't help somebody who's at home receiving assistance but not really doing anything. If you look at this other chart called PA in New York City Six Year Engagement Comparison, you can see the major differences in the old JOBS program, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Program compared to the present. If you look at the top, you can see columns a, b, c, d, e and f. And in December 19, 1994, which is column e and f, you can see the number of cases that were there. If you look at line 3 in column e, you'll see 544,000 people were on welfare in December of 1994, as compared to in column b, 221,000 now, which is more than a 60% reduction. But equally interesting I think is where people are now. The overall message here is that people are engaged in activities designed to help themselves. If you look at line 20, the number of people who are engaged in some activity is up from 74,000 in column e, to 85,000 now. But more importantly, because the caseload was so much larger back then, only 25% of the caseload was engaged in something in 1994 compared to about 59% now. And if you look at line 22, whereas only 3.7% of the caseload was in private employment while they were on welfare, now we have 21% engaged. And look at line 28, the proportion in work experience went from 5.5% to 15% and so on. In short, the proportion of people who were doing something constructive as they move from dependency to independence is up sharply under the Guiliani Administration and that's a major achievement. The way we did it was we set goals. We set the goal of full engagement meaning that there would be nobody who was sitting at home doing nothing. The second thing we did was we set targets for the year 2000, that we would get 100,000 jobs for people, which we met. We actually exceeded it. We got 129,000 jobs for people in the year 2000. That's as compared with an overall caseload, mind you, of 260,000 at the time. We established new employment contracts where we got private vendors and we paid the vendors to help individuals find people employment and keep them employed. Under the old JTPA system what used to happen was the government would pay vendors in community-based organizations just to open the doors, turn on the lights and process people. What we have done in our system is only pay vendors when they actually got somebody a job. So as to the criticism, for instance, that this administration has not been properly attentive to finding employment for individuals as opposed to just having individuals in WEP, I would argue that our new contracts, which have already shown to be successful, more successful at getting people jobs at less cost, are the answer. Finally, we did a lot of things in terms of improving the internal processes to make certain that the internal system of Human Resources Administration, 17,000 employees with over 100 offices city-wide, operates better. And we did that by decentralizing the management responsibility to regional managers and to strong local job center operators. And then we did something which many of you in this room and many academics are familiar with, we have combined the old eligibility income maintenance workers and the old social workers into one worker. One worker, now, in New York City, will have responsibility for helping people move through the system and find employment while at the same time showing how their budget will be improved if they do so. These are just some of the things that we've accomplished. I guess the other main thing is that in trying to get everybody engaged, we haven't just put people in work experience but we've also tried to reach out to people who have mild disabilities and get them into vocational training, through vendors such as Good Will and so on. In short, we haven't excluded people from participating in the American Dream of getting involved in work activity and moving up and out, whereas the old system was one which placed people in categories of unable to work. What we've tried to do is include people in the category and then find the best opportunity for them. I would like to conclude by challenging those who are left of center in orientation and believe for instance that the main challenge that we have as a society is to assure that greater income goes to the low income population as the major social agenda. I would like to challenge those folks to the following: It's often not remarked upon enough but right now if a single mom with two, three or four children takes even a minimum wage job, full time, and takes the earned income tax credit, she is out of poverty. Let me read you the statistics. I take it folks here don't think those numbers add up? FROM THE AUDIENCE: We know they don't. JASON TURNER: Okay, you take a family size three that's a mom and two kids. The basic public assistance and food stamp benefit in New York City is $840, which is below poverty. So in the existing system, not being a worker assures that you will remain in poverty. We're not doing any favors for anybody that we're not helping move to employment. But even a minimum wage job, I wanted to take the most extreme example, because I didn't want to make it easier by saying, "Well, our average person who exits welfare actually makes over $7.00 a hour." I wanted to take the most extreme low example of $5.15 an hour at full time. At 35 hours a week, at minimum wage, a mom with two kids will make $780. She will get supplementary benefits of $197. That's because her case won't completely close because of the 45% disregard. She will get food stamps of $216 and she will get the earn income tax credit, worth $318 and her overall income is going to be $1512 or 180% more than the $840 she just receives from welfare and food stamps. The same applies for anyone, even a mom with four kids, receives $1850 when she works full time at minimum wage as compared with $1228 just on welfare and food stamps, or 51% greater. I would argue that it is unlikely that the national government is going to author a major and massive transfer of income to nonworking adults who are able-bodied as a way of improving their income prospects. Really and truly the only way to improve income prospects for our population is to help them find employment and then after we find them employment, to give them the supports they need, including medical care and childcare, which we do. That's the challenge for all of us and that's what we've been working on. Thanks. BOOS AND APPLAUSE ANDREW WHITE: I should remind everybody that this is going to be a three-day series. The second day is on May 30th, when we are going to be speaking about supported work and strategies for expanding access to supports for people in low wage jobs in New York, not only former welfare recipients but the low wage labor force in general. And the third day in June, the date is still tentative so I'm not even going to announce it, will be focusing on the politics and economics of alternative strategies or expanded strategies for welfare policy. Our next speaker, now that we've heard where we are in the city government, is going to speak about the view from Washington. Wendell Primus is Director of Income Security at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C. His work focuses on Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Child Support Enforcement, Income and Poverty Trends and you can see many of his reports on the web at www.cbpp.org, Dr. Primus. APPLAUSE WENDELL PRIMUS: Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here this morning and I think my role is to talk a little bit about what we know about welfare reform nationally and give you a little hint about where I think we'll go the next four years. As these slides are coming up, I guess the one thing I'd say to Jason is, I think we shouldn't judge welfare reform by the reduction in caseload. I think we should primarily judge it by whether or not people's well-being and children's well being is better off (applause) and I think the evidence we have is mixed on that front. I think for some families welfare reform has worked. But for other families it has not worked and so I want to emphasize that we implemented welfare reform in a very advantageous economic period. Unemployment rates have fallen by 2 or 3 percentage points. We've actually had real wage increases at the bottom of the wage distribution. We've enacted huge increases in terms of making work pay, in terms of an increase in the earned income tax credit, our childcare subsidies are up. And yes, there have been things going on at the welfare office as well. And so it's very hard to disentangle the economy from the make-work pay, the ITC childcare from what is actually happening in the welfare offices. Incidentally if you want a copy of these slides, see me at the break and I'll send it to you. Or e-mail me, whatever. I think there have been some positive outcomes to welfare reform and these are that single mothers are working more. In fact, this first slide shows that we've had a very astonishing increase in the labor force participation. These mothers are earning more. And it's also true that child poverty from 1993 to the present has really declined a lot. In fact, if you add in food stamps and housing and earned income, the child poverty rate is at 12.9%, its lowest level since we first began to use this measure, back in 1979. But as the next slide suggests, we have also had some troubling results. What this slide shows is that caseloads have declined much faster than poverty would have indicated. In fact, you can see, from '93 to '95, poverty declined about 5%, caseload declines were in the 2-4% area. Then from '95 to '97, poverty declined another 5% but food stamp caseloads, the number of children getting food stamps, declined 18%, the number of children getting TANF benefits declined by almost 21% and that same phenomenon has been repeated in the last two year period. The next slide really shows you what is happening to income. And there are two stories here. If you can't see the numbers, I'm just going to tell you what they say. Basically between '93 and '95, in every segment of female-headed families with children, their incomes grew and grew quite substantially. And then when welfare reform was implemented and the national law was passed in '96, we see that the poorest families actually lost ground. On average, they lost $270. This is the entire universe of female-headed families. I've included the cohabiting's income or the unrelated male in some cases. I've also included the income of others, maybe a grandmother is living there or whatever. If you take a subset of this population and only look at mothers who are living alone with their children, then the decline in the bottom quintile is on the order of $700, a very significant decline for a certain segment of mothers in the female-headed group. The second quintile, everybody would say is a success. We've had an enormous increase in earnings from about $4000 in 1993 all the way up to $11,000 by 1999. That's an enormous increase. Between 1995 and 1999 earnings increased by $4500 but when you take into account what has happened to their income, food stamps, housing and everythign else, despite the fact that they earn $4500 more, they only gained $1555. And I guess my question to this audience would be, if you got a pay raise from your employer of about $4500 but you only saw a third of it show up in your paycheck, how happy would you be? And that's essentially what has happened a lot of these families have lost their food stamps, they are not applying. It's a big hassle, etc. So I think that's the plus and the minus side of welfare reform. I'm going to skip the next chart. There is another phenomenon that I want to bring to your attention. You can see in the bottom set of rows that we've really increased the labor force participation of black women aged 20-24 significantly. We've increased it by the percent employed by about 13-14 percentage points. Their labor force participation went up 10 percentage points. But look at the other side, what has happened to men age 20-24, who are African Americans. Their labor force participation has actually declined and their percent employed, in this very good economy, 1993 to 1999, has only gone up 1% or so and I would argue that our welfare reform policies have been too sexist. We have leverage on the mother because she is getting benefit and we've stressed getting her into the labor force when I think we ought to pay equal attention to what is happening on the male side of this equation. This is another one that I want to show, this is what happens to disposable income as mothers increase their earnings here in New York. And you can see that Jason was correct, that if you go from zero to $10,000, the mothers keep about 70% or so of those earnings. But as you go from $10,000 to $15,000 or $10,000 to $20,000, we have a marginal tax rate of about 60%, meaning that these mothers, when they go from $10-20,000, typically can only keep about 40% of their earnings. I think that's something we should be addressing in Washington by making the child tax credit more refundable and other things. I think that's a problem that needs to be addressed in the next round of welfare reform. The next slide illustrates a similar phenomenon with respect to non-custodial parents, the males. New York State and Robert Doar knows more about this than I, you can see it's the same kind of chart. Look at a young male, let's say that has two children that he is supposed to be paying child support on. As his earnings go from zero to $5 to $10 to $15,000, you can see what happens to the order. At very low-income levels, his order is pretty low. At $10,000, his order is only $300 and in New York you do disregard the first $50 of that child support that's paid. But then as his income goes from $10-15,000, that order goes all of a sudden from $300 to $3400 and by the time he is earning $20,000, he's keeping less than half of his income after he pays his child support, federal and state taxes, etc. I would argue that if we want this system to work, we've got to have reasonable orders for males. They should pay. I'm all for strong enforcement. I want to make sure these men also get into the labor force and have earnings advancement. But when they pay, I want to make sure that almost all of their child support actually gets to the child and that isn't happening today in this State or in this City and in most places around the country. What is going to happen next year? I was actually quite optimistic several months ago. I'm less optimistic today. Not only are we going to reauthorize TANF. Congress is going to reauthorize TANF next year and also childcare programs and the food stamp program. I'm actually more concerned what will happen to the food stamp program than I am to what is going to happen to the TANF program, in some sense. The major issue in TANF is the funding level. I think we should make a commitment in this country like Tony Blair has made in England where we're going to try to cut the child poverty rate in Great Britain by half. I would like to see our major politicians pledge to reduce child poverty in half over the next five or ten years and then judge the success of the next round of welfare reform by whether or not we achieve that goal. The next slide talks a little about food stamp reauthorization. It is actually the program that got the biggest cut. One of the reasons TANF is working so well is that states actually got more money from it than we expected. Welfare rolls were high in '93-94 when the welfare levels were set and as a result they were able to spend a lot more on childcare than they would have under the old law. However, the food stamp program was cut by $5-7 billion annually and it is one of the reasons that mothers aren't doing as well, even in that second quintile or the first quintile, because we cut benefits substantially for the working poor. I'm going to talk a little bit about the TANF reauthorization. I think we should switch the goal from caseload reduction to poverty reduction. And there is a chance that we're going to be helped in that process by something that the census bureau is doing, called the American Community Survey, so that we could actually measure poverty especially child poverty, as quickly as Jason can measure caseload declines. It won't be quite as timely, it's not administrative data but I think that could help us again immediately tell what is happening to children's well-being jurisdiction by jurisdiction. I think we need to continue to support families in the transition from welfare to work. There are some families on welfare today that are going to still need considerable assistance. They have significant employment barriers. I don't think we should be concerned about the time limit. If the mothers are working, I think there is a small chance we'll be able to stop the federal time limit. There is not a prayer of a chance that we're going to get rid of time limits in this Congress for families that aren't working. I think we should help non-custodial parents as well. And as the next slide says, I also think we need to focus on two-parent families. There will be a large debate about marriage and family stability in the next round. The first thing I want you to remember is that children in two-parent families with the same income level are served a lot less in our welfare system. Their participation rate in TANF, Medicaid and food stamps are much lower. I think the first thing we should do to help those two-parent fragile families, is make sure they get the work supports and the income assistance that they need and indeed there has been a study by MDRC, the Minnesota Family Investment Program that suggests that if we do that, give that assistance to two-parent families, marriage rates actually go up significantly. I think again, the main issue here is going to be the funding level and I'm going to come back to this in a few minutes. I think the block grants should be indexed for inflation. I think we're going to continue to need to address the disparity between the levels of the federal block grant that New York gets, for example, on the neighborhood of about $2,000 per poor child versus states like Mississippi and Texas where it is $600-700 per poor child. And not that I want to take any money away from New York. I think the way we close this disparity is bring the other states up, as well as give New York more money because of inflation. I think we are going to have to look at the issue of giving states additional funds if we are in a recession or about to go into a recession. So those are the primary issues, I think. I want to focus on just three more things. I think we got to increase the amount of child support and well-being through investments in the male side. And this is going to take a lot of work. I think in 2001, we're back 25 years ago in terms of what we knew about how to get mothers into the labor force. I think it's going to take at least five things. We are going to be concerned about their earnings and try to help them the same way, to some extent, that we've helped some mothers get into the labor force. Second, we need to build on the fatherhood programs that are going on and try to connect males to their children. I understand there's issues of domestic violence in some cases but I think we've got to help the male. I think children are better off if they have two involved parents. I think we have a lot to do in the child support system, in terms of changing the orders, the size of those orders. I'm not complaining about New York's size in the $5-10,000 area but I think we need to escalate it more slowly. Almost all of these men….I did a study in Maryland….80-90% of the men involved in the 40s system had arrearages. And most of them were substantial, like $10,000 and a lot of young males are going underground and they are saying, "We can't afford to be in this system because we're essentially not keeping enough of our earned income." I think we've got to get more of the child support through to the family and if we, as a society, really believe in the payment of child support, then we ought to subsidize it. Just like we subsidize the earnings of the mother through the earned income tax credit, I think we need to subsidize the earnings of young males, perhaps through subsidizing the child support order. Making it reasonable and then as they pay child support, adding to it and sending it to the mom and kids. There is a myth in this country that our tax and transfer system creates marriage penalties and again, this is going to be a big debate. The prospective Secretary is very concerned and I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about the issue of marriage. But I think the prime issue is we're not serving them in the welfare system and the next slide, a little bit complicated, but I want to go through it very quickly. To understand this…is there a marriage penalty in our system. You can't read those numbers so I'll just tell you what it says. I looked at a mother and father where the mother is making $7,500 and the dads is making $12,500 and look at their situation if they are living married, if they are living together or if they are separated and the father has to pay child support. Well, in both of those instances, and I've repeated this sample with these different combinations of earnings in different states, you are almost always better off living together or being married. It is a myth that our tax and transfer system discriminates against marriage. So if there's one thought I want to leave you with, as we anticipate this debate is that our tax and transfer system does not discriminate against two-parent families, at least the rules. But they get it a lot less frequently. The final thing, I said I was less optimistic now and I think this president's primary concern is getting that tax bill through Congress. We have an unprecedented opportunity, even if you take the baseline surplus of $5.6 trillion dollars over the next ten years, subtract out Social Security and Medicare, we have a non-Social Security surplus of $2.5 trillion dollars. We could do an enormous amount of good in terms of reducing the number of children who are uninsured. In terms of providing more supplements for earnings. We could accomplish a lot for disadvantaged families, if we, as a society, wanted to do that. We have the money. But where are we going to put that money? That's really what's at issue right now in Congress and as you can see in this chart, 80% of it or so is going to go to this large tax cut. It's not going to help families at the bottom of the income distribution one iota. Bush has said let's double the child tax credit from $500 to $1,000. But he only does it for those families that pay income tax. Not for families that are paying payroll taxes or excise taxes. As a result, over 50% of minority children, black and Hispanic children are not going to get any benefit from doubling that child tax credit. And if we made it partially refundable, we could reinforce the message that Jason's trying to get out, in terms of if mothers are working, lets give them some additional assistance. So the thought I want to leave you with here and I think next year when the re-authorization comes up, I'm afraid all the money's going to be gone and we're not going to have the money to increase TANF, etc. And there's one kind of indication of that. Governor Bush, is from Texas. He was elected by the results, as you well know, in Florida, where his brother is governor. And there was a special supplemental grant that goes to Texas and Florida and 15 other states. It's about 10% of their block grant today. He chose not to re-authorize that. So if he proposed cutting TANF in his own state by 10%, what does that mean next year? And it is for those reasons that I'm a lot less optimist than I was several months ago. ANDREW WHITE: Thank you. New York is anomalous in a couple of ways from these national figures. One being the earned income tax credit is higher here for the state income tax than just about anywhere else in the country, which is actually a pretty stunning accomplishment in New York. Our next speaker, Larry Mead is a Professor of Politics at NYU where he teaches public policy and American government. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton and the University of Wisconsin. Professor Mead helped lay much of the groundwork for welfare reform over the last decade in his speeches and articles and books. And we are going to hear now where he thinks we have reached in relation to his early thinking and what he thinks about what is happening in New York. Professor Mead: APPLAUSE AND SOME BOOS LAWRENCE MEAD: Well, thanks very much. It's a real pleasure to be here. I think this is indeed a critical subject. I think the most important that Washington is facing. Let's start off with the first slide, the thing I want to emphasize is this is a summary of welfare reforms under Guiliani. In his first term, the key innovations were the eligibility verification review, a quality control program. And second, the expansion of the WEP program. The thing I want to emphasize is in the second term there's been a shift away from those strategies, although they remain in place and they remain worthwhile. In the second term, there's much more been a focus under Jason's auspices in building up the job centers and also improving job search for the bulk of the caseload. There's been a shift way, in other words, from public employment and towards placement in the private sector. I think that is a very promising development. There have been some implementation problems in instituting all these programs, as you're no doubt aware. I think some criticisms that I find reasonable have been made of WEP for not emphasizing the private sector enough. The job search initiatives are a way to respond to that. The food stamp lawsuit indicated problems in the implementation of the job centers. That's largely been resolved. The contractors for job search….there was an issue about those contracts. That also has been cleared up. So I think we need to focus on the end result of all this, which is an improved system with a greater capacity to place in the private sector and that is really critical, because under current conditions, that is indeed the best approach to welfare reform, to judge from our experience and research. So we need to look past the immediate conflicts and see where we are, which is that we are moving towards a reformed system that is focused on placement in the private sector. What I want to do is focus on two sources of feedback about the effects of this. The first is the Rockefeller Institute Leavers Study, which covers a year of time and follows a cohort of leavers from '97 through the ensuing year. And what we find is that about 63% of those who left, were employed at some point in that year in New York, compared to 66% for the state as a whole. Of those that worked, 61% were employed continuously. 60% in the state. And the earnings for those two groups, about $15,000….this is for those who were employed now. $15,000 for those working at any time and over $20,000 for those working continuously. This means at some point in four continuous quarters. And those figures are considerably higher than the rest of the state. The thing to note about this is that the work rate is quite typical of leaver studies nationally. New York is not special. There is nothing to suggest that there are special problems here. In fact, people can leave welfare and go to work and in most of those cases, they will work and can work continuously. Earnings, however, are startlingly high, at least to my eye. I think that's because wages are high in New York, relative to other places. And in fact, returning to the rolls is also limited. So this says to me, that all things considered, it is indeed possible for the bulk of recipients to leave the rolls, at least to date and make a better life in the private sector. The most compelling evidence about how New York has done and the change over time comes from The Urban Institute's National Survey of American Families. There have been two waves. One in '97, one in '99 and what is very striking here, if you look, New York is one of the thirteen states that are covered in this survey. It allows us to see change over time and also to compare New York to other states and the nation. What you see here is that children in single parent families, their poverty rate drops by 10 points over two years, an extraordinary decline for only two years. And we might imagine that's probably due to a good economy, however there was very little change for two-parent families so as a result of that we really can't say that it's just the economy. It seems to be something connected to single-parent families, who are of course the most exposed to welfare reform. What is the driving force? It appears to be the movement into the workforce. The employment rate for low income single parents, that's under 200% of poverty, jumped by 12 points in only two years. That's a truly extraordinary change. And again, very little change, almost no change for two-parent low-income families and so we know that this is not just the economy. This is, in fact, welfare reform. So a sharp increase in conditions for the families and it is directly tied to employment. Family with food problems, low income adults with food problems, drops by 7 points. There's a slight increase in the low income adults claiming housing problems but that is not significant statistically so we're not entirely sure that there has been a change there. Now, I find these effects remarkably positive and they are much in line with the national results and I think it is fair to say New York had a greater increase in conditions compared to the nation. I agree with Wendell that the social effects are more important than the effects on the caseload and that's why I mentioned this last. This is not the most important effect of the reform, driving the rolls down, but nevertheless they have dropped very sharply, both in TANF and in the safety net and the point to note here again is that it's very much in line with the nation. There is really nothing extraordinarily special about New York. The combination of welfare reform and a good economy and increased benefits has indeed driven dependency down and we should take satisfaction in that. We should also know, though I haven't seen studies specifically in New York about this but we know it's been mentioned many times already, that there's some other research elsewhere in Minnesota and so on, that show that declines of this order are probably associated with other good effects for families and children, including children doing better in school, a reduction in spousal abuse. In other words, we should expect to see some other good effects that go beyond the economics. So it seems to me that we're looking at a substantial success overall. I'm not going to minimize that there are cases of hardship, cases of homelessness. I'm not saying everyone is gaining from reform in New York but these numbers are pretty graphic to say that we are headed in the right direction. At this point I want to borrow a phrase from Senator Moynihan, courtesy of Robert Frost, namely miles to go. We have a long way to go. And we can tell this from the INSF Survey in New York, 62% of low income parents employed, that's a huge jump over two years previously. But, look at the national figures. 67%. New York has an extraordinarily low level of labor force participation compared to most big cities. I think that is directly tied to the share of the population on welfare, which is vastly higher than is true, even after the recent decline. Because we still have over 5% of our population on TANF compared to less than just about 2% for the nation. So New York is well behind the curve in terms of reducing dependency. That again, is not the goal, but what we should really be focusing on is the employment figure and also child poverty which is still well above the nation. Now you can argue whether that is due to too much reform or too little reform. I think based on the trends, we have to say it's due to too little reform. That we have, in fact, miles to go. What are the key reforms that we ought to be doing and what we will be talking about for the future? It seems to me the most important single change is to be able to enforce participation in full engagement in work activities and that's connected to the question of the sanction. New York is one of the few states that has not changed to full-family sanction. As a result, there are thousands of cases that have incurred a sanction, yet remained on the rolls and there is no way to engage that parent in a work activity. This is something about which the state is deeply divided. It seems to me there's a clear cut preference here. We should go to a full-family sanction. Not in order to throw people off the rolls but simply to require that they engage the opportunities that exist for going to work and retaining a lot of other benefits.
The work incentives mentioned have been made of the New York's 45% work incentive, that does play a role in helping people increase their income when they first go to work. But then it imposes a very heavy tax down the line as their earnings increase. I think it is time to question that. We ought to move away from work incentives and towards work subsidies. We ought to have perhaps an even larger EITC, other subsidies for people once they are working, which are tied to working directly. Which say, if you work, you will be helped. In order to make it ahead and get further ahead. The question of education training is bound to come up during the campaign. The current candidates are talking as if they would move somewhat backwards, allowing greater educational training on welfare. It is important to remember that some is already allowed. This City has not abolished any right to education training but it has said that you have to work first and then we will help you train along side that. I think that's the way to go. I think we should have work first, but not work only. The best evaluations in the country….and example would be Portland, Oregon, indicate that the best approach for moving people into work is to insist on some work up front, particularly to insist in participation up front. And then there may be a role for some education training, aimed at a particular job. What you can't do and this is what New York has favored traditionally, is have people go to school for indefinite periods without having to work at all. That is ineffective. But if you combine a work first test with some element of training for a better job, then I think we can get the best of both worlds. I think it is important not to reject what we've learned in this area. And finally, I would firmly support what Wendell said about the need to develop a greater, more successful program for absent parents. This is, indeed, the second frontier of welfare reform. We need to develop a system of programs which enforce participation and payment by fathers but also give them help. In fact, you can see here a sort of equivalent of what we are doing in welfare but from the other direction. In welfare moving from a benefit system towards a system that has some obligations tied to the benefits, in the case of the fathers, we have a system that is already quite punitive, quite demanding and unreasonably so in some cases. But the fathers need some help so we need to move from simple demands towards a structure where they can get some help but they have to participate. I think a model here, one that we ought to think of, is the reform in Wisconsin, which Jason had a bunch to do with. The thing that I want to emphasize about it is not every detail, which might well differ here in New York. But the central principle that Wisconsin was that they gave up entitlement, they gave up the idea that you should get help simply on the basis of need. They said, "no, no, you have to work, up front and that's a demand. But once you do that, we will then help you in all these ways. And the new ways extend to the entire low wage working population, not simply people on welfare." So they had a new New Deal in Wisconsin, based around employment but not based around ending the welfare state. Quite the contrary. Once you're working, we help you in a lot of ways that we didn't help you before and I encourage New Yorkers to change their own thinking in the same way. Let's give up entitlements. That's the bone of contention here. New Yorkers are clinging to the idea that families in need should get aid without conditions. That is passé. We found out it doesn't work. It's illegitimate. It's even impolitic in that most New Yorkers, in fact, reject this. Most Americans everywhere reject this. We need to move past that and look towards a new system in which work will be up front but then we will do other things to help you make it, to get into the mainstream. The main challenges we face, I think, are primarily institutional. They really aren't social and economic. There's a lot of room in this labor market to allow people to go to work and improve their lives. Our main problems are first of all administrative. We have to continue to improve the running of the programs, something where I think Jason's made a contribution not just in changing the reforms that we have in place but also improving the management of the welfare department generally. That's critically important. But our biggest problem is not administrative. It is in fact political. It's the fact that New York is still not agreed about the desirability of moving forward in the directions that I am suggesting. Although a large majority does acknowledge that some reform is needed. But despite this New York politicians tend to defend the old system. They tend to be afraid of change and there's fear on the right as well as on the left, conservative New Yorkers are afraid of the cost that might be incurred by rebuilding the system. They have to look past their fears. We have to, in fact, look towards the system where, indeed, we expect work but we also continue to do things to help people. The next mayor is likely to be someone more liberal than the current mayor, it would appear, on prospects. I'm not sure what they are going to do in terms of welfare. One of the leading candidates, Marc Greene, has claimed to have been converted on this question. In fact, he eluded to the fact that he and I once rode back on a train from Philadelphia some years ago and we argued about this matter and he didn't agree with me at that point and later on he claimed he saw the light. In fact, he told me this personally. And to compound the injury, I was described in that story as a Conservative Labor Economist. Wendell will roll over in his grave that that point. I'm certainly not an economist. And indeed, I think the issues really are political and we need to take our stand there. We need to say a new principle can be found for founding this system, around employment. Around obligation. Abandon entitlement but at the same time continue to help families make it in the city. Thanks very much. BOOS AND APPLAUSE ANDREW WHITE: Now we have a sense of where the policy makers are coming from and have been coming from. We have time to take three questions for Commissioner Turner, Professor Mead and Wendell Primus. If the three of you could come up here. Literally only three questions and I ask you to keep them to the point. Q: My name is Brian and I work for Urban Justice Center. We published a report that is at UJC Human Rights.org that among other things correlated the drops in temporary assistance and food stamp caseloads with the increase of people seeking help at emergency food service providers and people being turned away by emergency food service providers. People that are in need are not being served by the food stamps, TANF or safety net programs. I was wondering if Mr. Turner would comment on that and see if he thinks that there is a correlation between people who are hungry and people who are being reduced from the caseloads and whether or not the people who are hungry should be an indication of the success of welfare reform, instead of caseload reductions. JASON TURNER: Let me respond to that question by pointing out that the caseload since 1995, with the number of people on welfare since 1995 has gone from 1.1 million to about 520,000 or a reduction of about 600,000 New Yorkers. And I challenge the questioner to ask whether there are 600,000 new New Yorkers in the homeless shelters or not. Q: Sir that wasn't the question. The question was do you agree with the correlation between dropping caseload rolls and…. JASON TURNER: I'm making a correlation between the assertion that some of the caseload reduction has resulted in a comparable or proportionate increase in use of the emergency system, including food pantries and perhaps, although you didn't say it, homeless shelters. And I'm inquiring as to where, if we've decreased the caseload by 600,000, where those people are in that same system you are referring to. Q: I am making the assertion that people aren't receiving food stamp benefits because of the policies in place by your administration and so they have no alternative but to go to these emergency food providers and they aren't able to meet the needs and so people are going hungry, while you are saying that welfare reform is a success. JASON TURNER: Right, but I don't think you responded to my question to you, which is if there are 600,000 people who are off the caseload, many of whom are no longer receiving food stamps and your assertion is that as a result of that, those same people are accessing the food pantries, then why haven't we seen an increase proportionate or close to proportionate in the use of food pantries. We don't have 600,000 people going to food pantries. Obviously, most of them are working. Q: The New York City Coalition Against Hunger has published studies. I don't know the statistics off the top of my head, but the report, if you check it out on the web at UJC Human Rights.org, it goes into the numbers that they published and I would assert that the numbers have increased of people seeking the emergency food programs. The emergency food programs aren't able to handle the need. People are being turned away. And therefore, that should be used as an indicator of success or failure of welfare reform and not merely the caseload reductions. Do you agree or disagree with that assertion? JASON TURNER: We wouldn't use caseload reductions alone as an indicator but caseload reductions combined with increases in employment and reduction in poverty and increases in other indicators, many of which both Wendell and Larry Mead have talked about this morning. LARRY MEAD: I think the point that Jason is trying to make is that you don't really have any hard evidence connecting the homeless increases to welfare reform. In light of the drop in child poverty and other problems in the City, it is not clear cut that the reason is welfare reform. It might be something else. It might be due to homeless policy. It might be due to something else. I don't know what it is. But there was a study done in the Milwaukee case where similar allegations are raised. The study was done, where they inquired, they interviewed people in the shelters to find out what reasons had brought them to the shelter and they found in 8% of those cases that they looked at closely, it was due to welfare reform. So there is a contribution there but it is very small compared to other factors. So I think this needs to be looked into and a correlation is not necessarily causal. ANDREW WHITE: Hold that thought because both of those issues will be coming up in the next panel discussions. Q: Hi, my name is Andrew Friedman and I work at a community organization called Make the Road by Walking in Brooklyn. And because Commissioner Turner, you were speaking about obligations and benefits going together, I'm interested in your thoughts on some of the City's obligations to comply with federal civil rights law as a result of getting TANF money from the federal government. As I'm sure you are aware, in October of 1999, the Federal Office of Civil Rights, after a five month investigation found that New York City's Human Resources Administration in a widespread way was discriminating against non-English speaking immigrants, as well as hearing impaired individuals and the federal government demanded that within 30 days the City of New York draft a corrective action plan. Today, eighteen months later, the City has still failed to even draft a corrective action plan, let alone begin implementing that corrective action plan. Now, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on New York City's abysmal record in terms of complying with federal civil rights law. Particularly when we consider the dramatic effect that New York City's continued failure to comply has on low income immigrant families and children. JASON TURNER: First of all, if one like myself is going to hope to be a change agent in New York City, as elsewhere, I can expect that there will be plenty of assertions of all kinds, politically motivated and otherwise. So let me first say that we had a spirited political race going on for Senate and there were all kinds of things in the Clinton Administration and elsewhere that were going on. BOOING JASON TURNER: But let me also say the following: The assertion contained in that report was that HRA wasn't providing a sufficient amount of translation services, among other things. There's about 120 languages spoken in New York City. We translate our documents into Spanish and then we have Russian speakers available as well to help translate documents. But it is not possible, feasible or even desirable to be able to translate documents into 120 languages. There are some languages that are only spoken by 100 people in this city. So it is up to the City, prudently to make a decision as to how to make certain that people have access to translation services but not to translate every document that we have. Q: Unfortunately, it is not up to the City whether or not to comply with federal civil rights law and in fact, the federal government does not require that the City translate everything into every language spoken by anyone in New York City. But rather that the City ensure that the largest and most common language groups and groups of immigrants have equal access to emergency benefits and New York City has continued to fail to do so and right now it is a Bush Administration and the City still has not signed a corrective action agreement that the federal government finds acceptable. WENDELL PRIMUS: I would make just one comment on the administration. I think the issue of immigrants was probably the worst aspect of the 1996 law and one number I would like to have you remember and that is 27% of poor and near poor, basically food stamp eligible children have a non-citizen parent. 27% of poor and near poor children have a non-citizen parent. In New York that percentage is somewhat higher. Even in my home state of Iowa, it's close to 20%. Q: My name is Bik Hofam with the Hunger Action Network and I wanted to address or ask a question to the last speaker. I believe it is Professor Mead. You had mentioned the support of the general public for work first policies and that is get the person on welfare to work, whether or not it's a low income temporary job. That the public supports that. And actually we just finished a polling project statewide, I believe of about a 1,000 New Yorkers including an oversampling of 200 city residents, likely voters. And we actually asked them a very direct, hypothetical situation: person one believes that the government should put someone on welfare into a job immediately and even if it is a low income job and that then the person could get assistance later. And person two believes that the government should invest in education training for the person so that they can actually get a job that pays a family a living wage and stay off welfare. And we weren't sure what the response would be and it actually was a pretty high percentage, I think high 60s or 70…I don't have it on me…that said, the government should invest in low income people and not work first. So I just wanted to ask you, where you got your information from, saying that most people, including New Yorkers like work first policies? LAWRENCE MEAD: The question as you described it, you put an alternative whereby if we invest in education and training people will get a good job and stay off welfare. Now, if you frame it like that to the general public, they will of course support it. But that's not actually an option in the real world. When you put people in education training for a better job, they usually don't, in fact, leave welfare. They don't go to work if you don't also have a work requirement. So that isn't really an option in the real world and you can't ask people that and expect to get an honest response. Q: When I've heard that response before, that usually has to do with pre-96 welfare reform data, in terms of people on welfare reform prior to '96, who access some degree of education and training. Do you have statistics in terms of current? LAWRENCE MEAD: The poll I have is something done by the Empire State Survey. This was funded by several foundations, private poll. And the figures were specifically about workfare. This is a more punitive option than private sector and certainly inferior to placement in the private sector. They asked….this was in 1994…whether respondents favor requiring recipients to work off their grants in government jobs. Q: But that has to do with workfare. We're not talking about workfare, we're talking about access to education and training. LAWRENCE MEAD: If they favor this, they would favor private sector jobs even more. Q: That is absolutely untrue. LAWRENCE MEAD: Do you want to hear my numbers or not? Q: No, if they have to do with work first, please respond to that. But not to workfare. LAWRENCE MEAD: There wasn't a question in this poll specifically about work first. Q: Then I think to make a statement that the mayoral candidates should know that the general public supports work first is not true and I think you should…. LAWRENCE MEAD: I think this is the equivalent to work first. Q: It really isn't because in our survey we actually had a question about workfare, and you are right, it resembled the rest of the nation, where people said, "Oh yeah, work first sounds like a good idea." Until educated, what is it Commissioner Turner, that 2% of the people get jobs out of workfare? APPLAUSE ANDREW WHITE: Any final comments? LAWRENCE MEAD: It is a legitimate criticism of workfare that it doesn't per se place in the private sector. I believe that. And that's why it's preferable and that's why it is desirable to move towards more emphasis on direct placement in the private sector as the City has done. That is indeed an improvement. But the general question is would there be work obligation attached to benefits and that's the place where I think the public, including New Yorkers are considerably out of step with many people in this audience. The public does not believe in entitlement. They do believe in helping the poor but conditional on adults helping themselves. And it's that combination that New Yorkers who are politically active have not yet accepted. They still think there should be entitlement aid given to people because they are needy, without the parents having to do anything. And I believe that that is the fundamental obstacle to reform in this city. It's a cultural, deeply ingrained attitude that is getting in the way of positive change. WENDELL PRIMUS: One last comment. Both Larry and I agree that we have miles to go and I think the real question was whether the Americans improved outlook about welfare policies in this country will actually translate into a large increase or some increase in the amount of resources that are devoted to this problem in the next round of welfare reform so that we can address the remaining problems in the system as well as help those who are working achieve even a higher standard of living. And I'm pessimistic about that but I really hope that we can translate that into additional resources. ANDREW WHITE: Commissioner Turner? JASON TURNER: No. ANDREW WHITE: Thank you, the three of you. APPLAUSE ANDREW WHITE: I want to move to the first panel and before doing so I want to repeat something I said earlier. This is the first of three sessions. The third one we're going to be talking about some of the polling, which actually there have not been any polls that I've been able to find since 1998, talking about this issue and Blum and Weprin has actually talked about going ahead and adding some of the questions to their poll in the upcoming month or so, so perhaps we will have some fresh data in June. This project has been supported by the New York Community Trust and I want to thank them for helping us make this happen. And by the Task Force For Sensible Welfare Reform, which was the original organizing effort, started by Jack Krauskopf, who is going to be moderating the next panel. We are going to be hearing now from a couple of academic researchers and one researcher with the New York State Comptroller's Office. Jack Krauskopf is the moderator. He is the former dean of Milano and he is currently at the Aspen Roundtable. Jack. JACK KRAUSKOPF: If I may invite the panel to come up, Howard Chernick, Marcia Meyers and Tom Sanzillo. I will introduce them in just a moment. I want to make just one comment to point out something in the comparison that Commissioner Turner made between family that receives only public assistance and a family that works and his point….and I assume the numbers are accurate…..is that the family that works ends up with about twice as much income but I think it is important to note that in that comparison nearly half of the disposable income that working family has comes not from their earned income from the work but comes from other supplements that are publicly provided or the results of public policy. That is $170 of it in his example was from supplemental welfare that that family that was working at the minimum wage, the head of that family would continue to be eligible for. $216 in food stamps. And $318, in his example, from earned income tax credit. So these public policies, the kinds of things that Wendell Primus was emphasizing in his talk, are really critical to families that leave welfare to work. They are not going to be able necessarily in all cases to leave welfare entirely and these other public supports are essential to their well-being and the administration of the system has to be such that they can get those supplemental benefits, particularly benefits like food stamps that have been somewhat problematic for families that are leaving welfare to work. With that caveat, thank you for allowing me to say that as a former HRA commissioner as well as a former dean here. Let me introduce the panel. The first is going to be Howard Chernick, who is Professor of Economics at Hunter College. He was a senior economist in the Department of Health and Human Services and is currently a research affiliate at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. He is also on the Board of the National Tax Association and Citizens for Tax Justice. He will speak first. Then Marcia Meyers, who is Associate Professor of Social Work and Public Affairs at Columbia University and is the Associate Director of the Columbia, New York City Social Indicators Survey Center, which she will be reporting results from. She has written extensively on welfare and also on childcare and child welfare programs. Unfortunately, Marcia will be leaving New York as her academic base to go to the University of Washington next year but she promises that she will continue to stay involved in her New York activities, which is good news for us. Tom Sanzillo, who will be the final speaker, is Director of Fiscal Research and Policy Analysis for the New York State Comptroller, Carl McCall's office and has a variety of state government experiences. He has relevant state government experiences in social services prior to his work with Carl McCall and he will be talking about some of the audit findings that were relevant to where the welfare reform has gone in New York State. Given the time, I guess I would ask everyone to adhere to what Andrew asked, that everyone hold to about seven minutes in their presentations and helpfully you can sneak in a few more points in answering questions. Howard: HOWARD CHERNICK: Thanks Jack. I am going to report very briefly today on research I've been doing with my colleague at Hunter, Cordelia Rhymers, investigating welfare in New York City and our basic question is, "How are low income people and people at risk of needing public assistance doing both before and after welfare reform?" And we've used the limited available data from the National Current Population Survey, the sample for New York City to address that question. And how people are doing consists of two parts. One is the receipt of public programs, which provide cash or in-kind assistance and secondly their private earnings and income. So we look at both of those questions. We ask have there been changes, have there been differences for different groups? And in fact we find a very startling finding, which we for now refer to as a puzzle. We are doing more research. A huge difference in the effects both on the public assistance side and the earnings and income side of Hispanics versus African Americans and we are doing further research with additional data to see whether that story holds up. Of course, welfare is a very important phenomenon in New York City. First of all, there was a very high proportion of the population getting welfare. Why is that? It's controversial. It depends a little bit on where one sits. One idea is that the proportion of people who needed welfare, who were at risk because of low earning capacity was exceptionally high in New York. A second proposition stated more or less explicitly by the Commissioner is that it was easy to get on to welfare. Under the current mayor, there has been a strong, but I think safe to say controversial push, to move people off welfare. A number of the legal cases cited are evidence of that. Many New York Times stories, I think, provide ample evidence that something is going on in the welfare centers that has some positive effects. It may not be quite as benign as described by the Commissioner. So why are people moving off of welfare? Well, we can think of a push and a pull. The push may come from changed administrative policies. The pull is clearly the strong economy. The economy has been strong in big cities and New York City has done exceptionally well. This has been the strongest period of job growth in New York City since the 60s. The latest data show that even as the nation is slowing down, New York City….we'll cross our fingers….is continuing with strong economic growth. And whatever the distribution of those jobs, that should create a strong economic motivation and opportunity to move off of public assistance or to increase involvement in the labor force. What would we expect to happen? We expect kind of a mixed picture, which is from one group push, which I think everyone agrees has been the case, was necessary and it's led to relatively benign or good outcomes. That is people moving off of public assistance, into the labor force and earning more and doing better, because that's the ultimate bottom line. Are people doing better? For another group, adequate substitutes are not available and they are doing worse. The question is how big is each group? And that's what we try to address. Some additional possible effects…there has been some evidence around the country of a chilling effect of welfare reform that would apply particularly to immigrants. As New York has a large proportion of its population not born in the United States, those effects for non-citizens are especially great. In addition, there has been a substantial evidence of confusion, misinformation, some deliberate, some not, regarding people's eligibility. Part of that has to do with major changes in systems and part of it, which may be temporary, part of it may reflect deliberate policy. We can't separately identify these various reasons in our work. But we hope to get an overall picture. So we want to look at the packaging of programs. So families that lose public assistance, do they still get other programs? This is one question. A second major one is welfare and earnings. How much replacement? How much combining? How does it differ by ethnic group? And lastly, how are families at risk doing? What we do is to use a before and after….current population surveyed data from '94-'95 and '97-'98 and so we are continuing that with later data. So it's really, in terms of evaluating welfare reform per se, it is too early to tell and really, in a sense, what we are picking up is the beginning of the Guiliani Administration, new policy and the strengthening economy. However, the economy itself really kicked into gear, at least as measured by job growth, starting about '98-'99. So in a sense we are a little behind the real strong job growth. And we researchers always want to make caveats about the data. This data is far from perfect. It is still a pretty small sample. So some of the results may be due to misreporting data problems and we want to keep that as a kind of caution. So with all that introduction, what do we see? First of all, look at the first slide, showing the receipt of the major welfare programs in New York and the blue line is before and the red line after and what we see is consistent with the data from the administration though not as strong but a big drop in public assistance from 11 to 8% of all households. Food stamps also a substantial drop. And increase in SSI, which is largely non-citizens and non-citizen elderly and Medicaid about the same proportion receiving overall. So if we keep in mind the broader package of programs which collectively contribute to the well-being and consumption power of low income people, we see these patterns. Now these conceal….and I'll talk a little bit about lots of flows. This doesn't mean the same people. Some people are flowing off. Some flowing on. And we don't have good estimates of that but we do try to make some estimates. And in particular, as shown in that chart, the proportion getting at least one benefit stayed the same. And there is basically a decrease in public assistance and an increase in Medicaid but it is different folks really getting those two. In terms of packaging, one of our original questions was, are people leaving public assistance, getting other programs? Other public programs, which would contribute to their economic well-being and we can't get that directly from our research but we can infer a kind of minimum and a minimum is that at least 30% of people who left welfare are in the later period, getting no other benefit of those programs. They might still be getting the earned income tax credit or they might be getting that but not of the food stamps, Medicaid or SSI. There the overlap isn't very great. So that is an important summary result for us. I want to turn the question of differences by ethnic group and race. And here is where we find, I think for us, the most surprising and unexpected finding, which we are searching for explanations for. And that starts the tantalizing too is that we find a much, much bigger drop in public assistance receipt for Hispanics than for blacks. And I'll show you the picture here is quite dramatic. So if we focus on this group, which are households who might be at risk of needing or getting public assistance, the gap between the blue and the red lines is very big for Hispanics. Not very big at all for blacks and not very big for others. In terms of statistical analysis, this difference is not statistically significant. We are a little bit suspicious of this result for blacks, because with more than 500,000 people having left the rolls since '95, it's implausible to us that there would have been such small declines for blacks. But the dramatic story is this big drop among the Hispanic groups. What is going on there? So we said, "Does this drop for this self-identified group reflect the kind of intersection of new administrative policies that penalize people for whom English is not their first language or whose language skills are deficient? Is this reflecting the adverse impact of a set of new rules and new procedures on non-citizens?" So we broke the Hispanic group into Puerto Ricans, other Hispanics and the other Hispanics by citizen and non-citizen category and here we found yet another unexpected story. The biggest drop is among Puerto Ricans and that holds when we do a more sophisticated statistical analysis. So, in fact, it is the only group for once we do a reasonable statistical analysis of that this result holds. So we've tried to check this with the administration on their data and of course it is data collected differently but they do report, when I say "they" I mean the researchers there, report an decrease in the proportion of the caseload that is Hispanic, which is consistent with this kind of story. Why Puerto Ricans? It's certainly not a citizen/non-citizen story. Puerto Ricans are of course U.S. citizens. It doesn't look like a language story, because if anything, one would expect Puerto Ricans to be more fluent in English than other groups. So we are left with a result in search of further data and explanation and I am receptive to any stories or explanations that could help us to figure out what is going on here. Now the other side of the story says how people doing on the other side, in terms of income and earnings, because that is, after all, the most important thing. And here we find, these are intermediate tables and chart, evidence of the story reported earlier of an increase of people on welfare who are getting earnings, an increase among the at-risk households of a portion getting earnings. All that shows. Here for example, we can see these increases. Again, very big for Hispanics. Not so big for blacks. Here is a disturbing finding that I think is really a different result and story than that reported by the Commissioner this morning. This column says among households at risk are people with either low education or single-parent families and mean earnings we show going up for Hispanics. So these are folks, if they have some earnings and going down for blacks. Overall, when we put all the groups together, we find no change in earnings. Now, we might say what about the whole package of household income? And here the last graph addresses that, the household income, which is the most comprehensive measure we've used of the resources available to individuals. We find here before and after and again, this is a group that is at risk, has low income and earnings capacity and we find an increase for Hispanics, significant. No change for blacks or even a little decrease. And overall no change. So the results are quite discouraging or disturbing to us in that we find that through a period, though not yet the hottest period in the New York economy, a period of robust economic growth, lots of changes in the composition and the form of public programs, overall household income has remained, I guess what I would say, disturbingly unchanged and it is our hope that in the next round of data we'll begin to see some increase here. So I guess I conclude with this. Our very big differences in findings between Hispanics and blacks and what we've described that, as is a kind of gap closing. Any group that had very high rates of public assistance in '94-95 has moved down much closer to the average among all the groups in the city. The whole group has moved down. Groups that were deficient in employment and earnings and income have moved up to the average but the whole average has not moved up very much. So I'll stop here and that's a summary of our results. APPLAUSE MARCIA MEYERS: I have been debating the best way to do all of this. I am going to present a few results from the work we are doing at Columbia University, the Social Indicators Research Center. We are engaged in a larger enterprise of tracking the well being of families and individuals, what we call the social temperature of New York City. Certainly within that low income, disadvantaged, vulnerable families, families in and around the welfare system are of particular interest and that's what I am going to talk about today. I'm going to go quickly through a couple of methodology points, just because our approach to this is a little bit out of the ordinary. We collect our data through a telephone survey, random-digit dialing with a random sample of New York City households so what we have is for this study, two points in time where we are treating pre-welfare reform 1996 and post-welfare reform 1999, from a random sample of households in the City. Next slide, what we are doing in this analysis that I'm going to describe today, we are taking advantage of the fact that we have actually quite detailed information because we are in one city. We actually have pretty detailed information about policy. So we took our survey respondents all kinds of questions about their incomes and their family composition. What we do then is apply the rules for welfare eligibility to the information that we have about individual households, using the adjustments to income, adjustments to family composition and comparing adjusted incomes to the standard. I've put a few examples of the kinds of adjustments we do. Wendy Nadig, who is working with me on this is in the audience and has done a lot of the detailed work on this. So you are welcome to speak with us later about more detail about how we did this. Now we have one estimate how likely was this family to have been eligible for public assistance? Our second step in the analysis is to use the reports by the respondents themselves, did they get welfare? And we classified the respondents into three groups. Those that said no, they did not get any welfare, they had no welfare income in the prior year. A second group that said yes, they did get some welfare, they were on welfare at some point in the prior year but they left. We're calling those leavers. And a third group who said yes, in the prior twelve months they got welfare, had welfare income but never left and we are calling those recipients. So we had three groups within the population of potentially eligible. Now what did we find? First, and I think this is an important, very important thing to keep in mind is that we see very little difference in the share of the population, and these are families with children who are potentially eligible for welfare….so we might think about this as a measure of need. This is a measure of need and by that measure of need, having income low enough to qualify for welfare, under the rules for AFDC in '96 and TANF in '99, the share of families in the city who were that poor. Who were poor enough to qualify hardly changed. It may have gone up a little or it may have stayed about the same. What has clearly changed is the rate at which people within that population are participating in the welfare system and this is certainly new news about the drop in welfare participation but perhaps another way of thinking about it, which is within the population of families potentially eligible for welfare, what we see in the pre-reform period 60% receiving welfare, 20% having left in the prior year, 20% never having been on in the prior year despite having been income eligible. Dramatically different distribution in the post-welfare reform era. Sharp drop in the share of the population that were recipients. Small drop in the share of leavers and a big increase in that share of the population that are non-recipients. I think we tend, in our preoccupation with welfare leavers to forget this larger population of families that we are calling non-recipients, who include families who may have left two years ago. Our measure is just leaving in the prior year. So we're accumulating over time people who were once on welfare but have left in the past. Also people, who maybe were deterred, dissuaded out of the system. People who may be actively deterred at a job center. People, who may, because they think that the process of getting into welfare is difficult and uncertain, essentially opt themselves out of applying for welfare. So we have here a growing population of families who for a variety of reasons are eligible but not receiving welfare in the city. That raised questions for us about why. The why questions about both leavers and the non-participants and the next two slides detail some responses from our survey respondents. First about among those who we defined as leavers. Those on welfare and left in the prior year, how come? Why did they leave? According to their response to us, the overwhelming majority, 95% were cut off by the welfare office. Only 5% described themselves as having voluntarily left or closed their case. Among those who described themselves as having been cut off by the welfare office, 25% were closed for reasons having to do with employment or family composition. They got a job, they had more earnings, they were married, children left home, the kinds of reasons that we think are the typical reasons for being ineligible for welfare. A very large share, 26% share left because their cases was closed due to some kind of paperwork error, which for those of us who have spent time in and around the welfare system know this is extremely common. Some forms don't get in, or something happens in the paperwork flow to close the case. And the largest share, the majority, was those who reported themselves as having been terminated because they didn't comply with some rule through the welfare system and were terminated for noncompliance. Equally interesting to me is this question of why aren't people going into welfare? This is an increasingly important question as we have a larger and larger share of the population who are eligible but not participating. So among those who looked eligible by our calculations, who did not get welfare, we asked, "Did you ever think you might have been eligible? Did it ever seem to you, in the course of the year, that you might have been eligible for welfare? And if so, what did you do?" So within this population of those who we estimate to have been eligible and who themselves thought that they might have been eligible, this is the response to what did they do. About 18% applied and among those, about half when we spoke to them were pending and half denied. Of particular interest to me are the not-applied, which you might think of as….I'm not sure what the right term to use is. Deterred is probably too active a term. Dissuaded, discouraged out of the welfare system. A small share of those said they don't like welfare. They don't want to be part of the system. But that actually was a smaller share than those who didn't expect to qualify. They thought that they would not get into the system. A portion claimed, said it was too difficult, too hard, I was worried about what would happen to my family if I applied. And 17% didn't know how. That just didn't know how to begin the process, where to go. Almost nobody said it was because they didn't need it. And I read this to say that the majority didn't apply because they thought it was too difficult or impossible or unlikely that they would receive assistance. I'm going to close with these three slides that just have a real quick snapshot of what the real $64,000 question is. So what? How are families doing? And this is the question that everyone who has spoken here today has raised. How do we gauge the effects of changes in welfare policy? The way to read this is that the pink bars are the pre-welfare reform period, the blue bars are post-welfare reform and these are our three groups of non-recipients, leavers and recipients. As every other piece of data has shown, the good news about the changes in welfare as well as a very strong economy, is increases in employment in each of these groups. Each of these groups, more families report that somebody in the household is at work. Interestingly too, as we look at these slides is to think about how similar or different the three groups are, in terms of their well-being and in this case their employment. Slightly higher employment occurs among those who didn't access welfare. A little bit lower among the leavers and a little bit lower among the recipients. So that's the good news. The question is, among the families is that employment and those who are still on welfare enough to help them avoid economic hardship. And here the news is not quite so good. This is hunger in the prior year. This is a little bit less optimistic than the data that Larry has from the NSAF, which may be because that is for the state and this is for the city, so that hardship may actually be more acute here in the city. This suggests, that particularly among the leavers and the recipients, post-welfare reform reports of hunger in the family due to insufficient income were actually up. And the last slide is another measure of hardship or economic difficulty, which is overcrowding, which we define as less than one room in the house per family member. Not one bedroom but one room per person living in the household. And in all cases we see an increase in overcrowding. Not surprising, given that doubling up is a very common survival strategy for families who are on the edge economically. So I think in terms of understanding what this means and what it means for the future, clearly welfare changes are a mixed bag and several sources of evidence point in the same direction, which is that employment is up but it is not at all clear that economic well-being is improved and may even be declining in some ways. And I think that the really important challenge is to think about what is our measure for success for policy changes in welfare and other social programs. I think it's actually pretty easy to get people off welfare. It's pretty easy to close cases and to deter people out. Administratively, it's not all that challenging to keep people out of the welfare system. I would say in a strong economy that's producing a lot of low wage jobs it is also relatively easy for people to get into the workforce. I think what is really much harder is to reduce that level of need. To reduce the level of need that I measured here as eligibility for welfare. Other people measure in terms of at-risk or poverty levels. I don't think welfare is the issue. No one likes welfare. Nobody ever liked welfare. Nobody liked being on welfare. Nobody ever thought welfare was the right solution for anybody. I think what we have to do is reduce the need for welfare and we've always needed to reduce the need for welfare but we sort of started at the back end by reducing welfare before we reduced the need. And I think we know something about how to reduce the need for welfare. We reduce the need for welfare by making sure that families have access to sufficient income. And there's a familiar set of policies that are associated with that. We need parental leave so that families have some income support when they have children. We need childcare. We need good childcare so that families have a secure place for their children while they are at work. We need wage equity for women. The continuing irony is that women have most of the children and earn less than men. We need wage enhancements and supports and there are a number of different approaches on the table from tax benefits to wage supplements to raise the floor under those who do go to work. Tax benefits that I think the data that Wendell was showing about the marginal improvement of income for families that go to work is really quite stunning. And there are things we can do with the tax system to make sure that it really does pay to work and to work more. We need a strong UI system so that when workers lose their jobs they have someplace to go. Right now the Unemployment Insurance system is particularly poor for low wage, low skilled workers, such as the individuals, the families, the adults leaving welfare. We need to make sure that families have health insurance. I think that agenda of policies is really much more central than what we do with welfare because if we put in place a really strong social insurance and support system, we are not going to need welfare and I think that should be the goal. Thanks. APPLAUSE TOM SANZILLO: My name is Tom Sanzillo and I'm with the New York State Comptroller's office. I'm the director of policy and fiscal research. Just for some of you who might not know what it is we do, we audit state and local governments around the state and we conduct studies, fiscal studies as well as program studies. The Comptroller, for all of you…I'm pretty such most of you know but it is an elected position and my boss is Carl McCall. We've taken a fairly substantial look at the welfare reform in New York State and New York City. And they gave me seven minutes to summarize seven policy reports, fifteen audits and three lawsuits so I'm going to try to go through this as fast as I can. You've heard some discussion from Dr. Mead and Commissioner Turner, about the various findings of studies and all of that. There have been two evaluations of how people are faring whom have left the welfare rolls in this state, one by HRA and one by the State of New York. We have reviewed both of those studies. Those are the ones that tell you how many people are getting jobs and how much money they are making. We find in all the studies that the numbers have been completely overstated. The methods are flawed and we would not recommend use of these studies as a management tool for the welfare administrators or for the public to understand what is happening with the welfare system. APPLAUSE The second thing…and those studies I have with me. They are as sophisticated and as smart as anything you've heard here. They are the record. They are the numbers crunched. I won't go into all the numbers with you. But let me just say the one study at the state level that was performed and used by Dr. Mead and the Rockefeller Institute and also the Department of Labor and the Office of Temporary Assistance in the Disability System, that particular study was put together in such a manner that when we asked them to explain to us….that was the one that showed people making a lot of money and 60% working continuously….when we asked them to explain to us how they did that, the three entities that worked on it were like the Keystone Cops. They just pointed at each other and in the end they said, "We can't tell you how we got to these numbers." That's a public study of welfare reform and that was done. And it's documented here. You can look at it. I would not use that report ever. Ever! Q: Can you give us the title? TOM SANZILLO: It's all on our website, www.osc.state.ny.us. There are a dozen audits as well and I will go through those very quickly because what we did was we looked at just about every aspect of welfare reform that we possibly can and there are still some that are in progress. But I just want to go through with you…this is from a dozen audits. When we looked at the fair hearing process in New York City, we found that the City of New York loses its fair hearings 85% of the time. To us, that reflects an underlying arbitrariness in the decision-making process. When we looked at the two programs, finger imaging and the eligibility review program that was referred to before, we found that they are both well staffed and very efficiently run. When we looked at the services that the people who come in receive, it was a very different story. In the area of domestic violence, we found serious staff shortages in New York City throughout the HRA centers so that women coming in and presenting the problem were basically told to go someplace else in order to get help. We also did a study of the state on its domestic violence and found that for the most part the assessments that were done of the women who came in and then the strategy to help them deal with their problems were not particularly well documented. We don't know what kind of services were performed and we had asked the Department to kind of correct what it was doing to adhere to its own rules, essentially. In the area of Medicaid, when we went into the centers in New York City, we basically found that the recipients were not being given the information that they needed, particularly when they were being terminated from the rolls or leaving the rolls because of getting employment. Now, that is particularly important because when the City did do its study of people who left the rolls in its own study it found 50% of the people who were leaving the rolls and who should be on Medicaid, were not. But there was no follow-up action being taken. When we looked at childcare, we went into the centers and found that the workers didn't know the rules on childcare. We also have done two separate studies, one at the state level and one at the city level on how the city and state are planning for childcare and how they are investing in it and we found that there are no plans. And we are a comptroller, we like to see plans, we like to see a business mentality behind how we run everything in the state. And we don't have that in New York State. We have more money going in. I think everybody acknowledges that. Lots more money going in and I'm sure there's some improvements. But we can't find them because the way that the systems are set up they can't tell you. In the area of job training, and here we've done several audits and a study that we did when welfare reform was first passed, we looked at a decade of job training findings in the State of New York and here is what we find: We find, that the skill assessments that are supposed to be done when people come in are fairly routinely not done. So that the people are not necessarily getting assessed as to what skills they have and what they don't have. We find that the system lacks accountability in terms of the work assignments and what people are doing and how they are doing. You can't tell from anybody looking independently at the system, as to what is happening with people. And then something was mentioned before about the reform effort in New York City for job training and there is a reform effort, as Commissioner Turner pointed to and I think Dr. Mead eluded to. And the problem that we all find there is not that there was a sort of minor problem in how the thing was set up, but that there was a finding of corruption in the letting of the contracts in the City of New York. The finding was by City Comptroller Alan Hevesy. And that mars the city's program and progress to date. Now there has been a description of several initiatives and on the job training front and when welfare reform was passed, we put out a study that looked at ten years of audits that the State Comptroller did, prior to my boss being elected in '93, Ned Regan was our comptroller and he was a Republican. Our audits, for those ten years, show the same thing. Programs that don't meet goals, people don't get jobs and overstatement of results. It's pretty uniform throughout the different ones. You get an alphabet soup of JPA, it doesn't matter, they were all the same. And what we're hearing now and we're hopeful in listening to what is going on, some changes that are being made, we've seen no results. You know, agencies are telling us things are going along better. We have been not able yet to independently verify things although we do have some audits in the works and when they are in the works I'm not allowed to talk about them. Another area we looked at was the drug screening that welfare reform is supposed to help people who might be having a problem with drugs, get into drug treatment and hopefully get their lives turned around. What we found there was that the coordination at the state level between the drug Oasis and Office of Temporary Assistance and Disability is seriously lacking and that's from the very beginning. We went back a year and a half later, still there were no programs. There was no program in place. The forms and training had not been put together. We've been told that that has been corrected. We've not gone back to independently verify that. We will. Generally, we find a fairly different picture than what has been reported in the aforementioned studies of both how people are faring and the service provision for people. In other words, what we find is that the area that is used administratively to deal with eligibility, sanctions, etc., that runs and is well staffed and the service delivery of the stuff that is supposed to be helping out people, we find pretty uniformly to have a lot of problems. I've been pretty critical here and I do that because that's what our findings are. We are auditors. And our audits are subject to what is called an independent peer review. That is a national board comes in and looks at our work to verify whether or not it is accurate or it is not. And then there are findings generated, which are publicly available as to whether or not we did our job right. And we've never received a critical comment on the work that we've done. It's always been determined to be accurate. We've also been hindered in New York City, in terms of our doing our audits. Several years ago Mayor Guiliani locked the doors on us, told us we couldn't have our auditors come in and we took him to court and for two and a half years we fought the City of New York in court. Three different courts, twelve judges all found in favor of the State Comptroller's right to audit the City of New York. That gave us the right to get back in after several years of not being able to do it. But we are now in there with kind of a grudging acceptance of the City. Every state agency and every other local agency around the state agrees when we come in. Let me put it this way, you know when you go to court and you put your hand on the Bible and you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Well, we kind of have something like that in auditing. It's an exchange of letters and the City of New York, they won't swear to it. They won't now say to us, that what they are giving us is the full picture so we've doing our best and I understand there's tension there at many levels. You've also heard me be pretty critical of agencies and at the City level we do have a very contentious relationship. At the state level, it's very different. The audit work that we do there, we get in routinely, we deal with the agencies, we have disagreements particularly with the Office of Temporary Assistance and Disability and we have disagreements with them, no doubt about it. But it's handled professionally and we very much appreciate that kind of relationship. So all of this being said, I think that there's just a couple of things that I will try to get to. I'm a little over seven minutes but I want to do what I can. First of all, I wanted to thank all of you for coming today. This is a topic that we devoted a lot of energy to because the Comptroller of the State of New York, Carl McCall grew up on welfare and has a very strong interest in seeing that the program looked at benefits of people who were supposed to benefit. But our basic message to you, both to the academic community and to the community people who are here is that we don't think you're going to get an honest appraisal of welfare reform from the government either from the state or the city. We think that the academic community needs to do its work and do it independently and we think that community groups in the state should do their best, put out what they know to be their truth and let it stand next to what the agencies are saying is their truth so that we at least can have some kind of debate on the numbers as to whether or not people are doing better or not. At the general level, people are probably doing better when you do the economic models. Walk into a welfare office and if you remember the 85% number, three people similarly situated will come out with three different outcomes. That's just the way it works. So that's what I think a lot of the discrepancy is in this. So what we would really want you to do is to do that kind of research and put it out there and let the chips fall where they may. I want to make one editorial comment, if I could. Wendell Primus was speaking before about the refundability of the child tax credit at the federal level. We've asked the Congressional Delegation of the State of New York to pass a refundable child tax credit. We think if done, that could be the most important anti-poverty measure passed in maybe twenty or thirty years. It can only be done however for the poor, if it is refundable. When it was passed in 1997, the first part of the child tax credit, the poor were basically cut out of it. Currently, the credit generates about $15 billion in benefits, 1.9% of that goes to the poorest people in the country. What we need to do is to fight to double it from $500 to $1,000 and then to make sure that people at the bottom can get it. Thanks. APPLAUSE KRAUSKOPF: We've now head the reports from some of the agencies. Some of the comments from Washington and from varied academic points of view and then the critique of what went before that Tom has just done. We have about fifteen minutes for questions and I would ask you to make them as brief as you can and come to the microphones and direct them to particular panelists, if you can. Q: My name is Laura Peck and I work at Columbia University in the School of Social Work. I will direct this at all of you. Tom you just said there's tension at many levels and the tension that I'm kind of interested in is that between research and politics. And I would like to hear each of your views on what ways researchers can actually get their findings into the policy-making arena so that it has a chance of having an influence on policy decisions? HOWARD CHERNICK: As researchers we probably spend a disproportionate amount of our time on research and a disproportionately small time on getting the findings out. What we all do is have academic and social networks and we distribute papers, try to. I routinely send all my stuff to the Comptroller's office, Carl McCall, who I feel, is an ally in trying to get good social policy in New York State. But I think that we are a little bit deficient, at least on my side of the political divide in the volume with which our information is heard. And I think we could and we need to do better. MARCIA MEYERS: The observation I would make is the difficulty of research contributing to better policy formulation in a highly politicized environment. And I think I would describe New York in those terms, as highly politicized, which creates a couple of problems for this flow of academic research into the policy arena. And one is access. And access through cooperative arrangements between academic and public agencies that is one of the ways in which we foster research. The second is the use of research findings and the extent to which research findings are used thoughtfully as information to help guide policy rather than used aggressively as weapons on all sides to promote particular points of view. I think in both those areas there's room for a lot of improvement in New York, in terms of both that cooperation and also in terms of making good use of research findings in the policy discourse. Let me say one other thing while I have the microphone and we are on public access, because I should have said that the Survey Center at Columbia also has a website, at which we put up as much as we can, the work that we do at the Center to try to get it out to the public and that's a very short one which is www.siscenter.org. TOM SANZILLO: We've tried to write about this topic in several reports we did. We've done three on welfare evaluation in this state and I think we are pretty realistic that research findings will be used in both ways, like Marcia said, no matter what we do. One for political purposes probably distorting findings in order to make political points. And then the other, by people who are responsible for the administration, in this instance, of the welfare system. We would hope that the contribution of the academic community, the people who have to live with the programs and to the degree government can do it, working to support the line agencies and come up with research and analysis that hopes that, both worlds can occur and people can make the choice. The problem in New York State and in New York City is that there are two studies on welfare reform. The one in New York City and Jason Turner gave us some numbers of 200,000 some odd people that have left the rolls. In New York City study, accounts for 126 families and we think that study is flawed. That's a responsible program of evaluation in our point of view. In other states, you find like California has had an aggressive evaluation program on welfare reform for ten years. Maybe even longer and several other states have used the evaluation organizations MDRC, APT Associates, Mathematica. We don't use them in the State of New York. There is always politics involved but there are ways to do this better and in New York we've not done that. We've done two studies and both of which we feel were done in a less than professional matter. JACK KRAUSKOPF: Tom didn't say it so I will say it for him but at the beginning of the implementation of welfare reform in New York State, the Comptroller sent a letter to the Governor and the leaders of the legislature saying, "Here is what ought to be in a state plan for evaluating this as we go forward." And it simply hasn't been followed and that was quite a detailed and impressive set of information. HOWARD CHERNICK: A crucial question is why are people leaving the rolls. To what extent are they being kicked off versus voluntarily leaving. And it's very difficult to extract that information from the administration of New York City. In fact, I'm told by the City Project that they have changed the measures which allow comparison of prior and current policies regarding percent of cases turned down, percent of fair hearings disposition. So it is very important for researchers and the kind of questionnaires that Marcia described, for work that assesses the economic well-being of people who have left, to try to infer what is going on in these thousands of human contacts within the welfare system, I see as an important role for research. Q: My name is Zella Jones and I am an independent consultant in marketing communications for a variety of nonprofits, among them Greenwich Village Youth Council and voluntarily a number of other organizations. My particular area of interest is in youth, particularly youth who have been aged out of the system. A crucial area being 18 to 24 years old where up to half of them are already claimed as younger children among people who are getting benefits and another half are not claimed at all. We have great increases in homelessness in Manhattan among this particular group. Kids who can't get to the system. Kids who aren't reported in the system and on top of that, with the Regents testing program who are aged out of high schools. They don't pass the test in the senior year and then they are denied access to another senior year in high school in order to get any kind of high school degree. So I'm interested because I know Dr. Meyers you have the Fragile Families Program and many, many subsets. I haven't heard anything about age in any of the statistics, the wonderful studies that have been presented today. But I'm interested to know what you may know about the 18-24 year olds and they may have children and households, they may be married, they may be unmarried also. MARCIA MEYERS: Not much, I'm afraid. It's a really tough group. In part, for all the reasons that you just described. For the kind of work that we do with the telephone surveys, they are a really easy group to miss because they are not stablely housed, necessarily. They may be moving from residence to residence. We certainly have a few families, particularly if they are more stablely housed and have kids, young parents. But I think we probably miss and underestimate, miss them in our sample and then thereby underestimate the contribution to the overall well being that is accounted for by them. The Fragile Families is exactly the opposite end. It's a study, also at Columbia University, of families starting at birth, at the birth of a child. So it is going to be quite a while before they get to that age group. Q: But you do have participants in that study who are 18 years old now with families and knowing what the work habits are or non-work habits or absent parents. MARCIA MEYERS: Exactly right. That the parents in that study, and I can't tell you much about it, I'm not one of the PIs on that. One other study to think about or to follow also is there is a Survey of Parents and Youth SPY for short, which has been fielded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in a number of cities, which actually interviews the parents and then the youth. I don't know quite what the age group is. But it is more within the age range you are considering and you're interested in. That's not yet in New York but we're hoping it will be soon. So that will start to fill in that gap and I think it is a really important gap that you are emphasizing. Q: It gets into the skills training program too because these kids really need help.</ | |||||||||||||||||||