TANF Policy Implementation: The Invisible Barrier

Barriers to participation in welfare-to-work programs are generally described in terms of human and social capital. Findings from case examination of four Philadelphia-areaw elfare-to-work programs under TANF suggest that theory about policy implementation is more applicable. Faulty policy logic, organizational and personnel incompetence, and inadequate coordination between and within funding, referral, program, and employer organizations regularly resulted in delayed program start-ups and strained program operations. Generally invisible and absent from research attention, these implementation delays and strains impeded program staff efforts and harmed TANF recipients. States\u27 24-month time limit policies are a critical target for advocacy efforts

Moving Up is a Steep Climb: Parents' Work and Children's Welfare in the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Jobs Initiative

Presents an ethnographic study of ten families participating in job access programs in Milwaukee and Seattle. Includes policy implications for workforce development, immigrants, and political refugees

Voices from the Middle: How Performance Funding Impacts Workforce Organizations, Professionals and Customers

Under recent policy reforms, the landscape of authority relations in welfare and workforce development organizations has radically changed from one that privileged internal professional autonomy to one that privileges external authorities. Performance, rather than input funding is the medium for this change. Longitudinal ethnographic research reveals that performance requirements in workforce development both contribute to and challenge organizational structure and program design, professional practices, and job seeker outcomes. As such, when the voices of job-seeking customers, directly and through their affiliated workforce organizations, professionals, and employers, are added to the voices of funders under performance funding, polyvocality may result in more consensual authority relations: in particular,l ess autonomous power for professionals, less program hegemonyforfunders, and greater power for job seekers over their futures. These findings may also pertain to organizations and professionals funded under other performance directives, such as managed care and welfare-to-work

Middle-income families in the economic downturn: challenges and management strategies over time

The “Great Recession” has hurt many families across the United States, yet most research has examined its impact on those already considered poor or working poor. However, this recession has affected middle-income families, whose experiences with economic challenge have seldom been looked at in any detail. Such families have been recently called “the new poor,” “the missing middle,” and “families in the middle.” One in seven American children under age 18 (10.5 million) has an unemployed parent as a result of this recession, and because economic mobility for children in the U.S. is affected by their parents’ earning capacities, their mobility potential may be mediated by parents’ strategies for children’s educational futures. The research presented here, which is informed by Weberian stratification theory and capital theories, is based on a longitudinal subset of a larger two-country, multicity, mixed-methods study that used surveys and qualitative semi-structured interviews to explore how middle-income families contend with economic downturn and how their adolescent children’s educational futures might be influenced. Our findings suggest that most families maintain their children’s developmental and educational status quo, but their strategies to do so constrict the potential for educational attainment. As such, the American approach to off-loading much of the cost of higher education to middle-income families who are economically stressed is not viable if we hope to maximize the number of children who will receive mobility-enhancing postsecondary education