Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Imagine a justice system built on rigorous evidence, not gut instincts or educated guesses about what works and what doesn't.
More people could access the civil justice they deserve.
The criminal justice system could be smaller, more effective, and more humane.
The Access to Justice Lab here at Harvard Law School is producing that needed evidence. And this podcast is about the challenge of transforming law into an evidence based field.
I'm your host, Jim Griner, and this is Proof Over Precedent.
This week we're bringing you a student voice.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Welcome, everyone.
My name is Julia Saltzman and I am a 2L at Harvard Law School and a student with Professor Greiner's Access to Justice Lab.
And I'm here today with Professor William Schneider, who is a professor at the University of Illinois School of Social Work.
And I'm talking to him because I found his study, which is called the Empowering Parents with Resources or Empower Study, really interesting.
The study hypothesizes that providing families with financial resources can prevent child mistreatment and mitigate the harms associated with the family regulation system.
Personally, I'm really interested in the family regulation system and am considering going into family defense work because of how it impacts families and disproportionately impacts people living in poverty and families of color.
And last semester in a law school clinic, I helped work on an appeals case for a mom who had her parental rights terminated.
And something, in my opinion, that was really frustrating was how the state agency and the court system let that family down, including by requiring her to complete action steps that just didn't address what brought her family into the state system in the first place.
So I found Professor Schneider's study really interesting because it's trying to address interventions that may work better than those traditional state services.
Thank you so much, Professor Schneider, for being here.
Could you tell us a little bit more about the Empower study and introduce yourself?
[00:02:23] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. As you noted professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and I'm faculty director of our Children and Family Research center, which is a child welfare research center here at the school.
Empower really came about because we've got 30 or 40 years of research showing associations between poverty and child neglect, that these two things kind of move in tandem.
More recently, over the last 10 years or so, we've had a growing number of what we call quasi experimental studies.
These are studies where something happens. A locality raises the minimum wage or a state expands Medicaid coverage.
They're not randomized control trials. They're Natural experiments.
That body of work has told us that as the social safety net expands, there are fewer cases of child neglect in those states or in those areas.
Increasingly, it's become clear, I think, that poverty is associated with child neglect in particular.
We have some pretty good evidence, but what we don't have are really solid randomized control trials of the role of cash in the prevention of child neglect.
Empower is really designed to be that study. There are a number of similar studies going on around the country, and Empower is kind of the largest of its kind involving a child welfare involved population.
And so we've partnered with a local child welfare service agency, a statewide agency here in Illinois called Brightpoint, that provides a range of child welfare services. In this case, we've focused on what's called in Illinois intact family services. So these are cases in which there's been child maltreatment, but the child has not been removed. The child remains in the home.
And so Empower really comes in kind of a couple of phases. So unlike many kind of guaranteed basic income studies, we started off with focus groups of caseworkers and caregivers to find out what they thought about the idea that poverty may play a role here. And then from those, developed a training manual for caseworkers.
It's an odd thing, but caseworkers aren't really trained about the role of poverty, about structural poverty, structural inequality, structural racism, and their intersections in the prevention of child maltreatment. And that's for a variety of reasons. But I think most importantly, caseworkers don't really have the tools to address poverty. And so we don't really train them to identify it, to identify its role, or to provide resources to prevent it.
And so we developed this training manual and trained all of the Brightpoint caseworkers on it, which was really quite an experience.
And then we've begun randomization. So the kind of second phase is we're randomizing about 800 families receiving intact family services from Brightpoint. Half will get just services as usual, and half will get services as usual, plus an unconditional monthly cash gift for 12 months.
And so again, we're. We're social workers, so we're a little different from your usual kind of guaranteed basic income study. We're not giving everyone the same amount of money.
So we started at about $500.
And then you get a little bit more money for each additional child you have in the household.
And then the amount of money you're given, you're gifted, you're giving varies depending on the local cost of living. So if you've got three kids and you live in Chicago, you'll get more money than if you've got three kids and you live in Champaign where life is cheaper.
We'll look at a range of outcomes related to child welfare that we access through the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services administrative data. So things like child removals, temporary removals, re referrals for new allegations of child maltreatment. So In Illinois, about 20% of families who receive intact family services will have a new investigation within 12 months. There's clearly something that's missing that families need then. We're also collecting surveys from families at baseline 6 months and 12 months post randomization to get a range of things about child and family well being.
We think of those things both as outcomes, does cash affect those things, but also as kind of pathways. Is it that child welfare system involvement decreases because families are less stressed, because there's less depression? Right. And then we're conducting individual interviews with about 40 families from the treatment group and 20 families from the control group at baseline 6 and 12 months to really better understand families experiences of both poverty and the intervention.
And I think the basic idea here is cash may have a direct effect. It may directly reduce child maltreatment because parents are able to buy the essentials that they need, safe housing, winter clothes, food.
But it may also have an indirect effect. And that's to say that poverty may cause child maltreatment, not only because parents can't afford the things they need, but because poverty causes stress and it reduces the range of good decisions parents can make.
The example I always give is if you put into Google news work and child maltreatment, what you get is a lot of articles about folks who work at places like Amazon Fulfillment centers who were called in for a late night shift last minute and are told, show up or you're fired.
Those parents are left with no good decisions. They can get fired, or as is most often the case in these stories, they can leave their children home unattended while they go and work.
What we do traditionally is treat those families with things like psychosocial interventions or parenting classes. But we think it's really possible that those parents know that those were two bad decisions and they had to make one of them. And so a parenting glass may not solve this problem, but a little bit of cash may help, right? It may help them get an emergency babysitter when they have to go into work or skip a shift if they're able to.
And so the study's really designed to get at both of those pathways, both the direct effects and these indirect effects of the range of choices that policy that poverty restricts.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: Thank you. That was a great overview, I guess, on that last point. In terms of the study design targeting both the direct and indirect effects of poverty and providing families with cash assistance, are the surveys and individual interviews structured more to get at those indirect effects? I guess. What parts of the outcomes are you hoping will measure both the direct and indirect effects?
[00:09:02] Speaker C: Yeah, so the direct effects are really drawn from the administrative data from the state on child welfare involvement. But we also ask families a series of questions about. From what's called the Conflict Tactics Scale, which is a scale designed to measure the risk for child abuse. In those surveys. The surveys are designed to get these indirect effects. So we ask things about cognitive load. So imagine a scenario where you're.
You're stressed about your ability to pay the bills to get by, and you're bathing your one year old and there's a knock at the door and you're worried it's the bill collector, you're worried it's repo man and you're distracted and you leave the bathroom to go enter the door and try and figure it out. Well, that's not because you didn't know you shouldn't leave your 1 year old in the bathtub by himself. But the kind of stress, the scarcity mindset of poverty shaded your decision making.
And so does a parenting class fix that? It may, but what may also help fix that is a little bit of cash to help pay those bills. Right. And so we're really thinking about families that are where a little bit of cash can help prevent a kind of cascading effect of lack of resources into bigger effects. Right. Into bigger. Into bigger precarity.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: How does guaranteed basic income and studies like yours differ from standard federal benefits programs like TAMP or SSI that could also maybe support families in need of assistance?
[00:10:33] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So I think first we. We think of our FAM as our program as a little different from a guaranteed basic income. We really think of it as a targeted intervention for a number of reasons, but most importantly, I think we see it as a tool in the kind of child welfare toolbox rather than as a broader social policy.
Our study and many of the guaranteed basic income studies, although they vary, the cash that we provide is considered a gift. So families don't have to do anything for it. They don't have to stay in the study for it. And so in that sense, it's a gift and it shouldn't and doesn't affect benefits.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: I guess just to push that more, some folks might say, well, these families already have access or should have access to other federal benefits program.
What is the difference to provide it in like access or breadth or for families between extra cash assistance through federal welfare versus through a targeted intervention?
[00:11:40] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So I think there's a number of differences. I think if, if, if there are travel upper agencies that are really proactive in helping connect families to existing benefits, I think that's great. And existing benefits I think can do a lot like the, the research shows us that when benefits are more generous, there's less child maltreatment. And, and that's a great thing. You know, I think access to cash benefits is pretty rare these days in the United States. Tanf, what, what, what is now welfare is really a kind of a, a shell of its former self, right?
And work by Kathy Eden and others tells us that many people don't even know that welfare still exists in the US and the amounts that you are likely to get from TANF are generally speaking pretty low and are often tied to what can be onerous work requirements.
My colleague Meg Feeley and I have a paper about investigating kind of employment patterns among low income mothers and the risk for child maltreatment.
And we really find that both too little work and too much work are risks for child neglect. And that's because low wage work, no matter kind of how many hours you work, often isn't enough to provide for a family.
And so I think fundamentally attaching benefits to work in the way that we do in the US is often a hindrance for families rather than a benefit in some ways. And I want to unpack that a little bit, which is to say that unless the all families need kind of time and money to provide what we call safe and consistent care for children. So you can use money to buy more time, right? You can pick up a rotisserie chicken on your way home from work until you don't have to cook dinner. You could buy a babysitter so that you can go work your shift.
And if you have a lot of money, you can kind of offset that.
If you have a lot of time, you can offset the money, right? So if you have a partner who stays home with the kids and the other one goes out to work, then you can make do with a little less money because you have more time.
When benefits are tied to work, then in some sense we haven't alleviated this time work stress. Right.
We're not providing enough cash or in kind goods and benefits to offset the loss of time that you have to spend working.
And so the kind of beauty of something like a cash assistance program or in our case a cash gift, unconditional cash gifts, is that it doesn't change the kind of general family functioning right. Of work of you commit to your children of the time you need.
And rather than saying, well, you can, here's a, here's a card and you can buy this type of beans, but not that type of beans, we're really trusting families to spend the money as they see fit as they know that their family's need. And the kind of overwhelming results from guarantee basic income studies in the US and abroad is that families spend this money exactly how you would suspect on groceries, on bills, on fixing your car so you can get to work. And so I think there's good reason to trust that families will spend this money in ways that benefit their children.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: That was really helpful. And I guess on that last point, is any part of your study tracking what families are spending their cash assistance on?
[00:14:55] Speaker C: We are. So families are given a refillable debit card. So it acts like a regular debit card and we refill it. And it does show us as long as families opt in and which they generally have, it shows us at an aggregate level that about the high 90% of families so far in our study have spent their money at grocery stores. So we don't know, wow, specific items, but we know how families kind of the types of stores they're going to,
[00:15:27] Speaker B: I guess to pick up on a point that you started with in terms of your program design and both learning from and educating the caseworkers that are implementing this program.
You talked about incorporating anti poverty and anti racist ideas into the training and services that we are providing. Can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like?
[00:15:55] Speaker C: Yeah, I think one of the things that we were struck by was the kind of disconnect between policy and kind of boots on the ground. So there's, there are a number of movements in different states to kind of say that that child maltreatment caused by poverty shouldn't go to the child welfare system or to kind of legislate around poverty and child maltreatment. But in talking to caseworkers really found that, that they didn't really receive any training about this at all and that they weren't really, in many cases often weren't clear about what we meant by poverty. And that really struck us. And I think it's an important point. I think in child welfare, we often talk about poverty related neglect by kind of defining on what we would think of as the dependent variable. So we say, okay, lack of housing, lack of food, yeah, we're willing to call that poverty. But I think our stance is a little bit different, and that's that we have to think about what things poverty predicts rather than look at the outcomes and say, yes, we're willing to call that poverty.
And so we really felt strongly that if we wanted this to be a systemic change, we needed to create a way of training caseworkers about what we were doing and why.
And it was a fascinating and kind of, and I think, rewarding experience.
The other piece is that our plan really is. Our hopes and goals are really to have this kind of project expand beyond just our partnership and beyond Illinois. And part of that is submitting it to the Family First Prevention Services Act Clearinghouse, which approves all new interventions for federal reimbursement. And that legislation requires that all new interventions be manualized.
And so our training is a manualized training. So we are hopeful and in the, in the end that we have positive results and we have our manualized training and we can submit it to the clearinghouse for approval. And then, and then ideally, anyone who wants to take up this kind of intervention can do so and be reimbursed in doing it.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: For those who don't come from the child welfare space specifically. Can you explain what this clearinghouse is and who gets reimbursed for what?
[00:18:06] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So for basically all of us. Child welfare history, child welfare, federal child welfare, Federal funds have flowed to states and agencies almost exclusively for foster care and not for the prevention of child maltreatment or prevention of foster care.
And that's for a lot of reasons, mostly dating back to the Child Abuse Prevention and treatment act of 1974.
But in, I'm going to get my dates wrong, but In, I think, 2017, the family first Prevention and Services act was passed by Congress and then signed into law. And, and that represented a kind of large shift in federal thinking about child welfare system involvement and really focused new funds and new funding streams on the prevention of foster care rather than just the funding of foster care.
And this is, I think, in some ways, kind of a revolutionary moment and an important moment in child welfare. And part of what it did was to create a new clearinghouse that would approve prevention of foster care interventions.
And they have a kind of a series of standards and you can meet a standard one or a standard five.
You can get funding from the federal government to partially support your evaluation of your intervention and then submit it to their clearinghouse for approval. And if it's approved at the kind of highest levels, then it's kind of in their database. And if folks want to use that intervention, they can be reimbursed at varying levels to do so. So in our ideal world, it works. We meet the gold standard from the clearinghouse, and then if, say, Cambridge wants to take up our intervention, they'll be reimbursed to do so.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: Yeah. One of the statistics that I found in my research was that state agencies spend 10 times as much on foster care and adoption, but on family reunification. So I think it is interesting that we're at this moment where some states and the federal government is recognizing that priorities should shift.
So I guess on that, what would you say?
I guess this is maybe more of a policy question than a research question, but do you feel like programs like this actually have the ability to save taxpayer costs?
[00:20:35] Speaker C: Well, I'm hopeful. We don't know.
We don't know. So I think if it works, then it would certainly be a savings. So it's probably aware foster care is really expensive.
So if we can prevent foster care through small cash payments to families, I think that's a real boon. I think you'll often hear from folks, we spend billions of dollars on foster care. Why can't we just give that money to families? And I think part of the answer is that that's just not how the funding streams are allocated.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: So a state gets money from the federal government for a certain type of service like foster care, and they. They really aren't able to just shift it to something else. And so we need to build the evidence base that those something else's do work so that we can create new funding streams to support them.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that. That makes a lot of sense.
So you were able to share a little bit about how families are using the targeted assistance that you're providing them. Is there any other preliminary results that you're able to share at this point?
[00:21:38] Speaker C: Unfortunately, not yet. We're still kind of early days in randomization.
[00:21:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:42] Speaker C: And so we don't know a whole lot. We don't know a whole lot yet.
[00:21:46] Speaker B: Okay, well, I'm definitely looking forward to it, I guess, to close. If you were to wave a magic wand for funding for further research on this path, is there other related research that you would like to see performed by other researchers?
[00:22:06] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's a real need to build out more training for caseworkers.
I think there's a perception among caseworkers, not all obviously, that that kind of dates back to a kind of common law puritanism, that, that that's kind of fundamental to the United States. Right. That if you work and try hard enough, you can pull yourself up and if you haven't, it's really a character default defect.
And, and caseworkers are, are often low wage workers who have worked hard and have gotten ahead.
And so I think we need to fund a robust trainings for caseworkers and supervisors and managers about structural inequalities and how they relate to families and to the cases they see to really help them understand why we're trying to do programs such as Empower. I think without caseworker buy in, without them understanding what we're trying to address, programs like Empower have very little hope of, of success.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: Well, that makes a lot of sense. The people that are on the ground with families need to believe in it. So.
[00:23:19] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. This was so great and I'm definitely will be watching for whenever you come out with any results. So yeah.
[00:23:31] Speaker C: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to chat.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you so much.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Proof Over Precedent is a production of the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School.
Views expressed in student podcasts are not necessarily those of the A J Lab.
Thanks for listening. If we piqued your interest, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Even better, leave us a rating or share an episode with a friend or on social media.
Here's a sneak preview of what we'll bring you next week. I have a remarkable group today where there are six of us on this podcast recording because so many of us have worked on today's topic, which is the Mother Up Pre pilot program, an evaluation of a guaranteed income project targeted at participants who have experienced or in danger of experiencing getting involved with the child welfare system in DC.
