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Did We Lose the War
on Poverty?—II Legacies of the War
on Poverty edited by Martha J. Bailey and Sheldon Danziger Russell Sage, 309 pp., $39.95 (paper)
Shadows of residents of a housing project in Red Hook,
Brooklyn, 2011; photograph by Jared Wellington, a twelve-year-old workshop
participant, from Project Lives: New York Public Housing Residents
Photograph Their World. Edited by George Carrano,
Chelsea Davis, and Jonathan Fisher, it has just been published by PowerHouse Books. ·
What evidence exists
that Head Start has benefited children over the long haul in their lives? ·
Have schools that have
received Title I grants produced higher standardized tests scores
over the years? What political
purposes have Title I grants to public schools served? ·
What evidence exists
that making students college loans has failed? What reasons does Jencks offer
for the declining numbers of low income students who graduate from college? ·
Why do politicians never
criticize the Social Security benefit? ·
What evidence exists
that the food stamp program has contributed to the improved health of low
income children? ·
What tenuous political
alliance has made the continuation of the food stamps program possible? Although an accurate estimate of how the poverty rate has
changed since 1964 would show that we are much closer to achieving President
Lyndon Johnson’s original goal of eliminating poverty than most readers of
this journal probably believe, it would not tell us how effective specific
antipoverty programs have been. The poverty rate could have declined despite
the War on Poverty, not because of it. Assessing specific strategies for
reducing poverty is the main task that Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger take on in Legacies of the War on Poverty. When Johnson initiated the War on Poverty, he reportedly
said that its political success depended on avoiding handouts. The initial
focus was therefore on equalizing opportunity by helping poor children
acquire the skills they would need to get steady jobs with at least average
pay. I will discuss three of these programs: Head Start for poor
preschoolers, Title I funding for public schools with high concentrations of
poor children, and financial aid for low-income college students (now known
as Pell Grants). Any program aimed at young people, no matter how
successful, inevitably takes a long time to change the poverty rate. Johnson
knew that the War on Poverty’s political survival was also likely to require
programs that produced more immediate results, so despite his worries about
“handouts” he began looking for ways to cut the poverty rate by improving the
“safety net” for the poor. I will discuss two of these programs: the big
increase in Social Security benefits for the elderly and food stamps. 1. Head
Start Head Start was primarily a program in which children
attended preschool for a year or two, before they went to kindergarten. The
Perry Preschool, which opened in the early 1960s in Ypsilanti, Michigan, is
probably the most famous preschool in American history. It was a true
experiment, selecting its pupils randomly from a pool of poor black
three-year-olds and following both those admitted to Perry (the “treatment”
group) and those not admitted (the “control” group) for many years. After two years in the Perry program its graduates did
much better on IQ and vocabulary tests than the control group,
making Perry an important inspiration for Head Start. As time passed, however, the test score gap between Perry’s treatment
and control groups shrank. Eventually the treatment group’s advantage was
so small that it could have arisen by chance. Almost every evaluation of Head Start has also found this
same pattern. Children who spend a year in Head Start make more academic progress
during that year than similar children who are not enrolled in preschool.
Almost every follow-up has also found that once children enter kindergarten
or first grade the Head Start graduates’ test score advantage shrinks, and
over time it often disappears. For
many years people who paid attention to this
research (including me) interpreted it as showing that Head Start doesn’t
work. Nonetheless, Head Start’s reputation remained high among
parents, and the program survived. Over
the past decade its reputation has also risen dramatically among those who
keep abreast of new research, largely because longer-term follow-ups have
allowed evaluators to take a broader view of what differentiates a “good”
school from a “bad” school. A follow-up of Perry Preschool children at
age twenty-seven found more than three decades ago that the treatment group
was significantly less likely than the control group to have been arrested
for either a serious or not-so-serious crime. In addition, boys had
significantly higher monthly incomes and were significantly less likely to
smoke, while girls were significantly less likely to have been put into
special education or to have used drugs.1 In the chapter on Head Start in Legacies,
Chloe Gibbs, Jens Ludwig, and Douglas Miller also summarize several recent
studies of its long-term impact. In 2002 Eliana Garces, Duncan Thomas, and Janet Currie reported a comparison
of siblings born between 1965 and 1977, one of whom had been in Head Start
and one of whom had not. Just as in Perry, test score differences between the
Head Start children and the control group declined with age. But when they
compared white siblings, those who attended Head Start were 22 percentage
points more likely to finish high school and 19 percentage points more likely
to enter college than those who did not attend Head Start. Among black
siblings, Head Start had little effect on high school graduation or college
attendance, but blacks who had been in Head Start were 12 percentage points
less likely to have been arrested and charged with a crime than those who had
not been in Head Start. In 2009 David Deming reported a similar study of siblings
born between 1980 and 1986. Again the Head Start graduates’ test score
advantage shrank as they got older, but those who had attended Head Start
were less likely to have been diagnosed with a learning disability, less
likely to have been held back a year in school, more likely to have graduated
from high school, and more likely to report being in good health than their
siblings who had not been in preschool. These
studies do not tell us why Head Start graduates fare better
in adolescence and early adulthood. One
popular theory is that Head Start helps children develop character traits
like self-control and foresight that were not measured in early follow-ups
but persist for a long time.2 Schools
spend hundreds of hours teaching math and reading every year, so the
advantage enjoyed by a sibling who attended Head Start becomes a smaller
fraction of their total experience the longer they have been in school. In
contrast, once traits like self-control and foresight are acquired, they may
be more likely to persist and strengthen over time as their benefits become
more obvious. Such theories are speculative, however. Although the Head Start story still contains puzzles, it
certainly suggests that holding elementary and middle schools accountable
only for their students’ reading and math scores, as the Bush and Obama
administrations have tried to do since 2001, misses much of what matters most
for children’s futures. The Head Start story also suggests that figuring out
what works can take a long time. This is a serious problem in a nation with a
two-year electoral cycle and a twenty-second attention span. Had parents not
embraced Head Start, we might well have abolished it before we discovered
that, in important ways, it worked. What evidence exists that Head Start has benefited children over
the long haul in their lives? Title I Supplementary federal funding for schools with high
concentrations of poor students has been administered in a way that makes
conclusive judgments about its impact on children very difficult. The chapter
of Legacies by Elizabeth Cascio
and Sarah Reber suggests that the federal payments
to poor schools under Title I helped reduce spending disparities between rich
and poor school districts in the 1960s and 1970s, but not after 1990. Nor
does Title I seem to have reduced expenditure differences
between schools serving rich and poor children in the same district. Finally
there is no solid evidence that Title I reduced differences between rich and
poor school districts on reading or math tests. If there was any such impact,
it was small. Title I did, however, give the federal government more
leverage when it wanted to force southern school districts to desegregate in
the 1970s. Threats to withhold Title I funding induced many recalcitrant
southern school districts to start mixing black and white children. School
desegregation in the South appears to have been linked to gains in black
students’ academic achievement. Title I also gave Washington more leverage
over the states in 2001, when the Bush administration and Congress wanted to
make every state hold its public schools accountable for raising reading and
math scores. How well that worked remains controversial. What political purposes have Title I grants to public schools
served over the years? Have these schools produced higher scores on
standardized tests due to federal grants? Financial
Aid for College Students The War on Poverty led to a big increase in federal grants
and loans to needy college students. Bridget Terry Long’s chapter in Legacies shows
that if we exclude veterans’ benefits and adjust for inflation, federal grants and loans to college
students rose from $800 million in 1963–1964 to $15 billion in 1973–1974 and
$157 billion in 2010–2011.3 Most
of that increase took the form of low-interest
loans backed by the federal government, not outright grants. Much of it
also went to students from families with incomes well above the poverty line.
But Pell Grants to relatively poor
students began to grow after 1973–1974 and totaled $35 billion by 2010–2011. The
initial goal of all this federal spending was to reduce the difference
between rich and poor children’s chances of attending and completing college.
That has not happened. In the
mid-1990s Congress broadened federal financial aid to include middle-income
families, reducing low-income students’ share of the pot. But the college
attendance gap had been widening even before that. Daron
Acemoglu and Jörn-Steffen
Pischke, for example, have compared the percentages of students in the high
school classes of 1972, 1982, and 1992 who entered a four-year college within
two years of finishing high school. Among
students from the top quarter of income distribution, the percentage entering
a four-year college rose from 51 to 66 percent between 1972 and 1992. Among those
from the bottom quarter of the income distribution, the percentage rose only about half as much, from 22 to 30 percent.4 What evidence exists that the monies spent to give students
college loans have failed? What reasons does Jencks offer for the declining
numbers of low income students who graduate from college? The same pattern recurs when we look at college dropout rates. Martha Bailey
and Susan Dynarski have compared college graduation
rates among students who were freshmen in 1979–1983 to the rates among those
who were freshman eighteen years later, in 1997–2001.5 The
graduation rate among the freshmen from the top quarter of the income
distribution rose from 59 to 67 percent. Among freshmen from the bottom
quarter of the income distribution, the graduation rate rose
only half as much, from 28 to 32 percent. The gap between the graduation
rates of high- and low-income freshmen therefore widened from 31 to 35
percentage points—a fairly small change, but clearly in the wrong direction. Rising
college costs are the most obvious explanation
for the rising correlation between college attendance and parental income.
Tuition and fees in public four-year colleges and universities rose twice as
fast as the Consumer Price Index between 1979–1982, when Bailey and Dynarski’s first cohort was entering college, and
1997–2000, when their second cohort was entering. Rising tuition reflected several political changes: growing opposition to tax increases
among those who elect state legislators, growing
competition for state tax revenue from prisons, hospitals, and other services, and the fact that federal financial aid now allowed low-income students to pay a
larger fraction of their college costs. The combination of rising college costs and growing
reliance on student loans to pay those costs led to a sharp rise in debt among both low-income and middle-income
students. For students who chose their college major with one eye on the job
market and went on to earn a four-year degree, repaying loans was often
difficult but seldom impossible. But two thirds of the low-income freshmen
and about half of middle-income freshmen in four-year colleges leave without
earning a four-year degree. After that, earning enough to both support
themselves and repay their college loans often proves impossible, especially if they have majored in a
subject like teacher education, sociology, or the arts, which employers tend
to view as “soft.”
A child
in a Head Start program, Washington, D.C., 1990 Low-income high school students became increasingly aware
that a lot of students like them were having trouble paying back their loans.
As a result, many students whose parents could not pay the full cost of
college decided to postpone college, take a job, and go to college after they
had saved enough to cover the cost. Few earned enough to do that. Others went
to college for a year, got so-so grades, concluded that borrowing more to
stay in college was too risky, and dropped out. As an experiment in social policy, college loans may not have been a
complete failure, but they cannot be counted as a success. Social
Security When Social Security was established in the 1930s, many
occupations and industries were not part of the system. Those exemptions were
narrowed over the next three decades, but benefits are still limited to those
who have worked in employment that is covered by the system, and they still
vary depending on how much one earned. As a result, almost everyone thinks
Social Security recipients have “earned” their benefits, even when the amount
they receive is far larger than what they would have gotten if they had
invested the same amount of money in a private pension fund. Nonetheless, the combined effect of not having covered all
workers during Social Security’s early years and the low wages and sporadic
employment of many people who retired in the 1940s and 1950 meant that about
30 percent of the elderly were below the poverty line in 1964. When President Johnson looked for ways to
cut poverty quickly without giving money to those whom he thought voters saw
as undeserving, he almost inevitably chose the elderly poor as his first
target. After adjusting for inflation, Congress raised Social
Security’s average monthly benefits by about 50 percent between 1965 and
1973.6 These
increases aroused little organized opposition, partly because workers who had
not yet retired expected that making the system more generous today would
benefit them too once they reached retirement age. In addition, many of the
elderly poor were relying on their middle-aged children to make ends meet in
1964. Every increase in Social Security benefits reduced the economic burden
on those children, many of whom were far from affluent. Higher real benefits, combined with increases in the
proportion of surviving retirees who had worked in covered employment long
enough to qualify for full benefits, cut the poverty rate among the elderly from
30 percent in 1964 to 15 percent in 1974. By 1984 the official poverty rate
was the same among the elderly as among the non-elderly. Today the poverty
rate among the elderly is only two thirds that among eighteen- to
sixty-four-year-olds and half that among children. Raising Social Security benefits was, in short, the simplest, least
controversial, and most effective antipoverty program of the past
half-century. Why do politicians never criticize the Social Security benefit? The
Safety Net The premise of a “safety net” is that a rich society
should make sure all its members have certain basic necessities like food, shelter, and medical care, even
if they have done nothing to earn these benefits. After all, the argument
goes, we feel obligated to provide these necessities even to convicted
felons. Yet the idea remains controversial in the United States, where many
politicians and voters habitually describe such programs as providing
handouts. The two major national programs that try to help almost everyone in
need are Medicaid and food stamps.
These programs enjoy far less political support than Social Security. Thus
far, however, they have survived. Here, I concentrate on food stamps. Jane Waldfogel begins her
chapter of Legacies by describing the nutrition of poor
Americans in the mid-1960s. Her most vivid evidence comes from a 1967 report
by Raymond Wheeler, a physician who had traveled through the South along with
various colleagues, providing medical examinations for poor black children.
Wheeler’s report chronicles the symptoms of hunger and malnutrition that he
and his colleagues saw. No one who read it was likely to forget the
third-world conditions it reported. Read alongside the Agriculture
Department’s summary of its 1965–1966 Household Food Consumption Survey,
which estimated that over a third of all low-income households had poor
diets, and the Selective Service System’s report on why it found so many
young men from the South unfit for military service, Wheeler’s report helped
broaden political support for federal action to reduce hunger. That support
was reinforced by a 1968 CBS documentary on Hunger in
America. Nonetheless, the response was slow. The Johnson administration inherited a tiny pilot program,
established in 1961 by the Kennedy administration, that
offered food stamps to poor people in a handful of counties. Congress
expanded that program in 1964, but it was still limited to a small number of
poor counties. Coverage expanded
fairly steadily over the next decade, but food stamps did not become
available throughout the United States until 1975. Today the program provides a maximum monthly benefit of $185 for each
family member. The amount falls as a family’s cash income rises. It does
not pay for anything but food, but it is more than the United States provided
before Johnson launched the War on Poverty. Because food stamps became available at different times in
different counties, Douglas Almond, Hilary Hoynes,
and Diane Schanzenbach have been able to produce
quite convincing estimates of how their availability affected recipients’
health.7 They
show, for example, that living in a county where food stamps were available
during the last trimester of a mother’s pregnancy reduced her likelihood of
having an underweight baby. They
also show that living in a county where food stamps were available for more
months between a child’s estimated date of conception and its fifth birthday
improved the child’s health in adulthood, reducing the likelihood of what is
known as “metabolic syndrome” (diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity,
and heart disease).8 Nonetheless, the politics of food stamps remain
complicated. The program’s political
survival and growth have long depended on a log-rolling deal in which urban
legislators who favor food stamps agree to vote for agricultural subsidies
that they view as wasteful if rural legislators who favor agricultural
subsidies agree to vote for food stamps that they view as unearned handouts.
That deal could easily unravel. What evidence exists that the food stamp program has contributed
to the improved health of low income children? What tenuous political alliance has made the continuation of the
food stamps program possible? 2. If I am right that poverty as we understood the term in
the 1960s has fallen by three quarters, Democrats should be mounting more
challenges to Republican claims that the War on Poverty failed. A first step
would be to fix the official poverty measure. A second step would be to come
clean about which parts of the War on Poverty worked and which ones do not
appear to have worked, and stop supporting the parts that appear ineffective. On the one hand, there have clearly been more successes
than today’s Republicans acknowledge, at least in public. Raising Social Security benefits played a
major part in cutting poverty among the elderly. The Earned Income Tax Credit
cut poverty among single mothers. Food stamps improve living standards for
most poor families. Medicaid also improves the lives of the poor. Even
Section 8 rent subsidies, which I have not discussed, improve living
standards among the poor families lucky enough to get one, although the money
might do more good if it were distributed in a less random way. Head Start
also turns out to help poor children stay on track for somewhat better lives
than their parents had. On the other hand, Republican claims that antipoverty
programs were ineffective and wasteful also appear to have been well founded
in many cases. Title I spending on
elementary and secondary education has had few identifiable benefits,
although the design of the program would make it hard to identify such
benefits even if they existed. Relying on student loans rather than grants to finance the early years of
higher education has discouraged an unknown number of low-income students
from entering college, because of the fear that they will not be able to pay
the loans back if they do not graduate. Job-training programs for the least
employable have also yielded modest benefits. The community action programs that challenged the authority of
elected local officials during the 1960s might have been a fine idea if they
had been privately funded, but using federal money to pay for attacks on
elected officials was a political disaster. The fact that the War on Poverty included some unsuccessful
programs is not an indictment of the overall effort. Failures are an
inevitable part of any program that requires experimentation. The problem is
that most of these programs still exist. Job-training programs that don’t
work still pop up and disappear. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act still pushes money into the hands of educators who do not raise
poor children’s test scores. It has had little in the way of tangible
results. Increasingly large student loans still allow colleges to raise
tuition faster than family incomes rise, and rising costs still discourage
many poor students from attending or completing college. It takes time to produce disinterested assessments of
political programs. The Government Accountability Office has done good
assessments of some narrowly defined programs, but assessing strategic
choices about how best to fight poverty has been left largely to journalists,
university scholars, and organizations like the Russell Sage Foundation,
which paid for Legacies. Scholars are not completely
disinterested either, but in this case we can be grateful that a small group
has helped us reach a more balanced judgment about a noble experiment. We did
not lose the War on Poverty. We gained some ground. Quite a lot of ground. —This is the second of two articles. 1 The best analysis of these effects
appears in a recent paper by James Heckman, Rodrigo Pinto, and Peter Savelyev, “Understanding the Mechanisms Through Which an
Influential Early Childhood Program Boosted Adult Outcomes,” The
American Economic Review, Vol. 103, No. 6 (October 2013). ↩ 2 See the paper by Heckman, Pinto,
and Savelyev cited in footnote 1 for some evidence
on this. ↩ 3 These expenditures are reported in
2010 dollars. ↩ 4 Daron Acemoglu and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, “Changes
in the Wage Structure, Family Income, and Children’s Education,”European
Economic Review, Vol. 45 (2001). ↩ 5 Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, “Inequality in Postsecondary Education,”
in Whither Opportunity?: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s
Life Chances, edited by Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane
(Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). ↩ 6 See Kathleen McGarry,
“The Safety Net for the Elderly,” Legacies of the War on Poverty,
Figure 7.1, p. 184. ↩ 7 See Douglas Almond, Hilary W. Hoynes, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach,
“Inside the War on Poverty: The Impact of Food Stamps on Birth
Outcomes,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 93, No. 2
(May 2011). ↩ 8 See Hilary Hoynes,
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond,
“Long-Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net,” Institute for
Policy Research, Northwestern University, November
2012. ↩ |
