Features » October 6, 2003

School’s Out

New welfare rules could put education out of reach

By Neil deMause

You’d think Maureen Lane would be happier than this. In April, after years of lobbying by her Welfare Rights Initiative and a coalition of advocates for the poor, the New York City Council passed Local Law 23, the Coalition for Access to Training and Education law. Seven years after President Clinton authorized strict limits on education for welfare recipients, the CATE law would at last allow city residents to enroll in college classes without jeopardizing their welfare benefits. The euphoria lasted all of one month.

On May 8, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg filed suit against the council, saying it was his prerogative to decide how to run the city’s welfare programs, and no two-bit gang of elected officials was going to tell him how to do it. Two months later, Bloomberg’s Human Resources Administration upped the ante, announcing that it would refuse to comply with the law, prompting a legal showdown that could drag on for years.

And now, as the latest wave of welfare legislation slogs through Congress, the entire CATE law could be wiped out by new federal requirements that would force cities and states to pull welfare recipients out of classes and find them jobs—any jobs, no matter if they’d be enough to pay the rent, let alone lift families out of poverty. So instead of spreading the word on the opportunities provided by Local Law 23, the CATE Coalition is back to lobbying local officials to do what they thought had been achieved back in April.

“In the City University of New York system alone, we’ve lost 23,000 students” to the changes in welfare law, Lane says. “That we even have to add one more family to that statistic this year, that’s the shame of it.”

As hopes for a more progressive, less punitive welfare reform have fallen away before the reality of a Republican-controlled Congress, education was thought to be the one possible exception. Unlike such wild-eyed schemes as guaranteed childcare or lifting the five-year time limit on benefits, education and training programs appeal even to many Republicans: Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) long has championed her state’s Parents as Scholars program, which lets students count classroom time toward welfare’s work requirements.

Certainly, there’s plenty of evidence that education is by far the most effective and lasting route out of poverty. Studies have shown that a GED or high school diploma can boost earnings by more than 30 percent; with a vocational or bachelor’s degree, income nearly doubles. Maine’s Parents as Scholars program is a case in point: Its graduates’ earnings jumped from $7.50 to $11.71 an hour after getting a college degree.

Traditionally, earning an education while receiving welfare was a common route out of poverty. All that changed in 1996, when the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program imposed a one-year cap on schooling, requiring at least 20 hours of work a week on top of coursework. Immediately, says Lane, enrollment of welfare recipients at CUNY plummeted.

“Students would say, ‘I can’t take this workfare assignment, it’s right in the middle of my class schedule, and I’m about to graduate,’” she recalls. “You’re told you’re going to lose your food stamps and your Medicaid and everything else unless you forget school—the students left in droves.”

For the architects of welfare reform, it wasn’t a moment too soon. In an August 5 Washington Post op-ed, Heritage Foundation welfare guru Robert Rector and his colleague Brian Riedl blasted schooling as a waste of time: “Welfare recipients assigned to immediate work see their earnings increase more than twice as fast over the following five years as those first placed in education-based programs, according to calculations we made using data from the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. If the goal of welfare reform is to raise earnings while reducing dependency, then quickly moving welfare recipients into real jobs is the answer. Prolonged classroom training tends to be the dead end.”

Not so, says Mark Greenberg of the D.C.-based Center for Law and Social Policy. The study in question, he explains, found that narrow job-search programs fared slightly better at boosting short-term income than those stressing adult basic education—but never studied the effects of GED or vocational training, let alone a college degree.

“It makes sense that if somebody is at a 5th-grade reading level and can get to a 6th- or 7th-grade reading level, it doesn’t much affect employment prospects,” Greenberg says. In fact, the program most effective at increasing earnings was a Portland, Oregon, program that included both job-search and vocational training. (The MDRC study also found that none of the programs significantly boosted total income. Participants’ paychecks were neatly matched by loss of food stamps and welfare benefits, leaving them just as poor as when they started.)

For welfare activists and recipients themselves, the value of education is self-evident.

“I was going to school for my GED, and I was only allowed to go two days a week,” says Nichole Thomas, a mother of two who recently joined Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, one of the groups in New York’s CATE Coalition. “Welfare is supposed to be a stepping stone to help you get on your feet. If they make you drop out of college, how are you going to get on your feet? We would rather have a job. But if you’re going to end up working at McDonald’s, it’s not enough.”

Theresa Bill, then a women’s studies lecturer at the University of Hawaii, says that when the new work rules came down, “people were leaving school in droves. Talking to students about their classroom performance, it was clear that with their work hours they just didn’t have time to do their homework.”

To stem the tide of dropouts, the university teamed with the state department of human services to create Bridge to Hope, which allows students receiving welfare to count class time toward their work requirements, and provides part-time campus jobs to cover the rest. It’s been a popular program, with the 150 students it serves annually and with state legislators.

If trying to get an education while on welfare is a mess now, it could be thrown into complete disarray when Congress finally passes legislation reauthorizing TANF, which could happen anytime in the next few months.

While welfare terminology gets more arcane with each new “reform,” two of the key battlegrounds in the current reauthorization debate are over work hours and participation rate. Under existing law, recipients must work (or participate in “work activities”) 30 hours a week, although some states have passed even stiffer standards. House Republicans, following the lead of the Bush administration, have called for a 40-hour-a-week workload, with a minimum of 24 hours in “core activities” precluding training or community service—a schedule that would effectively block single moms from taking classes without risking their benefits.

The participation rate is a more esoteric figure, indicating the minimum number of welfare recipients who must meet program rules for a state to continue receiving federal funds. Under the 1996 law, the rate stands at 50 percent—but “caseload reduction credits” for cutting the rolls have given some states effective participation rates as low as zero. (Only five states, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, have half their caseloads officially participating in TANF.)

“Under current law, a state is always free to let somebody participate in postsecondary education, but if it’s for more than 12 months, it can’t count toward the participation rate,” Greenberg says. “Once you’ve got a high participation rate, you really have to structure your program around what does or doesn’t count.”

Both the House and Senate bills would raise this bar to 70 percent, with much less wiggle room than under the old law: The House would credit only caseload reduction since 2001, while the Senate bill would provide a limited “employment credit” for moving people off welfare into jobs. For states that have been using the old law’s leeway to ease restrictions on education—23 states, according to CLASP, currently allow more access to education than is permitted under TANF—such a jump in the rate would be a catastrophe. (New York’s CATE law, in fact, would likely be nullified entirely, as it requires the state to exceed the minimum participation rate by at least 10 percent—an easy target now, but nearly impossible under a strict 70 percent rate.)

Taken together, the increased work hours and tightened participation rates are expected to hit states with billions of dollars in new program costs, at a time when state governments swimming in red ink are already looking to slash benefits. It’s a scenario that could severely blunt the impact of Sen. Snowe’s Parents as Scholars amendment—attached to the Senate bill, but not the House—which would let states allow college classes to count toward work hours. Even if the Snowe amendment survives, there’s the danger that cash-strapped states will simply decline to implement a program that would force them to keep paying benefits to students until they get a degree.

“With the unemployment rate what it is, there is no way to put everybody to work, so the states are going to have to create massive workfare programs,” says Berkeley education activist Diana Spatz, noting that the California legislative analyst’s office estimated $2.9 billion in new costs if the House bill passes. “I don’t know how our state’s going to be able to manage.”

Until the Congressional debates are settled, Spatz and other activists can only continue their local efforts, hoping that they aren’t obliterated by the latest dictates from Capitol Hill. For New York’s CATE Coalition, it means everything from staging meetings with local education officials, to ambushing city welfare chief Verna Eggleston—who downplayed her single-mother’s reliance on welfare for nearly two decades—outside her office to demand a meeting on the still-dormant Local Law 23.

Nichole Thomas, one of those who confronted Eggleston, says there’s no excuse for the current stalemate: “If there are people out there who don’t mind working, that’s fine. But there’re a lot of us who do need a diploma. You got yours. Why can’t we get it?”

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• Reader Comments

  Connecticut allows NO post-secondary education as part of it’s TANF program. The results, a children poverty rate of 41.3% in Hartford (the state’s capitol) the the honor of being the second poorest city in the county. Food Banks report a 19% increase in demand and are limiting the amount of food they pass out.  Our unemployment rate is 5%, up from 4.4% ayear ago. One last note, we have had a Republican governor since 1994. You do the math.

  Posted by Deb Noble on Oct 6, 2003 at 4:53 PM

  This is an excellent article, but I would rush to take issue with the claim made that “thereís plenty of evidence that education is by far the most effective and lasting route out of poverty.” This is simply not the case. As long as there is a demand for low-skill jobs, and a significant portion of jobs don’t require a strong education background - and don’t offer higher wages or better work for higher levels of education - then we cannot possibly reduce poverty merely by offering better training or education for the poor on a society-wide basis. This can only be accomplished by either improving the type of jobs that an economy offers, or forcing the worst jobs to provide better wages and benefits (in other words, by upskilling the economy or raising minimum wage/benefis, or by improving the social wage through stronger welfare entitlements). The old literature on segmented labor markets has shown how the rang of worse jobs don’t offer returns to education (i.e. a better education will not mean higher pay). And a recent book by Gordon Lafer called _The Job Training Charade_ shows how training programs do not work for reducing employment or upskilling the job market.

  Posted by Benjamin Day on Oct 6, 2003 at 8:49 PM

  As a single mother who completed her college degree on welfare, thanks to In These Times for covering this important issue.  Because of my degree, I was able to get a job that pays me enough to support my family, and now pay $20,000 a year in taxes - more than I used to make working full-time in a low-wage, dead-end job.

  As an “education activist” and Executive Director of LIFETIME (Low-Income Families’ Empowerment through Education), this issue is particularly important to me.  LIFETIME is a grassroots membership organization of parents who are pursuing education as the means out of poverty.  Each year, LIFETIME receives calls for help from hundreds of TANF student parents throughout California, because their county welfare department is trying to make them quit school.  Existing research clearly shows that postsecondary education is the surest route out of poverty for a single mother in poverty, and the parents in our organization are daily proof of this.  Mothers in our organization ñ many beginning in GEDs and ESL programs ñ are completing associates, bachelors, and even master teaching credential programs ñ all the while with county welfare workers doing everything it can to make them quit school.  Theyíre earning $15 - $40 per hour, far above $6.50 an hour, the average wage of most mothers leaving welfare for work. 

  The education option under welfare reform is all the more important when you consider the experience of more than 130,000 TANF parents in California, who will reach the five-year lifetime limit under welfare reform in 2003 and never be eligible for public assistance for the rest of their lives - even though up to 90 percent of them are working and playing by the rules.  Because many of them were denied access to even basic education, they were relegated to low-wage jobs that didn’t pay them enough to get off welfare - let alone out of poverty.  And now, thanks to time limits enacted under welfare reform, they’re out of time - and their families are still poor.  Their experience is proof of how critically important it is to expand parents’ access to education and training opportunities under TANF reauthorization, so they can graduate off welfare and out of poverty for good.

  Posted by Diana Spatz on Oct 7, 2003 at 1:06 AM

  I didn’t go to college and I’ve got a good job. I think college is a waste of time. I started working and working hard when I was 16.

  All these kids now don’t want to work hard. I see it every day. Can’t do this, won’t do that… cry cry cry. We’ve got good jobs if you start low, stick with it, learn what you’re doing, and DO THE WORK.

  Best guy in our shop is this Brazilian kid who barely speaks English (but he’s learning). He came over, didn’t complain about nothing or ask for anything except a job. Now he’s got a kid and a house and is on cloud 9.

  He didn’t get any welfare or nothing. Now he’s paying taxes for the welfare.

  Posted by Nat G. on Oct 9, 2003 at 4:33 PM

  Nat, college is not a waste of time. The people who provide the biggest services to society all had to go to college, the doctors, the engineers and the lawyers all needed to college. There are many businessmen in this country who did not go to college, I know a millionare in business who didn’t go, but to say college is not valuable is a mistake.

  However, you make a good point about how you can get anywhere in this country wiith persistence and hard work.

  Posted by brad on Oct 10, 2003 at 3:05 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 6 posts.

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