Category Archives: Public Policy

Current Barriers to Bridging the Gap: A Follow-Up

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This week’s news provides one example of the political kinks between research and policy. The New York Times reports that federal funding for six new evidence-based initiatives will be significantly cut or eliminated under a new House proposal. Future of Children researchers show that one program funded by the initiatives, the Nurse-Family Partnership discussed in the previous blog, delays second births and reduces child maltreatment among teenage mothers.

While no decisions have been finalized yet, experts are concerned about the future of such programs. Brookings scholar and Senior Editor for the Future of Children Ron Haskins asks in the Times article, “Why, in a constrained budget environment, do you cut the programs that have to show they’re working? It makes no sense.” For more comments by Ron Haskins, see the Brookings Institution blog on this topic. Also see policy suggestions in the Future of Children.

Bridging the Gap Between Research and Policy

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New census estimates for counties and school districts indicate that a third of all counties in 2010 had school-age poverty rates that were significantly higher than the national poverty rate. This is one of many statistics about the welfare of U.S. children that compels us to review the supports we currently provide and in the future might provide to children and their families.

But in challenging fiscal times, how do we make decisions about what programs to support?

A major objective of The Future of Children is to translate evidence-based research for policy makers, practitioners, and others working in the field. Although no social science research is perfect, quality research can help policy makers and practitioners better understand what works best for children, and allocate finite resources to meet their needs.

The Obama administration embraces evidence-based programming. But interpreting evidence is often as important as the evidence itself, particularly when the views of policymakers and interest groups may influence interpretations of research outcomes. According to a Future of Children policy brief, the views of policymakers and those in office often outweigh the evidence, and influential interest groups may be more concerned with the people and organizations they serve than with evaluation outcomes.

In a recent presentation for the University-Based Child and Family Policy Consortium, Jon Baron, President of the The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and Woodrow Wilson School alumnus, spoke about the benefits and challenges of using evidence to inform policy and program development. It is tempting for programs to want to show success and for politicians to want to quickly dismiss what does not work, but is better to create an environment that supports accurate research and allows for program growth over time. Working closely with the Office of Management and Budget, the Coalition uses a two-tiered approach: providing support for programs with the strongest positive evidence from randomized trials, while rigorously evaluating programs with less evidence.

Mr. Baron presented two examples of programs that have yielded positive results among disadvantaged groups, one in the field of education and the other in child health and wellbeing, both of which were featured in Future of Children volumes:

In education, the H&R Block FAFSA Project yielded strong positive effects, according to Mr. Baron. As described in the Future of Children issue Transition to Adulthood and highlighted in a past blog, the goal of the intervention project is to inform low-income families of the financial aid that could be available to them and to help them make informed decisions about whether or not to apply and enroll in college. Findings from randomized experiments show that the program increased college enrollment for low- and moderate-income students by about 26% when compared to the control group.

In child wellbeing, rigorous social science evaluations of home-visiting programs designed to improve parenting and reduce child maltreatment convinced President Barack Obama’s admin­istration to initiate a multi-billion-dollar federal program to expand a particular model of home visiting, the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP). As summarized in The Future of Children’s issue on Preventing Child Maltreatment, in this program, specially trained registered nurses conduct regular home visits to low-income first-time mothers to promote healthy behavior during pregnancy and positive parenting skills.

Key to the success of these and future initiatives is working with policy makers and practitioners to better understand the problems they are trying to solve, their social networks, and the ways by which they acquire, interpret, and use research. The next step is then to effectively translate unbiased research that addresses their questions into information that they can use.

The Future of Children publishes two volumes and policy briefs each year to bring research on various topics about child wellbeing to those working on the frontline. To read our volumes and policy briefs, click here. To view webcasts from some of our outreach events, click here.

The Child Support Connection: Giving Children a Brighter Future

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Scholars, service providers, and city government officials filed into CUNY Graduate Center yesterday to take part in a discussion on the wellbeing of children and families in New York City, co-sponsored by the Future of Children, the New York City Office of Child Support Enforcement, and CUNY.

“The heart of the community is the family. We at the Office of Child Support Enforcement [OCSE] are about work and we are about families,” said Federal Commissioner for the Office of Child Support Enforcement Vicki Turetsky in her opening remarks. Child support is not only an important anti-poverty strategy for children but has also been positively associated with other important child outcomes, like academic achievement.

Executive Deputy Commissioner of NYC’s Human Resources Administration Frances Pardus-Abbadessa explained that automated child support collection is working effectively for the majority of parents. However, traditional enforcement tools have been less effective for the approximately 25 percent of parents who owe child support, but have limited ability to pay. Approximately 70 percent of unpaid child support debt is owed by parents earning no or low-reported income.

Columbia University’s Irwin Garfinkel and Rutgers University’s Lenna Nepomnyaschy, working with data from Princeton’s Fragile Families study, showed that the vast majority of parents want to be engaged and financially supportive in their child’s life at his or her birth. But that involvement declines over time, which is when child support plays an increasingly important role.

How can systems better connect with the families and parents that are the most difficult to reach?

The group divided into three breakout sessions: one focused on family wellbeing, another focused on incarceration, and a third focused on employment.

The groups returned with a few suggestions:

–Find ways to connect parents to employment. Incentivize the placement of formerly incarcerated parents for employers and workforce development agencies and continue policies and programs that cap child support debt for incarcerated parents.

–Increase efforts to involve fathers in their children’s lives from birth, and build OCSE mediation programs to encourage better coparenting relationships. As keynote speaker Princeton’s Hillard Pouncy suggested, engaged fathers will be more likely to contribute financially.

–Continue finding ways to improve the image of the child support system through collaborations with workforce agencies, fatherhood programs, domestic violence coalitions, mediation and parenting services, and social service organizations.

Additional and more specific recommendations were offered and discussed by a panel including Larry Mead of New York University, Commissioner of the NYC Human Resources Administration Robert Doar, Vicki Turetsky, and the Center for Court Innovation’s Liberty Aldrich. Breakout session speakers included Maureen Waller of Columbia University, James McHale of the University of South Florida, Petersburg, Mark Kleiman of Community Mediation Services, George T. McDonald of the Doe Fund, Kathleen Coughlin from NYC’s Department of Probation, Amanda Geller of Columbia University, Virginia Cruickshank of F.E.G.S., Elaine Sorenson from The Urban Institute and James Riccio of MDRC.

For more information on this topic, visit the Future of Children’s Fragile Families volume, specifically the chapter by Robert Lerman on Capabilities and Contributions of Unwed Fathers.

The Government’s Role in Work-Family Balance

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Work-family policy is not a new concept in the U.S., but it has hardly kept up with the changing needs of the worker and the family as noted in the Future of Children’s recent volume, Work and Family. The safeguards that are currently in place for the American worker were created at a time when mothers were typically at home to care for children, aging or ill family members, and do the household chores. Today, the vast majority of families do not have a stay at home parent but still have child care, and increasingly, elder care responsibilities.

In 1935, the government addressed the need for income support when workers could not be at work with the Social Security Act, which established Old Age and Survivors Insurance, unemployment insurance, and income assistance to mothers and children. This law was built on the dynamic that men were the bread winners and women, the caregivers. But that leaves many gaps for today’s families where both women and men are breadwinners and caregivers alike. Policy makers have since tried to fill many of these gaps, but inequalities that affect caregivers remain, perhaps most notably the failure of the law to cover caregiving leave. Today there are only two states, California and New Jersey, that provide state-level social insurance to workers for family leave.

In 1938 Congress enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). FLSA regulated the nation’s minimum wage and hours worked, particularly hours worked by women and children. This act was not designed to address work-family conflict but in limiting the hours worked, it did reserve time for workers to care for families. However, the act was based on the assumption that workers were employed full time – in that era, commonly ten to twelve hours each day – and did not deal with, or encourage, workplace flexibility.

Times have changed greatly since these safeguards from the 1930’s were enacted, and policies need to be updated to reflect the modern workforce. Work-family policies, that fit our time, involve initiatives that give caregivers flex and leave options that allow them the flexibility to meet their family needs without compromising their productivity. For professional workers and those subject to mandatory overtime, the problem is most often too much work; for low-wage workers it is more often too few hours and unpredictable schedules.

A growing body of empirical research suggests that workplace flexibility policies may enhance productivity by improving retention and reducing turnover. In 2010, the Council of Economic Advisers reviewed evidence on the economic value of adopting workplace flexibility and concluded that the “costs to firms of adopting these kinds of management practices can also be outweighed by reduced absenteeism, lower turnover, healthier workers, and increased productivity.” Additional research is needed to further substantiate these findings, but these initial claims are promising.

Given this, how do we update our nation’s work-family policies to reflect the flexibility needs of our changing workforce?

Although there are no easy solutions to the work-family challenge, the evidence presented in our Work and Family volume provides useful insights into the types of work-family conflicts American employees are experiencing, as well as the types of employer, governmental, and community policies that might most effectively address them. For example, the costs of sick day benefits are minimal and can be borne by individual employers, who also stand to reap gains from not having workers with contagious diseases show up at work, make their colleagues ill, and reduce overall firm productivity. Paid sick days are now guaranteed by law in several U.S. localities including San Francisco, the District of Columbia, and Milwaukee, and are gaining momentum, even despite the current economic recession. In the past few months, paid sick days were enacted into law in the state of Connecticut, in the city of Seattle, and passed in the city of Philadelphia (although not yet signed by the mayor).

For more detailed information about local and state initiatives that have updated policies to ease work-family tensions and employers that have voluntarily implemented workplace flexibility initiatives, go to our Work and Family volume and policy brief.

This blog draws from Heather Boushey’s article in the Future of Children journal, “The Role of the Government in Work-Family Conflict.”

Hispanic Children in Poverty Exceed Whites

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According to a recent report by the Pew Hispanic Center, “More Latino children are living in poverty–6.1 million in 2010–than children of any other racial or ethnic group. This marks the first time in U.S. history that the single largest group of poor children is not white. In 2010, 37.3% of poor children were Latino, 30.5% were white and 26.6% were black.”

Prior to 2007, more white children lived in poverty than Hispanic children. But the Great Recession hit the Hispanic population particularly hard. Poverty rates between 2007 and 2010 increased by 36.3% for Hispanic children. Comparable rates during this time period for whites and blacks increased by 17.6% and 11.7%, respectively.

Of the 6.1 million Latino children living in poverty, more than two-thirds (4.1 million) are the children of immigrant parents. And, as noted in the Future of Children’s Immigrant Children volume and policy brief, a substantial percentage of these children are falling behind in school. More than 5 million, for example, struggle with their academic subjects because they are still learning English.

Evidence shows that three policy reforms -increased attendance in quality preschool, improved instruction in English, and increased attendance in postsecondary education -would improve the school achievement of Hispanic youth, lift their economic wellbeing as adults, and increase their economic and social contributions to American society.

Latin American immigrants arrive in the United States with a strong work ethic and strong family values. By the second generation, their work rates decline, their wage progress appears to slow, and both their nonmarital birth rates and their divorce rates rise. Finding ways to boost achievement and help more Latinos complete high school and attend and complete college or other postsecondary training should be high on the nation’s list of priorities.

As Pew Center Associate Director Mark Hugo Lopez commented in the New York Times “Who [Hispanic children] become will be important for the future of the nation.”

For more specific information about the Future of Children’s recommendations for children of immigrant families, see our Immigrant Children volume.

Tackling Poverty and Unemployment: A New York Example

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More people are living below the official poverty line ($22,314 for a family of four in 2010) than have been since the Census Bureau began publishing data on it, reports The New York Times. Over two and a half million dropped below this line last year, bringing the number of poor Americans to 46.2 million. A crumbling economy and shifting demographics are among the reasons for this increase, but according to economists, unemployment is the biggest issue, as 48 million people ages 18 to 64 did not work a single week last year.

While the effects of unemployment and a weak economy are felt by many, the hardest hit are racial and ethnic minorities, particularly blacks and Latinos, whose poverty levels are at 27% and 26% respectively. Explained in The Future of Children volume The Next Generation of Antipoverty Policies, of particular concern are nonwhite young men. In few locations is this more evident than in New York City, where one study of five boroughs found the poverty rate for black and Latino young men to be 50 percent higher, and the unemployment rate 60 percent higher, than that of their white and Asian counterparts.

According to the Huffington Post, one factor that might play a part in the high unemployment rates for these young men is the high percentage of racial and ethnic minorities now incarcerated. One in eight black males in their twenties is in prison or jail on any given day. Devah Pager, Princeton University professor and research associate for the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, reports that within one year after release, up to 75 percent of ex-convicts are still without work.

These figures represent a crisis that New York City Deputy Mayor Gibbs says demands an urgent response, “New York City is going to send a signal that the situation facing young black and Latino men requires the same kind of aggressive, cross-agency response that a natural disaster would demand, because fixing these outcomes is critical to the City’s health and future.” The “signal” he refers to is the initiation of a public-private partnership presented by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg early last month in an effort to cut down barriers to employment. The strategy, dubbed the Young Men’s Initiative, involves investments of over $127 million over the next three years into policies and programs that will connect young men in the City to educational, employment, and mentoring opportunities, and will include an overhaul of the Department of Probation, which supervises nearly 30,000 New Yorkers, most of whom are black and Latino men.

An important component of Mayor Bloomberg’s initiative, as highlighted by the Huffington Post, is new policy regarding the hiring process for City positions. City agencies are to prohibit questions about prior convictions from the initial job interview; only after this first stage will applicants be asked about their criminal history. They must still submit themselves to a background check, but their offenses will be examined in view of the job requirements.

In the past, some opposition has been reported for these so-called “Ban-the-Box” policies, which have been practiced in other states and major cities. Business owners may not consider it wise to invest resources toward applicants, only to find they have a criminal record and choose not to hire them. Still, the purpose of such policy is to help young adults get a leg up, many of whom are otherwise good candidates for some positions. As Washington works to tackle the nation’s unemployment in an effort to prevent more from slipping below the poverty line, could they benefit from looking to cities like New York as an example? The Future of Children’s Transition to Adulthood volume stresses the need to provide opportunities to those who are willing to work but have difficulty finding steady employment because of a criminal history or other circumstances. Some of these include extending the age of eligibility of youth-serving programs into young adulthood and moving from a set of independent systems into a single integrated system.

Federal Budget 2012: What’s Most Important?

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On February 14, 2011, President Obama released the 2012 federal budget, and a flood of media responses followed. For a moment, it appeared that children might fare well in the proposed budget: domestic discretionary spending remained level, and the proposed budget asked for $77.4 billion in education funding as well as continued and increased funding for early education, teacher support, and community initiatives, among others.

Then the House of Representatives responded, proposing a $61 billion reduction, including cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, Head Start, Community Health Centers, and Title I (K-12 education for low-income students), among others. President Obama threatened to veto these cuts, which could potentially result in a government shutdown. The House responded by suggesting a temporary spending bill, which would institute House-passed cuts on a pro-rated basis.

Even if these cuts pass, they are relatively minimal when compared to the impact that potential state budget cuts could have on children’s futures. State and local revenues fund the bulk of social programs for youth, most notably in education and health care. And while the federal government can operate without a balanced budget, states cannot. Cuts will be made, and public debate will rage, as it has in Wisconsin.

Part of the conflict over budget cuts arises from the reality that, while the majority of Americans support the idea of spending cuts in order to reduce government deficits, they are deeply divided when it comes to the areas in which these cuts will be made.

How can governments decide which funding is the most valuable and which can be eliminated? What can the public do to help inform these decisions?

One suggestion, already embraced by the Obama administration, is to look to evidence-based programming. While no social science research is perfect, quality evaluations can provide the government with an idea of what strategies work best and thus have a better chance of producing the greatest marginal return for every dollar spent.

For example, in an upcoming Future of Children policy brief (check back in March for our latest volume), Ron Haskins and Marta Tienda note that although a high-quality national evaluation shows that the federal Head Start program is not adequately preparing preschoolers for the public schools, many evaluations show that state pre-K programs promote school readiness for four-year olds more effectively than Head Start. States, then, might be able to produce greater benefits for poor children than does the current Head Start program. Giving the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to experiment by allowing a few states to control Head Start funding and then rigorously evaluating the success of the programs could help the government reapportion funding so that it is more effective.

This is just one example of how research-based strategies can inform policy. Obviously, such decisions cannot fully account for the realities that will emerge from decreased funding to programs more generally. Such strategies could, however, help the country continue to improve programs’ efficacy and shift the country’s focus to a more positive perspective during a time of challenging economic realities.

As the federal and hopefully state governments begin embracing a culture that supports evidence-based practice, it is important that the public advocates for a culture of research that:

-Gives programs the freedom to show both what is working and what is not working, in order to make incremental improvements to programs. It is tempting for programs to want to show success and for politicians to want to quickly dismiss what does not work. It is better to create an environment that supports accurate research and allows for program growth over time.

-Advocates for an unbiased presentation of research. It is easy to use research to support any political agenda, and it is important that the public holds politicians accountable for presenting the full range of findings.

Using and funding (a topic for another blog) social science research to inform policy decision making is a complex process and will certainly take time to perfect – well beyond this budget cycle. However, it is important to begin embracing this perspective now, so that our country continues to make better use of its limited funds. More money, after all, does not always mean better results.

The Future of Children compiles the best research to date on social issues in order to help policy makers, practitioners, and civilians make informed decisions. Our most recent volumes on Fragile Families, Transitions to Adulthood, Preventing Child Maltreatment, and America’s High Schools, and the associated executive summaries and policy briefs, provide clear recommendations that can be helpful when considering the impact of budget cuts on the future of children.

Winning the Future for Children

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President Obama’s State of the Union address focused on our country’s future. Despite our challenges, our country must come together to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

The President rightly acknowledged that this will take excellence in the classroom. We need to begin education earlier, advance education in math and science, reward and retain high performing teachers, prepare students for education beyond high school, and make post-secondary education affordable and meaningful to students, so that they are primed for jobs in a technologically driven global economy.

Obama then went on to emphasize the importance of parents, in addition to teachers and schools, in a child’s education. The education of a child begins “not in our classrooms, but in our homes and communities.” The President asked “whether all of us – as citizens, and as parents – are willing to do what’s necessary to give every child a chance to succeed.”

The question is a hard one that involves not only making changes to our education system, but also buttressing families, particularly fragile families, so that they can provide the support necessary for their children’s success.

As the President mentioned, “it’s family first that instills the love of learning in a child.” Our country must look to comprehensive policy approaches that not only promote and improve education, but also encompass a wide range of initiatives from job creation to health care, to support American families.

And the government cannot and should not do it alone. Our individual knowledge and advocacy around these issues is critical to building communities that can work in tandem with policy changes to support children’s development.

As the President begins suggesting policy plans to implement his vision, investigate some of our relevant volumes, which will hopefully help you clarify your thoughts and advocacy efforts related to improving child wellbeing: Fragile Families, Transition to Adulthood, Preventing Child Maltreatment, America’s High Schools, and Excellence in the Classroom, among others. <http://www.futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/journals/>;

Our upcoming volume on Immigrant Children (March 2011) will provide additional clarity regarding both legal and illegal immigrant children and their futures in the United States.