This volume combines essays by public policy scholars with comments by social project directors who speak from their experiences in the field. Essays include critical assessments of policies to reduce dependency on welfare and a discussion of the effects of poverty on women and children, as well as a look at welfare reform in Illinois.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 fundamentally changed the nation's social welfare system, replacing a federal entitlement program for low-income families, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), with state-administered block grants, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. PRWORA furthered a trend started earlier in the decade under so called "waiver" programs-state experiments with different types of AFDC rules-toward devolution of design and control of social welfare programs from the federal government to the states. The legislation imposed several new, major requirements on state use of federal welfare funds but otherwise freed states to reconfigure their programs as they want. The underlying goal of the legislation is to decrease dependence on welfare and increase the self-sufficiency of poor families in the United States. In summer 1998, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) asked the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council to convene a Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs. The panel's overall charge is to study and make recommendations on the best strategies for evaluating the effects of PRWORA and other welfare reforms and to make recommendations on data needs for conducting useful evaluations. This interim report presents the panel's initial conclusions and recommendations. Given the short length of time the panel has been in existence, this report necessarily treats many issues in much less depth than they will be treated in the final report. The report has an immediate short-run goal of providing DHHS-ASPE with recommendations regarding some of its current projects, particularly those recently funded to study "welfare leavers"-former welfare recipients who have left the welfare rolls as part of the recent decline in welfare caseloads.

Examines the forms that poverty takes in American families and what can be done to remedy it.

This examination of Canadian welfare policies updates changes to the fall of 1997. It begins with a look at fiscal restraints originating at the federal level and then turns to changes in welfare policy by province and territory. The individual provincial chapters are followed by an analysis of two of the factors with the most impact on the welfare system: jobs and money. A concluding chapter contains a series of recommendations for improving welfare in Canada.

This text explores the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives. It also focuses on what welfare reform reveals about work and family life, and its impact on us all.

This is the second in a series of books growing out of the annual Mid dlebury College Conference on Economic Issues. The second confer ence, held in April 1980, focused on goals and realities of welfare reform. The objectives of the conference were threefold: (1) evaluation of the antipoverty effort so far; (2) discussion of welfare reform alternatives; and (3) prediction of how new initiatives would change work behavior and productivity. During the time this country has been engaged in a "war on poverty," two massive efforts to reform welfare, Richard M. Nixon's Family As sistance Plan (FAP) and Jimmy Carter's Program for Better Jobs and Income (PBJI), were proposed. Both defined national benefit levels and featured a negative income tax. Both measures were defeated in Congress. More modest efforts at reform have, however, changed the economic landscape. Because of the rapid growth in cash and in-kind transfer programs, income poverty is no longer the serious problem that it was in 1964. In fact, looking at the proliferation of programs and the substantial surge in participation rates, some politicians have even advocated a period of government retrenchment. In 1971, the governor of California vii viii INTRODUCTION proposed (and implemented) a major welfare reform in an attempt to stem the rapid growth of welfare caseloads that began in his state in 1967-68. He argued that savings from administrative improvements could be used to raise benefits for the "truly needy.

It's hard to imagine discussing welfare policy without discussing race, yet all too often this uncomfortable factor is avoided or simply ignored. Sometimes the relationship between welfare and race is treated as so self-evident as to need no further attention; equally often, race in the context of welfare is glossed over, lest it raise hard questions about racism in American society as a whole. Either way, ducking the issue misrepresents the facts and misleads the public and policy-makers alike. Many scholars have addressed specific aspects of this subject, but until now there has been no single integrated overview. Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform is designed to fill this need and provide a forum for a range of voices and perspectives that reaffirm the key role race has played--and continues to play--in our approach to poverty. The essays collected here offer a systematic, step-by-step approach to the issue. Part 1 traces the evolution of welfare from the 1930s to the sweeping Clinton-era reforms, providing a historical context within which to consider today's attitudes and strategies. Part 2 looks at media representation and public perception, observing, for instance, that although blacks accounted for only about one-third of America's poor from 1967 to 1992, they featured in nearly two-thirds of news stories on poverty, a bias inevitably reflected in public attitudes. Part 3 discusses public discourse, asking questions like "Whose voices get heard and why?" and "What does 'race' mean to different constituencies?" For although "old-fashioned" racism has been replaced by euphemism, many of the same underlying prejudices still drive welfare debates--and indeed are all the more pernicious for being unspoken. Part 4 examines policy choices and implementation, showing how even the best-intentioned reform often simply displaces institutional inequities to the individual level--bias exercised case by case but no less discriminatory in effect. Part 5 explores the effects of welfare reform and the implications of transferring policy-making to the states, where local politics and increasing use of referendum balloting introduce new, often unpredictable concerns. Finally, Frances Fox Piven's concluding commentary, "Why Welfare Is Racist," offers a provocative response to the views expressed in the pages that have gone before--intended not as a "last word" but rather as the opening argument in an ongoing, necessary, and newly envisioned national debate. Sanford Schram is Visiting Professor of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Joe Soss teaches in the Department of Government at the Graduate school of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, D.C. Richard Fording is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky.