TANF: Denying single mother’s the opportunity to obtain Self-Sufficiency
The American welfare system is inefficient and not structured well. In particular, the most recent and drastic welfare reform, the 1996 PROWRA Act, and its provision which established the new rules and guidelines for federal welfare, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, TANF, is failing recipients and the country. TANF fails us by denying welfare recipients the authentic opportunity to become self-sufficient. Through the implementation and structure of TANF, a flawed system of American welfare provision, single mothers are denied an opportunity for self-sufficiency. Recipients, who are predominantly single mothers, are denied the opportunity to become truly self-sufficient in two ways. First, the recipients are denied access to higher education or the opportunity to attend a higher educational institution. Second, the recipients are repeatedly and explicitly encouraged to become married by the government and the welfare system.
Upon the examination of the text of PROWRA, specifically the language of TANF, it is explicit that the government is denying recipients a genuine opportunity to obtain self-sufficiency by promoting marriage as well as through the denial of access to pursue a higher education. Both options foster dependency and do not allow the recipients to obtain the skills and training necessary to be competitive in the market place, hence TANF does not aid recipients in becoming economically independent. This denial of an opportunity for recipients to become self-sufficient members of society is problematic for many reasons. The most important being the fact that TANF contradicts its own mission statement. TANF states that is was created to assist families in obtaining self-sufficiency, this is in theory. In practice, through the grant of state power, eligibility criteria, sanction criteria, recipients loose the rights they had as citizens before entering the welfare system.
TANF states that is was created to assist families in obtaining self-sufficiency, this is in theory. In practice, through the grant of state power, eligibility criteria, sanction criteria, recipients loose the rights they had as citizens before entering the welfare system. The text of TANF is federal law, it dictates the lives of the recipients and denied rights once held by recipients, rights that were fought for and gained through the welfare rights movements of the 1960’s. Through the enactment of TANF, the federal entitlement to welfare that was created by FDR was abolished as well. Additionally, the states via the power granted to them by the federal government are allowed to deny the rights of citizens to recipients, such as reproductive freedom and vocational freedom, this means that TANF explicitly violates equal protection of the law.
TANF denies recipients equal opportunity, of equal citizenship, and equal protection of the laws. The government, through TANF, quasi-coerces recipients to positions of dependency: get married and become financially dependent on their husbands, and/or to become workers who are trapped into a low wage work force due to the denial of a higher education and/or adequate training that would have enhanced the recipients opportunity of self-sufficiency. The coercion of marriage and work is explicitly done to recipients in America; non-recipients do not get explicitly economically punished for choosing not to live society’s dominant ideal of the nuclear family structure. Recipients are denied equality through their treatment by the government versus non-recipients treatment by the government, meaning the loss of some of the recipient’s rights just by becoming recipients, they enter into sub-citizenship.
A Brief Historical Analysis of American welfare Policy: How We Got To TANF
Single motherhood, with the exception of widows, has been morally unacceptable and economically punishable since the beginning of the American welfare state. Later in the paper I will discuss this in greater length as I discuss “Mother’s pensions.” Stereotypes of moral preferences are exhibited in welfare legislation for numerous decades. Welfare had constantly violated the Constitutional liberties of recipients, Congress has attempted to legislate nuclear families as law, with economic sanction as punishment to those who do not conform to this social norm. A conservative coalition has launched attacks on welfare since its beginnings in 1935, and they won with the enactment of PRA by recruiting a bi-partisan coalition and stigmatizing public opinion of welfare recipients.
Conservative Coalitions and the Stigmatizing Framing of Recipients
The government, interests groups and businesses worked together and through a conservative movement and republican control of the government, to manipulate public opinion of the welfare system by the demonization of recipients through the portrayal of them as “welfare queens” and their “illegitimate children.” This is an example of an external preference, as Ronald Dworkin would note (I will discuss in great length later in the paper), that preference of the Republicans, being the nuclear family and work first, which manifested into bad policy, that is bad governing and I will illustrate why. Furthermore, this demonization of recipients creates a problem for mobilization due to the stigma created, and it also creates a barrier for people to truly understand the welfare system.
Stigmatization of the welfare system and its recipients shaped public opinion in American and eventually created bi-partisan support for welfare reform. Conservatives began this movement with the creation of the term “welfare queen” and since recipients have been labeled as “illegitimate families, lazy, promiscuous, immoral.” Furthermore, while the majority of recipients are white, Conservatives frame the attack on welfare as if most of the recipients are black or non-white. Granted, blacks and non-whites are disproportionately poor compared to their population size and the percentage of recipients is high versus their population sizes. However, this is due to lack of opportunity for advancement, lack of access to higher education. This stigmatization of the recipient oppresses the recipients due to the public opinion of the moral choices she made by reallocating funds that could help her to attempt to force her into dependency.
A Conservative group called the Heritage Foundation and how it influenced Bush’s policies on “reducing out of wedlock childbearing.”1 Reese discusses Charles Murray, who argues that “welfare should be abolished because it promotes unwed motherhood.”2 Wade Horn and Andrew Bush are also discussed, regarding their collaborated work, Father’s, Marriage, and Welfare Reform (2002), and how it urges that politicians stigmatize welfare and create policies which would give priority funding and bonuses to married couples. Religious ideology ultimately influenced and directed the concepts and values underlying the Conservative reformation of the American welfare system “Politicians emphasis on traditional ‘family values’ was linked to the rise of the Christian Right, which revitalized the Republican Party and shifted in rightward on social issues.”3
Federalism and American Welfare Policy
Upon examining the policy history of the American welfare system, the first issue is that welfare is a product of federalism, and TANF in particular grants the states more power over the structure of the system. Through TANF, the federal government gives the states the ability to impose moral based eligibility requirements. Restrictions placed on recipients by TANF are placed carefully in an implicit manner, because the government must respect the Constitution and cannot force labor of lifestyle (reproductive, relationship) demands on recipients explicitly. So the states and individual counties impose these morality based requirements which coerce recipients into certain personal relationships and jobs. For economic purposes, the effects of the “labor market,” and wages, welfare was turned from an “income maintenance program” to a “wage supplement.” This allows states to use eligibility criteria and sanctions in order to force women, through the enactment of TANF, into a low wage workforce and/or marriage and to attempt to control recipient fertility. Furthermore, TANF is partly funded by a federal block grant, and the federal government provides financial bonuses to states that lower recipient’s birth rates and abortion rates simultaneously by promoting abstinence and marriage.
Both the state and the federal government are denying recipients the full rights of citizenship hence are treating the recipients as sub-citizens. A historical analysis of eligibility and sanction criteria illustrates the government’s intrusion into the private lives and moral choices of recipients and their legal punishments through eligibility criteria and sanction criteria as well as through rules and regulations. Furthermore, the federal government granted the states the most freedom they’ve had with welfare since the New Deal through the enactment of TANF, allowing states to deny access to education, services, and healthcare.
Recipients are also denied equality amongst each other, through location of the recipient. There exists inequality between states; the rules in one state could not apply in the next. Family cap is an example of this, in some states, recipients are denied aid for additional children they bare while receiving assistance. In New York however, there is no family cap provision. There can even be differences within a given state, for example, the meager benefits one receives in NYC are nothing compared to the benefits a recipient in Westchester county receives. Sanctions and eligibility criteria punish single motherhood for the poor and force single mothers into a low wage workforce and denying them access to higher education. In essence, they are denying the option of single motherhood as economically feasible and legally protected.
Theoretical Framework: Using “External Preferences” to Analyze TANF Violation of Civil Rights
I am going to borrow terms from Ronald Dworkin’s writings, Liberalism and A Moral Reading of the Constitution, such as “external preferences,” “neutrality” and “the good life” to illustrate how the government has, through federalism, history, and the enactment of TANF, denied recipients the equal rights of citizenship and hence has violated their Constitutional rights. Furthermore, I will use Drowkin’s theories to explore how rights can be used as protection from the government’s legislated external preferences such as TANF. These welfare rights could be discovered in the Constitution by the court and upheld and protected. Furthermore, the Court can easily protect recipients through the equal protection clause, as I will illustrate.
In Liberalism, Dworkin argues there are defects in a “pure majoritarian process” that can be addressed by adding a “scheme of rights.” This scheme of rights ensures that individuals are “treated as equals” by the government.4 The government treats people as equals by acting “neutral to varying conceptions of the good life.”5 This in turn respects people’s “moral independence.” Additionally, the judicial branch plays an essential role in limiting majority rule through the use of judicial review and striking laws that violate the rights of individuals.
Dworkin is in favor of majoritarian democracy with rights which would limit and constrain ordinary law, Dworkin argues for the majoritarian process PLUS rights. In A Moral Reading, Dworkin distinguishes between the two types of laws produced by majoritarian rule: laws based on external and laws based on personal preferences. Personal preferences refer to decisions that are made based on personal needs and interests. External preferences are “preferences people have about what others shall do or have.”6 The democratic majoriratian process sometimes mixes in external preferences, some of which can be harmful to a minority’s rights (or laws containing “animus”).
Civil Rights are necessary (scheme of rights) to provide minorities with protection by ensuring that strong external preferences are removed from the majoritarian political institutions. Dworkin argues that without rights, the majoritarian process and external and personal preferences would lead to “in-egalitarian results,” which is the opposite of the liberal’s egalitarian intentions. Rights, for the liberal, ensure that the government treats people as equals. Treating people as equals is the “idea that the government has to treat all individuals with equal concern and respect.”7 This requires government to be neutral to differing conceptions of “the good life”.The good life is each “individual’s conception of what gives value to life.”8 Neutrality would mean that the government would not value one version of the “good life” over another. That would ensure the government treated peoples’ values equally and treated individuals as morally independent. This gives people equal status as moral individuals. This ensures that when the majority has strong external preferences, that Congress, for example, would not pass a law that reflects the majority’s external preferences and violate the rights (or good life)of minorities. Based on external moral preferences (animus against poor single mothers), recipients’ are denied this same right (or equal opportunity) as non-recipients. Dworkin states that all though external preferences are problematic, we can’t remove ALL of them from the political process. When we vote for Congress we are voting on our external preferences.
In Liberalism, Dworkin notes the United States is committed to guaranteeing the government treats citizens with “equal respect and concern.” For Liberals, this “scheme of rights” is the Bill of Rights plus the 13th and 14th Amendments. He goes into the example of the Equal Protection clause and how it was written when homosexuality and gender were not issues. Yet, because of the generality of the language used in the Equal Protection Clause (“equal protection of the laws”), it was left open for future interpretation to fit any issue where equality was being denied. Rights, Dworkin argues, function as “Trump Cards” that citizens can use if the majority’s external preferences are violating a minority’s rights. Rights are justified as a necessity because “they protect equal concern and respect.”9 Liberals argue that rights are justified because they improve “political morality”.
All three branches have important functions in ensuring rights are upheld and granted. Dworkin notes that one particular branch plays a role of significant importance when ensuring our rights: the judiciary. In A Moral Reading, Dworkin notes that judicial review is a check on the majoritarian system. Judicial review ensures that civil liberties are not violated or inexcusably compromised. Depending on the Justice’s interpretation or reading of the Constitution, rights are expanded, denied, or protected. How justices interpret the Constitution can grant or deny rights.
In A Moral Reading, Dworkin notes our rights (or protection from the government) come from the Bill of rights and the 13th and 14th Amendments. These rights were written using abstract moral language which restrains governments’ power. He uses the example of Equal Protection of the laws to illustrate that our rights are “general political principles.” Taking into account precedent, political and legal history and the framers intention, Justices are left a broad scope for judicial interpretation. He notes Brown v. Board of Education as an example of justices performing a moral reading of the Constitution. It was a Moral reading because the Court recognized that segregation is inconsistent with the 14th Amendment (implicitly overturning Plessey v. Ferguson). Justices can now use judicial review to recognize that TANF denial of recipients Constitutional rights violates the 14th Amendments Equal Protection Clause. Drowkin’s theories to explore how rights can be used as protection from the government’s legislated external preferences such as TANF. These welfare rights could be discovered in the Constitution by the court and upheld and protected. Furthermore, the Court can easily protect recipients through the equal protection clause, as Mink has argued and as I will illustrate.
TANF: A Denial of Constitutional Rights/Civil Liberties
The “Personal Responsibility Act” of 1996 included TANF, which forced recipients to work in low wage jobs, receive minimal educational training, and maintain financial connections with biological fathers. Furthermore, the federal government gave the states more control over the system through replacing individual entitlement to welfare with federal block grants. Additionally, with TANF, there is a five year lifetime limit for recipients to be eligible for assistance. As Dworkin would note, TANF is an example of multiple external preferences legislated by the government. These external preferences manifest as the legal denial of equal citizenship, through legislated morally based preferences that impose one version of the good life on all citizens, and does not respect the differing conceptions of the good life as equal. By denying recipients the access to services and an education based on their private moral choices to be single mothers, through the enactment of TANF, the government is imposing conservative moral preferences of individuals. The government has failed to “act neutrally”, and through and the enactment of TANF, legislated “external preferences.” The government failed to respect varying conceptions of “the good life” by denying single mothers a genuine opportunity for self sufficiency. This in turn denied recipients the equal rights of citizenship and hence has violated their Constitutional rights.
It is essential to understand that the right to welfare, as Mink notes, is an essential component of reproductive freedom and for vocational choice for single mother recipients. Through TANF’s work first policy, denial of higher education, promotion of marriage, and family cap policies, these freedoms are denied by the welfare system. Through a right to assistance though, a woman could in theory be independent, until the system is altered, it will be just that, a theoretical right. The right to welfare if administered properly (the system and the right) would allow for the true exercise of reproductive and vocational freedom, but presently, the system denies these rights to recipients. Access to higher education would mean the right to have the hours one spends in a four year institution counted as part of the recipients 35 hour a week work requirement. Without an adequate education, recipients will cycle on and off of welfare and remain in poverty, a condition that will affect all American taxpayers and the quality of our society. Furthermore, the right to welfare is essential in protecting recipients from the strict and moral based eligibility and sanction criteria of the state and federal governments.
Recipients’ Constitutional rights such as reproductive freedom, vocational freedom, and the right to privacy are denied by TANF. This deprives a recipient of equal protection of the law; hence, recipients and their dependents are denied basic citizenship rights. If women’s work in the home were recognized as work credited by the 35 hour work requirement, women would be closer to gender equality through the economic recognition of care giving for their children. If TANF included a federal provision which also protected mother’s rights to receive a bachelors education, as part of approved educational or vocational training, this would also lead to real self sufficiency of recipients when they reach their federal time limits.
In the book When Welfare Dissaperas: The Case for Economic Human Rights, Kenneth J. Neubeck discuses economic human rights, and analyzes the history of welare policy in the United States. Neubeck illustrates why single mother recipients have particular dificullty staying off of or avioiding public assistance which is through systemic barriers such as a lack of access to education and job trainning skills that woud allow singe mothers to be more competitive in the job market and get out of poverty. “PROWRA reflects what some have called the ‘new paternalism.’ The act subtly communicates a strongdistrust of–if not disdain for–impovershed lone mothers even as it spells out measures to control them.”10 Furthermore, Neubeck goes on to note that “U.S. welfare policy has reflected and, in many ways, has reinforced society wide systems of class, gender, and racial inequallity.”11
Neubeck discusses the difficulty of single mothers and uses statistics of those on TANF, exiting, and the poverty rate to illustrate the harmful effects of TANF. Neubeck uses a human rights framework as a claim for welfare rights in the United States. He discusses “invisible barriers” such as mental illness and domestic violence thatare not adequately addressed by the system.The reason that many women remain in poverty, after all, is because they lack the skills, training, and resources to obtain a good job, any job in some cases, and some don’t even have the ability to travel to appointments and training due to transportation access as well as safe and secure child care access.
I refer to Neubeck to illustrate that the right to welfare should encompass the human/economic rights to food/from hunger, to a job or assistance, a right to shelter, a right, although Neubeck states “welfare has never been treated as a right”12 which is true, it was an entitlement, but if the agrument for a right to welfare was framed as esential to fulfiling the human rights of American citizens who were in need, then we could be closer to equality between recipients and non recipients citizen status.
TANF: Disabling American Citizenship for Recipients
Through the enactment of TANF, the government denies recipients some of the fundamental rights that non-recipient American citizens enjoy. Furthermore, by treating recipients as legal and social sub-citizens, the government is implicitly legalizing racial and class-based hierarchies as well as the legal perpetuation of male dominance. Mink discusses in great depth the argument that TANF creates sub-citizenship through its coercion of recipients and denial of citizenship based rights such as reproductive and vocational freedom. Al though she mainly advocates a poor woman’s right to be a homemaker, and advocates economic recognition of care-taking, I rely on her analysis of recipient citizenship status as a denial of equal citizenship as support for my argument.
Recipients are denied equality through their treatment by the government versus non-recipients treatment by the government, meaning the loss of some of the recipient’s rights just by becoming recipients, they enter into sub-citizenship. The coercion of marriage and work is explicitly done to recipients in America; non-recipients do not get economically punished for choosing not to live society’s dominant ideal of the nuclear family structure. A right to obtain higher education is denied by the states, based on the states’ criteria of what constitutes an approved work activity. ” In NYC for example, while non-recipients who receive Pell and TAP are allowed to go to school, recipients who receive Federal Pell and state TAP are told that they cannot go to school, because welfare doesn’t recognize their education as an approved work activity. Some recipients don’t even have the ability to travel to appointments and training due to transportation access as well as safe and secure child care access. They need the right to safe and secure childcare and the right to adequate transportation if none is available in order to even comply let alone exercise true vocational freedom.
TANF: Married v Unmarried Recipients of Social Services
Single motherhood, with the exception of widows, has been and still is morally regarded as unacceptable and economically punishable. A conservative coalition has launched attacks on welfare since its beginnings in 1935, and they won with the enactment of TANF. TANF promotes a model of wage-earning in the nuclear family as envisaged by conservative policy as the foundation of a healthy society” (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996). By promoting marriage through the use of TANF funds, as opposed to creating programs that could aid single mothers, Congress and the states have chosen to legally quasi-coerce recipients into positions of dependency. Non-conformity to this patriarchal social norm, being a single mother, results in an economic sanction. If women wanted to be stay at home mothers they had to remain married. If they wanted to be single mothers, they are punished with work outside of the home. One of the stated objectives of TANF is:
“to end dependence by promoting marriage. Many policy-makers want to devote more public resources to this goal, even if it requires cutting spending on cash benefits, child care, or job training. Some states, such as West Virginia, already use their funds to provide a special bonus to couples on public assistance who get married. In December 2001, more than fifty state legislators asked Congress to divert funds from existing programs into marriage education and incentive policies, earmarking dollars to encourage welfare recipients to marry and giving bonus money to states that increase marriage rates. On February 26, 2002, President Bush called for spending up to $300 million a year to promote marriage among poor people.” 13
Recipients in different states, through TANF, a federal policy, are given different benefits at different levels, access, and, eligibility and sanction criteria. TANF explicitly promotes marriage as we have seen. But it also granted the states wide discretion in how they choose to implement their federal block grants, how they choose to allocate funds and meet the goals of the federal government. With financial bonuses to states who meet goals related to abstinence, out of wedlock births and abortions, some states have chosen to allocate more funds on marriage promotion and abstinence, hence more money on influencing recipients to exercise their right to privacy in a certain conservative manner, or regulating privacy, regulating the private moral choices of recipients, violating their Constitutional rights as equal citizens to enjoy and exercise the right to privacy.
States receive cash bonuses from the federal government when they reduce or keep down out of wedlock births, abortion rates. “PRWORA authorized funds for marriage counseling among poor couples and abstinence education among teens, despite little effectiveness of these programs…Congress also offers states and illegitimacy bonus: 20 million for each of the top five states in reducing out of wedlock birth rates without raising the abortion rate, ”14 Congress is regulating morality through the enactment of TANF, restoring the state/local moral regime that ruled recipients through the text and policy goals and design of TANF, which abolished the federal entitlement to welfare.
Dworkin’s works provide an analytic framework to illustrate that through the enactment of TANF, the government legislated unconstitutional moral preferences. The text of TANF illustrates the moral based external preferences of the federal government and allows the states wide discretion to impose these external preferences as eligibility, bonus, and sanction criteria on recipients who do or do not comply or adhere to these standards. Authors Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre discuss the failure of marriage promotion to impact the marriage rate of recipients, the harm that “marriage bonus” would actually impose, as well as the necessity of these programs versus other essential TANF programs.
“There is little evidence that [marriage promotion] policies would in fact increase marriage rates or reduce poverty among children. Indeed, the main effect of marriage bonuses would probably be to impose a “non-marriage” penalty that would have a particularly negative impact on African-American children, who are significantly less likely to live with married parents than either whites or Hispanics…Public policies should not penalize marriage. Neither should they provide an economic bonus or financial incentive to individuals to marry, especially at the cost of lowering the resources available to children living with single mothers. Such a diversion of resources from public assistance programs penalizes the children of unmarried parents without guaranteeing good outcomes for the children of people who are married.”
The authors of this publication are aware of the dangers of associating marriage with poverty. Granted, two incomes are better than one when dealing with poor families, but marriage isn’t going to make two poor people rich because they married, it will not solve the issue of poverty, because being unmarried is not a cause of poverty.
“In 2000, about 38% of all poor young children lived in two-parent homes These families have been largely overlooked in the debates over anti-poverty programs and marriage. Indeed, the campaign to increase marriage has overlooked one of the most important public policy issues facing the United States: the growing economic gap between parents, whether married or unmarried, and non-parents.”15
We cannot believe as a society that being unmarried is a large factor that effects poverty rates for recipients. They might be a little less poor with an extra income, but nevertheless, poor. Two individuals making minimum wage will still be poor whether they are married or not, and although two incomes are better than one, their combined incomes would still be below the poverty level. Poverty among children is not confined to single-parent families.
Marriage is a reinforcement of a position of dependency for recipients. TANFs’ diversion of funds from programs that would aid single mothers to programs that would reinforce a dependent position in women represents a “quasi-coercion” of recipients into positions of dependency.
This unlawfully imposes a standard of dependence on women, TANF uphold marriage as the highest moral standard. Meaning, women who do not meet the standard of being married or staying married were economically punished by not being eligible for marriage bonuses and having their funds that would help them be independent, such as child care, redistributed to marriage promotion. Meaning the government is replacing programs that would make women economically self-sufficient and independent such as low cost child care with services which promote dependence, since marriage won’t alleviate many women’s poverty and in marriage, they are expected to rely upon their husbands for money.
In this system, the woman is left in an intersection of economic dependence. A dependence for food, childcare, housing and other monetary needs such as a decent minimum wage. The cost of living has risen so that the single mother is placed in a position of dependence, either on “the man” or “a man” or many men. Yes women have the right to an “equal opportunity” in theory, but in practice, American society does not allow single mother autonomy. Women are, as Francis Wright noted, still the ultimate subordinate beings in society, but I’d say now a days that poor single mothers are definitely the most oppressed group in America. As she noted, and evidence such as the 1996 TANF act suggests, it pleases men that women are dependent.
Recipients who may have lost a husband, been abused in some way, had a husband who left them, or was just very poor even with her husband’s minimal income, or never was even able to get married because he didn’t want to. And then in society, comes to welfare with children, there is a stigma toward that woman and her children if they don’t live up to that standard, and not by choice perhaps. What if a woman is single not be choice? But what would be wrong with women making the individual private moral choice to be single mothers as opposed to being married? It would be breaking systems of patriarchy that have been in place since almost the beginning of time, allowing recipients more autonomy and affording women greater rights. But by not providing services such as child care, which is necessary for a single mother to go to work, then recipients are explicitly being denied equal access to resources.
Recipients have their children’s fathers forced into their children’s’ lives hence the recipients life, if not through marriage promotion, than through child-support enforcement, and invades recipients right to privacy. Congress is demanding the return of the father to the family, hence forcing recipients into a position of dependency on a man or her child(ren)s’ father as, opposed to aiding the mother in obtaining the means to be self-sufficient economically. Congress denies the recipient the economic security to remain free of this dependency. Additionally, Congress denies recipients the option to choose single mother hood if recipients desired to and/or had to. Congress made a bi-partisan decision to deny poor single mothers the safety net they once had before the enactment of TANF. If you were poor, you would have to depend on a man, “As we shall see, since 1967 both democrats and republicans have insisted that fathers return, at least to financial, if not marital, family headship.”16
Since welfare’s beginning, the government has used morality based eligibility and sanction criteria to create, uphold, and perpetuate a distinction of widows as worthy for public assistance and unmarried single mothers as unworthy, using legislated morality based external preferences to distribute aid to the needy with preference to married women. Mink and Reese’s respectively provide historical analysis of morality based eligibility criteria and morality based sanction criteria (man in the home penalties) to illustrate the discrimination against unmarried single mothers.
Mother’s pension” was the first form of government-run welfare offered in America, and it was controlled and funded by the states. “Mother’s pension” allowed a woman to stay at home and raise her children; the government recognized motherhood as a job, if the recipient was a white widowed woman. Reese notes that when Mother’s Pensions were first enacted, they were targeted to poor white widows, with the maternalist idea that mothers should be compensated for the work of child-raising, because mothers would “raise good citizens.”17 Social Security was created to ensure that white widows would earn enough as homemakers to continue the job of raising good citizens. As Mink discusses, the idea that these women were single mothers through no fault of their own, their moral choices to marry, was what gave them moral preference over other single mothers. Widows were “worthy” of assistance and the opportunity to be stay at home mothers, yet unmarried women were thought of as immoral and punished with work outside the home to instill “moral values.”
Recipients were required to endure several intrusions into their private sexual life and were given strict moral guidelines of how to behave. Eligibility criteria consisted of “suitable home” and “fit mother” standards to deny assistance, “and such policies reinforced the marriage ethic-the expectation that women should get and stay married.”18 President Roosevelt created the American welfare system through his aggressive passage of the New Deal; he created Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), which is a system that is federally funded, a product of federalism. However, the states retained many of their rights to implement welfare as they saw fit, and Congress ensured that any law attempting to federally regulate welfare was not enacted. Both Mink and Reese note the rise in caseloads once ADC allowed for more recipients who were non-white and/or unmarried to receive welfare.
Social security still allows (barely, but it still does allow) a single widow to be a stay at home mother if she chooses or has to be. But poor women are “compelled” by the government, as Mink notes, to work outside the home by not having their work in the home economically recognized. The fact that SSI is still very generous when compared to welfare benefits illustrates the government’s preference to provide subsistence assistance for “worthy” single mothers, or widows. TANF recommends that poor women who are divorced and unmarried either work first to support their families or find husbands if they want to be stay at home mothers. Mink illustrate how recipients have to work outside of home for EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) yet widows do not have to for IRA (Independent Retirement Account). Retirement is an acknowledgement of a life time of work, meaning middle class stay at home mothers are being economically compensated for their work in the home. Yet recipients have to work outside of the home to receive their tax credit. Mink notes that most single mothers will choose to work outside of their homes, but the issue she has with PRA is the “coercion” of poor single women: “why should poor single mothers,–and only poor single mothers—be forced by law to work outside of the home?”19
Mink highlights differences in Congressional policy for women of different classes, races, sexualities and marital statuses. Congress made it possible (as welfare did in the 30’s) for the white middle class married women to stay at home through the creation of the IRA, which “are an untaxed portion of earned income,” and through TANF, at the same time, denied poor women the right to be homemakers and compel poor single mothers to work outside of their homes. Congress used their own standards to determine the legal value of homemaking based on skin color and class, and strengthened divisions, in society and in the eyes of the law, between women. The IRA reinforces the Conservative ideology that dominated the government during the Mother’s Pension and the creation of SSI.
There is no economic punishment for women who are not married and are non-recipients of TANF. This illustrates the differences in rules and penalties for recipient and non-recipients of TANF. An example of this is in the work place, it would be discrimination to explicitly pay one person more than another solely on the basis of marital status, give bonuses to married employees simply because of their marital status, or financially incentivize and promote marriage at work. The unmarried or never married employees would state that bonuses on the basis of marriage status were not based on merit or need, theses employees did nothing grand for the company by being married, but rather the private moral choices of some employees were being financially rewarded due to the external preferences of the bosses. Yet it is ok to redistribute funds for marriage promotion?
There is distinction in what rules apply to married and unmarried recipients, unmarried recipients being denied access to certain benefits based on this status. There is also a distinction between recipients and non-recipients, because recipients Constitutional rights to privacy and reproductive freedom are being violated. Congress believes any marriage is a good marriage, and legislated this preference through the funding of marriage promotion, which denies recipients the equal protection of the law as citizens. The “quasi-coercion” of recipients to become married is an example of the unequal citizenship status between recipients and non-recipients. Not to say that marriage is not promoted to both recipients and non-recipients, but in the case of recipients, money is being taken away from recipients benefits such as individual cash benefits and child care, to funnel into marriage promotion. Recipient’s resources are reallocated to and wasted by being funneled into marriage promotion. TANF is an example of legislated “new paternalism,” which uses the welfare system to further the agenda of Conservatives by oppressing predominantly female recipients, merely examining the first words of Congress’ finding is section 101 illustrates this oppression:
“The Congress makes the following findings: (1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children, (3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.”20
In 251 pages, this is the first things stated after the content, and as Dworkin would note, this is an example of a legislated external preference. The government was not acting neutrally, hence it violates the rights of recipients by not respecting their conception of the good life and their moral independence. It is as if the government and society are morally punishing alternative families because they do not consist of the same nuclear-male dominated households which perpetuate patriarchy. The private nuclear family life is just, after all, as Frederick Engels notes a model of the lager social hierarchy, patriarchy is reinforced through systems in public and private life, in which the man dominates the women and children.
Many stable homes for children are provided by single parents, extended family, as well as homosexual couples who cannot get legally married. As Dworkin would note, TANF sets a standard in the law of what is best for society, implying that single mother hood or alternative families are not sufficient. This is a manifestation of a legislated external preference, denying non-nuclear families the same respect and consideration as nuclear families, this violates the moral independence of the recipients by not respecting their version of the good life, and the government is not acting neutral between Conservative and Liberal conceptions of the good life. Marriage is not a solution to poverty.
If TANF created a stay-at-home income for women, through welfare grants, during the young years of a child’s life before they start school, this would allow poor women to be stay at home mothers for at least a few years to raise their own children without having to get married to be stay at home mothers. Another alternative to marriage promotion would be more generous shelter benefits/low income housing for single mothers to allow them to be independent. This would respect single motherhood as a lifestyle and a choice and allow independence for them in practice through resources, as opposed to diverting funds from TANF to impose positions of dependency.
TANF: Barriers to Recipients’ Access to Higher Education
Many individual states and localities choose policies that promote “work first” and ultimately believe that any job, low-wage, temporary, insecure, is a good job. Many states do not include four year colleges as an eligible work activity, and so through the use of sanctions for noncompliance, welfare agencies deny recipients the opportunity to go to school by also making these hours ineligible for the child care that is subsidized during the hours of the work activity to be used toward the classes. Despite evidence that women who obtain a higher education have an almost 100% rate of remaining off of public assistance, the numbers of recipients in college has dropped, as noted by authors Ellen Reese and Felicia Kornbluh. This is due to the fact that local welfare agencies promote work as opposed to long term economic security and authentic self-sufficiency.
Through the federal and state government’s emphasis of promoting and funding of work first, they have explicitly limited recipient’s access to necessary educational training, hence limited recipients marketability. This is an example of unequal citizenship between recipients and non-recipients. Further issues of unequal citizenship arise between recipients in different states because of the differing implementations of TANF and various definitions of what constitutes a work activity. Because welfare is a product of federalism, the states have had broad discretion over eligibility and sanction requirements, and the rules that it requires for recipients to remain eligible for assistance.
Through the promotion and implementation of work first over higher education, TANF has denied broad and equal access to higher education, which has denied recipients the opportunity to become self-sufficient and independent. I examine the article Welfare Reform and Enrollment in Postsecondary Education to examine how TANF has affected educational rates of recipients. A low wage job is insecure for a single mother headed family, offering no real skills and making the single mother no more marketable. In contrast, a degree, higher education, offers economic security by providing recipients marketable skills. Vivyan Adair is a professor who was a former welfare recipient, and she writes an article which discusses the fight to have work study counted toward TANF work activity. There is no Federal definition of what constitutes a work activity/vocational training. The federal government imposes numbers that the states must meet to receive funding, such as participation rates in a work activity. Al though the federal government imposes on the states that only a small percentage of its caseload can be receiving educational training g at a time; states have ways to get around these requirements, as discussed below.
Al though TANF grants the states broad discretion when implementing TANF, “TANF discourages states from allowing welfare recipients to participate in education and training programs,”21 Furthermore, only “30%” of a state’s caseload can count education as a work activity for a “12 month period.” This limits a recipient’s ability to higher education explicitly, and further limits a state’s ability to count education as a work activity for a greater number of recipients. A right to obtain higher education if one can obtain it through financial aid is also denied by the states through there criteria of what constitutes “educational training.” Many states do not include four year colleges as an eligible work activity, and so through the use of sanctions for noncompliance, welfare agencies deny recipients the opportunity to go to school by also making these hours ineligible for the child care that is subsidized during the hours of the work activity to be used toward the classes.
In the article State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Education under TANF, Pamela Friedman observes what effect welfare reform has had on recipient’s ability to obtain and maintain jobs which would support themselves and their families. While it was discovered that more people were working, it was also discovered that they were working in low wage jobs, with few if any skills, hence limited opportunity, if any, for growth. This article links higher education to the real success of welfare reform, allowing people to leave and stay off of TANF. This article discusses how many states implemented their welfare to work programs, focusing on “basic adult education” and “job search,” approaches that the author notes were unsuccessful in regard to recipients obtaining employment opportunities that would lead to self-sufficiency.
“A state has broad discretion in defining what it means to be “engaged in work” for purposes of this requirement and a state can choose to count participation in postsecondary education (or other education or training activities) as being engaged in work for purposes of the 24-month requirement,” 22 Through the “use of state maintenance effort funds” states can aid in the funding on recipients during their time in a four year college. (In order to get around time limits, have this activity count within the time frame). “Data on state policies indicate that there are 22 states with policies allowing participation in postsecondary degree programs for longer than the 12 months countable as work under federal law.”23
If we adopted a policy along the lines of Illinois welfare policy, reform could be successful, “In 1999, a number of states took legislative or executive action to increase access to postsecondary education and training. Illinois has an especially innovative policy: the state “stops the clock” for purposes of TANF time limits while a TANF recipient is a full-time postsecondary degree student and requires no other work activity, provided the recipient maintains at least a 2.5 grade point average.”24 Policies like this would enable recipients to truly successes and to maintain self-sufficiency when leaving the roles, avoiding getting back on them. This article used statistical evidence to illustrate that while employment rose and rolls declined, many recipients were employed in jobs that kept them below the federal poverty level as well as a lack of employer based services such as health insurance. “A recent study of a national sample of women who had left welfare found that among those who were employed, wages averaged $6.61, above the minimum wage but at only the 20th percentile of wages for all workers. Only 23% of the employed former recipients were receiving employer-provided health insurance. For employed TANF recipients, average earnings in 1998 were $553 a month.”25
States with success stories after implementing programs focusing on educational attainment “The recent, very impressive results from the Portland, Oregon site of the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS) confirm earlier research findings–the most effective welfare-to-work programs are those that have a central focus on employment, but also make substantial use of education and training as a tool for helping recipients become employable and find better jobs.
Program.”26 Areas such as Florida, California, Portland, and Baltimore have enacted successful welfare to work programs. Statistical evidence illustrates the benefits of attaining a higher education:
“An analysis of the labor market returns for postsecondary education found that women with associate degrees earn between 19-23% more than other women, even after controlling for differences in who enrolls in college. The same study, which analyzed nearly twenty years of longitudinal data while attempting to adjust for differences in ability and family background, found that women who obtained a bachelor’s degree earned 28-33% more than their peers. Other studies have found that each year of postsecondary education increases earnings by 6-12%.20 In addition, studies that have tracked welfare recipients who completed two or four-year degrees have found that about 90% of these graduates leave welfare and earn far more than other recipients.”27
Statistical evidence for educational attainment and higher wages, leaving poverty, staying off of welfare is further verified, “Census data also show a strong relationship between educational attainment, earnings, and the likelihood of being unemployed or out of the labor market.”28
“While Congress enacted a specific list of what counts as being ‘engaged in work’ for purposes of participation rates, Congress expressly said that for purposes of the 24-month requirement, an individual must be engaged in work ‘as defined by the state.’ This was not a technicality in drafting; it was broadly recognized that states would have extensive discretion in defining the contents of the 24-month work requirements… While a state’s definition of being ‘engaged in work’ must be within the bounds of reason, inclusion of work-preparation activities such as job search, job readiness, education and training can all be considered within the permissible activities that a state could include. Thus, there is no reason why the 24-month requirements need be a barrier to allowing access to postsecondary education in a state’s TANF program.”29
“A state may, unless otherwise prohibited by the law, spend TANF funds in any manner reasonably calculated to accomplish the purpose of the law. One purpose of the law is to provide assistance to needy families; another purpose is to end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work and marriage. Thus, any of the above postsecondary education related costs could be viewed as reasonably calculated to accomplish a purpose of TANF for members of needy families.”30
Furthermore, MOE funds can be used by states to aid in families achieving self-sufficiency. “Thus, it is clear that a state may choose to use TANF or MOE funds in support of postsecondary education if it wishes to do so.”31 This further illustrates that the states are choosing to limit recipient access to higher education, even beyond what TANF requires.
“There are two principal work and participation requirements under TANF: federal participation rates (discussed below) and the 24-month requirement. While federal participation rate requirements are very specific as to what counts as participation and the consequences of a state’s failure to meet the rates, the 24-month requirement was written to allow very broad state discretion. It is up to each state to determine what counts as being “engaged in work” and a state can count participation in postsecondary education as being engaged in work for purposes of the 24-month requirement.”32
So, although TANF imposes limits on the states autonomy when implementing TANF, it never the less allows the states ways to grant recipients access to higher education. Furthermore, states can use measures such as “state waivers” to grant recipients access to higher education. “HHS says that a state’s waiver demonstration will be considered to have a “work participation component” if the demonstration includes provisions that directly correspond to the work policies in Section 407 of the TANF statute.”33 However, only “some states will be able to count postsecondary education toward participation rates to a greater extent, but only if the state asserts inconsistencies based on continuing a waiver until its expiration, and only if the state files the necessary certification with HHS.”34
This is a great start, a solution to the problem at the moment and allowing people more access now, yet this is not ideal. All recipients in every state need an equal right to be recognized to obtain/access higher education., we need a liberal federal standard. The article further discusses how states can use a “caseload reduction credit” to fund access to higher education for TANF recipients. Ultimately however, I disagree that we should use funding for job training programs, I advocate we focus solely on advocating funds in a manner which would allow recipients access to higher education. This focus, I believe, will lead to greater marketability of the recipients, hence an even greater opportunity for self-sufficiency.
This unequal access to higher education in different states manifests in numerous types of unequal citizenship between different groups of people. The first type of unequal citizenship exists between recipients and non-recipients of public assistance. Recipients are forced to revoke their financial aid and the ability to go to college where as non-recipients are not penalized by their employers for going to school (that would be discrimination). There are numerous recipients in a given state who are eligible for financial aid and cannot go to school because of TANF. All the while, non-recipients who receive aid can go to school without anyone telling them that their education doesn’t count/restricting their access with financial penalties. People on SSI or unemployment, for example, are not told that in order to receive their benefits, they must drop out of school.
TANF produces unequal access to higher education in different states due to the broad control given to the states to implement welfare to work policies. Differences in the state’s promotion of work first/implementation of welfare to work programs, illustrate the unequal citizenship between recipients in different states across the country and also between recipients within a state. Because resources are used to promote work first and insufficient vocational training programs, they are diverted from childcare that could allow for more recipients to pursue a higher education. Though the denial of access to higher education which would allow single mothers to earn a wage that would support her family, she is denied the option of being a self-sufficient single mother and supporting her family on her income. She gives up stay at home motherhood in an attempt to be a provider in a low wage job and go to school to get a better job. Due to this dilemma, not only must she forfeit the option of being a stay at home mother, she also has to accept that with current TANF policy, she will never be an adequate economic provider for her family. “Not surprisingly, given their low skills and educational levels, many welfare recipients fare poorly in the labor market.”35 This is proof that through the denial of higher education, the opportunity to obtain marketable skills, predominantly single mothers recipients are being kept in a certain position in the labor market.
TANF policies promote a system of patriarchy, or “new paternalism,” focusing explicitly on the goal of raising marriage rates and curbing out of wedlock births, promoting the nuclear dominant American family type which denies single mothers the opportunity to become self-sufficient as single mothers. Additionally, while TANF claims that the key to self-sufficiency is employment, a low wage job does not produce self-sufficiency. True self-sufficiency would come with the recipients gaining marketable skills to be marketable in the labor force, which are currently gained through post-secondary education. Recipients who are merely thrown into the labor force with no or little skill sets become extremely dependent on will of employer, and this leaves room for oppression, harassment, and exploitation by the employer.
If recipients attempt to deviate from this “New Paternalism” by becoming single mothers, then they are economically disenfranchised and forced to forfeit raising their children to work in the labor market. If women’s work in the home were recognized as work credited by the 35 hour work requirement, women would be closer to gender equality through the economic recognition of care giving for their children. In addition, if recipients were granted the opportunity to attend a four-year college, they would have opportunity to become self-sufficient. States can use surplus TANF funds to get around federal guidelines and to promote self sufficiency by providing access to higher education.
The government is limiting vocational freedom by denying higher education through the promotion of work-first. It is a common fact that people utilize higher education as a means to get out of poverty and/or climb the social/economic ladder, so the government is basically saying, “you’re too poor to ever be a doctor, the most you will and can ever be is a medical assistant, because that is all we will assist you in being.” This not only denies recipients the right to choose a career, it denies them the opportunity to gain skills necessary in today’s marketplace.
Conclusion
Both democrats and republicans held certain negative beliefs about welfare recipients, and through the enactment of TANF, Congress made a bi-partisan choice to restrict single mother headed families’ access to welfare. As TANF states explicitly in its first page, and as Mink discusses, TANF was created to promote marriage and work (outside the home), as opposed to providing assistance to needy single mothers. Being on welfare, recipients are not given the right to choose a partnership or to choose not to be in one, the right to reproductive freedom and a right to privacy. TANF inevitably makes all decisions for the recipient, and falsely bases their poverty on “poor moral choices,” hence legally punishes recipients by denying them an opportunity out of this poverty by denying recipients the entitlement or right to welfare. Poor women in need of welfare are legally susceptible to moral interrogation and denied full citizenship rights, this takes away this groups full equal status in the eyes of the law. This makes recipients legally sub citizens when compared to non-recipients, and rights are denied on the basis of TANF recipient status. The enactment of TANF is a way to slowly end welfare, and in its place would be private charity and social security, marriage promotion, and low-wage work, options that will not help poor single families become self-sufficient.
Next semester, I am going to interview recipients, experts on welfare policy, and politicians to illustrate what being on TANF is like, what a better policy would look like, and illustrate how some politicians are constrained as political actors while others are advocating the measures taken in TANF. I will also be doing more statistical research for marriage rates and funding for marriage promotion. I will also be doing more research on recipients access to higher education and how TANF is a barrier to this access. Through the interviews of recipients, I want to illustrate the goals, choices, and experiences that being on TANF create/enhance/destroy. I am also going to do more research on the welfare rights movement as I conclude the honors thesis advocating that we start a new welfare rights movement.
Bibliography
Books
Dworkin, Ronald. A Moral Reading of the Constitution 1996
Dworkin, Ronald. Liberalism 1985
Mink, Gwendolyn. Welfare’s End. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Neubeck, Kenneth: When Welfare Disappears: The Case for Economic Human Rights Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, New York; 2006
Articles
Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy By Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre (A Discussion Paper from the Council on Contemporary Families, Prepared for the Fifth Annual CCF Confrence, April 26-28, 2002.) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/marriage/etc/poverty.html#
Workforce Development Series: Built to Last: Why Skills Matter for Long Run Success in Welfare Reform By Karin Martinson and Julie Strawn April 2003 Brief No. 1
Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 http://s242739747.onlinehome.us/publications/state_opportunities_to_provide_access.pdf
1 Reese, Ellen: Backlash against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present University of California Press, 2005 Page 160
2 Reese, Ellen: Backlash against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present University of California Press, 2005 Page 158
3 Reese, Ellen: Backlash against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present University of California Press, 2005 Page 145
4 Dworkin, Ronald. Liberalism 1985 Page 190
5 Dworkin, Ronald. Liberalism 1985 Page 191
6 Dworkin, Ronald. Liberalism 1985 Page 196
7 Dworkin, Ronald. Liberalism 1985 Page 190
8 Dworkin, Ronald. Liberalism 1985 Page 191
9 Dworkin, Ronald. Liberalism 1985 Page 198
10 Neubeck, Kenneth: When Welfare Disappears: The Case for Economic Human Rights Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, New York; 2006 Page 31
11 Neubeck, Kenneth: When Welfare Disappears: The Case for Economic Human Rights Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, New York; 2006 Page 32
12 Neubeck, Kenneth: When Welfare Disappears: The Case for Economic Human Rights Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, New York; 2006 Page 35
13 Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy By Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre (A Discussion Paper from the Council on Contemporary Families, Prepared for the Fifth Annual CCF Confrence, April 26-28, 2002.)
14 Reese, Ellen: Backlash against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present University of California Press, 2005 Page 18
15 Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy By Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre (A Discussion Paper from the Council on Contemporary Families, Prepared for the Fifth Annual CCF Confrence, April 26-28, 2002.)
16 Mink, Gwendolyn. Welfare’s End. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998 page 5
17 Reese, Ellen: Backlash against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present University of California Press, 2005 page 22
18 Reese, Ellen: Backlash against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present University of California Press, 2005page 23
19 Mink, Gwendolyn. Welfare’s End. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998 page 28
20 Text of TANF
21 Workforce Development Series: Built to Last: Why Skills Matter for Long Run Success in Welfare Reform By Karin Martinson and Julie Strawn April 2003 Brief No. 1
22 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 page 5
23 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 7
24 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 7
25 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 9
26 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Pages 12-13
27 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Pages 13-14
28 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 14
29 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 17
30 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 15
31 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 16
32 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 16-17
33 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 21
34 Mark Greenberg, Lisa Plimpton, and Julie Strawn, State Opportunities to Provide Access to Postsecondary Educational Training Under TANF CLASP February 2000 Page 21
35 Workforce Development Series: Built to Last: Why Skills Matter for Long Run Success in Welfare Reform By Karin Martinson and Julie Strawn April 2003 Brief No. 1
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