This report, along with its supplemental volumes, assesses the welfare system and its successes and failures, describes the frustrations felt by the poor in the United States, and proposes a basic change in public assistance policy. America's state and federal governments spend more than $150 billion a year on programs to alleviate poverty, yet…

This report provides an overview of the current welfare system. The number and size of federal public assistance programs have increased during the past 25 years, with particular growth in noncash benefit programs, which now constitute about three-quarters of all means-tested assistance. From mid-1983 to mid-1984, more than 52.5 million Americans…

At the 1987 Winter Meeting of the National Governors' Association, the Governors adopted a policy program calling for a major reorientation and reform of the nation's welfare system. This document addresses how the welfare system can be reformed to better encourage the self-sufficiency of recipients and reduce their dependency, and how to use…

Between the summers of 1986 and 1987, the Coalition on Human Needs interviewed 202 low income people to learn about their experiences with employment, education, their families, and various government programs. The interviewees showed a higher level of participation in the paid labor force than was predicted. According to those interviewed, the…

The predicted incidence of poverty before and after government income transfers, the effectiveness of such transfers, and the distribution of children in one and two parent families are examined in this report on the trends in poverty since 1965. Included are a review of how the Reagan budget cuts will affect households with children and a…

Five papers which criticize Charles Murray's book, "Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980" are presented in this report. In general, the papers dispute Murray's thesis that the poor did not benefit from social policies but were, instead, substantially harmed by these programs. The papers (and their authors) are: (1)…

This discussion places the ten years of the war on poverty in perspective and, on the basis of both the experiment in policy intervention and some recent trends, speculates on the nature and course of social policy over the next decade. The basis of and motivations for the war on poverty are reviewed as the primary concern of the first part of…

This is a report on the Symposium that accompanied the 15-16 May, 2007 meeting of the UNAIDS Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT) on Education. The IATT Symposium provided an opportunity to address in some detail two selected problems that are critical to stemming the advance of HIV infection--areas that have had some attention, but remain insufficiently…

This paper examines the status of social welfare programs in the United States and recent efforts to reform such programs. It proposes key issues that need to be addressed in any attempt to overhaul the federal welfare system. Welfare reform should ensure that: (1) those families on public assistance are able to meet their basic needs in order to…

With Chile's return to democracy in 1990, evidence of serious deficiencies in quality and equity in Chilean schools prompted the Ministry of Education to design and implement the 900 Schools Programme, a reform measure to improve the quality of primary education in the country's impoverished areas. The guiding principles of the program are…

This book contains seven papers prepared for a 1975 conference which addressed the progress and setbacks experienced during the first decade of the War on Poverty. Included with each paper are two commentaries by conference discussants. The seven papers deal with issues such as the origins of the War on Poverty, its education, health, and…

This publication is the text of the House of Representatives bill, H.R. 5600 introduced to the U.S. Congress and titled "Children's Initiative." This legislation is designed to promote family preservation and the prevention of foster care with emphasis on families where abuse of alcohol or drugs is present, to improve the quality and…

The failure of State governments to use their unique place in the Federal structure for the relief of urban areas is illustrated by the school lunch program in New Jersey. The cities have a higher share of needy students and yet do not receive a greater share of program funds than the suburbs. The lunch gap--i.e., the number of low income students…

In order to study the persistence of poverty across generations with a view to developing or monitoring cross-generational poverty-reduction policies, social indicators to track dependency and deprivation of children are needed. Available data on the dependency and deprivation of children primarily describe the following characteristics of the…

By winter 1987, up to three million men, women, and children will be homeless; the number of homeless persons will continue to increase at a rate of 25 percent. This report surveys the changes in the homeless population in the following 23 cities over the past year: Albuquerque (New Mexico), Atlanta (Georgia), Boston (Massachusetts), Chicago…