Fighting for Reliable Evidence

Chapter 4: Inventing a New Paradigm: The States as Laboratories

CHAPTER 4 Inventing a New Paradigm: The States as Laboratories* [Should MDRC be] putting ourselves out of organizational existence? —William J. Grinker1 Who let those closet socialists evaluate our program? —Reagan administration official2 Political transitions can sound portentous but may bring little change. For our story, however, Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 was a true revolution, marking a dramatic turning point in welfare policy, the role of the states, and the nature and origin of welfare research. Support for a welfare entitlement and for voluntary programs such as Supported Work yielded to the harsher language of mandates and obligations. Policy initiative shifted from Washington to the more varied and less predictable terrain of the states. Funds for demonstrations evaporated, and social science researchers came to be viewed with suspicion, as advocates for the liberal policies they typically assessed. The prospects for continued, large-scale, government-supported random assignment research looked bleak. Each of the conditions that had nurtured such studies—enthusiastic federal commitment, generous funding for test programs, and centralized clout—disappeared, in some cases permanently. Yet *Chapter 4 authored by Judith M. Gueron. INVENTING A NEW PARADIGM 89 in these seemingly hostile conditions, this type of research not only flowered but, within the decade, produced results of greater policy relevance and impact than the negative-income-tax or Supported Work experiments. The emerging new style of research prompted no less a sage than Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to proclaim that research had played a central role in shaping and facilitating the passage of federal welfare reform legislation in 1988. This chapter begins to tell the story of that transformation, the most farreaching and unlikely of MDRC’s forty-year history, and corrects the myth that random assignment studies of state initiatives were the result of federal insistence on this approach. As this and subsequent chapters recount, the original impetus came from outside government, to be embraced only years later as a central tool of federal waiver policy. THE REAGAN REVOLUTION Reagan came into office at a time of shifting attitudes toward women, work, and welfare. These changes fed anger at a welfare system that many felt encouraged dependency, undermined family structure, and unfairly supported people who could work but did not while others struggled at low-wage jobs. As a result, public debate shifted permanently from whether welfare mothers should work to who should work and how to make that happen. Reformers sought to balance four goals: reduce dependency, increase work, reduce poverty , and save money—all without harming children. Workfare, Mandates, and Devolution Reagan brought to Washington a conviction that government could not solve the problems of poverty, in fact made things worse when it tried, and should basically get out of the way and let the market do its job. To implement this, the new administration promoted two elements of the strategy Reagan had attempted as governor of California: changes in the calculation of welfare benefits and workfare, in which welfare mothers with school-age children would be required to work for their benefits.3 One attraction of workfare was that it appeared to offer something for nothing. In place of a Work Incentive (WIN) program, in which most people escaped the intended mandate, workfare sounded simple: require people to earn their benefits by working (for the number of hours determined by dividing the grant by the minimum wage), with no compensation beyond limited reimbursement for work expenses. Defenders of this approach argued that it 90 FIGHTING FOR RELIABLE EVIDENCE would bring welfare into line with prevailing values, provide work experience for the poor and useful services to the public, encourage people (including those with off-the-books jobs) to leave the welfare rolls, provide the dignity of work, and ultimately increase public support for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Opponents characterized it as “slavefare” that threatened mothers and children; they also estimated that it would cost, rather than save, money. Concerned about the likely outcome from workfare, as a March 7, 1986, Washington Post editorial later put it, “an uneasy Congress deflected the issue to the states, allowing them to set up work programs if they chose.” The relevant legislation, passed in August 1981, was the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 (OBRA). The legislation included a long list of provisions defining how states should calculate benefits and eligibility (several of which substantially reduced work incentives) but also gave the states...