Editorial: Welfare sequel/A fading promise
08/28/2005
Star Tribune
August 28, 2005
Some 15 years ago Minnesota embarked on an experiment in welfare reform that would earn it a national reputation in social science circles. Its strategy was exemplary: scrupulous empirical research and bipartisan accord in the Legislature. The product was exemplary, too: Outside evaluators found that the Minnesota Family Investment Program was among the best in the country at moving welfare recipients into jobs and achieved unparalleled results in reducing poverty and improving family well-being.
This month those same evaluators, a New York organization called MDRC, came back to Minnesota with a six-year follow-up study, and it turns out that the program is still bearing fruit. While its impacts on earnings and incomes faded somewhat over time, the children of participating families continued to do better in school years after the program ended and, remarkably, the program’s most disadvantaged families saw sustained gains in employment and family well-being. “Minnesota had an unusual commitment to reducing dependency and reducing poverty, and it’s still producing results for some of the most disadvantaged families,” MDRC president Gordon Berlin said in an interview last week.
This would be a source of pride in Minnesota, except that two years ago the state quietly but abruptly began retreating from its ambitious antipoverty strategy. In 2003, at the urging of Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the Legislature remodeled the system by adding a “diversionary work program” that requires virtually all new applicants to spend four months in a full-time job search before formally entering the welfare system. (The new program will pay their rent and utilities, but not give them ordinary welfare benefits.) In short, the state added a new and daunting front door to the welfare office.
The premise of diversionary work is fine. Some share of welfare applicants don’t need long-term aid. They’re qualified to work, they’ve suffered some temporary crisis, and a quick jolt from the state can put them back on their feet. And as a political matter, it’s extremely popular to make poor adults look hard for work before giving them a welfare check.
But 10 years of careful research by scholars at the University of Michigan and the Urban Institute shows that a large number of welfare applicants—perhaps a third or a half—don’t fall into that camp. They suffer from mental illness, borderline retardation, traumatizing domestic violence, drug dependency or some combination of the above. They’ve washed out of the job market time and again, and four months of filling out job applications will be pointless, or worse.
The problem is that Minnesota’s county welfare offices don’t have the resources to discern which applicants fall into which camp. They don’t have adequate tools to assess new applicants. They don’t have the money to provide rapid, effective employment services that diversionary work was supposed to deliver. Worse, they don’t really know what becomes of their diversionary work clients—whether they get stable jobs, whether they climb out of poverty, whether their children are cared for.
The diversionary work program might eventually produce a more efficient welfare system, keeping the least needy applicants off welfare and targeting resources on the most needy clients. (It’s true that the original family investment program did not cut caseloads quickly—which was deliberate—and that it didn’t always get services to clients quickly.) Then again, the new diversionary program might simply create more hardships and hassles for the state’s most vulnerable families—and the state can’t really answer that question yet.
Meanwhile, it sounds a plain retreat from Minnesota’s second goal: lifting poor families out of poverty and into more stable lives. It was that effort that set Minnesota apart, that produced the exemplary family results documented by MDRC and that showed what real welfare reform might accomplish.