WETZSTEIN: Family Rewards results fall short

While researching poverty recently, I caught up with the news about an innovative program that New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg implemented a few years ago.

The programs premise was tantalizing: End “intergenerational” poverty by investing in a poor familys “human capital,” i.e., give them cash rewards for activities that will benefit them in the long run, like going to school, working full time and seeing a dentist regularly.

Armed with $40 million in private funds, the city embarked on its Opportunity NYC conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, also known as Family Rewards. A few weeks ago, city officials announced early results of the program — as well as the news that it would be ending in August.

It turns out that even though families earned an average of $6,000 over two years for good deeds, they still didnt look all that different from similar families who got no rewards.

For instance, Family Rewards families visited dentists more often and had stronger attachments to health care than control-group families, MDRC researchers found. Family Rewards families also reported feeling more secure about their incomes and food supplies, and in the workplace, they were more likely to work at least 30 hours a week.

But with more than $14 million paid out to 2,400 families, these were not quite the dazzling outcomes that city officials had hoped for, especially since they were thinking of pitching Family Rewards as a taxpayer-funded program.

Some of the disappointments were that even when kids in fourth and seventh grades were offered $25 a month to attend school regularly, they didnt show up any more often than the control-group kids.

And ninth-graders with test scores “below proficiency” performed the same as control-group kids, even though the Family Rewards teens could get $25 a month to attend school, $600 a year for earning 11 school credits and $600 for passing a Regents exam.

MDRC will do more studies on Family Rewards, as its third year of outcomes wasnt included in the citys March 30 report.

But as social experiments go, CCT seems to be just another variation on the tried-and-failed cash-welfare approach that is so irresistible to well-meaning policy wonks.

Its not the money thats missing in these homes. Its the relationships, specifically with a man who is also the husband and the father and who lives in the house. More than 80 percent of the poor families were headed by a single parent.

Which do you think a 10-year-old cares about more? A piece of paper that says $25 and the words “good job” or a father who embraces him in a bear hug and tells him, “I love you. Good job. Oh, and heres some money for your savings account.”

“The most important thing in all of life is relationships,” Jeff Kemp, president of Bellevue, Wash.-based Stronger Families, said in a discussion about poverty prevention on “The Bob Woodson Show” on TalkZone.com in April.

“If children come from the sexual relationship of a man and a woman, then the most important thing in the whole world is the relationship between that man and that woman,” said Mr. Kemp.

“Ideally, they stay together, parent the child all the way through, support each other in health, finances, spiritually … and keep sexual energies channeled toward one person, which solves a lot of problems for them and for society,” said Mr. Kemp.

The best anti-poverty program the government can provide, he added, “is to go to the smallest unit of society — marriage — and strengthen it. … Make sure that not so many kids have to be cared for by government programs that will never provide love, moral training, identity, history, a heritage and vision for their future.”

My view? How about some deep-pocket funding for experimental relationship-skills training for 2,400 New York families? That might get some results worth replicating.

• Cheryl Wetzstein can be reached at cwetzstein@washingtontimes.com.