---------------------- Forwarded by Dennis Raphael/Atkinson on 08/01/2001 11:16
AM ---------------------------





"Montgomery, Laura E." <[log in to unmask]> on 08/01/2001 10:21:40 AM













 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/national/31WELF.html?pagewanted=print
 JUL 31, 2001

 Surprising Result in Welfare-to-Work Studies

 By TAMAR LEWIN

 Early studies of families in three welfare-to-work programs have
found unexpected evidence that their adolescent children have lower
academic achievement and more behavioral problems than the children
of other welfare households.

"The findings are so surprising that they should wake us up and make
us think more about what's happening to adolescents," said Martha
Zaslow, one author of the study, issued by Child Trends, a nonpartisan
Washington research center.

"Most of the research, and the concerns, have been about how young
children's lives would change with welfare-to-work, how their daily
care would be different," Ms. Zaslow said. "The early studies have
found positive impact on young children, especially in certain
subgroups.  But the effects for adolescents were negative in all
three of these studies. There were no positive findings."

The data, gathered for Child Trends by the Manpower Demonstration
Research Corporation, researchers specializing in social policies
that affect low-income people, came from welfare-to-work programs
in Florida, Minnesota and Canada, all of which were precursors to the
federal welfare overhaul. In each of the studies, hundreds of
adolescents whose parents had been enrolled in a welfare-to-work
program for three or four years were compared with a control group
of young people in welfare households where the parents were not in
such a program.

In all three places, the adolescents with families in the programs
did worse in school than those in the control group, on measures like
performing at grade level.

In Florida, 40.7 percent of these 13-to-17-year-olds had been
suspended from school, as against only 32.7 percent of the control
group. Among adolescents in mother-headed households that had been on
welfare for only a short time when the program began, there was also
an increased likelihood of arrests, convictions and other involvement
with the police.


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