Government Responses to Social and Economic Inequalities

Government policies we will look at… Welfare to Work Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Every Student Succeeds Acts (ESSA) Race to the Top American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Medicare/Medicaid and Obamacare Minimum Wage

Welfare to Work

Welfare to Work The main US Government strategy to reduce poverty is called ‘Welfare to Work’. Under this strategy, the poor are expected to ‘work their way out of poverty’. ‘Welfare to Work operates by the Federal and State Governments trying to support citizens to find work. Welfare support such as Medicaid health insurance, child care, food stamps and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC is worth up $2853 per child) is only available to those actively seeking employment or who have taken up employment.

Success/Failure of ‘Welfare to Work’ Reaction to Welfare to Work has been mixed. Supporters of Welfare to Work claim that more people have been ‘encouraged’ into work and this has increased the incomes of the poorest (see graph below). It has also reduced the cost of the welfare budget (50 million Americans will claim $614bn in welfare payments 2008). Opponents of Welfare to Work claim that is has forced many people to work for very low wages (‘burger flipping jobs’) and that it has not reduced inequality or poverty levels in the USA.

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) The main policy to reduce child poverty in the US is called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. This program, is federally financed but State run, and aimed at getting as many parents back to work as possible in order to provide for their children. Again, welfare benefits are linked to finding or looking for work. TANF is only available for a maximum of 60 months although some states have reduced this further.

The TANF Emergency Fund, created as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, provided nearly $5 billion in federal funds to 52 states and territories and 25 tribes for basic assistance (such as food stamps), non-recurrent short-term benefits (childcare payments or summer food programs), and for subsidized employment. With these funds, states placed 262,520 unemployed people in subsidized jobs, including 138,050 youth.

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)

Analysis: Success/Failure of TANF Success - Since TANF was introduced in 1996, the child poverty rate among single parents has fallen. Clearly, the ‘push’ provided by TANF to get single parents into work has been a success. Overall, less families today receive TANF as eligibility rules have tightened. In October of 2017, received some form of TANF benefit 1,081,680 . This had fallen to 974,847 by June 2018. Failure - However, some commentators argue that the fall in US child poverty rates is because of an improvement in the US economy and not because of TANF. It is also pointed out that the level of child poverty in the US remains one of the highest in the developed world. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-an-introduction-to-tanf https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-an-introduction-to-tanf TANF in Kansas

No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) When George W. Bush became President in 2000, he believed that too many public schools were failing their students. In response, the then Republican-led Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act 2001. This Act required schools within each state to reach a certain standard in basic skills (reading, writing, maths) if the state is to continue receive federal funding for education. Federal funding makes up about 10% of education funding across the country. Bush hoped that by setting high standards in education and better tracking students progress, standards would be forced up. Through this act, the federal government significantly increased spending on education. The NCLB Act was replaced in 2015 by the the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

Under NCLB states had to test students in reading and maths in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. States were required to bring all students to the “proficient level” on state tests by the 2013-14 school year, although each state got to decide, individually, just what “proficiency” should look like, and which tests to use. Under the law, schools were kept on track toward their goals through a mechanism known as “adequate yearly progress” If a school missed its state’s annual achievement targets for two years or more, it was identified as not “making AYP” and was subject to a cascade of increasingly serious sanctions including: A school that missed AYP two years in a row has to allow students to transfer to a better-performing public school in the same district. If a school missed AYP for three years in a row, it had to offer free tutoring. By 2015 0/50 states had reached 100% proficiency. The law also required states to ensure their teachers are “highly qualified,” which generally means that they have a bachelor’s degree in the subject they are teaching and state certification

There is fierce debate over the success of NCLB. Supporters highlight the following successes of the Act: reading scores and scores in maths have improved at their fastest rate for many years whilst reading and maths scores for Black and Hispanic children are at an all-time high. the gap between Black/Hispanic children and White children’s scores in reading and maths are at the lowest ever levels. No Child Left Behind had at least one significant — and, experts say, lasting — success: It changed the way the American educational system collects and uses data. NCLB forced schools across the country to figure out which students were being left behind, and to make that information public. Districts such as Beverly near Boston adopted new programs aimed at identifying and helping struggling students – mainly from ethnic minority backgrounds - who might otherwise have fallen through the cracks. By 2005, Beverly was meeting the law’s standards for progress for all racial and income groups, and the performance gap among the groups had narrowed.

But critics of the Act claim: reading and maths scores have improved as schools ‘manipulate results’ to retain funding; this has also occurred as States were allowed to choose their own tests. Critics argue that NCLB relied too heavily on standardized tests and that the emphasis on math and reading tests has narrowed the curriculum, forcing schools to spend less time on subjects that aren’t explicitly tested, like social studies, foreign language, and the arts. This has made the USA less internationally competitive in terms of education. It is also unclear that the two main remedies for low-performing schools did much to improve student achievement. In many cases, students did not take advantage of the opportunity to transfer to another school, or get free tutoring. States and districts also had difficulty screening tutors for quality.