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Posted 9-5-01
CLEVELAND -- In 1996, when President Clinton signed into law a sweeping overhaul of the nation's welfare laws, it might have been expected that Alvin Schorr would immediately write a book denouncing the changes. Through a lifetime as a social worker, administrator, and teacher, Schorr had become known as an outspoken opponent of the way America has developed and administered its welfare laws.
But Schorr maintains that he had no thoughts of a book. "I'd more or less decided not to do it," he says. "I was already on record through speeches and articles and op-eds as opposing welfare reform. I didn't see the need to say it again."
That resolve melted at a dinner party a couple of years later. "A literate, informed, socially conscious friend leaned over and asked, 'Tell me again, Alvin, why am I against welfare reform?' I figured that if this person didn't know, then perhaps I ought to put my views into a book," he recalls.
The result is Welfare Reform: Failure and Remedies (Praeger, 2001). Schorr argues in the book that the 1996 reform has not been nearly the success its supporters claim, and has resulted in great hardship for thousands of children and single mothers.
Schorr is the Leonard W. Mayo professor emeritus of child and family welfare at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University and former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now health and human services).
Under the old law, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), every eligible family was legally entitled to assistance. But the new law, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), rules out entitlement to assistance. Instead, each state is free to design assistance programs for categories of families it defines, and to set stringent lifetime limits on how long individuals can receive government assistance.
Schorr argues that while supporters of TANF take credit for lower caseloads, these include hundreds of thousands of people who are off the roles because they were "sanctioned" (punished for infractions of rules ranging from trivial to important) or were "diverted" (arbitrarily told to look elsewhere for help). Little is known of what becomes of these families.
A variety of studies show, Schorr writes, that mothers and children have been hurt in various ways -- deprived of food, shelter, and medical care and forced into unsafe and undesirable family relationships. Mothers are working, he says, who should not be working if we care about children. And children are being separated from mothers.
"Viewed educationally," Schorr writes, "it is as if [poor children] were being schooled to become poor adults -- untrained, insecure, truculent."
Schorr's book appears as the government's 2002 deadline for reauthorizing TANF looms on the horizon. Acknowledging that many more welfare mothers are now working than before reform, the book points to low wages, temporary and part-time work, the paucity of good quality child care, and the multiple handicaps of the mothers and their children to account for unimproved and even lower income for many, even in times of great prosperity.
This is not the first time Schorr has raised his voice in opposition to welfare reform. "I've opposed most previous attempts at reform, because I felt they've gone the wrong way," he said. "In general, I am in favor of universal programs, those that favor all people in a particular category, such as all children or all veterans. I don't think we ought to tie benefits to a lack of income, because Americans tend to stigmatize people who get benefits due to a lack of money."
Schorr argues that "welfare is not an isolated system and its beneficiaries are not a population distinct from the working poor population, many of whom once tuned to welfare when they lost work or had hours cut back. The welfare system is an integral part of the economic system and our social structure. Technical fixes are not adequate for reforming welfare. True reform requires larger social and economic changes."
The book offers a chilling forecast of the society we will have if we continue on our current course. Among various recommended alternatives, it outlines changes in the levels of low-end wages in the Earned Income Tax Credit, in Social Security, in our system for delivering medical care, and in tax policies.
About the book, Senator Paul Wellstone, an opponent of the 1996 legislation, writes: "Schorr's sympathetic portrait of the lives of poor families helps us see more clearly the depth and extent of the hardships these families endure as a result of current federal welfare policy. For anyone who accepts without question the claims of the success of welfare reform, this book provides an invaluable dose of reality."
Schorr's father died when he was very young, and his mother qualified for what was then known as Mothers' Pension. That experience, he says, probably has influenced his interest in welfare policy. But beyond that, he says, "I've always had a very strong feeling that poor people in this country are treated badly, and I have trouble grasping why that should be so. It's something I get passionate about."
Welfare Reform: Failure and Remedies is available in Praeger paperback for $18 and in hardcover for $59.95.