Archive: Jan 2019

In 2016 there were more than 400,000 children in foster care in the United States. Kids are placed in foster care because of parental neglect, abuse, incarceration, and other reasons that make it unsafe for them to live at home. The majority of these kids are successfully reunited with their parents after their parents complete a case plan. However, a sizable minority of these reunited children will re-enter foster care. New research by Sarah Font, Kierra Sattler, and Elizabeth Gershoff identifies the policy and family conditions that make foster care re-entry more likely.

Foster care is meant to be a temporary status, and the federal government pushes states to achieve “permanency” for kids in care as quickly as possible. Federal funds can even be withheld from states if too many children remain in foster care for longer than a year. A “permanent” home has two main forms: reunification with parents, or terminating parents’ rights and matching kids with an adoptive home. Terminating parents’ rights is considered an extreme step. Doing so requires detailed evidence that parents are not making timely progress toward their goals. By contrast, the standards for reunification are less clear. This means that if parents’ progress is not good, but also not bad enough to terminate their rights, the state has an incentive to reunite them with their kids as they approach federal deadlines. Returning children to parents who have made sub-par progress makes it more likely that they will be taken from their home again in the future.

The researchers analyzed data of children from Texas to find out what family conditions predict foster care re-entry. The children most at risk of re-entry were those who initially entered foster care because of parental substance abuse and neglect (substance abuse is rarely the only reason children are removed from a home). Of these cases, parental substance abuse and neglect were also typically the reasons for reentry, showing that these issues within the home persist over time.The children most at risk of re-entry into foster care were those who initially entered foster care because of parental substance abuse and neglect.

These findings are especially important at a time when opioid use (combined with neglect) is increasing the number of children being removed from their homes. The researchers do not suggest that states should lower their standards to terminate parents’ rights. Rather, they advocate that timelines toward permanency should be relaxed and more post-reunification services should be offered to formerly substance-abusing parents to reduce the risk of returning a child to a home that is still unsafe.

Originally posted August 14, 2018.

Helping former inmates return to communities after being released from prison is a serious challenge. Poor and unskilled populations with criminal records face significant barriers to enter the labor market, especially when trying to access formal and stable jobs. New research by Naomi Sugie describes the day-to-day experiences of job search and survival for 133 men recently released from prison in Newark, New Jersey.

Since former prisoners are a highly mobile and hard-to-reach population, Sugie distributed smartphones among participants and asked them to report their daily job search and employment experiences. This type of self-reporting and real-time data also prevented the difficulties of trying to remember past work experiences. The more than 8,000 real-time daily measures showed that respondents experience extreme job instability. Only about half of the participants ever worked at least two consecutive days and only one-quarter of the sample ever worked at least four consecutive days. Most men ceased looking for jobs after the first month, and for those who continued to search,  the chances of finding a regular job were still fairly low. To survive and fulfill their immediate needs, men relied on various low-skill and irregular jobs — from warehouse keepers to carnival maintenance workers. This particular type of work experience challenges the idea that work always leads to social integration and desistance.

To explain the experience of working at the margins of the labor market, Sugie created the concept of work as foraging, which refers to engagement in intermittent, short-term, and precarious work needed to make ends meet. The irregular and sometimes exploitative experience of work as foraging may even exacerbate strain or criminal activities among marginalized job seekers. This particular type of work — work as foraging — challenges the idea that work always leads to social integration and desistance. On the contrary, working as a form of survival is more likely to lead to higher social inequality and lower social integration for foraging workers.

High school math teachers may have a new answer to the perpetual student question, “Why do we have to learn this?” Researchers who study education stratification know that math serves as a gatekeeper to advanced high school degrees, selective colleges, and sought-after majors, as all of these require advanced math courses or math test scores. In new research, Daniel Douglas and Paul Attewell test whether math achievement still matters for inequality when other demographic factors are taken into account, as well as whether the emphasis the education system places on math really reflects the needs of the workforce.

First, Douglas and Attewell find that math achievement does not simply reflect mastery of skills students will need in prestigious jobs. An analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics O*net program and the Occupational Employment Statistics found that 81% of all U.S. workers and 62% of all U.S. workers in jobs requiring a bachelors degree never use advanced math or statistics beyond simple algebra or formulas. Less than 3% of Americans said that their jobs require more math than knowing how to calculate the square footage of a house. In fact, individuals with master’s degrees or doctorates often used less math or less advanced math than individuals with bachelor’s degrees. But importantly, math achievement does still predict college attendance and degree attainment, even for students of the same race or class. This effect of math achievement was most significant for students with higher socioeconomic status.Students may not need to be able to do the math that they learn in high school, but not achieving in high school math can limit opportunities for the rest of their lives.

The fact that knowing advanced math mattered for college attainment, but not for the actual workplace, indicates that the math education system is doing more than simply giving individuals the skills they will need in advanced jobs or sorting which students are most qualified for the most prestigious jobs. Instead, math achievement allows students to collect certain credentials, such as a degree from a selective college or an advanced high school diploma, and the gatekeeping function of math achievement keeps those credentials rare (and therefore valuable). So students may not need to be able to do the math that they learn in high school, but not achieving in high school math can limit opportunities for the rest of their lives.

Originally published November 1, 2018.

For a long time, individuals and organizations have drawn stark lines between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. Over the past 40 years, these distinctions have been used to justify cutting or limiting social safety net programs, leading to a decline in cash welfare programs and other parts of social assistance programs that working-age, able-bodied, poor adults are eligible for. Furthermore, researchers have shown that welfare recipients are subject to a growing list of limits, conditions, and expectations. In a recent study, Eric Bjorklund, Andrew P. Davis, and Jessica Pfaffendorf continue such research by examining states’ efforts to implement drug testing for applicants to “Temporary Aid to Needy Families” (TANF), a flagship national welfare program.

In the tense racial and economic climate following Obama’s 2008 election, Arizona became the first state to introduce a policy restricting access to cash welfare for applicants based on drug test results. Since then, 15 states followed by passing drug test policies for recipients of TANF. To understand how the states that passed welfare drug testing policies potentially differ from states that did not, Bjorklund and colleagues looked for patterns in the years leading up to the implementation of the policy. They examined factors such as states’ government ideology, whether a Republican governor ousted a Democrat, the proportion of nonwhites in the population, and the white employment rate.  Whites’ racialized economic fears may have led them to support restrictive policies framed as “correcting” the behavior of certain groups, thus prompting politicians and legislators to tighten access to welfare programs by excluding those who failed a drug test.

Both decreases in white labor force participation and having a Republican governor were associated with a state’s implementation of a drug testing policy. The authors rely on social context to explain this finding — specifically, these policies were implemented during the economic recession following Obama’s 2008 election as the first African American President of the United States. Given the importance of the white employment rate, the authors speculate that whites may have held a zero-sum belief that economic gains by people of color would entail losses for whites. Whites’ racialized economic fears may have led them to support restrictive policies framed as “correcting” the behavior of certain “morally compromised” groups, thus prompting politicians and legislators to tighten access to welfare programs by excluding those who failed a drug test. In short, this research highlights the ways social assistance programs can be shaped by public perceptions about who deserves assistance and who doesn’t.