A significant amount of intellectual hand wringing has gone on as of late regarding the nature and importance of early childhood intervention programs. Some have claimed that such programs (including Head Start) are inherently a waste of money, while others tout their apparent ability to increase future educational and life opportunities, particularly for the under-privileged. This intriguing...

In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) replaced the federal cash public assistance program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the state-level block grant Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. By September 30, 2002, the TANF program has to receive congressional reauthorization, and it is expected that Congress will...

Established in 1966 by the US Office of Economic Opportunity, the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), University of Wisconsin-Madison, investigates the "causes and consequences of poverty and social inequality" in the United States. Often a source of in-depth information on welfare reform, IRP research is available in full text via the quarterly publication Focus (Fall 1994 to present), IRP...

Since its establishment in 1996, Connecticut's Job First Welfare Reform Program has been under rigorous evaluation. As a result, under a contract with the Connecticut Department of Social Services, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) decided to study the effects of the Job First Program. During the study, nearly 5,000 single-parent welfare applicants and recipients in Manchester and...

Conducted by Families USA, a health consumer group, this first national study of the connection between welfare reform and the loss of health insurance estimates that up to 675,000 people were uninsured in 1997 as a direct result of welfare reform. As 1997 was the first year of welfare reform implementation, the group expects the number of uninsured to increase dramatically in the next several...

The Economic Research Service division of the United States Department of Agriculture has published a number of insightful and thoughtful studies in its long history, and this study by Dean Jolliffe lives up to those exacting standards. Released in September 2006, the paper takes a critical look at the location of poverty across urban and rural areas in the United States. Drawing on a variety of...

In this recent paper from the Institute for Poverty Research's Working Papers series, Howard Chernick and Cordelia Reimers examine the Current Population Survey in 1994-1995 and 1997-1999 to see if there was a discernible drop in households receiving public assistance in New York City. While they found that the proportion of households receiving at least one public assistance benefit remained the...

This report, recently released by the US General Accounting Office (GAO), examines some of the consequences of the federal Welfare Reform Act of 1996. The report studies how five states -- Arizona, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin -- have been implementing the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which supplies time-limited assistance to recipients while helping...