TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081991/0819102.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.8 KB | 160 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 18

SOCIAL PROGRAMS

Learn, Work and Wed


Wisconsin's Governor Tommy Thompson offers an imaginative -- but
controversial -- solution to the problems of poverty and welfare
dependency

By ALEX PRUD'HOMME -- Reported by Elizabeth Taylor/Milwaukee


    Keyola Lackey got pregnant in the 10th grade and dropped
out of school. A year after her baby was born, she got pregnant
again. With no husband and no job, she was living on welfare.
Her mother begged her to go back to school, but Lackey wouldn't
listen. Then, three years ago, Wisconsin state officials
delivered a blunt message. "They told me I had to go to school
to keep getting benefits," she recalls. "It was a big push."
Last year she graduated from high school, and she is now
studying to be an accountant at Milwaukee Area Technical
College.

    Lackey, 20, is one of the 1,000 Milwaukee County welfare
recipients who have been sent back to school since Republican
Governor Tommy Thompson launched his Learnfare program in 1988.
Learnfare is one of a spate of carrot-and-stick reforms intended
to break long-term dependency on state and federal handouts. It
is a bold behaviorist experiment seeking to prove that, given
the right rewards and punishments, even the most
underprivileged can become productive, self-reliant citizens.
And if it works in Wisconsin, argues Thompson, 49, who is in his
second four-year term, his plan can be the model for a radical
recasting of welfare programs nationwide. Says he: "Our
welfare-reform initiatives are geared to help individuals help
themselves. Some people think they're very harsh, and some are.
They're toughlove."

    Thompson's attempt at social engineering has touched off
a debate over the virtues of economic carrots and sticks. "It's
been demonstrated that incentives work," says University of
Chicago economics professor Gary Becker. "The controversy is
over magnitude." But some critics charge that Thompson's
policies -- which basically seek to force welfare recipients to
learn, work and wed -- smack of Big Brotherism. They also accuse
the Governor of oversimplifying poverty and human motivation.
Changing behavior, notes Theodore Marmor, a political science
professor at Yale, "is a lot more complex than simpleminded
microeconomics." Some even sense a veiled racism. "It's no
longer permissible to make direct appeals based on race," says
Mark Greenberg, senior staff attorney of the Center for Law and
Social Policy, but "making the attack on welfare recipients has
the same effect."

    Wisconsin seems an unlikely laboratory for welfare reform.
After all, the state offers some of the country's highest
benefits and lowest poverty levels. But the ideologically driven
Governor has aggressively pushed to get people "off welfare, and
onto the elevator of opportunity." And he claims that his
toughlove works: while 40 states showed a 10% increase in the
number of families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent
Children between July 1989 and April 1991, Wisconsin's case load
increased only 2.8%.

    Learnfare is Thompson's flagship incentive program.
Designed to keep poor kids in the classroom and off the streets,
it has proved extremely controversial. In the 1988-89 school
year, Wisconsin sanctioned some 6,600 truant teens, saving the
state an estimated $3.3 million in AFDC benefits. Says Thompson:
"The state of Wisconsin is watching them and saying, `If your
mother and father don't require you to go to school, the state
is going to be there to make sure you ((do)).' "

    For some, the program seems an unqualified success.
Hugging her three-year-old son and two-year-old daughter, Lackey
praises the harsh medicine that put her back in the classroom.
Learnfare "should be put in all the states," she says. "The
people who criticize it want the money free and do nothing for
it. But nothing comes free."

    Others are less sanguine. A 1990 audit by the state
legislature found that 84% of the appeals made by truant teens
were overturned because of errors in records kept by the schools
or the welfare agency. Furthermore, the Employment and Training
Institute of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that
in Milwaukee County less than 30% of the kids whose families had
welfare payments docked for poor attendance were actually in
school two months after being sanctioned. Last summer U.S.
District Court Judge Terence Evans ordered that Learnfare be
suspended in Milwaukee. "Recipients," he wrote, "should not be
made homeless and hungry in the name of social experimentation."
In October, however, the judge reinstated Learnfare, after the
city improved its record keeping and hired social workers to
help truant teens.

    The program's final report card won't be available until
a federally ordered evaluation is completed later this year.
Thompson declares that Learnfare "is encouraging teens to return
to school and to attend regularly." But the evidence suggests
otherwise. Whereas the dropout rate in Milwaukee was 10.5% in
1988, the year before Learnfare started, it skyrocketed to 14.7%
in the 1989-90 academic year.

    Thompson has also run into trouble with his proposed
Parental and Family Responsibility Initiative, dubbed
"Bridefare" by critics. The Governor prefers to call it "Make
Room for Daddy" and insists that the program will make fathers
more responsible for their children. Says Republican state
representative Susan Vergeront: "The concept of trying to
promote two-parent families makes good sense." But Democratic
state representative Barbara Notestein brands it "a
state-sponsored shotgun wedding," and adds, "No one objects to
bringing fathers in, but should the government do something that
encourages teenagers to get married and limit their options?"

    The Governor gripes that his state has become a "welfare
magnet" for out-of-state poor because Wisconsin -- despite a
reduction of AFDC outlays of 6% to fund Thompson's reforms --
has some of the highest benefits in the nation. In 1989 he
proposed a two-tier system that would peg newcomers' benefits
to those in their home states during their first six months of
Wisconsin residency. Advocates for the poor challenge the
legality of the double-barreled scheme, pointing out that the
Supreme Court banned residency requirements for welfare benefits
in 1969.

    Thompson's most radical proposals have not yet got off the
ground. Last month the Democratic-controlled state legislature
rejected the Governor's bid to expand Learnfare by applying it
to children as young as six. Wisconsin lawmakers have similarly
voted down the two-tier benefits system and weakened the
Bridefare plan. Undeterred, Thompson announced last week that
he would push for a Federal Government waiver that would allow
for a modified version of Bridefare.

    Though the practical results of Thompson's experiment are
meager so far, other states -- like Ohio, Arkansas and Kansas
-- are experimenting with economic incentives of their own. And
under the influence of a Republican Administration that prefers
self-help to government assistance, such ideas are likely to
gain momentum.

    Republican House whip Newt Gingrich has praised Thompson
as an "activist conservative," and some tout the Governor as a
rising G.O.P. star. There are even those Wisconsinites who,
having watched ex-second baseman Thompson (he played for the
Royall High School Hilltoppers) standing next to ex-first
baseman George Bush at last month's major league All-Star game
in Toronto, see their Governor as a possible future President.
That may seem farfetched. But to many of those who elected
Reagan and Bush, a man who tells welfare recipients to get off
their rear ends and work for a living could have strong appeal.