Can You Fight Poverty by Paying Kids to Go to School?
Politico Magazine
MEMPHIS — On one side of South Lauderdale Ave. sits the Foote Homes, among the last of the old federal housing projects that once proliferated in South Memphis, a low-slung, dun-bricked complex marked by stuffed animal memorials to dead teenagers, a place where two grown women recently pummeled each other silly while neighbors stood by laughing, smartphone cameras rolling for YouTube posterity.
But behind those reassuring facades persist many of the same underlying problems found at the housing project across the street: single-mother households, substandard schools, lousy off-the-books jobs, a near-universal dependence on government support. Cleaborn looks a world apart, but in fact many of its residents are drawn from other projects around Memphis that have been demolished over the years under a massive federally subsidized effort to replace the city’s crumbling housing stock that poured as much as a quarter-billion dollars into Memphis over the past decade — without conquering the city’s endemic poverty......
......About one of every three families in this river city of 655,000, one of the perennially poorest in the country, lives beneath the poverty line, and thousands more teeter just above it. Figuring out how to pull people like Gordon-Cole out of the permanent underclass has been one of the most vexing challenges the country has faced in the past half century, and it remains unfinished despite the billions spent on the effort. Gordon-Cole’s house is located exactly one mile south of the Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he embarked on a never-finished Poor People’s Campaign that was supposed to transform the civil rights movement into a quest for economic equality. Forty-six years later, the marchers are gone, the movement is mostly dormant and the national poverty rate is basically the same as it was when King made his final speech here.
But these are different times, and a new kind of anti-poverty push, less a movement than a technocrat’s dream, is quietly being tested here, a modest experiment that could help redefine a static national conversation about how to deal with intractable poverty of the sort that not only has overwhelmed the old projects like Foote Holmes, but also afflicts even the shiny new places like Cleaborn Pointe. Three years ago, Gordon-Cole was one of 600 people (most of them single mothers) selected for the Memphis Family Rewards Program, a widely watched trial that provides cash incentives to poor parents and their high school-age children for completing tasks that seem, at first glance, absurdly second nature for middle-class families. A student who compiles an acceptable school attendance record gets $40 a month, showing up for an annual dental or medical check-up means a $100 check, grades are monetized ($30 for an A, $20 for B, $10 for a C) and taking a college entrance exam like the ACT gets you a $50 check. Parents are also rewarded: Adults get a $150 monthly bonus, up to $1,800 a year, simply for working full-time.
The rewards system, modeled on similar programs in Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia principally aimed at the rural poor, is one of the few genuinely novel anti-poverty experiments to sprout up in the innovation desert that is post-1996 welfare reform in America. Enthusiasm for the programs, known as “conditional cash transfers” (CCTs), remains high internationally, and has been enthusiastically embraced by the Davos set. In a 2009 report, the World Bank hailed the success of CCTs in Mexico as “powerful proof that well-designed public programs can have significant effects on critical social indicators.......”
.......“It’s really the boldest alternative out there, especially at a moment when there isn’t a taste for transferring more money to poor people,” says James Riccio, who is in charge of assessing the Memphis and New York rewards program for the Manhattan-based social policy research group MDRC......
