Employment among lower-income men has declined by 11 percent since 1980 and has remained flat among lower-income women. Men and women in the top and middle of the income distribution, on the other hand, have been working as much or more since 1980, creating a growing “work gap” in labor market income between haves and have-nots.   

This paper simulates the effect of five labor market interventions (higher high school graduation rate, minimum wage increases, maintaining full employment, seeing all household heads work full time, and virtual marriages between single mothers and unattached men) on the average incomes of the poorest one-third of American households. They find that the most effective way to increase average incomes of the poorest Americans would be for household heads to work full time, whereas the least effective intervention would be increasing education.

In terms of actual impact on incomes, the simulation of all household heads working full time at their expected wage increased average household earnings by 54 percent from a baseline of $12,415 to $19,163. The research also suggests that even if all household heads worked just some—at expected wages or hours—average earnings would still increase by 16 percent.

The least effective simulation was increasing the high school graduation rate to 90 percent and having half of those “newly” graduated go on to receive some form of post-secondary education. The authors note that the low impact of increasing education on mobility is likely because only one in six of bottom-third adults live in a household in which someone gains a high school degree via the intervention.

Because single parents are disproportionately represented among low-income families, Sawhill and coauthors also explored the impact of adding a second earner to single-parent families through a simulation that pairs low-income, single-mother household heads with demographically similar but unrelated men. That simulation increased the average household earnings of the bottom-third only modestly, by $508, or about 4 percent.

Efforts to increase employment among heads of the poorest households must take into consideration why those household heads aren’t working, they note. According to data from the 2015 Census, the most cited reason for women not working is “taking care of home and family” and for men it is being “ill or disabled.”  

Downloads

• Download "One third of a nation: Strategies for helping working families"

      

 

 

In the last half century, marriage rates have fallen dramatically. In this paper, we explore possible drivers of this trend, including declining economic prospects among men, an increase in unwed births that constrain women’s later marriageability, rising rates of incarceration, and a reversal of the education gap that once favored men and now favors women. We estimate that the decline in male earnings since 1970 among both black and less-educated white men can explain a portion of the decline in marriage, but that cultural factors have played an important role as well. We argue that the ratio of marriageable men to women depends critically on how one defines “marriageable.” Looking just at current data rather than historical trends, and using different definitions of marriageability, we find that there are shortages of marriageable men among the black population, but not among the white population (except among the best educated).

Downloads

• Download the policy brief
• Download the media summary

      

 

 

Summary
Non-marital childbearing is associated with many adverse outcomes for both the mother and the child. Most of these births are unintended. If we could reduce these unintended births it might improve children’s prospects by enabling their mothers to get more education, earn more, and wait to have children within marriage. In this brief, we trace the effects of reducing unintended childbearing on children’s success later in life by using the Social Genome Model (SGM) to simulate the effect on children’s life chances of aligning women’s fertility behavior with their intentions.

Though the impacts of improving women’s control over their fertility are small for the population as a whole, there are significant and important improvements in the lives of children who would have otherwise been "born too soon." These findings suggest that increasing access to and awareness of high-quality, easy-to-use contraception and improving the educational and labor market prospects of low-income women are important steps in improving children’s life chances.

Causes of Unintended Childbearing

Unintended pregnancy is a growing problem in the United States and accounts for the majority of births to single mothers. The term "unintended" is derived from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) which asks women to characterize retrospectively the intentionality of all of their previous pregnancies at the time they learned they were pregnant. If a woman describes the pregnancy as unintended, she is then asked if the pregnancy was mistimed (that is, came earlier or later than the woman desired) or unwanted (that is, she never wanted the pregnancy to happen). About half of all pregnancies in the US are unintended and around seven-in-ten pregnancies to unmarried women under the age of 30 are unintended. Less educated, poor, and minority women all have particularly high rates of unintended pregnancy (see Figure 1).

Not all pregnancies are carried to term, of course. Almost half result in miscarriages or are aborted. But among births to single women under the age of 30, 60 percent are unintended (see Figure 2). Less-advantaged women are, in addition to being more likely to have an unintended pregnancy, also more likely to carry an unintended pregnancy to term. As a result, unintended births as well as pregnancies are much more common among less advantaged women.

A key cause of the rising number of unintended pregnancies and births is inconsistent and incorrect use of contraception. Though many types of birth control are widely available, many couples who claim they do not want to have a child do not use birth control regularly or correctly. There are many reasons for this – misinformation and myths about contraception and its side effects, the cost of the most effective forms of birth control, and human error.

Of those who do use contraception, many people do not use the most effective methods. Among sexually active women aged 20-24, about 3 percent use intrauterine devices (IUDs), 27 percent use the pill, 7 percent use another hormonal method, and 15 percent rely on condoms. These methods have low failure rates when used perfectly, but, alas, humans are imperfect. Condoms require a couple to remember to use one in the moment, the pill must be taken every day, and prescriptions must be refilled on a regular basis.

Long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs) such as IUDs and implants have particularly low failure rates in large measure because they are more likely to be used consistently than other methods. The CHOICE Project in St. Louis, which provided free contraception and counseling on the efficacy of different methods, found that the risk of contraception failure was twenty times higher among users of the pill, transdermal ring, and hormonal patch than among LARC users. The advantage of a LARC is that it changes the default from getting pregnant unless you work hard to avoid it to not getting pregnant unless you take a deliberate action to do so.

Downloads

• Download the full paper

      

 

 

Children born into low-income families face barriers to success in each stage of life from birth to age 40. Using data on a representative group of American children and a life cycle model to track their progress from the earliest years through school and beyond, we show that well-evaluated targeted interventions can close over 70 percent of the gap between more and less advantaged children in the proportion who end up middle class by middle age. These interventions can also greatly improve social mobility and enhance the lifetime incomes of less advantaged children. The children’s enhanced incomes are roughly 10 times greater than the costs of the programs, suggesting that once the higher taxes and reduced benefits likely to accompany these higher incomes are taken into account, they would have a positive ratio of benefits to costs for the taxpayer. The biggest challenge is taking these programs to scale without diluting their effectiveness.

Downloads

• Download the full paper
• Download the media summary

      

 

 

Adopting an official measure of social mobility and charging an office to track it would help create a shared understanding of the facts, a clear assessment of U.S. challenges and progress, and a better foundation for developing policies likely to make America more socially mobile.

There is a strong case for the mobility measure and related activity to be owned and promoted by an independent, apolitical institution, because improving the rate of social mobility is a long-term task, spanning many Administrations and Congresses. Giving mobility an institutional ‘home’—in the form of an Office of Opportunity—will help maintain a commitment to the mobility cause over the longer-term. The new Office of Opportunity will act, then, as a commitment device, a measuring device, and an accountability device.

Recognizing that there is an important space between agreeing, in general terms, that we have a mobility problem, and agreeing on policy solutions, it should still be possible to at least agree to officially measure trends in mobility, track interim indicators of our direction of travel, and assess the likely effects of various policies on mobility. The Office of Opportunity should be given three central tasks:

• Defining and measuring success. By contrast to other areas of bipartisan enthusiasm (such as economic growth), there is a dearth of clear, comparable, consistent data on progress on social mobility. And there is no official measure that is tracked and published on a regular basis, unlike, for example, the poverty statistics. The Office should produce an annual official mobility report, with a selection of different yardsticks, as well as perhaps highlighting a single measure of progress, such as those born in the bottom quintile making it to one of the top two.
   
• Producing leading indicators of likely future mobility trends. The Office should also produce annual reports on shorter-term trends that—based on the best available evidence—will likely lead to more upward mobility in the long run, such as a dashboard from which overall progress can be estimated, similar to one produced by the British government comprised of 17 indicators.
   
• Assessing policies for improving social mobility. The Office would research whether the many policies aimed at narrowing the opportunity gap are effective, and the charge would include evaluation not just of government programs but also policies adopted by businesses or voluntary organizations. Corporate hiring policies, for example, may have as great an impact on mobility as any number of federal K-12 initiatives. The Office ought to be evangelical about the ends—intergenerational mobility—but agnostic about the various means to it. What matters is what works.

There are three possible ways to set-up the office: by Executive Order, through legislation or as a hybrid agency, commission or board. All three have pros and cons, and the establishment method is important to ensure the office is minimally political and long-lasting since mobility takes time to measure and improve upon.

It is always tempting, especially for those of us outside government, to prescribe the creation of a new institution to fix a prevailing social or economic problem. As a rule, the better path is to make better use of existing institutions. But there is at least a plausible argument that intergenerational mobility could be an exception, that a new institution is justified. This is not to say that even a modestly-funded, narrowly-focused Office of Opportunity will have an easy birth. Building an institution is always hard: and never more so, perhaps, than in a congressional political system, during a partisan period of political life. If ‘opportunity is who we are,’ we should do a better job of finding out how we are faring, and holding ourselves and our successors to greater account for our efforts to restore its promise.

Downloads

• Download the policy brief

      

 

 

Based on conventional estimates of the lowest unemployment rate consistent with stable inflation, the job market has been slack for much of the past three decades. This persistent excess supply of labor has created myriad problems, all of which remain with us to this day. High unemployment, particularly for the long-term unemployed, remains a central problem. But one of the most important, if often underappreciated, aspects of slack labor markets is the extent to which they also hurt job holders through the reduced rate of real wage growth, especially for minorities, low-, and middle-wage workers. In this regard, persistently high un- and underemployment are also implicated in the long-term problem of growing inequality.

When the job market is operating below full employment, fiscal outcomes also take a hit as fewer people are working, either at all or for their desired number of hours. The result is less tax revenue, more spending on safety net programs, and all else equal, higher budget deficits. The last time the budget hit surplus, in the latter 1990s, full employment was the main factor behind the swing from deficit to surplus.

Another serious problem associated with persistent periods of slack labor markets is “hysteresis”: when large shares of the workforce are un- or underemployed for a long time, their skills can deteriorate and they can lose their connection to the labor market. At the same time, economic slack typically leads to diminished capital investment. Together, these dynamics can lower the long-term growth rates of the labor force and the broader economy, i.e., they can lower the economy’s potential growth rate.

Finally, those unfortunate enough to begin their careers in slack labor markets have often been found to have permanent lower career trajectories, in terms of occupational and compensation advancement.
Conversely, we argue that every one of these problems can be ameliorated by tight labor markets. By facilitating a dynamic wherein employers need to bid up compensation to get and keep the workers they need, full employment raises both the pay and hours worked of low- and middle-wage workers relative to those at the top of the pay scale. In other words, it pushes back against the long-term trend of wage and income inequality.

Moving towards full employment is clearly associated with higher tax revenues, due to more people working and thus paying taxes, and at the same time putting less pressure on safety net programs. Our analysis of the last time the federal budget was in surplus (1998-2001) shows these employment dynamics clearly dominated the more commonly told tale of those years: the fiscal rectitude of the Clinton budgets (which did play a role, but a quantitatively minor one relative to growth).

A very important benefit of full employment is its capacity to reverse some of the damage of hysteresis, as defined above. When people are unemployed for too long—and long-term unemployment has been a particularly pernicious problem of late in the U.S. labor market—their skills and general employability can atrophy in ways that make them less attractive to employers. Recent research has revealed, for example, that simply being unemployed for many months is (not unexpectedly) perceived by employers as a negative attribute. This dynamic has played a potentially damaging role in lowering the share of the working-age population participating in the labor force, which in turn slows the rate of potential G.D.P. growth. We argue that full employment, by fully utilizing available labor resources, including some of those currently sitting out of the labor market, can reverse some of the damage and raise the economy’s “speed limit.” Note also that if we are correct, then tolerating slack labor markets, say, through wrongly timed austere fiscal policies, is a very expensive mistake indeed.

In other words, if policymakers have the tools to move the economy to full employment, as we believe they do, then not taking action against slack job markets does permanent damage to the rate of economic growth, the rate of job growth, federal and state budgets, career trajectories, and living standards, particularly of the least advantaged.

Downloads

• Download the full paper

      

 

 

Proposals to increase the minimum wage at the federal, state and local levels are currently receiving a lot of attention. Workers from Seattle to Washington D.C. have been promised a raise.

Advocates for an increase point to the failure of the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation or with average wages in the economy as a whole. A single parent with two children earns less than $15,000 a year working full-time on a minimum wage job: hardly enough to support her family, especially after deducting payroll taxes and work-related expenses such as child care. Whatever her level of effort, she will end up poor and probably dependent on government benefits to survive.

While a higher minimum wage will help to boost earnings, critics worry about its effects on hiring, arguing that employers will create fewer jobs if they have to pay higher wages. Although past increases do not appear to have adversely affected employment, there is no denying the risk that much larger increases might pose to the least skilled workers. Raising the minimum from its current $7.25 to $15.00 per hour, as some have advocated, would more than double the cost to an employer and likely have some impact on hiring. In addition, a higher minimum isn’t well targeted on just the poor. Many of the people who would benefit from a higher minimum are secondary workers from more advantaged families. About two-thirds live above 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Only about a fifth are poor.

If we are really worried about families at the bottom, a better way to improve their lot is to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) since it is well-targeted to those who most need assistance and will not significantly affect employers.

That said, any increase in the generosity of the EITC could cost billions of dollars—unlikely to be approved in today’s fiscally constrained environment. Moreover, as currently designed, although it clearly encourages work, it may discourage marriage, or encourage unwed childbearing. (Empirical evidence for the last two effects is lacking but they remain a concern.)  

Our proposal

A better way to boost earnings is to combine the best elements of each policy, allowing them to work in tandem to reduce poverty and inequality. Specifically, we recommend the following hybrid policy:

• Raise the minimum wage to $10.10 and index it for inflation;
• Provide a more generous EITC to families with young children (and somewhat less to large families);
• Provide a significant benefit to childless individuals;
• Eliminate the marriage penalty for most households by basing credits on personal instead of family income;
• Impose a work requirement for childless workers (and a less stringent one for second earners) and restrict eligibility for these two groups to households below 200 percent of the federal poverty line.

Downloads

• Download paper

      

 

 

Summary

For the past few decades, it has been widely argued that a college degree is a prerequisite to entering the middle class in the United States. Study after study reminds us that higher education is one of the best investments we can make, and President Obama has called it “an economic imperative.” We all know that, on average, college graduates make significantly more money over their lifetimes than those with only a high school education. What gets less attention is the fact that not all college degrees or college graduates are equal. There is enormous variation in the so-called return to education depending on factors such as institution attended, field of study, whether a student graduates, and post-graduation occupation. While the average return to obtaining a college degree is clearly positive, we emphasize that it is not universally so. For certain schools, majors, occupations, and individuals, college may not be a smart investment. By telling all young people that they should go to college no matter what, we are actually doing some of them a disservice.

The Rate of Return on Education

One way to estimate the value of education is to look at the increase in earnings associated with an additional year of schooling. However, correlation is not causation, and getting at the true causal effect of education on earnings is not so easy. The main problem is one of selection: if the smartest, most motivated people are both more likely to go to college and more likely to be financially successful, then the observed difference in earnings by years of education doesn’t measure the true effect of college.

Researchers have attempted to get around this problem of causality by employing a number of clever techniques, including, for example, comparing identical twins with different levels of education. The best studies suggest that the return to an additional year of school is around 10 percent. If we apply this 10 percent rate to the median earnings of about $30,000 for a 25- to 34-year-old high school graduate working full time in 2010, this implies that a year of college increases earnings by $3,000, and four years increases them by $12,000. Notice that this amount is less than the raw differences in earnings between high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders of $15,000, but it is in the same ballpark. Similarly, the raw difference between high school graduates and associate’s degree holders is about $7,000, but a return of 10% would predict the causal effect of those additional two years to be $6,000.

There are other factors to consider. The cost of college matters as well: the more someone has to pay to attend, the lower the net benefit of attending. Furthermore, we have to factor in the opportunity cost of college, measured as the foregone earnings a student gives up when he or she leaves or delays entering the workforce in order to attend school. Using average earnings for 18- and 19-year-olds and 20- and 21-year-olds with high school degrees (including those working part-time or not at all), Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of Brookings’ Hamilton Project calculate an opportunity cost of $54,000 for a four-year degree. In this brief, we take a rather narrow view of the value of a college degree, focusing on the earnings premium. However, there are many non-monetary benefits of schooling which are harder to measure but no less important. Research suggests that additional education improves overall wellbeing by affecting things like job satisfaction, health, marriage, parenting, trust, and social interaction. Additionally, there are social benefits to education, such as reduced crime rates and higher political participation. We also do not want to dismiss personal preferences, and we acknowledge that many people derive value from their careers in ways that have nothing to do with money. While beyond the scope of this piece, we do want to point out that these noneconomic factors can change the cost-benefit calculus.

As noted above, the gap in annual earnings between young high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders working full time is $15,000. What’s more, the earnings premium associated with a college degree grows over a lifetime. Hamilton Project research shows that 23- to 25-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees make $12,000 more than high school graduates but by age 50, the gap has grown to $46,500 (Figure 1). When we look at lifetime earnings—the sum of earnings over a career—the total premium is $570,000 for a bachelor’s degree and $170,000 for an associate’s degree. Compared to the average up-front cost of four years of college (tuition plus opportunity cost) of $102,000, the Hamilton Project is not alone in arguing that investing in college provides “a tremendous return.”

It is always possible to quibble over specific calculations, but it is hard to deny that, on average, the benefits of a college degree far outweigh the costs. The key phrase here is “on average.” The purpose of this brief is to highlight the reasons why, for a given individual, the benefits may not outweigh the costs. We emphasize that a 17- or 18-year-old deciding whether and where to go to college should carefully consider his or her own likely path of education and career before committing a considerable amount of time and money to that degree. With tuitions rising faster than family incomes, the typical college student is now more dependent than in the past on loans, creating serious risks for the individual student and perhaps for the system as a whole, should widespread defaults occur in the future. Federal student loans now total close to $1 trillion, larger than credit card debt or auto loans and second only to mortgage debt on household balance sheets.

Downloads

• Should Everyone Go To College?

      

 

 

Whether a child is a proficient reader by the third grade is an important indicator of their future academic success. Indeed, substantial evidence indicates that unless students establish basic reading skills by that time, the rest of their education will be an uphill struggle. This evidence has spurred efforts to ensure that all students receive high-quality reading instruction in and even before the early grades. It has also raised the uncomfortable question of how to respond when those efforts fail to occur or prove unsuccessful: Should students who have not acquired a basic level of reading proficiency by grade three be promoted along with their peers? Or should they be retained and provided with intensive interventions before moving on to the next grade?

Several states and school districts have recently enacted policies requiring that students who do not demonstrate basic reading proficiency at the end of third grade be retained and provided with remedial services. Similar policies are under debate in state legislatures around the nation. Although these policies aim to provide incentives for educators and parents to ensure that students meet performance expectations, they can also be expected to increase the incidence of retention in the early grades. Their enactment has therefore renewed a longstanding debate about retention’s consequences for low-achieving students.

Critics point to a massive literature indicating that retained students achieve at lower levels, are more likely to drop out of high school, and have worse social-emotional outcomes than superficially similar students who are promoted. Yet the decision to retain a student is typically made based on subtle considerations involving ability, maturity, and parental involvement that researchers are unable to incorporate into their analyses. As a result, the disappointing outcomes of retained students may well reflect the reasons they were held back in the first place rather than the consequences of being retained.

Recent studies that isolate the causal impact of retaining low-achieving students cast further doubt on the conventional view that retention leads to negative outcomes. Much of this work has focused on Florida, which since 2003 has required that many third graders scoring at the lowest performance level on the state reading test be retained and provided with intensive remediation. Students retained under Florida’s test-based promotion policy perform at higher levels than their promoted peers in both reading and math for several years after repeating third grade; they are also less likely to be retained in a subsequent grade. Although it is too soon to analyze the policy’s effects on students’ ultimate educational attainment and labor-market success, this new evidence suggests that policies encouraging the retention and remediation of struggling readers can be a useful complement to broader efforts to reduce the number of students reading below grade level.

Background on Grade Retention

Even in the absence of test-based promotion policies, the extent to which America’s school systems have retained low-performing students in the same grade has varied considerably over time. Proponents of retention have long argued that low-performing students stand to benefit from an improved match of their ability to that of their peers and from the opportunity for additional instruction before confronting more challenging material. They also contend that the threat of being held back and the creation of grade cohorts that are more homogenous in ability could yield benefits even for higher-performing students. In the 1960s, however, concerns that retention hinders the social, emotional, and cognitive development of at-risk students led many educators to call for students to be advanced to the next grade with their peers regardless of their academic performance. Although systematic data are scarce, this push for so-called “social promotion” appears to have reduced the incidence of retention nationwide. Conversely, retention rates increased with the advent of standards-based reform in the 1980s and again in some school systems in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

The most comprehensive information on the incidence of retention at present comes from just-released data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR). In 2009-10, OCR for the first time included the number of students retained at each grade level as an element of the data it collects at regular intervals from a large share of the nation’s school districts. Although not a complete census, the nearly 7,000 school districts that participated in the OCR data collection serve more than 85 percent of students in American public schools.

The OCR data indicate that 2.3 percent of all students in these districts were retained in the same grade at the close of the 2009-10 school year. However, much of this overall rate reflects retention in high school, when many students fail to accumulate enough credits to advance their academic standing but often repeat only specific courses as a result. Roughly one percent of students were retained in grades K-8, with the largest numbers repeating kindergarten or the first grade. The OCR data also confirm that retention rates are highest among traditionally disadvantaged minorities, who are most likely to suffer from low academic performance. The respective rates for black and Hispanic students were 4.2 percent and 2.8 percent, as compared with just 1.5 percent for whites.

Retaining a student in the same grade is a costly educational intervention, if students (as intended) spend an additional year in full-time public education as a result. Given average per pupil spending of roughly $10,700 (the most recent national estimate), the direct cost to society of retaining 2.3 percent of the 50 million students enrolled in American schools exceeds $12 billion annually. This estimate excludes the cost of any remedial services provided specifically to students repeating a grade, as well as any earnings foregone by retained students due to their delayed entry into the labor market.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that consensus is lacking as to whether retention yields any benefits at all for students that could offset these costs. Critics of retention contend that students are actually harmed by the trauma of being held back, the challenge of adjusting to a new peer group, and reduced expectations for their academic performance on the part of teachers and parents. They also argue that, once in high school, being over-age for their grade makes students more likely to drop out. As noted above, a large majority of existing studies confirm that students who have previously been retained are at elevated risk for low academic achievement and early dropout. Ernest House of the University of Colorado-Boulder concluded in 1989 that “It would be difficult to find another educational practice on which the evidence is so unequivocally negative.”

To the extent that much of the evidence available on a topic suffers from a common flaw, however, a consistency of findings should not increase confidence in their validity. In the case of grade retention, the central challenge facing researchers is to distinguish the effect of being retained from the effects of those factors that triggered the retention decision in the first place. With few exceptions, the available studies of retention have attempted to meet this challenge by comparing the outcomes of retained students to those of equally low-performing, demographically similar students who were promoted. Yet the very fact that a different decision was ultimately taken on whether to retain the student in the same grade casts doubt on the usefulness of these comparisons. For example, educators may be more apt to hold back a student who performs poorly on a standardized test if they believe that the test is an accurate indicator of their true ability than if they believe the student simply had a bad day. Given the stigma associated with repeating a grade, more involved parents may also be less likely to acquiesce in a school’s recommendation that their child be held back. Although speculative, these and many other possible sources of bias make studies relying on standard observational methods an unreliable guide for policy.

Fortunately, recently enacted policies tying retention decisions explicitly to performance on state tests provide an opportunity to generate more rigorous evidence on retention’s consequences for low-performing students. Under these policies, students with test scores just below the standard for promotion face a far greater likelihood of being retained than students who met the standard exactly. And because there is considerable measurement error in individual student test scores, these differences in retention probabilities are nearly as good as would be achieved by randomly assigning low-performing students to be either retained or promoted. By comparing the outcomes of students with test scores in a narrow region around the promotion standard, researchers are therefore able to discern the causal impact of being retained for those students. First used in evaluations of a test-based promotion policy adopted by Chicago Public Schools in the mid-1990s, this quasi-experimental approach to the study of retention has recently been applied in a series of studies of test-based promotion in Florida. Because the Florida policy has served as a model for other states, evidence on its implementation and impact on retained students is of considerable interest.

Test-based Promotion in Florida

In 2002, the Florida legislature mandated that third grade students scoring below level two (of five performance levels) on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in reading be retained and provided with intensive remediation unless they qualify for one of six “good cause exemptions.” The policy’s exclusive focus on third grade reading distinguishes it from many earlier programs with retention gates based on reading and math achievement at multiple grade levels. This focus reflects the accumulation of evidence that acquiring basic reading proficiency in the early grades is critical for later performance across disciplines. Many educators characterize third grade in particular as a key transition point from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” In reality, this transition is a gradual one and the decision to focus on third grade is in large part a reflection of the fact that it is the lowest grade included in the state testing program.

Florida schools may exempt low-performing students from the retention requirement if they fall into any of the following categories: students with disabilities whose Individualized Education Plan indicates that the state test is an inappropriate measure of their performance; students with disabilities who were previously retained in third grade; Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students with less than two years of instruction in English; students who were retained twice previously; students scoring above the 51st percentile nationally on another standardized reading test; and students demonstrating proficiency through a portfolio of work. In light of these exemptions, calling the Florida policy “test-based promotion” may be a misnomer. It would be more precise to say that, for students not in special education, a low test-score shifts the burden of proof such that educators need to make an affirmative case that the student should be promoted. Across the first six cohorts of third graders impacted by the policy, a slight majority (52.2 percent) of students failing to meet the promotion standard received an exemption.

Even so, the policy sharply increased the number of students held back in third grade. The number of Florida third graders retained jumped to 21,799 (13.5 percent) as the policy was implemented in 2003, up from 4,819 (2.8 percent) the previous year. Consistent with national patterns, the students retained under Florida’s test-based promotion policy are disproportionately black and Hispanic. Black students represented just 22 percent of Florida third graders between 2003 and 2008 but fully 40 percent of those who were retained. Hispanics accounted for 24 percent of all third graders but 29 percent of those retained. The over-representation of blacks and Hispanics among retained third graders reflects the fact that students in these groups are more likely to have reading test scores below the promotion standard. In fact, controlling for reading performance, black and Hispanic students are two percentage points less likely than white students to be retained.

As noted above, the Florida policy also includes provisions intended to ensure that retained students acquire the reading skills needed to be promoted the following year. First, retained students must be given the opportunity to participate in their district’s summer reading program. Schools must also develop an academic improvement plan for each retained student and assign them to a “high-performing teacher” in the retention year. Finally, retained students must receive intensive reading interventions, including ninety uninterrupted minutes daily of research-based reading instruction (a requirement that has since been extended to all students in grades K-5). The degree to which schools comply with these requirements varies considerably across the state. Nonetheless, it is important to note that existing evaluations of the Florida policy capture the combined effect of retention and these additional measures.

The latest research on the Florida policy examines its impact on students retained in 2003 for six subsequent years, by which time students retained only once as third graders had reached eighth grade; students retained in later years are followed for shorter periods of time. The best evidence of retention’s short-term impact on student achievement comes from comparing the performance of retained students in grade four (two years after the retention decision) with that of their promoted peers in grade five, which is possible due to Florida’s use of vertically aligned tests that place the achievement of students in different grades on a common scale. Comparing retained students to promoted students at the same grade level would conflate the effects of retention with any benefits of being a year older. Moreover, in the retention year itself, the test scores of third graders could be inflated due to their prior exposure to the same content and the additional stakes attached to the test.

After two years, students retained under Florida’s test-based promotion policy outperform comparable students who were promoted by substantial amounts in both reading and math. The positive impact of retention on reading achievement is as large as 0.4 standard deviations, an amount which exceeds a typical year’s worth of achievement growth for elementary school students. The impact of retention on math achievement is roughly half as big, perhaps because the remedial services provided to students before and during the retention year focus primarily on reading.

These short-term improvements in achievement, although dramatic, diminish over time and become statistically insignificant by the time retained students reach the seventh grade. The fade out of test score impacts is a common pattern in research on educational interventions, including interventions such as early childhood education and higher-quality kindergarten classrooms which have been shown to generate lasting impacts on such long-run outcomes as college enrollment and earnings. Whether students retained in Florida will also experience long-run benefits remains uncertain. However, it is worth noting that the retained students continue to perform markedly better than their promoted peers when tested at the same grade level and, assuming they are as likely to graduate high school, stand to benefit from an additional year of instruction. These factors may increase the likelihood of enduring benefits.

Third-grade retention in Florida has no impact on student absences or special education classifications, but it sharply reduces the probability that the student will be retained in a subsequent grade. Specifically, retained students are 11 percentage points less likely to be retained one year after they were initially held back and roughly 4 percentage points less likely to be retained in each of the following three years. As a result, students retained in third grade after five years are only 0.7 grade levels behind their peers who were immediately promoted to grade four. This implies that one important consequence of the introduction of the test-based promotion policy was to expedite the retention of many students who would have eventually been retained in a later grade. It also suggests that the costs associated with policies that increase retention rates in the early grades are less than is typically assumed because many of them would have received an additional year of schooling anyway as a result of being retained later in their educational careers.

The results for low-performing readers in Florida compare favorably to those observed under a similar policy in Chicago that has been studied using similar methods. Introduced in 1995, Chicago’s program combined test-based promotion gates in both math and reading at grades three, six, and eight with mandatory summer school for students failing to meet the promotion standards. These requirements generated small short-term improvements in the achievement of students in grade three but not for those in grade six. Retention in grade eight also increased students’ probability of dropping out, while retention in grade six again had no impact. These mixed results imply that retention requirements do not necessarily translate into gains for retained students. They also suggest that early grade retention may be more beneficial for students than retention in later grades. To the extent that this is true, Florida students retained in the third grade who otherwise would have been retained later may have particularly benefited from the state’s test-based promotion policy.

Policy Implications

Reducing the number of students who do not acquire basic reading skills in the early grades remains an urgent priority for American public education. According to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, one third of all fourth grade students, and fully half of black and Hispanic fourth graders, fail to demonstrate even a basic level of reading proficiency. Improving on this record will require that states provide students at risk of reading difficulty with access to high-quality early childhood education programs, help districts develop early identification systems so that struggling readers can be targeted for intervention, and take steps to improve the quality of instruction in grades K-2. Although often overlooked, this latter issue is critical given evidence that schools often assign less experienced and less effective teachers to those grades, which are typically excluded from state accountability systems.

Policies encouraging the retention of students who have not acquired basic reading skills by third grade are no substitute for the development of a comprehensive strategy to reduce the number of struggling readers. Yet the best available evidence indicates that policies that include appropriate interventions for retained students may well be a useful component of a comprehensive strategy. There is nothing in the research literature proving that such a practice would be harmful to the students who are directly affected, and some evidence to suggest that those students may benefit. Test-based promotion policies may also create new incentives for educators and parents to improve student reading skills prior to third grade. Interestingly, after the initial spike to 21,799 (13.5 percent) retentions, the number of Florida students retained in third grade fell steadily in the six years following the introduction of its test-based promotion policy, reaching 9,562 (5.6 percent) in 2008. This decline was due primarily to a reduction in the number of students failing to meet the promotion standard.

Test-based promotion policies are most likely to be successful if they are accompanied by specific requirements that retained students be provided with additional, research-based instruction in reading and adequate funding to implement those requirements. The apparently positive effects of the Florida reform reflect the combined effect of retention and the remedial services made available to retained students, and common sense suggests that retention should not imply an exact repetition of what came before. Policymakers must also take care to provide local educators with sufficient discretion to make decisions they believe are in the best interest of the child without compromising the goal of increased accountability and access to focused support. Finally, continued research is needed to document the effects of test-based promotion policies on the long-run outcomes of retained students and on the quality of instruction available to all students in the critical early grades. Evidence on these issues is essential in order to determine how the benefits of test-based promotion policies compare to their costs.

Downloads

• Is Retaining Students in the Early Grades Self-Defeating?

      

 

 

Abstract

The question addressed in this brief is whether rising inequality affects mobility. My answer is that, at current levels of inequality in the U.S., it likely does. However, this answer is qualified in several ways. First, there is not yet sufficient data to definitively prove the point. Second, rising income inequality has been partly caused by changes in education and in family structures that are, along with income disparities, important drivers of the mobility process. Any response to rising inequality that did no more than redistribute income would not by itself do much to promote mobility. Instead, a combination of government policies and changes in behavior that will improve education, reward work, and strengthen families while also maintaining a basic safety net for those at the bottom is needed. Without such changes the U.S. may well become a permanently divided society.

U.S. Attitudes on Inequality
The concentration of income and wealth in the U.S. has reached levels we have not seen since the late 1920s. The Congressional Budget office reports that incomes after taxes and transfers, adjusted for inflation, almost quadrupled (275 percent) for the top 1 percent between 1979 and 2007. By contrast, incomes for the next 19 percent rose by 65 percent; income for the middle 60 percent rose by 37 percent; and incomes for the bottom 20 percent rose by only 18 percent.

Despite this evidence of growing disparities there has been little public outcry. Why have Americans been so complacent about high levels of inequality? There are undoubtedly a variety of reasons. Until the Great Recession, incomes were growing, albeit modestly, credit was widely available to shore up living standards, and the great majority of the population enjoyed a standard of living that would be the envy of the rest of the world. Moreover, individuals increasingly live in communities that are geographically isolated from each other and growing economic segregation, best captured by the spread of gated communities, affords little opportunity to witness how others are doing.

True, the Occupy Wall Street movement and growing media attention to the facts may be changing this. A Pew Research Center Survey in early 2012 showed that two-thirds of the public believes that there are very strong or strong conflicts between the rich and the poor—an increase of 19 percentage points just since 2009. But the survey also showed that attitudes about why people are rich or poor have not changed and that these attitudes are distinctively American.

Americans believe that where individuals end up in the economic game—who wins and who loses—is the result of hard work and ingenuity. In Europe, by contrast, people believe that luck, family connections, circumstances of birth, and corruption are more important determinants of success. The proportion of people in the U.S. that believes that people get rewarded for their effort (61 percent), for example, is dramatically higher than the median proportion (36 percent) that believes this in other advanced countries.

Because differences in income in the U.S. are believed to be related to skill and effort and because social mobility is assumed to be high, inequality seems to be more acceptable than in Europe while safety nets and regulatory protections are less robust. The U.S. Census Bureau finds that in the U.S., the Gini index for households (a measure of inequality that is equal to zero when incomes are equally distributed and equal to one when a single household has all of the income) was 0.47 in 2008. Eurostat found that the same index was 0.31 for Europe.

The bottom line is that Americans believe they live in a meritocracy. Economists Alberto Alesina and Rafael Di Tella (both of Harvard University), and Robert MacCulloch of Imperial College London find that in Europe, the reported happiness of the less affluent is more negatively affected by inequality than in the U.S. The authors argue that the perception of higher levels of mobility in the U.S. might explain such differences.

But this set of American beliefs could begin to erode. A 2011 Gallup poll found that only 44 percent of Americans believe that the next generation will have a better life than their parents, which is the lowest proportion since the question was first asked in 1983. The Occupy Wall Street movement, and the attention it has received, could be interpreted as a growing unease not just about inequality but about the fairness of the system that produced it. If more and more people feel that the deck is stacked against them, that just a small group gets all the good cards, and that our political system has been corrupted by the concentration of money in the hands of a few, they are likely to become increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo.

For now, however, American beliefs in the fairness of the system appear to be reasonably intact. This sense of opportunity has been the glue that has helped to make the American experiment work. Studies have noted that altruism depends, to some extent, on the ability of the donor to identify with the recipient. Put differently, a sense of community is selective. It depends not only on the perceived causes of someone else’s good or bad fortune but on group ties or solidarity, which are harder to create in a large ethnically and racially diverse country such as the U.S. in comparison to the smaller and somewhat more homogeneous societies of Europe. America has been helped in this task by a shared commitment to the idea of opportunity and upward mobility. But are such beliefs warranted?

Downloads

• Download the full paper

      

 

 

Abstract

Unintended pregnancy is a widespread problem with far-reaching implications: almost half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and the women and children involved in these pregnancies are disproportionately likely to experience a range of negative outcomes. I review research on the causes of unintended pregnancy and the impacts of various evidence-based pregnancy prevention policies. I discuss the estimated effects of mass media campaigns discouraging unprotected sex, teen pregnancy prevention programs, and expansions in publicly funded family planning services, and then present new research showing that expansions in these policies would likely lead to reductions in teen and unintended pregnancy, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and child poverty. The research also shows that each dollar spent on these policies would produce taxpayer savings of between two and six dollars. Over the last few years, prudent investments have been made in several proven pregnancy prevention policies. Some of these investments, however, have recently come under attack at the state and federal levels. The findings presented in this brief suggest that policymakers would be wise to expand these programs rather than pare them back.

A Major Societal Challenge

Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and the parents and children involved in these pregnancies tend to be disadvantaged in a number of ways. For example, Figure 1 shows that unintended pregnancies are disproportionately concentrated among women who are unmarried, teenaged, and poor. Some studies have used sophisticated statistical techniques in an attempt to determine the extent to which pregnancy intentions have a causal effect on maternal and child outcomes. These studies generally suggest that unintended pregnancy and childbearing depress levels of educational attainment and labor force participation among mothers and lead to higher crime rates and poorer academic, economic, and health outcomes among children.

In addition, unintended pregnancy has important implications for public sector balance sheets. For instance, Emily Monea and I estimate that taxpayer spending on Medicaid-subsidized medical care related to unintended pregnancy totals more than $12 billion annually. This figure is substantially more than the federal government spends on the Head Start and Early Head Start programs each year. Unintended pregnancies are also much more likely than intended pregnancies to be terminated. Unintended pregnancies account for more than 90 percent of all abortions—and a substantial majority of Americans of all political stripes support the goal of reducing abortions.

In light of these considerations, policymakers have become increasingly interested in devising strategies for encouraging teens and young adults to take the steps necessary to avoid becoming pregnant until they are prepared to assume the responsibilities of parenthood. This policy brief presents new research showing that several different evidence-based strategies have the potential to reduce unintended pregnancy. The same research also shows that this goal can be attained in a cost-effective way: publicly financed mass media campaigns, comprehensive teen pregnancy prevention programs, and expansions in government subsidized family planning services are estimated to save taxpayers between two and six dollars for every dollar spent on them.

Since President Obama took office, lawmakers have made a number of sensible investments in evidence-based pregnancy prevention strategies. However, a recent wave of activity at the state and federal levels—most notably, Congress’s attempt to defund Planned Parenthood and several states’ efforts to do the same—threaten to reverse much of this progress. The evidence reviewed here suggests that public officials would be wise instead to expand their investments in this area.

What’s Behind the Problem?

The reasons behind the high rate of unintended pregnancy can be organized into three broad categories. First, many young women and men lack sufficient motivation to avoid becoming pregnant until they are ready to do so. This fact is partially the result of changes in cultural norms over time: attitudinal data show that there is now substantially less stigma surrounding premarital sex and out-of-wedlock childbearing than was the case a few decades ago. Motivation to avoid pregnancy is also reduced by the pervasive sense among young women in many low-income communities that there are few attractive alternatives to motherhood available to them. Qualitative studies have found that such women often believe their life prospects to be so limited that they anticipate facing few significant economic or social consequences as a result of becoming pregnant before they are married.

A second factor that contributes to unintended pregnancy is that some individuals who are motivated to avoid pregnancy are handicapped by a limited understanding of how to realize their good intentions. For example, survey data consistently show that teens and young adults are woefully misinformed about how to use various methods of contraception, about how safe and effective those methods are if used correctly, and about the importance of using such methods consistently.

A third contributing factor to the high rate of unintended pregnancy is that the costs of the most effective forms of contraception are sometimes prohibitive and/or access to them is limited. Some highly effective and long-acting reversible contraceptive methods (such as intrauterine devices) are comparatively expensive and can only be used if a young woman has access to a health care provider. Although surveys show that individuals tend not to list limited access or high cost as explanations for their failure to use effective contraceptive methods, I present evidence in the next section that increasing access to subsidized contraception has a notable effect on rates of unintended childbearing.

In sum, the prevalence of unintended pregnancies can be attributed to the fact that many teens and young adults lack the motivation necessary to avoid becoming pregnant; that some individuals are well motivated but are poorly informed about how best to protect themselves from an unplanned pregnancy; and that some of those who are armed with good intentions and the proper information contend with limited access to affordable and effective forms of contraception.

Proven Policy Solutions

Fortunately, public policy has been shown to affect all three of these factors. Regarding the lack of motivation to avoid unintended pregnancy, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that well-designed mass media campaigns can persuade some young men and women to avoid unprotected sex. Evaluations of these campaigns often compare a treatment city that was exposed to a given campaign with a control city that was not. Most of the campaigns in question encouraged condom use. Taken as a whole, the evaluation literature on these campaigns suggests that they changed the behavior of somewhere between 3 and 6 percent of their target populations. Although this may sound like a small effect, the results reviewed below show that a national media campaign has the potential to produce notable impacts on rates of unintended pregnancy and child poverty in a cost-effective way.

Insufficient knowledge about how to avoid unintended pregnancy is most commonly addressed via pregnancy prevention programs targeted on teens. These programs assume any number of forms: some are classroom based, others incorporate a strong youth development component, and still others rely heavily on parent involvement. However, their common thread is that they all focus at least in part on providing participants with information about how to protect themselves from unplanned pregnancy. The most successful programs tend to emphasize sexual abstinence as the only foolproof option while also educating participants about how to use various methods of contraception. Many of these programs have been evaluated using random assignment, which is the gold standard among the techniques available to policy researchers. Although there is enormous diversity in the findings from these evaluations, some of the best designed interventions produced reductions of 15 percent or more in rates of sexual activity and increases of 25 percent or more in rates of contraceptive use.

Abstinence-only sex education programs are also designed to discourage teens from having risky sex. The bulk of the high-quality research literature on these programs suggests that they have little effect on the behavior of the individuals who participate in them. A partial exception to this rule can be found in a recent study conducted by John Jemmott, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues. This study—which used random assignment to evaluate an abstinence-only intervention implemented in an unnamed northeastern city—found that the intervention substantially reduced the frequency of sexual initiation among program participants. It should be noted, however, that this program was implemented only for children who were in their preteens or their very early teens. On the whole, there remains little compelling evidence to date that abstinence-only programs can affect the sexual behavior of most teens or of young adults.

Turning to the third reason for the high incidence of unintended pregnancy, there is strong evidence that expansions in access to publicly subsidized family planning services can affect rates of contraceptive use and unintended childbearing. Family planning services (including the provision of contraception) are made available to low-income women via Medicaid. Eligibility for these services has historically been limited to women who are pregnant and to mothers whose incomes place them below a very low threshold. Since the mid-1990s, however, the federal government has granted waivers to about half the states allowing them to serve all income eligible women—regardless of whether they are pregnant or have children—and in most cases allowing states to raise their income eligibility thresholds as well. A recent and well-designed study by Economists Melissa Kearney of the University of Maryland and Phil Levine of Wellesley College used quasi-experimental methods to explore the effect of expanded eligibility for subsidized family planning services in waiver states on women’s contraceptive use. The authors concluded that these expansions resulted in a reduction of about 5 percent in the number of sexually active adult women who fail to use contraception at a given act of intercourse. They also found that the expanded family planning services produced reductions of about 4 percent in the number of births to teens and about 2 percent in the number of births to nonteens.

The bottom line is that the research community has produced solid evidence that public policies can reduce rates of unintended pregnancy. But are they worth the investment of public dollars needed to pay for them?

Policies Are Cost-Effective

The research findings reviewed above were incorporated into a series of benefit-cost simulations of a nationally implemented mass media campaign, a nationwide teen pregnancy prevention program geared towards at-risk youth, and expansions in Medicaid-funded family planning services within states that were not granted family planning waivers by the federal government. These analyses were performed using a cutting-edge simulation model that was developed at the Brookings Institution for the purpose of simulating the impact of policy changes on family formation outcomes. The model is described in greater detail in Box 1.

Table 1 summarizes the key results from these simulations. While the teen pregnancy prevention program is estimated to have the largest effect on the pregnancy rate among teenagers, the expansion in access to subsidized family planning services is estimated to have the largest effect on unintended pregnancy rates overall. The mass media campaign is estimated to have the largest effect on out-of-wedlock childbearing and on the number of children born into poverty. The simulation results indicate that children born into poverty would be reduced by 2.2 percent under the media campaign; by 1.4 percent under the teen pregnancy prevention program; and by 1.8 percent under the Medicaid expansion. These estimates correspond with reductions of 23,000, 15,000, and 19,000 respectively under the three policies.

The bottom portion of the table presents estimates of the cost of each program and of the taxpayer savings that each one would produce. Because of limitations in the relevant data, taxpayer savings are measured only in terms of the amount that would be saved on publicly subsidized medical care for pregnant women and on a variety of means-tested benefits provided to children under the age of five. The prevention of unintended pregnancy would probably also reduce government expenditures on the criminal justice system, on means-tested benefits for older children and adults, and on a range of other spending programs not incorporated into this analysis. Had sufficient data been available to allow for a more complete accounting of the taxpayer savings that would be generated by these policies, my estimates of the monetized benefits of these policies would be even larger.

Even given the relatively conservative approach taken here, the three programs’ estimated benefits substantially exceed their estimated costs. The benefit-cost ratios listed in the final row of the table show that the three interventions would produce public savings of between two and six dollars for each tax dollar spent. Due in large part to the fact that the Medicaid expansion and mass media campaign have lower costs per member of their target populations than does the more intensive teen pregnancy intervention, the benefit-cost ratios for the former two programs are higher than for the latter one. In other simulations whose results are documented in a longer paper but are not shown here, changes were made to some of the key assumptions underlying these analyses in order to test the sensitivity of their results. Under most of these alternative specifications, the core finding persisted that these policies would produce more in taxpayer savings than would be required to fund them.

The key message of these results is that each program would generate a substantial net savings for taxpayers at the same time that it helps to reduce child poverty and avert teen and unintended pregnancies. All three policies are thus a win-win proposition for taxpayers and for the populations they serve.

Charting The Way Forward

Policymakers have begun to make prudent investments in effective strategies for reducing unintended pregnancy. For example, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed in 2010 contains a provision that gives most states the option of expanding eligibility for Medicaid family planning services without having to go through the cumbersome federal waivers process. This provision is relevant for states that do not have family planning waivers and for a subset of waiver states that could implement further expansions of their programs under the new option. It is now up to individual states to determine whether to avail themselves of the option to raise their eligibility thresholds. Since the passage of the ACA, seven states have thus far done so. With many states facing tight budgets and tough fiscal choices, governors and legislatures may be more inclined to reduce expenditures on social programs than to expand them. But the evidence reviewed here suggests that this is precisely the right time for strapped states to implement expansions in their Medicaid family planning services, since such a move would likely generate budgetary savings in short order.

Separate provisions in the ACA also provide $75 million in annual funding for evidence-based interventions to reduce teen pregnancy and restore $50 million in annual funding for abstinenceonly programs. While the latter provision has little evidentiary support, the research discussed in this brief suggests that the former provision is smart public policy. The funding for evidencebased programs in the ACA complements an additional $110 million in discretionary funding for competitive grants to support both the replication of teen pregnancy prevention programs that have been shown to be effective and the implementation and evaluation of new interventions that have yet to be studied carefully. The Obama administration and Congress deserve credit for showing the foresight to allocate resources to these programs, which are rooted in a rich body of evidence demonstrating their efficacy and their cost-effectiveness.

Unfortunately, there have been no major publicly financed media campaigns discouraging unprotected sex in recent years (there is an ongoing federally funded campaign to highlight the prevalence of AIDS, but it does not place great emphasis on the importance of avoiding risky sexual behavior). Public officials should consider funding such an effort, perhaps using the widely hailed anti-smoking Truth Campaign—which was found to have had a substantial effect on smoking behavior—as a model.

In addition, five states have thus far declined to accept federal funding for evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs. Accepting and spending these funds would not impose any costs on states. Indeed, for reasons documented in this brief, these funds would likely generate taxpayer savings at both the federal and state levels even as they reduce teen pregnancy rates.

Overall, then, policymakers deserve a mixed report card. The relevant evidence suggests that state and federal lawmakers would be wise to maintain or even increase their investments in proven pregnancy prevention strategies rather than reduce their efforts in this area. One hopes that the strength of that evidence will ultimately carry the day.

Conclusion

The research reviewed in this brief shows that evidence-based pregnancy prevention interventions are public policy trifectas: they generate taxpayer savings, they improve the lives of children and families, and they reduce the incidence of abortion. These cost saving policies are particularly well suited to the current fiscal climate, in which state lawmakers are struggling to balance their budgets and the federal government is grappling with a yawning debt that is projected to increase in the years to come.

Placing a greater focus on these policies also has the potential to steer the public debate in a more productive direction. Much attention and energy has been devoted over the past decade to promoting marriage as a strategy for reducing the number of children growing up in single-parent families. However, marriage promotion programs have a mixed record at best—only one locally implemented program has thus far been found by a rigorous evaluation to have notable effects— and they are still in the research and development phase as a result. On the other hand, there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that meaningful reductions in single parenthood can be achieved via expansions in policies that curb unintended and out-of-wedlock childbearing.

In summary, the strategies reviewed in this brief—mass media campaigns discouraging unprotected sex, evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs, and expansions in publicly subsidized family planning services—merit broad support among public officials at all levels of government. In light of the prevalence of unintended pregnancy and the personal and societal costs that such pregnancies pose, policymakers would do well to invest further in these strategies.

Downloads

• Download the Brief

     

 

 

Abstract
This policy brief reviews the deepening marginalization of marriage and the growing instability of family life among moderately-educated Americans: those who hold high school degrees but not four-year college degrees and who constitute 51 percent of the young adult population (aged twenty-five to thirty-four). Written jointly by two family scholars, one of them a conservative (W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project) and the other a liberal (Andrew J. Cherlin, professor at Johns Hopkins University), it is an attempt to find common ground in the often bitter and counterproductive debates about family policy. We come to this brief with somewhat different perspectives. Wilcox would emphasize the primacy of promoting and supporting marriage. Cherlin argued in a recent book, The Marriage-Go-Round, that stable care arrangements for children, whether achieved through marriage or not, are what matter most. But both of us agree that children are more likely to thrive when they reside in stable, two-parent homes. We also agree that in America today cohabitation is still largely a short-term arrangement, while marriage remains the setting in which adults seek to maintain long-term bonds. Thus, we conclude by offering six policy ideas, some economic, some cultural, and some legal, designed to strengthen marriage and family life among moderately-educated Americans. Finally, unless otherwise noted, the findings detailed in this policy brief come from a new report by Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America.

The Problem
In the affluent neighborhoods where many college-educated Americans live, marriage is alive and well and stable families are the rule. Young Americans with college degrees, once thought to be a cultural vanguard, are creating a neotraditional style of family life: although they may cohabit with their partners, nearly all of them marry before having their first child. Furthermore, while most wives work outside the home, the divorce rate in this group has declined to levels not seen since the early 1970s. In contrast, marriage and family stability have been in decline in the kinds of neighborhoods that we used to call working-class—home to large numbers of young adults who have completed high school but not college. More and more of them are having children in brittle cohabiting unions. Among those who marry, the risk of divorce remains high. Indeed, the families formed recently in working-class communities have begun to look as much like the families of the poor as of the prosperous. The nation’s retreat from marriage, which started in low-income communities in the 1960s and 1970s, has now moved into Middle America. Take divorce. Today, moderately-educated Americans are more than twice as likely to divorce as college-educated Americans during the first ten years of marriage, and the divorce divide between these two groups has been growing since the 1970s. Similar trends are apparent in nonmarital childbearing, a category that includes both single and cohabiting women. By the late 2000s, moderatelyeducated American women were more than seven times as likely to bear a child outside of marriage as compared with their college-educated peers. Indeed the percentage of nonmarital births among the moderately educated (44 percent) was closer to the rate among mothers without high school degrees (54 percent) than to college-educated mothers (6 percent).

Most of the increase in nonmarital births among the moderately educated was due to a sharp rise in the number of women who were cohabiting when they gave birth. In contrast, there was little increase in the percentage that were single at birth. If our overarching policy concern is to provide stable, loving, two-parent living arrangements for children, we might conclude that the increase in childbearing among cohabiting couples would not be a problem if cohabiting relationships were as stable as marriages and if cohabiting partners were as committed to each other and to their children as married partners are. But in the United States, at least, cohabitation remains largely a short-term relationship, even when children are involved. Indeed, recent research by Demographers Sheela Kennedy (University of Minnesota) and Larry Bumpass (University of Wisconsin) suggests that 65 percent of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents part by age 12, compared to just 24 percent of children born to married parents. Primarily for this reason, the growth of childbearing within cohabiting relationships in the United States is a worrisome development.

To be sure, not every married family is a healthy one that benefits children. Yet, on average, the institution of marriage conveys important benefits to adults and children. This advantage may be due to the greater stability of the marriage bond, or to the kinds of people who choose to marry and to stay married, or to qualities associated with the institution of marriage (such as a greater degree of commitment and investment in family life). Let us assume that all of these factors play a role. The fact is that children born and raised in intact, married homes typically enjoy higherquality relationships with their parents, are more likely to steer clear of trouble with the law, to graduate from high school and college, to be gainfully employed as adults, and to enjoy stable marriages of their own in adulthood. Women and men who get and stay married are more likely to accrue substantial financial assets and to enjoy good physical and mental health. In fact, married men enjoy a wage premium compared to their single peers that may exceed 10 percent. At the collective level, the retreat from marriage has played a noteworthy role in fueling the growth in family income inequality and child poverty that has beset the nation since the 1970s. For all these reasons, then, the institution of marriage has been an important pillar of the American Dream, and the erosion of marriage in Middle America is one reason the dream is increasingly out of reach for men, women, and children from moderately-educated homes.

Downloads

• Download the Brief

     

 

 

Abstract

The high incidence of unintended pregnancy imposes costs on American society that range from increased rates of crime and welfare participation to reduced levels of high-school completion and labor-force participation. We focus on one of the most policy-relevant aspects of this problem by estimating the amount spent by the government each year on medical care that is directly associated with unintended pregnancies. We find that taxpayers spend about $12 billion annually on publicly financed medical care for women who experience unintended pregnancies and on infants who were conceived unintentionally. After accounting for the fact that some of these pregnancies are merely mistimed while others are altogether unwanted, we also estimate that taxpayers would save about half of this amount if all unintended pregnancies could be prevented. With state and federal budgets being scoured for potential savings—and in light of the mounting evidence showing that there are a number of cost-effective policy options for reducing unintended pregnancies—our results suggest that policymakers should increase their investments in proven pregnancy-prevention strategies.

Introduction

Here is a stunning but under-reported fact: nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. In other words, one out of every two pregnancies is to a woman who says either that she is not yet ready to have a (or another) child or that she does not want to have a child at all. Unintended pregnancies are particularly concentrated among individuals for whom they are likely to be the most disruptive and who are less likely to have the resources needed to deal with the consequences of becoming pregnant unintentionally. Among women who are teenaged, unmarried, or low-income, the proportion of pregnancies that are unintended exceeds 60 percent.

Unintended pregnancy is also associated with an array of negative outcomes for the women and children involved. For example, relative to women who become pregnant intentionally, women who experience unintended pregnancies have a higher incidence of mental-health problems, have less stable romantic relationships, experience higher rates of physical abuse, and are more likely to have abortions or to delay the initiation of prenatal care. Children whose conception was unintentional are also at greater risk than children who were conceived intentionally of experiencing negative physical- and mental-health outcomes and are more likely to drop out of high school and to engage in delinquent behavior during their teenage years.

Though most of the evidence on these relationships is correlational, some researchers have used sophisticated research techniques in order to pin down causal relationships between pregnancy and childbearing intentions and maternal and child outcomes. The results of these studies suggest that, over the long run, reductions in unintended pregnancy and childbearing lead to increased educational attainment and higher labor-force participation rates among women and to lower crime rates and better academic, economic, and health outcomes among the affected birth cohorts.

Taken as a whole, this evidence shows that unintended pregnancy imposes substantial costs on society. Given the current fiscal climate, it is particularly important to consider the hefty financial burden that unintended pregnancy places on federal and state governments—a burden that is ultimately borne by the taxpayers who foot the bill. In this brief, we present new national-level estimates of the public costs imposed by unintended pregnancy and of the potential savings that would accrue to taxpayers if all unintended pregnancies were prevented.

While many of the negative outcomes described above (i.e., higher crime rates and lower educational attainment) are difficult to monetize, it is possible to develop a credible estimate of the number of taxpayer dollars that are spent on medical care provided to women who experience unintended pregnancies and to infants under the age of one whose births resulted from such pregnancies. Even after we focus only on this particular category of public costs, our analysis shows that taxpayers spend more than $12 billion each year on unintended pregnancies. We also find that, if all unintended pregnancies were prevented, the resulting savings on medical spending alone would equal more than three quarters of the federal FY 2010 appropriation for the Head Start and Early Head Start programs and would be roughly equivalent to the amount that the federal government spends each year on the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).

These findings should create a renewed sense of urgency among policymakers about the importance of expanding funding for such proven cost-saving pregnancy-prevention measures as family-planning subsidies and evidence-based interventions to discourage unprotected sex.

Downloads

• Download the Paper

     

 

 

ABSTRACT

Low-skilled men, especially minorities, typically work at low levels and provide little support for their children. Conservatives blame this on government willingness to support families, which frees the fathers from responsibility, while liberals say that men are denied work by racial bias or the economy—either a lack of jobs or low wages, which depress the incentive to work. The evidence for all these theories is weak. Thus, changing program benefits or incentives is unlikely to solve the men’s work problem. More promising is the idea of linking assistance with administrative requirements to work, as was done in welfare reform. Few nonworking men receive welfare, but many owe child support. The child support system has begun to develop mandatory work programs to which nonpaying fathers can be assigned if they fail to work and pay their judgments. Evaluations show that such programs can help raise work levels if well implemented. Texas’s Noncustodial Parents Choices (NCP Choices) program shows the potential to build work enforcement into the child support system. We recommend that more states develop programs like NCP Choices. The federal government should support that effort by conducting more evaluations and by allowing states to receive federal matching funds for child support work programs, like other enforcement expenses of the child support system.

Men Are Working Less, Women More

A vital part of American culture is hard work leading to self-sufficiency. Few in American society question the work ethic, yet low-skilled men work much less in the United States today than they did a generation or two ago, in good times and bad. That fact goes far to explain the rise in unwed childbearing, the decline in marriage, and the persistence of family poverty in recent decades. Unless these men return to working at normal levels, progress against poverty will be difficult to achieve.

The broadest measure of work is the employment-to-population (E/P) ratio, or the percentage of a given demographic group that has jobs. There is a long-term trend toward nonwork by young men. In 1972, 76.1 percent of males age twenty to twenty-four worked, but by 2007, that figure had fallen to 71.7 percent, a decline of nearly 6 percentage points. This was before the Great Recession lowered the employment ratio of every demographic group. If the ratio in 2007 had been the same as in 1972, nearly 450,000 more men would have been employed.

Trends are even worse among young black males. In 1972, 70.4 percent of black men between the ages twenty and twenty-four were working. But in 2007, that percentage had fallen to 59.1, a decline of 16 percent.

If the problem were lack of jobs, one might expect a similar trend among low-income women, but their work levels have risen. In 1972, only 53.5 percent of women worked, but by 2007 the figure was 65.0 percent, a rise of over 21 percent. Even more impressive, in 1980 only 38.7 percent of never-married mothers worked, but by 2010 that figure had soared to 58.7 percent, an increase of over half. In fact, most of the increase occurred between 1995 and 1999 when the ratio leaped from 46.5 percent to 66.0 percent, a rise of over 40 percent in just four years. Never-married mothers are disproportionately black and in all probability living in the same neighborhoods as the black men whose work rates were falling.

Causes

How does one explain these paradoxical trends? If poor adults are working less, conservatives have traditionally blamed the welfare state. By taking care of fatherless families where parents did not work, government seemed to reward, and thus to encourage, improvident behavior. Mothers could have children without husbands, and the fathers could abandon them, knowing that welfare would provide. However, the link between more generous welfare and higher unwed pregnancy was never clear-cut, and it is men’s work levels that have fallen—even though they themselves never received much welfare.

Liberals, for their part, usually blame low work levels on discrimination or the economy. In some cases, employers might still resist hiring minorities, although they hired many nonwhite mothers during welfare reform. The mismatch theory developed by William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard University, and others claims that jobs have become less available to men in cities due to economic trends. According to Wilson, the well-paid factory jobs that used to support many low-skilled men, including many blacks, and their families have largely abandoned urban areas for the suburbs, the South, or overseas, and this largely accounts for nonwork among black men.

The trouble with this theory, however, is that a plethora of low-skilled jobs in the service economy have replaced the factories. These positions typically pay less than industrial jobs, but enough to avoid poverty and welfare if one works steadily and claims remaining benefits such as Food Stamps and tax credits. Over the last three decades about 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants have entered the country each year. Many of these migrants have no more skills than native-born nonworking men, yet the work rate for immigrant men has consistently been over 80 percent. Many of these immigrants live in the same cities where jobs seem to be lacking for black men.

Another economic theory is that low-skilled men may be able to find jobs, but they are unwilling to take them because wages are too low. Real wages for men with only a high school education or less did fall along with work levels in the 1970s and 1980s, tending to support this theory. However, unskilled wages rose for both men and women in the hot economy of the 1990s. And, while work levels did rise for women, they recovered very little for low-skilled men. And labor force participation rates—the proportion of adults working or seeking work—continued to fall for younger black men. There is also little evidence from research or program evaluations to suggest that higher wages would cause low-skilled men to work more consistently. Programs or experiments that offered nonworking men higher wages or wage subsidies if they worked have drawn at best a tepid response.

One explanation for falling work rates may simply be growing affluence. Ethnographic research shows that poor mothers can often piece together enough income to get by from various sources—child support, charity, and contributions from friends and relatives, as well as work and welfare—even without a regular working father in the home. Men fathering children feel less responsibility to support families because they know the mothers can survive without them. Lowwage work remains widely available, as the experience of immigrants shows, although it is less available during a recession.

Administrative Solutions

On this reasoning, simply to alter the economic forces around men is unlikely to change work behavior much. For most jobless men, low-wage jobs are already available yet are not consistently taken. Rather, government must reproduce the expectation of work that society levied informally in less affluent times. Nonworking adults must be expected to work, not only offered better chances to do so. Social policy must seek points of leverage where work can be made an obligation that the jobless have to discharge, on pain of some sanction.

That logic lay behind the welfare reform movement of the 1990s. Since improved work incentives had failed to stem rising dependency, an administrative work test was imposed on cash aid. Wage and child care subsidies rose, but equally important, more recipients than earlier were also made to work or look for work seriously as a condition of aid. That combination of “help and hassle” caused more than two-thirds of mothers to leave the rolls, and most of the leavers took jobs. Still more important, many mothers avoided welfare by going to work directly and never applying for aid. Those shifts lay behind the dramatic rise in poor mothers’ work levels cited earlier. Economic factors—a buoyant economy and the new wage and child care subsidies—also helped, but could not have sufficed alone. Rather, it was the firmer linkage of benefits with obligations that broke the mold of the old welfare system.

The best solution to the men’s work problem will probably be something similar. Unskilled men, like welfare mothers, need to earn more than the unaided labor market will give them. Few of them qualify for the generous Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) that working single mothers get, because they are not supporting children. But by itself, simply to make work pay better will not cause many men to work more regularly. Rather, as in welfare, the programs serving them must directly require them to work. Unlike with welfare mothers, that pressure cannot come from the welfare-benefit system because few single men receive support directly from government. Rather, it must come from other systems that already have authority over many nonworking men—the child support and criminal justice systems.

Child Support Enforcement

Besides welfare, the main institutional legacy of the weakening family has been child support enforcement. If fathers abandon their families, government will pursue them to ensure that they contribute to the support of their children. The federal government began funding and regulating state child support programs in 1975. Since the 1980s, the system has succeeded in establishing paternity and an order to pay support in the majority of child support cases.

But the men’s work problem has limited child support’s ability to collect money for poor and lowincome mothers. The system gains its income largely by garnishing the wages of fathers owing support. But this and other collection methods assume that the fathers are employed, and the main problem is getting them to pay up. That is often true among middle-class fathers with regular jobs. The system, however, has failed to get most low-income fathers to pay. While most poor women today have child support orders obligating the father to pay, less than half receive any payments. That is often because the father lacks regular employment.

The child support system in many states has come to realize that just to crack down on nonpayers achieves little. Rather, the system must address the men’s work problem more directly. To that end, many states have developed work programs designed both to enforce payment when the father has earnings and to get him to work when he does not.

When fathers who are in arrears on their payments appear before child support judges, they often claim they are jobless. The judges cannot verify this directly, but they can refer the fathers to a work program where attendance is enforced, on pain ultimately of incarceration. This forces the father either to admit he has a job and pay up, or to take serious steps to get a job. According to a survey in 2009, 47 percent of responding states already had work programs of some kind attached to child support, 90 percent of them mandatory. There are also fatherhood programs, funded by foundations and special federal grants that focus more on the fathers’ problems and less on child support.

Evaluations of child support work programs are moderately encouraging. Their largest impact is on child support payments. Effects on work levels have generally been smaller than in the welfare work programs used in welfare reform. But it is likely that such programs, if well-implemented, can have some impact on fathers’ work levels. It would help if child support aimed at raising employment as a goal, not simply on getting more money out of fathers. For if more fathers work, unwed pregnancy will likely fall and the whole need for child support will decline.

For parallel reasons, work programs have begun to appear in criminal justice. Most men in prison are fathers. They often have even worse problems with steady employment than other low-skilled men because of their prison records. Corrections officials realize that one key to whether convicts avoid a return to crime after prison is whether they get a job and work regularly. The parole system has proven insufficient in helping men leaving prison to find jobs. Thus, prison reentry programs have appeared that seek to get ex-offenders working quickly, as well as deal with their other problems. As in child support, evaluations are moderately encouraging. The best of these programs increase work and reduce recidivism, but they require further development. On the survey mentioned above, 65 percent of responding states already had such programs.

Getting to Scale

Most child support work programs are still small and detached from regular child support operations. Some have had difficulty obligating men to participate. These are reasons why the programs have so far had little effect on the men’s work problem. To have more impact, the programs would have to expand to cover a much larger share of low-skilled, nonpaying fathers. For that, work programs would have to be integrated into regular child support operations and enforce participation more effectively.

Again, welfare reform is a precedent. In the 1980s, most welfare work programs were small, largely voluntary, and detached from regular agency operations, just as men’s work programs are today. In evaluations, their impacts were enough to justify expansion, but not enough to change welfare fundamentally. Yet in the 1990s, due to welfare reform, the programs vastly expanded and became much more demanding. Few welfare mothers could escape pressure to work if they went on the rolls. Dependency then fell far more than the evaluations had foreseen. The key to this change was that welfare took on raising work levels as a central mission, alongside the traditional goal of supporting needy families.

Texas's NCP Choices

What a comparable shift might mean for child support is suggested by a remarkable program in Texas. The Lone Star State has the largest child support work program in the country. Noncustodial Parents Choices (NCP Choices) grew out of the state’s regular welfare work program for custodial mothers. It serves noncustodial parents whose families are or have been on welfare. Once referred to NCP Choices, nonpaying men must either pay up, participate in the program, or go jail—in the state’s phrase, “Pay, play, or pay the consequences.”

The program is quite simple. Men in arrears are assigned to it by child support judges on the recommendation of child support administrators. Employment services are provided by the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC), the state’s chief training agency. At TWC offices special staff help the men look for existing jobs; training is minimal. Should the men fail to show or drop out, they are referred back to the judges for enforcement action. TANF funds, channeled through TWC, pay for the program.

NCP Choices began in four counties in 2005 and has subsequently expanded to most of the state. Yet the program is still quite small compared to its potential caseload. In February 2009 it served only 3,194 clients statewide. That is partly because it is limited to men whose families have been on welfare (due to TANF funding) and owe at least $5,000 in unpaid support. The men referred to NCP Choices tend to be hard-core nonpayers. If referral were invoked sooner in the administrative process, the caseload would be larger and perhaps somewhat more job ready.

Texas also has a prison reentry program called Project RIO (Re-Integration of Offenders) with a very similar structure. Parole officers refer clients in need of work to TWC, where special staff help them look for work. Both NCP Choices and Project RIO recorded effects on employment in evaluations. Both programs suggest the potential to build work enforcement into regular child support and criminal justice operations.

Implementation

To institute large programs like this, however, requires statecraft. State policymakers must do more than pay money or set up work incentives and assume that nonworking men will respond. They must create institutions with the capacity to help unskilled men work and the authority to require them to do so. To do that poses political and administrative challenges.

NCP Choices obtained key political support when state child support and TWC officials worked together to design the program. Its features reflected hard experience with earlier work initiatives. It had a capacity to enforce attendance which earlier efforts had lacked, leading to low participation. The framers then sold it, first to their superiors, and then to the legislature. Their case was that child support could not be well enforced without a mandatory work program and that the costs would be more than covered by the greater child support that clients would pay. The success of the program on a small scale motivated its later expansion.

As the program grew, state officials had to get local officials on board. In both NCP Choices and Project RIO, managers had to sort out conflicts between the parent agencies (child support and criminal justice) and TWC, whom they relied on to handle employment. In NCP Choices, local child support judges had to be persuaded to refer men to the new program and to devote courtroom time to enforcing attendance. This administrative role was uncomfortable for many judges, but they accepted it as necessary to get better child support compliance.

NCP Choices also created computer systems so that staff at all the agencies involved could access the same information about cases. Effectively, administrators built a new organization bridging child support agencies and TWC at both the state and local levels. Common purpose uniting staffs at all levels was essential to that effort. As in welfare reform, it was not enough to change laws and policies at the top. Routines had to be altered down to the local level so that the expectations reaching clients actually changed.

Other states innovating in men’s work programs show this same combination of high-level political attention and bureaucratic willingness to change. Conversely, in states with little innovation, elected leaders have not focused on the men’s work problem, and agencies are content with established routines. Child support continues to emphasize payment by fathers who are already working, while criminal justice enforces parole rules on ex-offenders, even though these measures do not suffice to raise work levels. As the high and growing incidence of men’s work programs shows, however, thinking is changing.

National Policy

The best hope to solve the male employment problem is to accelerate the movement toward expanded work programs. Probably 1.2 million low-skilled men are already obligated to work yet are not doing so—men who owe child support without paying and ex-offenders on parole without working. To create work programs for these groups would cost from $1 to $5 billion a year, depending on program details. It is hard to justify any new spending in today’s harsh budget climate, yet the cost would be largely recouped in higher child support collections, reduced incarceration, and other offsets.

Currently, federal funding for male work programs falls well short of these sums, and most of the funding consists of transient project grants. The best regular funding would be to qualify child support work programs for matching funds under Title IV-D of the Social Security Act, the source of other federal child support funding.

The other need is more and better evaluations to learn more about how to optimize work programs for men. Of pilot programs to date, only two have received experimental evaluations, and many have not been evaluated at all. If government is to invest more in these programs, policymakers need more evidence that doing so is cost-effective and will visibly impact the problem. There are also several unresolved issues in program design. One of these is what share of nonworking men should be subject to enforcement. Another is whether programs should attempt to create jobs for men who are difficult to employ, versus seeking to place them in the private sector. Comparative assessments of different strategies could help here, just as they did in optimizing welfare work programs in the 1990s.

For nonworking men, like welfare mothers, the way forward toward steadier employment is programs that can both promote work and enforce it.

Downloads

• Download the Brief

     

 

 

Abstract

In the current era of massive deficits, federal, state and local government agencies are seeking ways to lower expenditures and still maintain essential services. Child welfare programs represent an area where significant savings could be achieved while actually improving the life circumstances of the young people affected. The way this could be accomplished is by increasing the number of children and youth who are adopted out of foster care. Findings from a recent national survey of child health provide new evidence that adoption can save the public money while improving the life prospects of youngsters who have been maltreated in their early years.

Public Costs of Foster Care

Children in foster care are children who were born to substance-abusing or mentally ill women, or youngsters who have been neglected or abused in the homes of their birth parents. They have been legally removed from their birth families and placed under the care and control of state-run child welfare agencies. There are close to a half-million children in the United States who are in foster care at any one time. Some are in foster care for only a brief period of days or weeks before being returned to their families. But almost a quarter of a million will remain in foster care for a year or more. Nearly 50,000 will stay in foster care five years or more, while 30,000 will remain there until they reach adulthood.

The public costs of removing all these maltreated children from their birth families and caring for them in foster families, group homes, or institutions are substantial. Annual state and federal expenditures for foster care total more than $9 billion under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act alone. Although exact amounts are difficult to disentangle, even more money is spent for publicly-subsidized medical care for foster children and food stamps, cash welfare, and child care payments to the families that care for them. On top of that, there are longer-term costs that society incurs because of the developmental risks associated with child maltreatment and family disruption.

Although children in long-term foster care represent only a small fraction of the total child population of the United States, they represent a much bigger portion of the young people who go on to create serious disciplinary problems in schools, drop out of high school, become unemployed and homeless, bear children as unmarried teenagers, abuse drugs and alcohol, and commit crimes. A recent study of a Midwest sample of young adults aged twenty-three or twenty-four who had aged out of foster care found that they had extremely high rates of arrest and incarceration. 81 percent of the long-term foster care males had been arrested at some point, and 59 percent had been convicted of at least one crime. This compares with 17 percent of all young men in the U.S. who had been arrested, and 10 percent who had been convicted of a crime. Likewise, 57 percent of the long-term foster care females had been arrested and 28 percent had been convicted of a crime. The comparative figures for all female young adults in the U.S. are 4 percent and 2 percent, respectively.

Former foster youth are over-represented among inmates of state and federal prisons. In 2004 there were almost 190,000 inmates of state and federal prisons in the U.S. who had a history of foster care during their childhood or adolescence. These foster care alumni represented nearly 15 percent of the inmates of state prisons and almost 8 percent of the inmates of federal prisons. The cost of incarcerating former foster youth was approximately $5.1 billion per year.

Adopting from Foster Care

Increased adoption from foster care is a way of decreasing the number of young people who must spend much of their youth in unstable and less than ideal living arrangements. It may also be a way of preventing the long-term detrimental consequences of such an upbringing. As things stand now, less than 15 percent of all children in foster care will be adopted. There were 57,000 children adopted from foster care during Fiscal Year 2009, but there were twice as many-115,000-waiting to be adopted on September 30, 2009. (That is, adoption was the agency's case goal for the child and the parental rights of the biological parents had been legally terminated.)

Adopting children from foster care is a risky proposition for prospective adoptive parents because of possible long-term effects on the child of both the traumatic early experiences they have endured and the detrimental genes they may carry in their DNA. Despite the risks involved, sizable numbers of middle-class couples are prepared to adopt these maltreated children. However, their efforts to adopt are often frustrated by federal laws and child welfare agency practices that require time-consuming efforts to preserve and reunify biological families and give preference to the placement of foster children with relatives. As a consequence, qualified couples who are eager to adopt an unrelated foster child may find themselves turned down by social workers in favor of a grandmother, aunt, or cousin of the child. This can occur even though the relative is reluctant to adopt and has only meager financial resources. An American couple can often complete an international adoption in less time and with fewer complications than adopting a child from foster care in the U.S. In addition, they have a better chance of obtaining an adoptive daughter or son near the time of the child's birth or within the first year or two of the child's life.

Congress has passed a series of laws with provisions aimed at facilitating and encouraging adoption of foster children, such as by providing financial incentives including an income tax credit, subsidized medical care, and regular support payments for less affluent adoptive parents. There was an initial upward jump in the annual number of children adopted from foster care following the passage of the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997, from a base-period level of around 28,000 children per year to a level of around 51,000 children per year in 2000. Since then, however, the number of children adopted from foster care has fluctuated around 55,000, with no clear sustained upward trend. Likewise, the proportion of foster children waiting to be adopted to those who actually are adopted has hovered around 50 percent.

There would be benefits for both the children who await adoption and for U.S. society as a whole if adoption of children in foster care by qualified non-relatives were made easier, faster, and more frequent. Yet advocates of family preservation have resisted efforts to make it so. Much of the controversy over adoption of children from foster care has gone on without the benefit of statistically reliable comparisons of how children fare if they are adopted from foster care as opposed to remaining in foster care or being reunited with their birth parents. Although definitive answers to this question can only be obtained through longitudinal studies and random-assignment experiments, there is useful information to be gleaned from a recent federal survey called the National Survey of Adoptive Parents (NSAP). A major purpose of this brief is to summarize the results of a special analysis of data from this survey that the author carried out in collaboration with Matthew Bramlett, a survey statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The analysis was aimed at shedding as much light as possible on the life situations and wellbeing of children who had been adopted from foster care as well as those who were currently in foster care.

Downloads

• Download the Full Paper

     

 

 

SUMMARY

Randomized treatment-control experiments suggest large returns to investments in prekindergarten education. Several studies consider the social benefits of such investments, but none have considered the full potential gains to government budgets. We embed estimates of the effects of two model programs in a growth model of the U.S. economy to judge the impact they would have on federal, state and local government budgets. Assuming a 3 percent discount rate we find that both programs would pay back in reduced costs and increased revenues in excess of three-fourths of their costs within a seventy-five year budget window. Both programs would eventually reap a positive return for government budgets if policymakers were sufficiently patient.

Investing in Children

Children living in families with low incomes and those with poorly educated parents are much more likely than other children to grow up to be adults with less education, lower incomes, poorer health, and shorter lives. There have been many attempts to break this cycle of poverty by enriching the environment in which disadvantaged children grow up and to better prepare them to enter school. In order to decide if these programs actually deliver the results they are aiming for, random assignment experimental evaluations with long time horizons must be conducted. Unfortunately, relatively few of these “gold standard” evaluations have been carried out. However, some programs — notably Perry Preschool and the Abecedarian Project — have been shown to have positive effects on later life outcomes in such studies.

Other studies have shown that the social benefits of these programs can substantially outweigh the social costs suggesting that they could be excellent social investments. Most of the benefits of these programs accrue to the participants, mainly in the form of higher income, which is due in large part to their obtaining more education. On the other hand, most of the costs fall on taxpayers when pre-kindergarten programs are implemented as public programs. Taxpayers, however, also reap some of the benefits. If program participants earn higher incomes, they will pay more taxes and be less likely to rely on government transfers. If they are less likely to require special education or to repeat grades, they will cost less to educate. This study attempts to calculate the fraction of the total costs to taxpayers that would likely be recovered if large scale versions of two early childhood programs were to be instituted. We use a simulation model of the U.S. economy to estimate the net effects of investing in pre-kindergarten programs on government budgets.

Ideally, governments would undertake all projects for which net social benefits are positive. However, if a program which has been shown to have positive net social benefits also pays for a large fraction of its own costs with revenue increases and savings, it then becomes more attractive than other programs that produce the same level of benefits but without the fiscal dividend. More such programs could be undertaken within a limited budget. Thus, we believe that the estimates we provide here are a useful supplement to the more traditional benefit-cost analysis of these programs.

Downloads

• Download

     

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Are jobs in the middle of the education and earnings distributions really disappearing, as some research and popular reports suggest? Or will the middle of the labor market remain robust? And what does all of this mean for education and training policy?

Over the 1990s, gains in jobs and wages rose more rapidly at the top and bottom of the earnings distribution than in the middle, in part because computers more easily replace jobs in the middle of the market than at the top (where abstract reasoning is required) or the bottom (where social interactions are needed). David Autor of MIT and others have warned of a growing “polarization” between workers with high and low earnings, conveying popular images of a “dumbbell” labor market, or an “hourglass economy.”

Given this picture of the labor market, some observers suggest that policy should focus almost exclusively on enhancing cognitive skills and the attainment of college degrees while deemphasizing occupational training for middle-skill jobs. However, if the trends towards labor market polarization are exaggerated and if the demand remains robust for workers to fill jobs requiring less than a B.A. degree, then education and training policies should have a broader focus and should encourage occupational training that targets middle skill jobs as well.

In this paper, we analyze the likely trends in supply and demand for workers with different levels of education and training over the next decade and beyond. We present data on the current distributions of jobs and wages and how these have evolved in the recent past. Next, we draw on data and projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to forecast the mix of occupations demanded in the coming decades. We compare these demand-side projections with forecasts of the supply of workers with varying levels of education and training.

Overall, we conclude that the demand for middle-skill workers will remain quite robust relative to its supply, especially in key sectors of the economy. Accordingly, accommodating these demands will require increased U.S. investment in high-quality education and training in the middle as well as the top of the skill distribution. Many current and future low-income workers are likely to take advantage of the added training for middle-skill jobs and thereby raise their earnings and their family’s living standards. If such investments are made on behalf of those who are currently poor, this could also lead to higher earnings and lower poverty rates for those currently at the bottom of that distribution.

Downloads

• Download

     

 

 

SUMMARY

During the 2006-2007 academic year, grants accounted for $52 billion, roughly half of the student aid received by undergraduate college students. The largest grant program—the federal Pell program—provided $13 billion in grants, primarily to lower-income students. Although grant programs provide significant support to students, their impacts have been disappointing— substantial inequalities in college-going and completion rates of youth from different income groups remain large and persistent. Despite extensive research, the impact of grants on college-going remains uncertain.

A recent natural experiment (during which net prices of important categories of colleges declined) provides an opportunity to reassess the effect of grant programs on college-going among lower income youth. Between 1996 and 2002, increases in Pell and other grant awards and relatively stable tuition and fees charges at lower-price public colleges combined to create small but steady declines in net-of-grant prices facing these traditionally underserved youth. During these years, the net-of-grant prices declined by roughly $950 to $1,000 for low-income students (those from families with incomes below $30,000 per year in constant 2005 dollars) enrolled in public two- and four-year (non Ph.D. granting) colleges.

These grant-induced reductions in net prices appear to have stimulated small but meaningful increases in college-going among these youth. Because the Pell program accounted for most of the increases in grant support during these years, the results of this natural experiment indicate that Pell awards are an important contributor to the positive impact of grant-induced declines in net prices on college-going.

Read full background paper »

Downloads

• Download

     

 

 

Abstract

This brief describes a recent analysis of the impacts of state policies that expanded eligibility for Medicaid family planning services to women who do not meet regular Medicaid eligibility criteria. The results of this research show that these expanded eligibility policies had a significant impact on reducing unplanned births. The effect on birth rates was largest for women ages 18 to 24. Data on individual behavior confirms that this reduction in births was achieved through increased use of contraception among sexually-active women. The authors estimate the policy cost of preventing an unwanted birth to be around $6,800. They conclude that this is a cost-effective policy intervention relative to other policies and programs targeted at reducing teen and unwanted births.

Introduction

There is widespread consensus among the American public that rates of teen pregnancy and unintended pregnancies to young, unmarried women are too high. Approximately 30 percent of teenage girls in the United States become pregnant and 20 percent give birth by age 20. Increasingly, policy makers and advocacy groups are recognizing that the high rate of unintended pregnancy among unmarried women in their twenties is also a major social issue. Half of all pregnancies in the United States are reported by the mother as being unintended. More than one-third of these (1.1 million pregnancies in 2001) are to unmarried women in their twenties. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy estimates that these pregnancies accounted for nearly half of the 1.3 million abortions in 2001. Rates of teen pregnancy and unplanned pregnancy are higher among young unmarried women, lower income women, women with lower levels of education, and minority women.

Advocates often call for increased access to contraception as a way to combat high rates of teen and unintended pregnancies. But it is not always clear what is meant when a woman says that her pregnancy or birth was unintended. About half of these women also report that they were not using contraception; one might reasonably wonder how committed they were to preventing a pregnancy. If teenagers or young, unmarried women who get pregnant are not committed to avoiding pregnancy, then a policy of increased access to contraception will not have much impact on pregnancy or birth outcomes. The recent headlines from Gloucester, Massachusetts provide a dramatic example. Eighteen teenagers in the high school in Gloucester became pregnant in one school year, four times more than in the previous year. The principal told reporters the girls made a pact to get pregnant and to raise their babies together. Although some of the details reported in the press have been challenged, this story nonetheless demonstrates the potential limitations of a policy focused solely on contraceptive access. Such a policy will be effective only to the extent that teenagers or other young women are committed to avoiding pregnancy.

This brief describes research we recently completed that speaks directly to the potential impacts of a policy of expanded access to publicly provided family planning services. Twenty-six states since 1993 have been granted waivers by the federal government to expand eligibility for Medicaid coverage of family planning services to women who would not otherwise qualify for the program. We examine the impact of this policy on service take-up, birth rates, sexual activity, and contraceptive use. Our results indicate that expanding eligibility to women at higher levels of income (above the traditional Medicaid eligibility level) reduced overall birth rates among women age 18-19 and 20-24 by 7 percent and 5 percent, respectively. The policy led to a 15 percent decline in births among just those 20-24 year old women made newly eligible for family planning coverage.

Downloads

• Download

     

 

 

Abstract

Recent research has identified a growing number of low-income single mothers who tend to be very poor and face serious barriers to achieving economic self-sufficiency for their families. This group includes long-term welfare recipients as well as those who left welfare without stable employment, often referred to as “the disconnected.”

Those remaining on welfare are a heterogeneous group, including short- and long-term recipients whose low wages or limited hours do not disqualify them from TANF as well as families who use the program during short-term economic disruptions in their lives. However, about 40 to 45 percent of the caseload is made up of long-term recipients who are not working or who work very sporadically.

Compared to women who left welfare and are working, the disconnected tend to have more barriers to employment, with less education, younger children, higher rates of mental and physical health problems, higher rates of substance abuse, and a greater history of domestic violence.

This brief recommends the development of a Temporary and Partial Work Waiver Program (TPWWP) to assist disconnected single mothers who face multiple barriers to securing and sustaining employment. A TPWWP would link families to medical and economic supports to prevent extreme poverty while providing more intensive case work assistance to ease the severity and duration of employment barriers.

Downloads

• Download