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Edited on Mon Dec-31-07 12:03 PM by Enrique
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i41/41a01401.htm
In 1997, when state governments were scrambling to meet the requirements of the federal welfare-reform bill enacted the previous year, Barack Obama was in his first term as an Illinois state senator. Mr. Obama didn't wield much clout -- he was new to state government and, as a Democrat, was in the minority. He was deeply apprehensive about the new law, which attached time limits and work requirements to public assistance; his district, on the south side of Chicago, has one of the state's highest poverty levels. He managed to insert a little-noticed provision into Illinois's welfare statute, instructing the Department of Human Services to find university researchers to conduct a study of the effects of welfare reform.
The study would track families who received welfare as of 1998, and follow them for six years, regardless of whether they left the welfare system (because of employment, time limits, or "sanctions"). Would their household incomes rise or fall? At what rate would they find jobs? Would those jobs offer health insurance and pensions? Would their rates of marriage, childbearing, and family violence change? How frequently would they suffer hardships such as eviction, crime, or serious illness? State agencies were instructed to give the researchers administrative data -- tax returns, health records, children's school files, and so on -- that could be compared with the participants' survey responses.
The catch? To make the bill politically digestible, Mr. Obama stipulated that all of the research would be conducted "at no cost to the department." In other words, whatever university took the study on would have to dredge up the financing itself.
"Cutting the welfare rolls is not that complicated," says Mr. Obama, who, as a law student in the early 1990s, became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. "What is complicated is making sure that people have the levels of support they need to move into the labor market and become self-sufficient." He had heard that other states were beginning to require their social-service agencies to gather similar data themselves, but he hoped that an independent study would be more credible. "There were plenty of good researchers in Chicago who already had models for doing this. Why reinvent the wheel?"
Dan A. Lewis thought Mr. Obama's bill was so ambitious and unwieldy that no university would ever sign up. "I said, This is such a long shot, and I've got 85 other things to do," remembers the Northwestern University professor of education and social policy. But a friend at the Chicago Urban League persuaded him after repeated phone calls to put together a proposal.
The long shot paid off. Today Mr. Lewis is the principal investigator in a consortium -- the Illinois Families Study -- that has just released its second annual report. With grants from several foundations as well as state and federal agencies, researchers from Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Roosevelt University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northern Illinois University have been tracking 1,363 families, proportionally balanced between Chicago and several downstate communities with lower rates of poverty.
The study is one of the most rigorous continuing examinations of welfare reform to date. As the researchers begin sorting through data from the third year of interviews, though, it remains to be seen how successfully the Illinois study has fulfilled Mr. Obama's vision: that social science would allow the state to fine-tune its system and to minimize public hardship.
(summary of findings follows...)
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