Reducing Intergenerational Poverty (2024) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 332-403
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From page 332... ...
Most pre-K programs have standards regarding curricula, teacher education, class sizes, and adultchild ratios. However, only about one-third of the pre-K programs have performance standards that meet or exceed those of Head Start, according to the National Institute for Early Educational Research (NIEER)
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From page 333... ...
The earliest ECE programs, like Perry and Abecedarian, were clearly effective at improving earnings, educational attainment, and health, as well as at decreasing crime and incarceration -- all of which are factors that tend to lower the rate of intergenerational poverty (Campbell et al., 2012; Heckman et al., 2010)
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From page 334... ...
Targeting Recipients of ECE Services Evidence shows that Head Start impacts were larger and more likely to be sustained when the children who attended Head Start would otherwise have stayed home with their parents or been cared for in a home-based ECE setting (Feller et al., 2016; Kline & Walters, 2016) , and this suggests that increasing funding for Head Start might have longer-term impacts and reduce intergenerational poverty if the program could specifically target those children.
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From page 335... ...
, however, raising questions about whether they were sufficiently large to reduce intergenerational poverty even if maintained past first grade. To What Extent Subsequent Experiences Support Initial Gains The extent to which communities and schools support and build on the skills children have acquired in ECE programs is clearly important for maintaining the programs' impacts and may play a role in fade-out.
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From page 336... ...
. Head Start initially focused heavily on promoting health and social skills.
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From page 337... ...
, the committee was unable to recommend the expansion of Head Start or pre-K enrollment. However, we hope that these ECE programs will help us identify engaging teaching practices for promoting the skills that appear to be fundamental to subsequent learning, such as language and general knowledge, executive functioning, and social skills (Burchinal et al., 2020; Fuhs et al., 2014; Pace et al., 2019; Welsh et al., 2010)
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From page 338... ...
As in the case of Head Start and pre-K expansions, however, we cannot conclude that the evidence supports subsidy expansions as a reliable way of reducing intergenerational poverty. K–12 Education Increase K–12 School Spending in the Poorest Districts Plausible expansions of federal funding could make a difference at the margin to both between-state and within-state gaps, but only if they are not offset by reductions in state and local funding.
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From page 339... ...
These districts have children in poverty as well, so the number of children in poverty who would be affected would be larger.) If this reform reduced their adult poverty rate by 7 percentage points, that would reduce intergenerational poverty by 16,000 students out of each birth cohort.
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From page 340... ...
340 REDUCING INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY these approaches would be candidates for recommended interventions; in the meantime, we see them as promising and worth consideration, but not meeting our evidentiary standards for committee recommendations. We discuss several here, acknowledging that this list is not exhaustive.
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From page 341... ...
Other approaches to diversifying the teacher labor forces include urban teacher residency models, such as Alder Graduate School of Education and the Boston Teacher Residency programs. An evaluation of the latter found that program graduates were more diverse than Boston Public School teachers, were more likely to remain teachers and, after several years,
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From page 342... ...
Reducing punitive school discipline Experimental and correlational evidence reviewed in the main text shows that exposure to harsh discipline in schools leads to worse adult educational and criminal legal outcomes. Given the disproportionate experience of school discipline by low-income and Black, Latino, and Native American children -- which is not accounted for by behavioral differences (Skiba et al., 2011)
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From page 343... ...
and in-school suspensions, as well as reduced ODRs and out-of-school suspensions for African American students." There are no studies of the direct effects of discipline practices and interventions on children's later adult outcomes. However, the evidence reviewed here and in the main section establishes a clear indirect relationship between school discipline and intergenerational mobility.
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From page 344... ...
. Specifically, each additional year of exposure to court-ordered desegregation led to a 1.8 percentage-point increase in the likelihood of high school graduation, and the average effects of a 5-year exposure to court-ordered school desegregation led to about a 15% increase in wages.
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. Postsecondary Education Community college completion provides low-socioeconomic status (SES)
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. Minority Serving Institutions and Intergenerational Mobility The evidence regarding the effects of attending minority serving institutions (MSIs)
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. And Native Americans who attended tribal colleges and universities had lower debt loads compared with peers at non-tribal colleges and universities (Gallup, 2019)
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From page 348... ...
improves higher education and labor market outcomes for disadvantaged students from a number of studies, all of which are based either on RCTs or lotteries among students who had applied to high school programs that were oversubscribed. For example: 1.
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From page 349... ...
; on-time graduation rates were also 7–10 percentage points higher (Doughtery, 2018)
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From page 350... ...
We do not understand enough about what made Table C-4-3 Sector-based training program models Annual Direct cost per earnings Target population Description of program participant gains Year Up Ages 18–24, high 6 months of classroom $23,000 total, of Nearly school diploma or training, 6 months of which employers $8,000 per GED internship plus program- cover all but year by based supports 40% ($9,200) year 5 Per Ages 18 and Training in IT by private $5,800 $4,800 in Scholas above, high providers plus program-based year 7 school diploma or supports GED Project Ages 18 and Training primarily in health $12,500 $4,600 in Quest above, high care certificate programs at year 11 school diploma or community colleges with GED program-based supports SOURCE: Committee generated, data from Year Up (2023)
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From page 351... ...
students earn college credentials which might draw returns for longer periods and with greater portability; and (c) as a community college program, it might be easier to scale.
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From page 352... ...
Each of the programs is now trying to replicate itself, but these efforts will not generate nearly enough scale to achieve our goals. The programs are also exploring ways to achieve more scale while maintaining quality, such as the use of online training to reduce cost, and partnerships with other providers (like community colleges)
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From page 353... ...
unding for IHS addresses only an estimated 48.6% of the health care needs of Native American children and has historically been subject to year-by-year discretionary allocations from Congress, which creates substantial long-term uncertainty in funding and makes it challenging to maintain and modernize needed health care infrastructure" (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2022)
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From page 354... ...
SAMHSA has focused on reducing emergency department utilization for children with mental health issues, reducing criminal justice interactions, and encouraging community-based care coordination. With research pointing to the importance of location-based policy levers (e.g., So et al., 2019)
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From page 355... ...
Nutrition and Food Insecurity For pregnant individuals, accessing healthy nutrition is critical to ensure healthy birth outcomes, such as lowering the risk of low birthweight (da Silva Lopes et al., 2017) , as well as developmental outcomes into 1 Facilities that manufacture, process, or otherwise use these chemicals in amounts above established levels must annually report the amount released (i.e., emitted into the air or water)
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From page 356... ...
. Improvements in 2009 to the nutritional content of WIC food packages -- including the addition of a fruit and vegetable voucher and requirements that bread be whole grain and milk be low fat -- have been found to improve dietary quality, perinatal outcomes, and early child development (Guan et al., 2021; Hamad et al., 2019a,b; Tester et al., 2016)
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From page 357... ...
Paid Family and Medical Leave There are some interventions that may be promising avenues for increasing intergenerational mobility through improvement in child and maternal health. These include paid family and medical leave.
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From page 358... ...
. Paid family and medical leave policies improve neonatal health outcomes, including reductions in rates of low birthweight and the risk of prematurity especially for unmarried and Black mothers (Rossin, 2011; Stearns, 2015)
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From page 359... ...
Finally, it provides more details on income and wealth interventions supported by direct or indirect evidence. Impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit on Child Outcomes Much of the report's discussion of the effects of family income and of income-oriented interventions centers around the EITC, which has been prominent in both policy and research for decades.
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From page 360... ...
We briefly cover trends in wealth and wealth inequality, followed by causes of these trends with a focus on differences by race and ethnicity. We then examine evidence from studies on parental wealth and adult child outcomes, and conclude with our suggested policy intervention, establishing federal child trust accounts or baby bonds.
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From page 361... ...
In 2019, median wealth for White households was $188,200 compared 1 These values do not include defined benefit pension assets. The Federal Reserve estimates that median wealth increases to $172,000 when inclusive of defined benefit reserves (Bricker et al., 2020)
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From page 362... ...
. Few datasets are available that specifically track the wealth of Native Americans, but research from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth estimated that in 2000, the median wealth for Native Americans in the survey was $5,700, compared with the median wealth of $65,000 for the sample overall (Zagorsky, 2006)
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From page 363... ...
Racial differences in wealth accumulation and growing wealth gaps over time have been also attributed to differences in asset holdings and returns on those investments. In recent decades, greater amounts of financial asset ownership among White households and appreciation in stock equity have rewarded them over time.
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From page 364... ...
Combining the EITC with Other Programs to Increase Income Stability The committee considered expansions along the lines of the 2021 Child Tax Credit, which made credits available to families without earnings without increasing the incentive to work. On the plus side, it would provide resources to more low-income families with children than the EITC alone, but it would probably lead to a reduction in maternal employment relative to the status quo.
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From page 365... ...
It is worth noting that even the employment effect is itself ambiguous. While competitive models of the labor market yield an unambiguous prediction of negative effects on employment, in other models that allow for employer market power, job search, or other deviations from perfect competition, modest minimum wages can have small or even positive effects
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From page 366... ...
Clemens and Strain (2018, 2021) studied the last decade of minimum wage increases and found little evidence that "small" increases of under $1 are associated with disemployment effects.
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From page 367... ...
found larger disemployment effects from the practice of indexing minimum wage increases to inflation, and speculate that modest, nominal increases are easier for firms to absorb without adjusting headcount than longer-lasting increases. A minimum wage increase could reduce poverty even if it also reduces employment, if the benefits to the still-employed workers are larger than the costs to those who lose employment.
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From page 368... ...
found little evidence that federal or state minimum wage increases reduce poverty, material hardship, or receipt of public program benefits among workers, younger individuals without high school degrees, or younger black individuals. Neumark and Wascher (2002)
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From page 369... ...
in 2021.4 Another approach is to provide tax credits to publicly owned firms that set themselves up as "B-corporations" (or "Benefit" corporations) rather than the more traditional "C-corporations"; the former allows firms to explicitly consider benefits conferred on workers and society among its goals, while the latter allows firms only to maximize shareholder value.
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From page 370... ...
There are also literally thousands of federal and state rules that explicitly bar returning citizens from particular occupations where they are perceived as being high-risk (especially those involving children or very elderly populations that are regarded as more vulnerable) , and from obtaining occupational licensure.
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From page 371... ...
Direct assistance to employers who hire returning citizens or others facing such barriers are provided by the Work Opportunity Tax Credit. This is a federal tax credit to companies that hire from a list of workers facing such barriers, including "returning citizens;" but take-up by employers is usually low, and evidence of its cost-effectiveness in expanding employment and earnings is quite limited (Hamersma, 2008)
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From page 372... ...
. To raise wealth among low-income households, especially those of Black and Native American families, the committee considered proposals to create Baby Bonds for children born in the United States, with the value of the bonds determined by the family's income and net worth at the time of the child's birth and targeting families with incomes below the SPM thresholds and total net worth less than one fourth of the federal poverty line.
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From page 373... ...
levels are so low. However, even if the assumptions in Zewde's simulation are basically sound, a Baby Bond program that markedly narrows the racial gap in wealth by early adulthood still leaves other drivers of the racial wealth gap in operation as youth move through adulthood (e.g., differential incomes, differential savings, differential rates of return on real estate, differential inheritances; Bruenig, 2019)
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From page 374... ...
It is possible that housing subsidies alone -- without requirements about where recipients use them -- might decrease intergenerational poverty; however, the evidence on this is mixed and limited. As an income subsidy alone, housing assistance lifted roughly three million people out of poverty in 2019, including 936,000 children (Fischer et al., 2021)
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From page 375... ...
They believe that the variation in local markets renders a one-size-fits-all housing policy less effective. They also discuss the possibility of broadening the reach of current subsidy dollars by providing more "shallow" subsidies and possibly time limits, instead of the long and deep subsidies that the HCV, LIHTC, and public housing currently offer.
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They propose combining a universal entitlement to housing assistance with increased Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit funding.
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. Evidence on Improving Housing for Native Americans Native American families face distinct housing-related barriers to intergenerational mobility.
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. Between 1993 and 2019, violent crime per 100,000 declined from 747 to 379 and property crimes fell by a similar proportion, from 4,740 to 2,109 800 700 600 Violent crime rate per 100,000 500 400 300 200 100 0 1960 1963 1966 1969 1972 1975 1978 1981 1984 1987 1990 1993 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 2011 2014 2017 2020 FIGURE C-9-1 U.S.
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From page 379... ...
state and federal prisons. Some of the persistently high rates of incarceration in the United States can be traced to those cohorts coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when the punitiveness of the criminal justice system increased, resulting in high incarceration rates for these cohorts.
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From page 380... ...
. Moreover, while for all young people involvement in the criminal justice system has fallen, Black, Latino and Native American youths are still significantly more likely than their White counterparts to be arrested, referred to court, and placed in outof-home facilities after adjudication (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2022; see Figure C-9-3)
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From page 381... ...
Incarceration rates tripled between 1980 and 2008, and the share of the adult population under criminal justice monitoring more generally
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From page 382... ...
. Causal evidence on the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice involvement is mixed; some studies have found that children whose parents were incarcerated are more likely to be incarcerated themselves (Dobbie et al., 2018; Wildeman, 2020)
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From page 383... ...
reports that adding one police officer prevents four violent crimes and 15 property crimes. • Reductions in lead pollution have been shown to have a causal impact on crime and disciplinary infractions in school (Aizer & Currie, 2019; Grönqvist et al., 2020; Reyes, 2007)
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From page 384... ...
provides grants to state and local agencies to support efforts to improve their juvenile justice system and support delinquency prevention programs. To receive grants, states must demonstrate that they are in compliance
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, while others believed that it would merely eliminate most such detention, and less for serious offending. Reducing Offending Through Human Capital Investments Such as Becoming a Man (BAM)
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From page 386... ...
neighborhoods with above-city-average rates of violent crime. Jurisdictions would be allowed to partner with community-based organizations or provide grants for low-income property owners.
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From page 387... ...
Not only does incarceration reduce earnings during and after detention, but also court fees and fines increase household debt, further reducing the resources available for investing in children. While there is no evidence estimating the direct impact of fines and fees on children, and evidence of the impact of parental incarceration on children is mixed, the committee considered policy proposals that have the potential to increase intergenerational mobility by reducing the disruptions in resources caused by parental involvement with the criminal justice system.
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. • Restorative justice in the juvenile justice system and schools.
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From page 389... ...
. • Restorative justice in the criminal justice system.
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From page 390... ...
. Although correlational, their study confirms that low-income children involved with the child welfare system are at elevated risk of poor mobility-related outcomes in young adulthood, making them a group at high risk of intergenerational poverty.
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From page 391... ...
(2009) found that, even after controlling for family poverty, Black youth who were maltreated were less likely to have obtained mental health services than White youth who were maltreated, suggesting racial disparities in mental health service receipt that may have implications for intergenerational poverty among Black children.
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From page 392... ...
. At the same time, however, other research suggests that the lower socioeconomic status of kinship care parents (e.g., poverty, food insecurity, reduced receipt of foster care payments; FullerThomson & Minkler, 2000; Miller-Cribbs & Farber, 2008; Taylor et al., 2020)
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From page 393... ...
Evidence presented in the text on the impacts of economic support policies on child maltreatment was limited to areas with the strongest evidence -- a child support experiment, the Earned Income Tax Credit program, Medicaid, and food and nutrition programs. Here we review evidence based on other economic support programs.
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From page 394... ...
Raissian and Bullinger's (2017) state-level regression analyses of change over time in the state minimum wage and in child maltreatment rates found that a $1 per hour increase in the state minimum wage (an increase of 16% on average)
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From page 395... ...
used variation in unemployment rates caused by the economic recessions and recoveries in the United States between 2000 and 2010 to examine the effects of county-level unemployment on countylevel maltreatment and child welfare involvement rates. She found that a 1 percentage point higher unemployment rate was associated with a reduction in child maltreatment reports of just over 4%.
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From page 396... ...
First, eight early home visiting programs have demonstrated meaningful reductions in child maltreatment through a rigorous randomized evaluation in at least one sample. These include Child First, Early Head Start Home Visiting, Early Start (New Zealand)
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From page 397... ...
, using a sample of child welfare-involved children, find that whereas participation in an early childhood education and care program, in general, was not associated with the probability of a subsequent foster care placement, Head Start participating children were 93% less likely to be placed in foster care, and children experiencing multiple types of child care were seven times more likely to be placed in foster care, than children who were not participating in an early childhood education and care program.
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From page 398... ...
Moreover, follow-up analyses at age 15 found no treatment-control group differences in child welfare investigations, substantiations, or foster care placements, perhaps reflecting fade-out of the initial effects. The randomized evaluation of the Chicago Parent-Child Centers program (Reynolds & Robertson, 2003)
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From page 399... ...
The committee's list of program and policy ideas, supported by direct evidence, for interventions to reduce intergenerational poverty is provided in Table 11-1 in the body of Chapter 11. Report Conclusions About Drivers of Intergenerational Poverty Chapter 2: A Demographic Portrait of Intergenerational Poverty Conclusion 2-1: As measured by household income, rates of intergen erational persistence in low-income status in the United States differ starkly by race/ethnicity.
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From page 400... ...
Chapter 3: Racial Disparities in Intergenerational Poverty Conclusion 3-1: The challenges that Black and Native American fami lies face in propelling their children into socioeconomic security result from contemporary and historical disparities, discrimination, and struc tural racism. Behaviors and choices can also have major causal impacts on intergenerational mobility.
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From page 401... ...
Chapter 5: Child and Maternal Health Conclusion 5-1: Improving the health of children experiencing poverty has been shown to improve economic status in adulthood as measured by future educational attainment, employment, earnings, and reduced reliance on public assistance. Two important mechanisms include access to family planning services and health insurance coverage in pregnancy and childhood, both of which are key to improving the short- and long term health and economic outcomes of children.
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From page 402... ...
Barriers to take-up in Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children and reduced eligibility among immigrant families limit the ability of children in the United States to benefit from federal nutrition programs. Chapter 6: Children's Family Income, Wealth, and Parental Employment Conclusion 6-1: When tax credits, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, and other noncash sources are counted as part of in come, the family incomes of children on the bottom rungs of the income distribution have nearly doubled over the past 40 years, and rates of child poverty have been cut in half.
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From page 403... ...
Conclusion 6-5: Higher parental earnings and employment among low-income families can potentially reduce intergenerational poverty by raising family income, increasing access to the Earned Income Tax Credit and other safety-net benefits, and -- at both the family and neigh borhood levels -- providing positive role models and access to good jobs through social networks. Interventions such as the EITC that promote employment and increase income improve children's long-run outcomes; interventions that promote employment in the absence of in creased income do not appear to improve child outcomes; and evidence on whether income supplementation alone improves long-term child outcomes is inconclusive, with some studies showing positive effects and others showing no improvement.
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