By Shannon Holmes
January 31, 2005

Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell moderated a standing room only workshop on The American Dream: Is It Working for Families? sponsored by the partnership between The United States Conference of Mayors and The Annie E. Casey Foundation. Purcell opened the session with President Clinton's 1992 vow to "end welfare as we know it." Four years later, Congress delivered on the President's promise with the landmark welfare reform bill, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The results ended up cutting the welfare roles by nine million women and children. Keynote speaker Jason DeParle, author of American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, And a Nation's Drive to End Welfare and senior writer at The New York Times followed three women over a ten-year period to see if the welfare reform truly worked.

DeParle described the impact that welfare reform had on these women and their families in Milwaukee (WI). He found that work had a positive uplift for these families off the rolls versus those on the rolls by about a fifteen percent raise in income, roughly $3,400. However with childcare, transportation, and other costs, those who came off the rolls just about broke even.

"Economically there is still a great hardship even on the high end of leaving the welfare roles, chronically running out of food and frequent loss of utilities," said DeParle.

According to DeParle, the intent of Congress when passing welfare reform was to have children progress past where their mothers were by seeing them as roles model going to work to take care of the family. Instead DeParle found that what impacted the children was not that Mom was working, but that Mom was absent. It was not seen as a positive influence and the children started to fall into the same traps, repeating the cycle of poverty. "Angie's kids started following in her footsteps," DeParle stated.

A major lesson that DeParle learned through the research of this book was that the presence of a father is huge and impacts the decisions that women make about their lives. Additionally, he found that even having a responsible male around makes a difference, especially in the lives of the children.

Bob Giloth, Director of Family Economic Success at The Annie E. Casey Foundation, and Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow of Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, responded to DeParle's findings.

Giloth stated that there needs to be a new welfare debate geared towards assisting the working poor in moving forward. The American Dream, Giloth added, keeps people moving forward. Two out of three families are working poor with steady jobs, said Giloth.

He highlighted four points of concern that struck him about the book:

• There was no connection to career ladders to assist one of the women who was a nurses aid to advance her career.
• Earned income tax credits and other work supports were very important but were also a challenge.
• It highlighted the high cost of being poor. The working poor pay more each year in basic costs.
• The social service delivery was appalling.

Giloth said that there were important issues that should have been mentioned in the book in order to complete the picture. They were the state of the local economy in Milwaukee, the deconcentration of poverty in the Milwaukee neighborhoods, and the social isolation among the family from the community, friends, church, etc.

Rector commended DeParle as having written one of the best books on the American underclass in the past twenty years. He told mayors that economics is not the hardest problem facing the welfare families, but rather lack of education resulting in low wages, crime, and unstable family life. Rector said that welfare can be solved by social and moral reform; job training is a secondary issue. He sited that the fundamental problems with the working poor include the erosion of marriage and work ethic, lack of self control, no parental control, and lack of religious influence, social connections and education.

Further, Rector stated that marriage promotion should be tied into policies to affect future generations to stop the cycle of poverty. A recommendation he put forth to mayors was to begin educating those kids in high school at risk for perpetuating the cycle about having and raising a child and the role of marriage. "The success of welfare reform was stopping the youth/kids from falling into the underclass with the lowering of out of wedlock birth," stated Rector.

For more information about American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, And a Nation's Drive to End Welfare please visit www.jasondeparle.com.