Fighting Child Poverty in America: How Research Can Help

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The research in this volume comes at an important time for poor children. Over 14 million U.S. children lived in poverty in 1997 more than in any year from 1966 to 1990. At same time, a record high proportion of poor children's families are working poor families, headed by someone who worked at least part-time part of year. Fully 69 percent of poor children had a family member who worked in 1996, up from 61 percent just three years before. These facts reveal both child poverty's stubborn resistance to economic growth in this country and growing importance of expanding help for working poor as a central strategy for ending child poverty. The coming years will offer important opportunities for enacting new public policies to reduce prevalence of child poverty in United States. Although opportunities will continue to occur at federal level, states have become a dominant arena for innovation. At all levels, researchers can play an important role by documenting causes and consequences of children's poverty and using evaluation and action research to highlight role of local policies and practices in lives of low-income children. For research to contribute more effectively to public debate, however, scholars must carefully assess current policy context, explore topics that currently are overlooked, and think ahead about dissemination strategies. Researchers can also provide technical assistance to community leaders committed to monitoring how reform unfolds. The Policy Landscape The passage of 1996 federal law left many social scientists who cared about children's poverty feeling both discouraged by policy changes and ignored by policy makers. National policy debates had defined problem as rather than poverty and focused narrowly on ending existing system rather than on how to replace it with something better. Compared with prior waves of reform, social science research played little role in debate. Some researchers complained that policy makers seemed immune to evidence, and language of final legislation did little to contradict this complaint. Revealing distance between researchers and lawmakers, Congress declared in law's preamble that the increase in number of children receiving public assistance is closely related to increase in births to unmarried women and clarified that new law was intended to address crisis. Only two years earlier, a strongly worded statement that welfare has not played a major role in rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing had been signed by 76 top scholars (including several whose work is reviewed in this volume) and circulated widely on Capitol Hill (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 1994). The political and economic landscape has since changed in several ways. First, old cash assistance program (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) is gone, taking with it much of public's focus on as cause of social problems. Second, in every state except Hawaii, caseloads have fallen in new