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BY REET RANA, rrana@wweek.com
In a few weeks, Oregon will probably have proof of what has long been assumed: The state's welfare-to-work program stands out as a national model. Since 1994, the state's welfare rolls have dropped more than 23,000 people; nearly 55 percent of the original caseloadhas gone off welfare. Much of that success is attributed to the state's JOBS and JOBS Plus programs.
Next month, the federal government plans to release a study of welfare-to-jobs programs in six states, including Oregon. If, as expected, the study shows Oregon's program to be as effective as everyone thinks it is, it will be helpful to other states as they craft programs to change welfare. But, as Kelli Daniels will tell you, the study came at a cost: For threeyears, she and 2,000 other welfare recipients in the Portland area were denied the services aimed at getting them off welfare. From a scientific perspective, it made sense. But to Daniels, it was frustrating."I felt like a guinea pig," says Daniels. "The government thinks they can toy with people's lives without asking them." Oregon's JOBS and JOBS Plus programs require welfare recipients to actively seek jobs, many of them subsidized by the state. In exchange, they are offered a variety of self-sufficiency services including motivational classes, résumé writing and interview-skills courses, child care, job-training programs and job-placement services. But in 1993, when the JOBS program was in its early stages, the federal Department of Health and Human Services wanted feedback from the 20 states that had welfare-to-work programs at the time. Six states, including Oregon, agreed to participate in an ambitious study involving nearly 50,000 welfare recipients nationwide. In order to to assess whether JOBS was making a difference in Oregon, DHHS tracked the experience of 8,000 welfare recipients in Multnomah and Washington counties. "Before the study, we operated the program based on what we felt was the best way to serve our clients," says Maureen Casterline, manager of Adult and Family Services for Multnomah and Washington counties. "At the time, we did not have any solid research that supported our assumptions. In a time of diminishing tax revenue, decreasing revenues for social-service agencies and increased competition for funds, it is very important to understand the value of our services and to make sure that federal and state tax dollars are being used effectively." Of course, good science requires a control group--in this case, a pool of welfare recipients who would not get the services of the JOBS programs. "We had to create an environment where the benefits of the program don't exist," says David Butler, associate director of Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., the private research group contracted to conduct the nationwide study. Daniels was one of the 2,000 people randomly assigned to the Portland-area control group. The mother of four rambunctious boys, Daniels moved to Portland to escape an abusive relationship, hoping to start over. Tired and demoralized by the welfare system, Daniels wanted more than anything to get training and find a job to sustain her family. But instead of the work requirements, continuous child care, comprehensive and individualized job training, motivational groups and occupational counseling normally offered to JOBS program participants, Daniels got little more than a hackneyed message of well wishes and a short list of community agencies with short-term support programs that she could contact. A caseworker described the control group as the chance to "sit on your ass for three years," Daniels recalls. "Some people even told me that I was one of the lucky ones, but I didn't think so." Although the three-year study is complete, there are still 500 people in the Portland area in a control group for an ongoing five-year component of the study. Putting women like Daniels in a control group presents a serious ethical dilemma. State welfare administrators believe the services offered through the JOBS program helped people get off welfare. Yet, in the name of science, they withhold them. Adult and Family Services went to the emergency board of the Oregon Legislature on two separate occasions to notify lawmakers of the study before it began, but federal officials presented the study as a fait accompli, and discussion was minimal. Still, Casterline says, "The decision was the result of a thoughtful process.In the end, thefact that we would be able to know much more about the effectiveness of our programs weighed out the drawbacks to the individuals." But people like welfare advocate Chuck Sheketoff are not convinced. "The fact is, they are using people as guinea pigs for scientific purposes," he says. "Whenever you draw hard and fast rules about who gets services and who does not, there are always going to be people who will be hurt by that." Lorey Freeman agrees. She's an attorney for the Oregon Law Center--a nonprofit agency whose hotline fielded a handful of complaints from people in the control group. "There is something intrinsically unethical about experimenting with the failure or success of people at or below the poverty level," she says. Furthermore, both Sheketoff and Freeman question the benefit of the federal study, given that the congressional welfare overhaul this decade has greatly changed JOBS' approach to self-sufficiency. Now, instead of emphasizing education and training programs, JOBS is more focused on getting people into subsidized employment at near-minimum wages at the first possible opportunity. "The study may identify things we used to do that we should go back to, but it's not going to be a relevant evaluation of the current program," Freeman says. But Jim Neely, deputy administrator of Oregon's Adult and Family Services, doesn't believe the changes in approach affect the study's relevance. He says the new focus on finding jobs quickly is more effective, especially in terms of the measures of the study--how fast JOBS participants obtained work, their rate of pay and whether they stayed off welfare. Freeman understands the desire to figure out the best way of getting people off welfare. But determining which types of programs are most successful is tough given the changing rules of the system, a fluid caseload and the infinite variability among individuals and state programs. "The current welfare system is a giant experiment," Freeman says. "This study may be a microcosm of that." As for Daniels, she didn't let denial of services stop her. Working on her own, she took out loans and went to community college. There, she became interested in computers and the Internet. Recently, Daniels voluntarily stepped off welfare and found a job as an outside sales representative for Cybernet Northwest, a local Internet service provider. |
