Fighting for Reliable Evidence

Chapter 2: They Said It Couldn’t Be Done: The National Supported Work Demonstration

CHAPTER 2 They Said It Couldn’t Be Done: The National Supported Work Demonstration* We were told [random assignment] would never wash. —Robert M. Solow1 Too many costly federal programs had been established and expanded without adequate information about their effectiveness. Supported Work sought to change this process: to acquire knowledge before legislators had to decide whether a demonstration should be expanded into a national program. —MDRC Board of Directors2 The Supported Work project started out as a small local program offering subsidized jobs to two hard-to-employ groups (former prisoners and former addicts) in a structured environment, followed by assistance in finding an unsubsidized job. The national Supported Work demonstration, the subject of this chapter, built that concept into a successful random assignment experiment that tested the program’s effectiveness for the two original target groups and two additional ones: young high school dropouts and long-term welfare mothers. Eli Ginzberg, the chairman of MDRC’s board of directors, as quoted in its February 1975 press release announcing the demonstration, described *Chapter 2 authored by Judith M. Gueron. THEY SAID IT COULDN’T BE DONE 23 it thus: “Supported Work is not a charitable undertaking. It’s a social investment . Unless people who have had difficulties with themselves and with society are able to work, they cannot become whole. It is work that binds people to the rest of society.” This chapter tells the story of how the national Supported Work demonstration , which was initially characterized by Ginzberg in an internal memo as “a social initiative and not a research experiment,” pioneered a research method that became, arguably, its greatest legacy. Although this country had already successfully launched several path-breaking negative-income-tax (NIT) experiments using random assignment, those were researcher-controlled endeavors that essentially handed out money to people and sought to measure the effect of economic incentives strictly defined. Supported Work had less design control and different objectives: to find out whether a promising program could be replicated for different people in diverse locations; to determine the effectiveness of the approach and the feasibility of using random assignment to do so; to show the value of a rigorous try-small-beforeyou -buy-big model of social policy making; and to test a new technique for the management and oversight of large-scale, private, and publicly funded research efforts. This chapter describes how and why the Supported Work demonstration was created, why particular decisions were made, and how the project became a four-year demonstration and five-year research effort costing a total of $82.4 million. (All cost estimates in this book are in current, not constant, dollars.) I also present lessons for methods, substance, and process in several areas: Could one get defensible answers on whether social programs worked? Did the answers confirm or refute the Great Society’s legacy of skepticism about the success of social programs? What insights from this project affected the management and nature of future experiments? Did having more definitive results translate into an impact on policy and practice, and, if not, why not? THE ORIGIN OF THE SUPPORTED WORK DEMONSTRATION In late 1973, a consensus emerged at a number of federal agencies and the Ford Foundation on the importance of funding a major demonstration to test the potential of a specific work-experience program to address the problems of people who had the most difficulty obtaining or holding regular jobs, people often deemed unemployable. Several factors contributed to this com- 24 FIGHTING FOR RELIABLE EVIDENCE mitment. First, there had been growing national concern with the problems of central cities, as reflected in high rates of crime and drug abuse, extensive unemployment, large numbers of discouraged workers, and rapidly increasing welfare dependency. Although general policies to stimulate growth might yield some employment improvement, there appeared to be a group of people largely outside the regular economy who were at once the chief source of social disintegration and its major victims. Second, the individuals involved in creating the demonstration, mirroring the shift in public sentiment discussed in chapter 1, shared a perception of the value of work as an integrating force in people’s lives. They argued that stable employment would offer people an opportunity and a reason to change. Third, the planners of the demonstration had been close to the employment initiatives of the 1960s. They had been impressed with the potential of the programs but discouraged...