Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children

Afterword

Afterword S ince the publication of Higher Ground, we have completed an eightyear follow-up analysis of the New Hope evaluation experiment and launched an initiative to promote a national demonstration of the New Hope program.1 Both efforts reflect a growing national consensus that work support programs are a critical component of policies to combat poverty. IMPACTS REMAINED AFTER EIGHT YEARS First are the long-term effects: eight years after entering New Hope, parents and their children continued to be better off than control group families in many respects, though some of the initial effects of the program had faded. In the book, we report that effects on employment and income were observed primarily during the three years when the program benefits were available, but that the impacts for a group of moderately disadvantaged individuals who had only one barrier to employment were more lasting. This group showed higher employment rates and earnings than the control group over the entire period. The difference actually increased over time—a striking effect considering that the program’s benefits were limited to three years. Study children ranged from nine to nineteen years old during our last contact with them. The adolescent years are fraught with considerable risks for school failure and socially deviant behavior, but the positive impacts on achievement and social behavior set in motion by the New Hope program continued to some degree. Among minority youth from low-income families, the overall trend with age is downward—declining school performance, disengagement from school, reduced motivation, and ultimately alienation from the world of work. We saw many of these outcomes among youth in the control group families: their achievement test performance declined sharply, they disengaged from school, and their rates of school failure rose as they grew older. New Hope partially stemmed this tide. New Hope youth were less likely than their control-group counterparts to show signs of serious school failure, that is, were less likely to have received poor grades, repeated a grade, or been placed in special educa- AFTERWORD tion classes. Perhaps because they were somewhat less likely to fail, they felt more involved in school and expected to do better in English and math. Despite New Hope’s successes, however, the program failed to boost its children into the upper ranges of academic achievement. A number of scholars have emphasized the importance of persistence, responsibility, and the ability to relate to others for adult success in work and family life. At the eight-year follow-up, New Hope had shown lasting effects on young people’s social skills, parent-child and peer relationships , and emotional well-being, though there were no enduring impacts on delinquency or problem behavior. Both school involvement and noncognitive skills may have contributed to the development of more positive work attitudes and behavior: New Hope youth viewed work more favorably and were more optimistic about their educational and occupational prospects. They were also more likely than control-group youth to be gainfully employed and learning the rudiments of money management (by having a bank account, for example). Overall, we find it impressive, and somewhat unexpected, that parents ’ participation in New Hope led to any long-term changes in the economic well-being of families or in the trajectories of the young people in the program. Recall that participation in New Hope over the entire three years of the program was rare, and that parents selected certain benefits, seldom using all of them all the time. Given that other research has demonstrated negative effects for adolescents when parents enter welfare and employment programs, it is especially noteworthy that some positive effects remained when New Hope children reached adolescence.2 Our best explanation is that increased family income, along with early experiences in center-based child care and structured out-of-school activities, provided important developmental opportunities during these children’s formative years. New Hope was not intended to demonstrate a time-limited policy, nor was it conceived as a program to support children, at least not directly—yet it did so. If its benefits had been available for the full eight years, or for as long as people’s incomes made them eligible, it might have had an even stronger impact. Although overall effects on employment faded for most of New Hope families, parents were still somewhat more likely than their control group counterparts to achieve stable employment combined with increasing wages. For their children, the most positive impacts on school achievement and social...