Missing the mark

Jennifer Marshall is vice president for the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., where she directs domestic policy research. With 2014 bringing the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a “War on Poverty,” we talked about his pledge that government programs would abolish poverty.

How close are we to winning the war? Sadly, we have missed the mark entirely. We’ve spent $20 trillion, more than all our other wars combined, and have hardly reduced the poverty rate. We’ve got to go deeper and ask questions like, “Why this stubborn resistance of the poverty rate? What should citizens be thinking? What should Christians be doing?”

Given that the rate is nearly the same, does poverty now look like it looked 50 years ago? In many ways no, because not even the federal government can spend $20 trillion and have it not make a dent. We have seen an increase in the material living standards of the poor. We can be thankful that the kind of absolute poverty we see in some developing nations, with people fearing for their lives, has been all but eradicated here.

What kind of poverty do we have here? Relative poverty. Relational deprivation, including erosion of the family and the collapse of marriage. When President Johnson announced the War on Poverty the rate of unwed childbearing was about 6 or 8 percent. Today it’s 42 percent. Then, one of four black children was born to an unwed mother. Today it is three of four. Among blacks, unwed childbearing was 25 percent, but today it is more than 72 percent.

Libertarians complain that social conservative talk of marriage is getting involved in personal matters. How do you react to that critique? Marriage, and the family centered on marriage, holds back the state and protects the individual. So those concerned about individual rights and limited government, those fighting government spending and centralization of power in Washington should be concerned about the stability of the family. There is a very extraordinary link between the collapse of marriage and dependence on welfare. A child born outside of marriage is five times more likely to be poor than a child raised in an intact family.

So one of the reasons that the poverty rate really hasn’t moved is family nonformation and malformation. What about education, which is crucial for social mobility? In 1965 the big federal intervention into local education came with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—today that’s known as No Child Left Behind. All the reauthorizations of that law, one after the other, have led to further and further intervention from Washington. So the big story of the last 50 years in public education has been the centralization of policy-making. Right now we’re debating whether there will be a common core, a set of national standards and tests. We’re seeing less of an opportunity for a community to design education according to the needs of the children there, and more centralization where bureaucrats in Washington do not know the names of children in need and how to design education fitting to them.

Homeschooling is one reaction to that . The zip code assignment system we use for education policy often locks children into failing public schools. The critical new idea on the block in the last 25 years has been parental choice in education. Homeschooling is up to about 3 percent of students now, and we have probably about 225,000 students participating in private school choice programs across the country. We’ve seen lots of innovation in terms of the mechanisms that provide for school choice, whether they be vouchers, tax credits, or education savings accounts. That’s encouraging to see, because they are making our education conversation child-centered, not system-centered.

Let’s talk Washington-speak: What is your major policy proposal? The most important is not even a policy proposal: It’s tapping those institutions in society that have relational capital. By that I particularly mean families able to give relational mentoring to other families. Marriage mentoring where older couples go into neighborhoods where perhaps a young person has never been to a wedding. Last weekend I heard a store vendor say she had never been to a wedding—that will happen more and more as the marriage rate declines. We need to help people form a vision for marriage and gain the relational skills.

How can government be useful here? We need elected officials to use their leadership capacities to point to the connection between marriage and poverty-fighting. President Obama is in a terrific place to be doing this. He has a beautiful family and by all accounts has been a great father to his two daughters. If he could be calling attention to the need for fathers to be committed to the mothers of their children in marriage, and to be devoted to the lives of their children by being present in a married family, that would be an enormous, enormous benefit to us. We’ve heard one or two statements on Father’s Day, but not a real sustained focus on the importance of marriage as a contributor to the common good.

Of course, “stay in school messages” are heard all the time, yet the enormous dropout rate shows those messages have not been all that effective. We don’t know what the dropout rate would be without that campaign, but we certainly haven’t seen results like the anti-smoking campaign produced.

Or people now coughing into their arms—but promoting marriage is harder. It’s got to be a very personal intervention.

Reforming welfare reform

You refer often to the 1995–96 welfare reform. What was the major change? Before, the welfare system was telling single moms in particular [that] you can keep getting your welfare check so long as you don’t have a job and so long as you don’t marry somebody with a job who kicks your income up. And those two disincentives were getting what you would expect. They were driving people not to work. Welfare reform almost two decades ago emphasized a work requirement: That has what social scientists call a “dissuasion effect,” because some people say, “If I have to bother coming into the welfare office every week to say I’m looking for a job, I might as well just go get the job that I know I can get anyway.”

Did welfare reform work? Changing Aid to Families with Dependent Children worked, but we only reformed that one program. We need to go systematically through 80 others. Food stamps needs to be a work activation program. Plus, the dramatic effects that we saw up front on welfare reform have been muted in the past years, in part because pressure has not been kept up on governors to keep those welfare rolls down in their states by helping people get out into work. The Obama administration’s willingness to waive the work requirement—something that is not legal for it to do and something that rips the heart out of welfare reform—has communicated to states that welfare reform is not a priority any longer.