Search

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded pilot grants to 10 States--California, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington--to test innovative strategies for providing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment and Training (SNAP E&T). As part of the pilots, all grantees offered support services, generally in the form of financial assistance, to offset an individual's barriers to participation and employment. These included gas cards or bus passes for transportation, books or fees associated with a pilot activity, or uniforms or tools to help with a new job. Support services were integral in reducing barriers that individuals participating in the pilots faced and helping them engage in activities. This brief highlights available support services, approaches to providing these services, and lessons learned.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded pilot grants to 10 States--California, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington--to test innovative strategies for providing employment and training services through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment and Training (SNAP E&T). Most grantees spent roughly the first year of the pilot in a planning phase, which included establishing new partnerships, creating service models, developing new activities, and hiring pilot staff. Grantees began enrolling individuals between January and April 2016, depending on the pilot. This brief presents five implementation challenges and the resulting lessons learned from a cross-pilot analysis of the planning and early implementation periods from March 2015 through July 2017. The implementation-related lessons identified in this brief are based on analysis of qualitative data collected through telephone calls and in-person interviews with pilot staff from State agencies, partners, and providers, and focus groups conducted with individuals participating in the pilot.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the nation's most important anti-hunger program, providing food assistance to people with low incomes, including postsecondary students, workers, children, people with disabilities, seniors, and many more. The needs of college students have changed drastically over time, requiring more comprehensive supportive services that improve their ability to persist in and complete their education. Estimates of food insecurity among college students range widely, from 9 percent to over 50 percent, depending on the methodology and population studied. Food insecurity is associated with a range of negative health consequences that interfere with students' ability to attend and complete college. SNAP offers a modest assurance that people are able to meet their most basic human need for food. A GAO study found that approximately 1.5 million college students nationwide receive SNAP, but this is only a small share of those who could benefit from it. So few college students benefit from SNAP because of both eligibility restrictions and the fact that less than 4 out of 10 students who appear to be eligible for SNAP are receiving it. This brief explains the special eligibility rules for college students, describes what states and schools can do to expand access to SNAP, and answers other common questions about SNAP and students.

Many college students, especially students from low-income backgrounds, face significant structural barriers that make it challenging to persist and complete a degree or certificate. These barriers include substantial financial challenges. Student financial aid at the federal and state levels has not kept up with rising college costs, resulting in sizable and growing gaps between what students from low-income backgrounds are asked to pay and the resources available to them through earnings and personal savings, grants and scholarships, and other sources. One solution to student financial hardship is to provide students from low-income backgrounds access to means-tested public benefits while in school. Public benefits can help these students make ends meet, improving both quality of life and their ability to focus on academics. This paper first outlines several federally and state-funded public benefits, including those that try to mitigate food insecurity, childcare costs, housing insecurity, healthcare costs, and financial insecurity. The paper then examines the frequency with which students access public benefits, whether, in fact, public benefits support college going and completion, and the costs associated with public benefits. The paper concludes with several recommendations for how institutions can help make public benefits more accessible to students.

This report introduces the MyGoals for Employment Success demonstration. MyGoals is an employment coaching program that helps participants set and achieve goals. It seeks to do so by explicitly focusing attention on participants' executive skills. MyGoals also offers participants a set of financial incentives to encourage, facilitate, and reward their engagement in the program and progress in achieving employment goals. Although employment is the program's central focus, the coaches also help participants set and achieve goals in other relevant domains: education and training, financial management, and personal and family well-being. Coaches make referrals to other services in the community as appropriate given participants' goals. Two public housing agencies--one in Baltimore, Maryland, and one in Houston, Texas--are piloting the program and evaluating its effectiveness with a randomized controlled trial. This report describes the origins of the MyGoals model, its core features, the rationale behind those features, the contexts in which the program is being operated, and how the program is being evaluated.

The Minnesota Subsidized and Transitional Employment Demonstration (MSTED) is testing the effectiveness of subsidized employment for individuals enrolled in the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP), Minnesota's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, who were unable to find employment after participating in the state's existing welfare-to-work program. To learn about the program's effects and costs, the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services funded a random assignment evaluation of MSTED, in which individuals were randomly assigned to a program group that had access to MSTED services or to a control group that did not have access to MSTED services but could receive other welfare-to-work services. The purpose of the cost study is to determine what it cost to provide MSTED services to a single program group member once MSTED had reached a steady state of operation. The analysis estimates the costs per sample member in three categories: (1) MSTED costs; (2) MFIP costs; and (3) education and training costs. In the first year after random assignment when program group members who had been placed in subsidized employment were still receiving subsidized wages, program group members were more likely than control group members to have been employed. However, by the end of the second year after random assignment when subsidies had ended, program and control group members were employed at similar levels. This study is part of a larger demonstration funded by the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, called the Subsidized and Transitional Employment Demonstration (STED), which is testing various subsidized employment strategies in several locations across the country.

In 2010, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded the first round of five-year Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG 1.0) to 32 organizations in 23 states; five were tribal organizations. The purpose of the HPOG Program is to provide education and training to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other low-income individuals for occupations in the healthcare field that pay well and are expected to either experience labor shortages or be in high demand. HPOG 1.0 grantees designed and implemented programs to provide eligible participants with education, occupational training, and support and employment services to help them train for and find jobs in a variety of healthcare professions. The ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation supports a multipronged research and evaluation strategy to assess the success of the HPOG Program. To assess its effectiveness, the first round of local HPOG programs was evaluated using an experimental design in which eligible program applicants were assigned at random to a "treatment" group that could access the program or a "control" group that could not. To compute the program's impact, the outcomes for each group were compared. This document reports on the impacts that arose about three years after random assignment. It reports an overall average impact across the diverse HPOG 1.0 programs, as well as impacts for selected subgroups of study participants.

The administration has proposed significant changes to broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE) in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which allows states to reduce some of the administrative burden associated with enrolling someone in SNAP. These changes will also affect the National School Lunch Program, which interacts with SNAP to determine free lunch eligibility for both individual students and entire schools. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) calculates that the proposed revision to BBCE could cause 982,000 students to lose their automatic eligibility for free lunch. However, this estimate only relates to individual students. Because of the participation requirements of the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), the BBCE revisions could result in entire schools losing their ability to provide free lunches to all students. Thus, students not participating in SNAP will also lose free meals. This brief explores this impact, which the administration's original analysis omitted. We estimate that roughly 142,000 students (1.1 percent of students at schools with community eligibility) attend schools that could lose community eligibility entirely. As stated, if a school loses community eligibility, it loses the ability to provide free lunch to all of its students. Enrollment at a CEP school has proven health, educational, and behavioral benefits for all students, not just those who qualify for free lunch because of their family's income. Additionally, we estimate that 1.05 million students, 7.7 percent of students at CEP schools, could see their schools lose full reimbursement for school meals. The federal government reimburses schools for the cost of free lunch based on the percentage of students who are directly certified for free meals through their participation in SNAP or other safety net programs. If the share of students identified as free lunch eligible through an administrative match dips below 62.5 percent, each student not directly certified represents an additional financial cost-imposed on the school. This increased financial burden could lead schools to opt out of CEP. Despite several unknowns that limit our analysis, we find compelling evidence that the potential nutritional and financial impact of this rule change is greater than the administration originally reported. The proposed restrictions on BBCE would put many more students at risk of losing universal free meals at their school, despite the substantial associated benefits.

People served by public assistance programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) often have difficulty finding jobs in the competitive labor market. This report describes the ways in which eight TANF programs primarily serving American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) families use subsidized employment. Subsidized employment programs rely on public funds to subsidize the wages that employers pay when they provide jobs to individuals who cannot find them in the competitive labor market. It can be used to create jobs in areas where there are more people interested in work than there are available jobs. It can also help individuals with barriers to employment gain work experience while earning income. The primary research questions of this report include the following: (1) How do Tribal TANF programs use subsidized employment to engage TANF recipients in work activities?; (2) What challenges do Tribal TANF programs face in implementing subsidized employment programs?; and (3) How do the approaches to subsidized employment taken by some Tribal TANF programs differ from other subsidized employment models used to serve low-income people?

We estimate the effect of welfare reform on the intergenerational transmission of welfare participation and related economic outcomes using a long panel of mother-daughter pairs over the survey period 1968-2013 in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Because states implemented welfare reform at different times starting in 1992, the cross-state variation over time permits us to quasi-experimentally separate out the effect of mothers' welfare participation during childhood on daughters' economic outcomes in adulthood in the pre- and post-welfare reform periods. We find that a mother's welfare participation increased her daughter's odds of participation as an adult by roughly 30 percentage points, but that welfare reform attenuated this transmission by at least 50 percent, or at least 30 percent over the baseline odds of participation. While we find comparable-sized transmission patterns in daughters' adult use of the broader safety net and other outcomes such as educational attainment and income, there is no diminution of transmission after welfare reform. These results are obtained by addressing nonrandom selection into welfare and are robust to other potential threats to identification from misclassification error, life-cycle age effects, and cross-state mobility. [Originally published in September 2016.]

"Hungry and Homeless in College" is a research report that assesses food and housing insecurity among community college students. The report is based on results of a survey of more than 33,000 students at 70 community colleges in 24 states--the broadest survey of its kind--that describes the extent to which students are adversely affected by unmet basic needs while pursuing higher education. [This report was co-produced with the Wisconsin HOPE Lab.]

With the emergence of "pay for success" programs, state and local governments have new opportunities to align services and demonstrate how service delivery investments in one system can improve outcomes in others and potentially save money. Integrated data systems that track individuals and families across different agencies are proving invaluable in these new efforts as well as in more traditional approaches to service coordination. This brief explores how one county -- Cuyahoga County, Ohio -- used an integrated data system (IDS) to develop an innovative pay for success program to serve a particularly vulnerable population: homeless mothers who have children in the child welfare system. The goal of Partnering for Family Success (Family Success) is to provide a more coordinated system of care that reduces the time children of homeless mothers spend in foster care. Family Success provides housing and supports that help mothers reunite more quickly with their children or allow the child to enter an alternative permanent placement.

There is a longstanding debate about whether helping welfare recipients quickly find work or helping them to first obtain some basic education and training better improves their economic well-being. This brief contributes to the debate by presenting long-term findings from three sites in the seven-site National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS), a multiyear random assignment study designed to directly and very reliably test the effects of alternative approaches to helping welfare recipients find jobs. As part of NEWWS, the research team followed study sample members for five years. This brief extends the follow-up period, presenting the effects of the interventions during a period that falls roughly 10 to 15 years after individuals entered the study. In the first two years of follow-up, a much higher proportion of enrollees in "labor force attachment" (LFA) programs than those in "human capital development" (HCD) programs conducted a job search, and a much higher proportion of enrollees in HCD programs than those in LFA programs participated in education or training, reflecting the two program models' different emphases. People who were randomly assigned to the LFA or HCD groups had more earnings over the entire 15-year follow-up period, on average, than did their control group counterparts, with the largest additional earnings occurring during the first five years after study entry. The LFA approach resulted in substantially higher earnings than did the HCD approach during the first two years of follow-up. In contrast, during follow-up years 10 through 15, enrollees assigned to the HCD group actually earned more than those assigned to the LFA group, although these differences are not statistically significant.

This report is Iowa's response to the four questions that the United States Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE), requires of all states and territories receiving federal funding through the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), Title II, Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA). The overall goal of the Act is "to increase the employability, retention, and earnings of participants and increase occupational skill attainment by participants and, as a result, improve the quality of the workforce, reduce welfare dependency, and enhance the productivity and competitiveness of the Nation." The federally-funded adult education and literacy programs administered by the Iowa Department of Education's Division of Community Colleges provide lifelong educational opportunities and support services to eligible participants. Programs assist adults in obtaining the knowledge and skills necessary for work, further education, family self-sufficiency, and community involvement. By improving the education and skill levels of individual Iowans, the programs enhance the competitiveness of the state's workforce and economy. Iowa adult education programs help learners to accomplish the following: (1) Gain employment or better their current employment. (2) Obtain a high school equivalency diploma by passing the state selected assessment. (3) Attain skills necessary to enter postsecondary education and training. (4) Exit public welfare and become self-sufficient. (5) Learn to speak, read, and write the English language. (6) Master basic academic skills to help their children succeed in school. (7) Become U.S. citizens and participate in a democratic society. (8) Gain self-esteem, personal confidence, and a sense of personal and civic responsibility. Appended to the report is: Workforce Investment Act (WIA), Title II, Section 223 State Leadership Activities.

In Djibouti, extreme poverty was 41.9% and relative poverty 79.4% according to the poverty profile elaborated by the national statistical office (DISED) in 2012. Malnutrition remains high in Djibouti, and comparable to Sub-Saharan countries, with 29.7% of children under the age of five chronically malnourished, 29.6% underweight, and over 17.8% of children acutely malnourished (SMART survey 2013). While the nutrition literature provides extensive evidence on multiple feasible strategies to prevent and remediate growth retardation in low-income countries, there is still no evidence on community-based interventions that attempt to combine the simultaneous promotion of improved nutrition (through behavioral changes) and income increases. In order to address both issues, the Government of Djibouti is piloting an innovative social protection program that integrates public works and nutrition intervention. The intervention: (1) actively involves the main caregiver in a number of ways (nutrition, workfare) to strengthen her role in the household; and (2) makes access to income (workfare) conditional on the caregiver attending regular nutrition promotion activities. The program targets households with pregnant women and children 0-2 years of age in poor areas (urban and rural) in Djibouti. The program consists of a community-based and workfare component and will be run from 2012 to 2017. Under the community-based program, a group of a maximum of 20 women come together once a month for three hours. The sessions include measurement of anthropometric data, nutrition education, feeding practices, growth promotion, cooking sessions, and distribution of nutrition supplements. For the workfare component of the program, the government employs a family member in various tasks, including garbage collection and community works. The objective of this study is to evaluate the added value of combining a public works program targeted to women over and above the provision of information and promotion of behavioral change in child care practices. A baseline household survey was administered to all eligible households (belonging to the test and control groups) selected for the study. Data is collected using CAPI (computer-assisted maintenance). A short follow-up survey is conducted while the public works are taking place. A final survey will be conducted after the household has finalized the 50 days of work, with the aim of measuring the effects of public works medium term. The study is ongoing.

Low teacher pay is not news. Over the years, all sorts of observers have argued that skimpy teacher salaries keep highly qualified individuals out of the profession. One recent study found that a major difference between the education system in the United States and those in other nations with high-performing students is that the United States offers much lower pay to educators. But for the most part, the conversation around teacher pay has examined entry-level teachers. The goal of this issue brief was to learn more about the salaries of mid- and late-career teachers and see if wages were high enough to attract and keep the nation's most talented individuals. This research relied on a variety of databases, the results of which are deeply troubling. Findings include: (1) Mid- and late-career teacher base salaries are painfully low in many states; (2) Teachers with 10 years of experience who are family breadwinners often qualify for a number of federally funded benefit programs designed for families needing financial support; and (3) To supplement their minimal salaries, large percentages of teachers work second jobs. The bottom line is that mid- and late-career teachers are not earning what they deserve, nor are they able to gain the salaries that support a middle-class existence. An appendix provides a table of state-by-state data on teacher salaries.

This document provides an overview of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment and Training (SNAP E&T). SNAP E&T is a funding source that allows states to provide employment and training and related supportive services to individuals receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) benefits. These services are intended to assist recipients in gaining skills, training, work, or experience that will increase their employment and earnings, and reduce their need for SNAP. This overview discusses the following regarding SNAP E&T: (1) eligibility and targeting; (2) funding; (3) examples of "third-party match programs"; (4) participation requirements; (5) SNAP pilots; and (6) program limitations.

Nebraska's Employment First (EF) program allows parents who receive TANF cash assistance to pursue education and training that improves their ability to secure employment and long-term economic success. A parent must negotiate and sign an Employment First contract, facilitated by a case worker, between the participating parent and the state of Nebraska. The caseworker assists the parents to meet their goals by providing information about the job market, specific careers and wages; addressing barriers to employment; and providing support in seeking child care and transportation assistance. Although EF participants may be approved to attend any education or training program that helps them accomplish their goals, participants who are interested in college are encouraged to attend public community colleges where tuition and fees are more affordable than private schools. EF participants are also encouraged to join the TRIO program, a service offered by some public colleges and universities that provides support services to students with significant barriers to attend and complete college. This brief is one in a series that profiles promising approaches to supporting education and training programs under TANF.

This brief summarizes findings on strategies for helping hard-to-employ populations--especially cash welfare assistance clients and disadvantaged parents with child support obligations--become employed. It begins with an overview of the unique needs of these two groups, followed by a review of strategies that have successfully boosted their employment. Approaches include caseworkers providing personal attention and robust supports; incentives; interventions informed by behavioral science; transportation assistance; recruitment efforts; and supported employment opportunities. Evaluations of the effectiveness of these employment strategies are cited when available. Takeaways include: (1) Some cash welfare clients and disadvantaged parents with child support obligations have significant barriers to finding and keeping a job; (2) Barriers include low education, physical or mental health issues, criminal history, caregiving responsibilities for a disabled child, and recent experience of domestic violence; and (3) Approaches include caseworkers providing personal attention and robust supports; incentives for employment and/or child support compliance; and interventions informed by behavioral science.

The federal government devotes roughly one-sixth of its spending to 10 major means-tested programs and tax credits, which provide cash payments or assistance in obtaining health care, food, housing, or education to people with relatively low income or few assets. Those programs and credits consist of the following: (1) Medicaid; (2) the low-income subsidy (LIS) for Part D of Medicare (the part of Medicare that provides prescription drug benefits); (3) the refundable portion of the earned income tax credit (EITC); (4) the refundable portion of the child tax credit (CTC); (5) Supplemental Security Income (SSI); (6) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); (7) The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called the Food Stamp program); (8) Child nutrition programs; (9) Housing assistance programs; and (10) the Federal Pell Grant Program. In 2012, federal spending on those programs and tax credits totaled $588 billion. Total federal spending on those 10 programs rose more than tenfold--or by an average of about 6 percent a year--in the four decades since 1972 (when only half of the programs existed). Medicaid accounted for more than 40 percent of the federal spending on those programs in 2012, followed in size by SNAP. A decade from now, Medicaid will account for an even larger share of spending on those programs, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects. A new means-tested program--federal subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people buy health insurance through insurance exchanges, which will begin in 2014--will be the second-largest means-tested program in 2023, CBO estimates.

In this paper we discuss several key challenges encountered when conducting a study of the continuity of participation in the child care subsidy program. While many of these issues are familiar to those who have studied participation dynamics in other assistance programs, and to those familiar with survival analysis, we describe these challenges and solutions in the context of the child care subsidy program. This brief is intended to help grant reviewers, policymakers, and researchers new to the study of dynamics of subsidy participation when they plan, conduct and evaluate studies of child care subsidy participation. Ignoring these issues can lead to study results that are not comparable with other studies and may yield misleading findings. Given the importance of child care subsidies for low-income families and children, there is a need for comparable research that increases our understanding of families' experiences with child care subsidies and the influence of policy differences across states on the continuity of subsidy participation. (Contains 4 figures, 4 tables, and 14 footnotes.)[This Brief was developed by members of the Child Care Policy and Research Consortium's Child Care Subsidy.]

Increasing education among low-income parents is a vital component of policies to improve families' economic status. Educational attainment matters: between 1979 and 2005, wages for those with college and advanced degrees rose by 22 and 28 percent, respectively, while wages for high school graduates remained stagnant and wages for high school dropouts fell by 16 percent. Moreover, the strong association between postsecondary education and higher earnings does not necessarily mean that facilitating access to higher education among low-income adults will lead to earnings gains, particularly considering that many lack recent or successful school experiences. This brief draws on rigorous studies to highlight what is known about efforts to encourage participation in and completion of postsecondary education among recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash assistance and other low-income populations. In this brief postsecondary (or higher) education is defined as academic and vocational/occupational postsecondary programs but not basic education (such as GED preparation classes or high school diploma programs). The brief explores the programs that have been tried, their success in increasing engagement and completion, and the extent to which increases improved economic well-being. (Contains 1 table and 28 notes.)

Between 2000 and 2003, the Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project identified and implemented a diverse set of innovative models designed to promote employment stability and wage or earnings progression among low-income individuals, mostly current or former welfare recipients. The project's goal was to determine which strategies could help low-wage workers stay employed and advance over time--and which strategies seem not to work. Over a dozen different ERA program models have now been evaluated using experimental, random assignment research designs, and three of the programs increased single parents' employment and earnings. This report augments the ERA project's experimental findings by examining the work, education, and training experiences of single parents targeted by the studied programs. Although the analysis is descriptive only and cannot be used to identify the exact causes of advancement, examining the characteristics of single parents who advance and the pathways by which they do so can inform the design of the next generation of retention and advancement programs. Key findings include: (1) Few parents advanced over time, and most of the remaining parents either spent long periods out of work or lost ground; (2) Parents who advanced worked more stably over the period than other parents; (3) Parents who did not work during Year 3 had very high rates of employment instability; (4) In terms of demographic characteristics and experiences, parents who worked but had not advanced were between these two extremes (that is, between parents who advanced and those who did not work in Year 3); and (5) Job changing is an important route to advancement. Supplementary Tables are appended. (Contains 24 tables, 5 figures and 45 footnotes.) [For "The Employment Retention and Advancement Project: Paths to Advancement for Single Parents. Executive Summary," see ED517020.]

For the people behind the Lumina Foundation for Education, the term "network" has particular meaning. In fact, largely as a result of their work in a national college awareness and action campaign called KnowHow2GO, they have come to define networks in a specific way--and they ask their KnowHow2GO grantees and partners to form networks that fit that definition. For them, a strong and sustainable network for increasing college access and success must be built on five dimensions: (1) An infrastructure that enables members to identify and achieve a shared purpose; (2) Service system cohesion, improvement and sustainability; (3) Data-based decision making about priorities, policies and practices; (4) Expertise in college access and success issues and advocacy for supportive public policies; and (5) Creation and dissemination of knowledge within the network and beyond. Already, such networks are leading the KnowHow2GO effort in 16 states. The KnowHow2GO campaign isn't the only example of networks in action. In fact, the principles of effective networks--principles articulated eloquently by Paul Vandeventer, president and CEO of Community Partners, in his book "Networks that Work"--are being embraced by any number of Lumina grantees and partner organizations. This issue of "Lumina Foundation Lessons" magazine highlights three such organizations, all of which are working tirelessly to promote college success among low-income and minority students. In this issue of Lessons, readers will learn about the LIFETIME (Low-Income Families' Empowerment through Education) program, which assists welfare mothers in their quest for college attainment in California. Readers will read about the Providence, Rhode Island-based organization What Kids Can Do, which empowers students to tell their own stories as a means of boosting postsecondary success. Finally, in Florida, readers will meet the organizers--and especially the students--who are involved in the policy-advocacy group ENLACE (ENgaging Latino, African-American and other Communities for Education).

This report summarizes the final impact results for the national Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project. This project tested, using a random assignment design, the effectiveness of numerous programs intended to promote steady work and career advancement. All the programs targeted current and former welfare recipients and other low-wage workers, most of whom were single mothers. Given that earlier retention and advancement initiatives studied for these groups were largely not effective, ERA sought to examine a variety of programs that states and localities had developed for different populations, to determine whether effective strategies could be identified. In short, nine of the twelve programs examined in this report do not appear to be effective, but three programs increased employment levels, employment stability, and/or earnings, relative to control group levels, after three to four years of follow-up. (Contains 3 tables and 6 footnotes.) [This paper was written with the assistance of Aaron Hill and Sonya Williams. For the full report, see ED514699.]

This report focuses on the seven original Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) projects selected for funding in 2003. Three of the original seven projects were selected for a national random assignment evaluation in 2005; however, this report only focuses on program operations prior to joining the random assignment evaluation for the three projects and all operations for the remaining four original projects. The seven original projects have been in existence for up to six years, during which they have accumulated a rich history that includes both notable achievements and disappointments. Based on our compilation and analysis of that history, we have identified a number of lessons regarding the design and implementation of employment-focused interventions for youth with disabilities. The presentation of these lessons constitutes the core of this report. Appendix A documents the use of Social Security Administration work incentives and YTD waivers by participants in the seven original YTD projects who received either Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance benefits. (Contains 12 tables and 21 footnotes.)

The budget for the U.S. Department of Labor for Fiscal Year 2010 includes a total of $45 million to support and study transitional jobs. This paper describes the origins of the transitional jobs models that are operating today, reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of this approach and other subsidized employment models, and offers some suggestions regarding the next steps for program design and research. The paper was produced for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by MDRC as part of the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ project, which includes two random assignment evaluations of transitional jobs programs. Transitional jobs programs provide temporary, wage-paying jobs, support services, and job placement help to individuals who have difficulty getting and holding jobs in the regular labor market. Although recent evaluation results have raised doubts about whether TJ programs, as currently designed, are an effective way to improve participants' long-term employment prospects, the studies have also confirmed that TJ programs can be operated at scale, can create useful work opportunities for very disadvantaged people, and can lead to critical indirect impacts such as reducing recidivism among former prisoners. Thus, in drawing lessons from the recent results, the paper argues that it may be important to think more broadly about the goals of TJ programs while simultaneously testing new strategies that may produce better long-term employment outcomes. (Contains 73 footnotes, 4 tables, 4 figures, and 1 box.) [This paper was prepared for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as part of the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration and Evaluation Project.]

Moving toward universal coverage has the potential to increase access to care and improve the health and well-being of uninsured children and adults. The effects of health care reform on the more than 25 million children who currently have coverage under Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) are less clear. Increased parental coverage will help these children since many have uninsured parents with unmet health needs. However, proposals to move children from Medicaid and CHIP into a new health insurance exchange could make these children worse off through the potential loss of benefits and legal protections and possible exposure to higher cost-sharing. At the same time, if reimbursement rates are higher in the exchange than paid under Medicaid and CHIP, children's access to providers could improve. This brief provides background information on current coverage and access to care for low-income children and considers the potential implications of shifting children with public coverage into exchange plans. It closes with a discussion of how health care reform could be structured to take these implications into account. (Contains 2 tables and 56 notes.)