Reforming Welfare Reform
WADE, RICHARD C.
Reforming Welfare Reform Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America By Lisbeth B. Schorr Doubleday. 484 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Richard C....
...Much as I would have liked Schorr to discuss the matter of illiteracy, the omission does not detract from the importance of Common Purpose...
...Since a regular job is seen as the solution to debilitating dependency on government handouts, it ought to be apparent that none of the current reform schemes will succeed if nothing is done to attack adult illiteracy...
...Although many of these people are unemployed and receive welfare, at the moment most contrive to make a living in regular jobs...
...Failures serve as a warning for overly ambitious state and Federal legislators...
...Clinton's years in office will be seen by historians as the fourth and fifth Reagan administrations...
...I had to counter at least four prevailing beliefs," she notes...
...These are not individuals who just can't handle difficult material...
...Worst of all, parents who are illiterate disproportionally raise illiterate children...
...What it called "reform" was actually a repeal of "welfare as we know it" driven by ideology, not experience...
...Second, that past efforts at social reform have failed far more than they have succeeded...
...Illiteracy would also hamper the use of vouchers, another popular remedy for inner-city ills intended to eliminate "throwing money" at problems through a maze of bureaucracies...
...Schorr is fully aware of the obstacles...
...Clearly the Clinton White House generally accepts the central tenets of the new conservatism: a skepticism of Federal action—particularly concerning the ability of government programs to produce better social outcomes than free market mechanisms—and support for the devolution of governmental power to the states...
...Similarly, there is a lot of talk about giving parents vouchers to pay tuition for the school of their choice...
...Our most conservative legislators should be able to do that arithmetic...
...Surveying over a dozen states that have innovative programs dealing with child abuse, children's education, welfare families, and workfare experiments, Schorr points out the successes and the failures...
...It costs $2,000 and takes two years to teach an adult to read and write...
...It costs $9,000 annually to keep a person on welfare—and $50,000 to keep someone in prison for a year...
...it can draw on experience rather than ideology...
...The proponents of workfare or its derivatives have yet to answer a simple question, "Who is going to hire someone who cannot read or write...
...If we want to save the children, we have to help the parents...
...As useful and important as these things are, the stubborn fact is that he surely will be remembered for signing the Welfare Reform Act of 1996...
...The next legislation need not be guesswork...
...Congress made no real survey of the existing welfare system, did not consult with front-line activists and had no idea of how to replace it...
...As a result, state and Federal agencies act as if nothing works and they must reinvent the wheel...
...Most important politically is the renewed emphasis on "states'rights," which of course creates 50 new bureaucracies instead of one, on the presumption that the states can serve local and regional needs better than Washington...
...It also ratifies, however, the growing suburban dominance of American politics...
...yet with the exception of "workfare," they were uncertain what should take its place...
...The accomplishments of YouthBuild in Newark, Success for All in Baltimore, Families First in Michigan, Healthy Start in Hawaii, and many other programs show what can be done...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Wade Distinguished Professor of American History Emeritus, City University of New York Graduate Center Seeking in his second term to establish his "historic legacy," President Bill Clinton first tried out the role of international peacemaker...
...Her detailed accounts of these efforts examine the specific to illuminate the general...
...The President and the bill's framers claimed the system was broken...
...The high-tech revolution is eliminating practically all unskilled manufacturing j obs, and every new job in our modern economy demands fairly sophisticated literacy...
...First, that the present distrust of government is a permanent condition of our national life...
...But that is destined to change...
...No one has researched the problems her book tackles more thoroughly, and no one is a steadier guide through the maze of private and mixed public-private experiments launched to solve them...
...But making a choice requires shopping around in unfamiliar neighborhoods and filling out applications...
...Schorr argues convincingly that although the states believe they are without precedents and guidelines, this is not the case...
...When this proved too ambiguous and unpredictable, he proclaimed that education reform would be his distinctive achievement...
...Regrettably, though, like virtually everyone else including the Clinton Administration, Schorr neglects to address one very relevant aspect of the situation: All of her suggestions assume a fully literate society, yet the harsh reality is that one out of five American adults—almost 40 million people—cannot read or write...
...In the meantime, she demonstrates, these achievements can be replicated onamore modest scale in otherplaces...
...To her, the critical issue is that the new legislation is the product of ignorance...
...They already have a tenuous relationship with their children's schools...
...Third, that most of the people who are stuck in the inner city are there primarily as a result of individual, personal failings...
...The next generation will surely move to a new national system—based, of course, on individualism and a free market economy—that ensures "the general welfare" as embodied in the preamble of the Constitution and reflects the traditional American consensus: "I am my brother's keeper...
...As an aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan lamented: "The remarkable thing about the welfare bill is that it ignores just about everything we've learned about the subject during the past 3 5 years...
...Neither can they read their children's report cards...
...That necessarily entails consulting the classified advertisements in newspapers, dealing with realtors and signing a lease...
...The Washington Literacy Council calculates that 65 percent of those not working are functionally illiterate...
...And last, that large-scale social reform that does more good than harm is simply not possible...
...But this would require the poor in need of, say, housing assistance to go out and find their own accommodations...
...It is this atmosphere that makes Lisbeth Schorr's Common Purpose so important...
...vouchers would cut them off completely...
...Moreover, they are not restricted to one group: Forty-two per cent are Americanborn, English-speaking whites...
...As recent California legislation on the subject declared, they "cannot read a want ad, cannot fill out an application, cannot read elementary medical instructions, cannot do elementary banking...
...Common Purpose is meant to be an antidote to the general public cynicism that led to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act...
...The rest have physical problems, such as dyslexia...
...People who cannot read the vouchers themselves would be thrown into the city's trickiest market without the slightest protection...
...She devotes particular attention to the children of poorfamilies.Theirplight is urgent, she contends, because of cutbacks in Federal funding of poverty programs...
...There is a relentless optimism in Common Purpose that over the long run sensible second thoughts will rescue welfare from the consequences of the '96 act...
...Even those who have low-level jobs lag behind their counterparts in every industrial country except Poland in reading skills...
...24 per cent are American-born, English-speaking blacks...
...The author concentrates on inner city neighborhoods where deprivation is acute and a tangle of social pathologies keeps many Americans caught in dead-end lives...
...In addition, 85 per cent of teenage unwed mothers, both black and white, are illiterate...
...Under the new arrangements, Washington sends welfare funds to the states and lets them set their own standards of eligibility and levels of assistance...
...Hence the scope of this effort reaches all the way from providing greater access to college for the middle class, to raising standards in public schools, to ensuring the health of every school-age child...
...Schorr has taken the first crucial step in the long journey back to a rational welfare and education policy grounded in informed judgment and hard experience, rather than ideology or political calculation...
...For adult illiterates there is only one option—the closest school...
...While she has no illusions that significant change will come soon, Schorr argues that the successful experiments should be among the building blocks of a new national welfare program...
...27 per cent are foreign-born, non-English-speaking, and illiterate in their own language...
...Her focus makes Common Purpose especially valuable: In the midst of all the sentiment from politicians and celebrities on the subject of children, this work is a welcome, hardheaded analysis of what really should be done...
...That single stroke completed the successful conservative revolution of the last two decades, shredding the social safety net that had been so painstakingly woven from the start of the New Deal...
Vol. 81 • January 1998 • No. 1
