BiblioVault - Books about Aid to families with dependent children programs

Leadership Counts

Lessons for Public Managers from the Massachusetts Welfare, Training, and Employment Program

Robert Behn

Harvard University Press, 1991

How can public officials move large government agencies to produce significant results? In Leadership Counts, Robert Behn explains exactly what managers in the inherently political environment of government need to do to obtain such performance.

In 1983 the leadership of the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare—Charles M. Atkins, Thomas P. Glynn, Barbara Burke-Tatum, and Jolie Bain Pillsbury—set out to educate and train welfare recipients, place them in good jobs, and move them from dependency to self-sufficiency. From these efforts to accomplish a specific and important public purpose, Behn extracts the fundamental ingredients of successful public leadership.

Behn’s analysis spans the spectrum of managerial tasks—from the almost spiritual responsibility to create and communicate a public mission to the seemingly mundane chore of motivating specific individuals to accomplish specific tasks. He describes how to manage for performance, examines how effective leaders can use external success to build internal morale, and analyzes the dilemmas of evaluating ongoing and evolving public policies. He explains in detail how accomplishing specific purposes requires “management by groping along.” And he analyzes three different metastrategies for government executives—strategies that emphasize policy, administration, or leadership.

Leadership Counts is more than an intriguing success story. It offers specific lessons that the nominal head of any government agency can employ to become the organization’s true leader. This insightful book will be of interest not only to students and teachers of public management but to leaders at all levels of government—from the principal of a school to the secretary of defense.

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Making Social Welfare Policy in America

Three Case Studies since 1950

Edward D. Berkowitz

University of Chicago Press, 2020

American social welfare policy has produced a health system with skyrocketing costs, a disability insurance program that consigns many otherwise productive people to lives of inactivity, and a welfare program that attracts wide criticism. Making Social Welfare Policy in America explains how this happened by examining the historical development of three key programs—Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and Temporary Aid to Needy Families. Edward D. Berkowitz traces the developments that led to each program’s creation. Policy makers often find it difficult to dislodge a program’s administrative structure, even as political, economic, and cultural circumstances change. Faced with this situation, they therefore solve contemporary problems with outdated programs and must improvise politically acceptable solutions. The results vary according to the political popularity of the program and the changes in the conventional wisdom. Some programs, such as Social Security Disability Insurance, remain in place over time. Policy makers have added new parts to Medicare to reflect modern developments. Congress has abolished Aid to Families of Dependent Children and replaced with a new program intended to encourage work among adult welfare recipients raising young children.

Written in an accessible style and using a minimum of academic jargon, this book illuminates how three of our most important social welfare programs have come into existence and how they have fared over time.

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Poor Kids in a Rich Country

America's Children in Comparative Perspective

Lee Rainwater

Russell Sage Foundation, 2003

In Poor Kids in a Rich Country, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding ask what it means to be poor in a prosperous nation - especially for any country's most vulnerable citizens, its children. In comparing the situation of American children in low-income families with their counterparts in fourteen other countries—including Western Europe, Australia, and Canada—they provide a powerful perspective on the dynamics of child poverty in the United States. Based on the rich data available from the transnational Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), Poor Kids in a Rich Country puts child poverty in the United States in an international context. Rainwater and Smeeding find that while the child poverty rate in most countries has been relatively stable over the past 30 years, child poverty has increased markedly in the United States and Britain—two of the world's wealthiest countries. The book delves into the underlying reasons for this difference, examining the mix of earnings and government transfers, such as child allowances, sickness and maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, and other social assistance programs that go into the income packages available to both single- and dual-parent families in each country. Rainwater and Smeeding call for policies to make it easier for working parents to earn a decent living while raising their children—policies such as parental leave, childcare support, increased income supports for working poor families, and a more socially oriented education policy. They make a convincing argument that our definition of poverty should not be based solely on the official poverty line—that is, the minimum income needed to provide a certain level of consumption—but on the social and economic resources necessary for full participation in society. Combining a wealth of empirical data on international poverty levels with a thoughtful new analysis of how best to use that data, Poor Kids in a Rich Country will provide an essential tool for researchers and policymakers who make decisions about child and family policy.

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Welfare Policy for the 1990s

Phoebe H. Cottingham

Harvard University Press, 1989

Welfare Realities

From Rhetoric to Reform

Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood

Harvard University Press, 1994

Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood examine the American welfare system—its recipients, its providers, and the swirl of policy ideas surrounding it—with objectivity and clarity. Focusing on the AFDC Program (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), they examine the composition of the populations receiving assistance, the duration of that assistance—who receives benefits for a long time and who only briefly, during important transitional periods—and the prospects facing AFDC recipients within the administrative culture of the system. The authors identify three models that have been used to explain “welfare dependency” and test them against an accumulating body of evidence They offer suggestions for identifying potential long-term recipients so that resources can be targeted to encourage self-sufficiency. Finally, they review policy options.

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