Description: We are living through historic times. Recent changes in social policy signal the end of the social policy equivalent of The Thirty Years War. The passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and the Balanced Budget Agreement of 1997 bring to the end the struggle to build in the United States a social welfare state at the national level. President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s declared a war on poverty and the federal government has continued to run deficits since the late 1960s. For several decades the country has struggled with whether it was willing to pay for the costs of building a welfare state at the national level that could effectively combat poverty. Now with the enactment of the 1996 and 1997 legislative changes, the federal government has essentially decided this issue in the negative. The war on poverty is now officially over and it is possible to suggest that the federal government has conceded defeat. Those who have fought for a set of effective anti-poverty policies at the national level have lost. In the process, the 61-year old federal welfare entitlement first established under the Social Security Act of 1935 (Aid To Families with Dependent Children--AFDC) has now been repealed and replaced by a block grant program to states (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families--TANF). In place of a federal entitlement is funding only for temporary assistance. This is itself an historic shift. Now there is urgency to study how this defeat has come about, what form it has taken, how will social provision be structured under the new system, what are the likely consequences and what are some of the appropriate responses.

This course focuses on the recent significant and manifold changes in social welfare policy in the United States that have occurred in the last two years since the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The historic ending of the 61 year-old federal welfare entitlement, the dramatic social welfare changes in immigration law, the accelerating shift to managed care in Medicaid, comprehensive reorganization of publicly-assisted housing programs, and other tumultuous changes related to the growing emphasis on disentitlement, devolution and privatization will be tracked in the course. The course will stress the political forces at work in promoting welfare reform and the impacts of the reforms for social work practice. It will examine how communities, especially low-income neighborhoods, are already being affected by the changes, how advocacy is developing in response to these many changes, and how research can contribute to assessing the changes and offering helpful responses. Students will read the major legislation and relevant scholarship; they will have opportunities to dialogue with experts about the reforms; and they will write in-depth research papers on focused topics of their choosing.

Topics to be covered include: the changing legal status of welfare entitlements, related legal issues regarding immigrants access to assistance, the effects of devolution, the prospects for increased interstate competition in setting welfare benefits, the consequences of block grant-funding, maintenance-of-effort requirements for states, opportunities for shifting federal funds to other programs, funding job creation, Private Industry Councils, limits on education and training with the shift to moving people quickly from welfare to work, the consequences of time-limits for those who continue to need assistance, the issue of work requirements and access to employment, related work issues regarding child care and extension of benefits after leaving public assistance, exemptions from requirements, the Wellstone/Murray Family Violence Option amendment, child support enforcement, employment opportunities for absent parents, the relationship of teen pregnancy and births outside of marriage to welfare reform, changes in Food Stamps, changes in Medicaid, changes in housing assistance, etc. Throughout all of the course, the focus will be on the broader political forces at work in bringing about welfare reform and the implications of such changes for social work practice geared to address the needs of low-income individuals, families and communities. Students will choose from any number of welfare reform topics and each will present findings to the class thereby creating a collective resource regarding welfare reforms likely impacts on affected communities.

Text Available for Purchase at College Bookstore:

Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor (1992, updated edition)

Davis, Brutal Need (1993)

Mink, Welfare's End (1998)

Schram and Beer, eds., Welfare Reform: A Race to the Bottom? (1998)

Schram, After Welfare: The Culture of Postindustrial Social Policy (2000)

Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare:Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy  (1999)

Albelda and Tilly, Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits (1997)

Additional Resources:

American Public Welfare Association, Survey Notes

Electronic Resources:

You can participate in the Institute for Women's Policy Research List-Serv bulletin board. You can send messages to the bulletin board via email at welfarem-l@american.edu. You can read the archives of all the messages listed via the Web at http://www.iwpr.org/. After you get there just click on "Welfare Monitoring Listserv." Also there you can follow instructions for subscribing to the listserv bulletin board so that all messages are delivered to your email box.

Also you can visit various internet pages including:

Electronic Policy Network-http://www.epn.org

The Urban Institute ---http://www.urban.org/

Welfare Info Network --- http://www.welfareinfo.org/

National Governors Association---http://www.nga.org/CBP/Activities/WelfareReform.asp

American Public Welfare Association -- http://www.apwa.org/

Rockefeller Institute---http://rockinst.org/rockrep1.htm

Other sites on welfare reform---http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/GSSW/schram/welfarebookmarks.html

 National Center for Policy Analysis (Very Up-to-date)

 Welfare Information Network

(The Welfare Information Network is especially great.)

 Comparison of AFDC and TANF

 Delaware Valley Welfare Reform Sources

Deconstructing Devolution Presentation:

http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/GSSW/schram/Deconstruct.html

Assignments:

Lead class discussion for one session

5-7 page essay on whether welfare reform is significant and if so how

12-15 page paper on the implications of some one aspect of welfare reform for social work practice in community settings

Class presentation of term paper

Term Paper:

Each student will have the opportunity to complete a paper on a focused aspect of welfare reform. Projects can focus on any aspect of welfare reform but should use the focus to address several key issues which are related to the broad themes of the course: (1) Is welfare reform political, i.e., does it serve broader political purposes beyond reducing poverty, promoting self-sufficiency and reducing reliance on public assistance? How does welfare reform serve political purposes? (2) How does the politics of welfare reform affect the system of social provision? How does it affect the social work in community settings? For instance, a project could be focused on the Family Violence Option and examine how the shift to intensifying the emphasis on moving recipients from welfare to work affects community social work concentrated on reducing male violence against women and spouse battering in particular. Other papers could focus on the mental health consequences of workfare or the child-rearing issues associated with work requirements or even broader issues such as the economic consequences for communities of time-limits or welfare reform more broadly. Many other topics are possible as well: Does welfare reform encourage disinvestment from poor neighborhoods? How will the new decentralized system of welfare affect people's rights to entitlement? Are workfare programs being designed to promote long-run self-sufficiency? Welfare reform raises a myriad of questions and students can pursue any one of them. Consistent with the themes of the course, they should frame their analysis to do two things: (1) place any one specific research topic in the broader context of the politics of welfare reform so as to address how welfare reform is or is not about more than assisting those who need public assistance; and (2) tie the analysis of how welfare is changing to its effects on social work practice in community settings.

Course Outline:

Discussion points for last year are available at: ---http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/GSSW/schram/Discussion218.html

1/19 Introduction

1/26 History

Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor

2/2Law

Davis, Brutal Need

Social Scientists Brief in Saenz  v. Roe (98-97)

2/9 Policy

Mink, Welfare's End

Irene Lurie, "Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: A Green Light to the States," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 27, 2 (Spring 1997): 73-88.

Sanford Schram and Joe Soss, "The Real Value of Welfare: Why Poor Families Do Not Migrate," Politics & Society, (March 1999): 39-66.

2/16 Welfare Reform Implementation

Schram and Beer, eds., Welfare Reform: A Race to the Bottom? (first half)

Shep Melnick, "The Unexpected Resilience of Means-Tested Programs," (typescript)

Children's Defense Fund Welfare Reform Evaluation

2/23 Disentitlement, Devolution and Privatization

Schram and Beer, eds., Welfare Reform: A Race to the Bottom? (second half)

Ehrenreich, ""Spinning the Poor into Gold," Harper's, 295 (August, 1997): 44-52.

3/1 Welfare Policy Discourse (I)

Schram, After Welfare (through chapter 3)

SPRING BREAK

3/15 Welfare Policy Discourse (II)

Schram, After Welfare (through chapter 7)

3/22 Race in Welfare Policy

Gilens,  Why Americans Hate Welfare

3/29 Race in Welfare Reform

Margaret Weir, "Is Anybody Listening? The Uncertain Future of Welfare Reform in the Cities," The Brookings Review
15, 1 (Winter 1997): 30-33.

Joe Soss, Erin O'Brien, Sanford F. Schram and Thomas Vartanian, Predicting Welfare Reform Retrenchment: The Persistence of Racial Bias

4/5 Gender in Welfare Policy

Albelda and Tilly, Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits

4/12 Gender in Welfare Reform

Kathryn Edin, "The Myths of Dependence and Self-Sufficiency: Women, Welfare and Low-Wage Work," Focus, 17, 2 (Fall/Winter 1995): 1-9.

Nancy Fraser, "After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State," Political Theory, 22, 4 (November 1994): 591-618.

4/19 Presentations

4/26 Presentations

5/3 Term Papers Due