THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 8, 1996 TAG: 9605080012
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
President Clinton has decreed that teenage mothers who want to collect welfare benefits should stay in school and live with a responsible adult.
This is good election-year politics.
It is also good policy, although the idea is a limited step toward ``ending welfare as we know it.''
Twenty-one states, including Virginia, already have adopted similar measures. The rationale is valid. About half of the 2 million people on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the nation's primary cash welfare program, had their first children as teenagers. Roughly half have no high-school diploma. The correlation between early pregnancy, limited skills and ongoing poverty is obvious.
While the welfare-reform frenzy has spawned some dubious ideas, the overall emphasis on individual responsibility is on target. Consciously or unconsciously, pregnancy should not be a way for teens to avoid an unpleasant home life, abandon school or seek independence through a welfare check. As long as there is an escape clause for young women in truly difficult homes, and there is under the Clinton plan, then keeping an authority figure nearby makes sense.
A more controversial part of Clinton's executive order inserts a carrot as well as a stick into the equation. Already, without getting prior approval from the feds, states can cut welfare benefits for young women who don't stay in school. Clinton is giving them the added authority to raise benefits for those who stay in school.
An Ohio program in effect since 1989 does just that, and the results have been good. According to a recently released study, high-school graduation increased nearly 20 percent among teenage AFDC recipients who got an additional $62 a month for regular school attendance. (They were docked $62 a month for a poor showing.) Employment rates among that group, all of whom were already in school when the plan took effect, went up by 40 percent.
The plan had less impact on a second group of young women who had already dropped out of school when it started.
Those who feel that virtue is its own reward will be reluctant to pay teenage mothers for school attendance. Gov. George Allen's administration, for instance, is cutting money for the Truancy Action Program, which paid welfare bonuses to some Norfolk parents who kept their children in school.
But the likely reality is that substantial financial investments in all sorts of creative ideas will have to be tried if a large portion of the welfare population is to become self-sufficient.
Most of the experiments in welfare reform in states, including Virginia, end benefits after a prescribed number of years. Most of those reforms have been sold as a way of saving money. But as the cutoff dates approach, some administrators are beginning to hint that women will need ongoing help with child care, transportation and other needs if they are to make it on their own.
For both welfare recipients and welfare reformers, the message may ultimately prove the same: There's no free lunch. by CNB