Summary
Capable and responsible adults are the foundation of any well-functioning and prosperous society. Yet low-income families struggle to offer their children the same advantages and necessities that better-off families can offer. As a result, throughout their childhoods children living in families with low incomes face an array of challenges that place them at much higher risk of experiencing poverty in adulthood as compared with other children.
The costs of perpetuating this cycle of economic disadvantage fall not only on low-income individuals and families themselves, but also on society as a whole. Poverty reduces overall economic output and places increased burdens on the educational, criminal justice, and health care systems. Understanding the causes of intergenerational poverty and implementing policies and programs to reduce it would yield a high payoff for children and for the entire nation.
The United States has made remarkable progress in reducing child poverty in recent decades, with the most comprehensive measure of child poverty used by the Census Bureau showing dramatic declines through 2021 but then increasing sharply in 2022 (Current Population Survey, 2023; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [National Academies], 2019a). But these data do not speak directly to the issue of intergenerational poverty—the chances that children who grow up in low-income families are themselves in low-income households as adults. Concerns over the threat to the United States’ economic future posed by intergenerational poverty led Congress to include in the Consolidated
Appropriations Act of 2021 a provision directing the National Academies to conduct a comprehensive study of intergenerational child poverty in the United States that would:1
- Identify key drivers of long-term, intergenerational poverty;
- Evaluate the racial and ethnic disparities and structural factors that help perpetuate intergenerational poverty;
- Identify evidence-based policies and programs that have the potential to significantly reduce the effects of the key drivers of intergenerational poverty; and
- Identify key, high-priority gaps in the data and research needed to develop effective policies for reducing intergenerational poverty in the United States.
To meet this charge, the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Academies convened an ad hoc committee with wide-ranging expertise across economics, education, medicine, sociology, social psychology, public health, and developmental psychology, and with subject area expertise in structural racism, labor markets, intergenerational mobility, minority populations, immigration, policy development, and community-based empowerment work. The committee reviewed research literature and a commissioned paper and held public sessions focused on Native American communities, the child welfare system, and the justice system. The committee also held closed listening sessions with low-income parents and caregivers,2 federal-level public policy experts, and community-based service providers with perspectives on poverty in rural areas, among Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian communities, and among Latino3 communities. These sessions were held with subsets of committee members and were organized as small group discussions with organizational leaders supporting communities that the committee had identified as being inadequately represented in its public sessions and in the evidence base.
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1 The committee’s full Statement of Task is listed in Chapter 1, Box 1-1.
2 Parents and caregivers involved in these listening sessions were primarily Black American individuals from southern urban areas.
3 The report uses the terms “Latino,” “Black,” “White,” “Native American,” and “Asian” in identifying these racial and ethnic groups. The term “Latino” is used in this report as an ethnonym of “Hispanic” and is referring collectively to the inhabitants of the United States who are of Spanish or Latin American ancestry. The term “Native American” is being used to be inclusive of Indigenous populations in the United States, including Alaska Natives. The term “Asian” is being used to be inclusive of a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent.
INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY AND POVERTY PERSISTENCE
The committee defined intergenerational poverty as a situation in which children who grow up in families with incomes below the poverty line are themselves poor as adults. It is a substantial problem in the United States. Among U.S. children born around 1980 who grew up in households with incomes below or near the poverty line, 34% were living in low-income households when they were in their 30s.4 In other words, one-third of children living in low-income households also had low household incomes in adulthood, which is twice the 17% rate found among adults in their 30s who did not grow up in low-income households.
Intergenerational economic disadvantage disproportionately affects Black and Native American families. As shown in Figure S-1, only 17% of Asian children living in households with incomes below or near the poverty line were poor in adulthood, compared with 29% of poor White children and 25% of Latino children. However, close to half (46%) of Native American children and over one-third (37%) of Black children who grew up in low-income families had low incomes in adulthood.
Despite the higher rates of low-income persistence among Black and Native American children, the largest share (40%) of persistently low-income children is White (Figure S-2). More than one-third are (34%) Black, 19% are Latino, and Native American and Asian children account for 2% each.
The flip side of intergenerational persistence is upward mobility out of a low-income childhood, and here also Black and Native American families fare worst. One can think of economic status as rungs on a 100-step ladder, with the lowest rungs corresponding to the lowest incomes, the highest rungs representing the highest incomes, and each individual rung representing one percentile of the income distribution. On average, White children who grew up in low-income families—with incomes on the 10th rung of the ladder in the 1980s and 1990s—were able to climb their way to the 41st rung by the time they were in their 30s (Figure S-3). Asian children rose higher up the ladder (53rd rung) than White children, while Latino children did only slightly worse (39th rung) than White children.
In contrast, Black and Native American children who grew up in the same economic circumstances—the 10th rung of the parental income ladder—on average climbed only as far as the 28th rung by the time they were in their
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4 As detailed in Chapter 2, a similar study based on different data and an income cutoff corresponding to the U.S. Official Poverty Measure threshold found that 29% of children growing up in poor households were themselves poor at age 30. This Summary uses the terms “poverty” and “low income” to denote economic disadvantage, depending on the income concept used in the cited research.
NOTES: This figure shows the share of children with parents in the bottom income quintile, who remained in the bottom income quintile in adulthood. Child income is measured as mean household adjusted gross income (AGI) in 2014–2015, and parent income is measured as mean household AGI in 1994–2000. Children were born between 1978 and 1983.
SOURCE: Data from Chetty et al. (2020).
30s—13 rungs below White children. These racial and ethnic gaps persist for children whether they started out on the 20th or even the 50th rung. Comparable data on intergenerational mobility in wealth for Black and White children show even larger gaps favoring White children. The size and consistency of these gaps across the entire distribution of parental household income point to the importance of developing and implementing large-scale, effective policies and programs to ameliorate them.
KEY DRIVERS OF INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY
The committee examined the drivers of intergenerational poverty and mobility for all children as well as the factors that moderate these drivers (e.g., histories, practices, contexts, and structural factors) and limit the intergenerational mobility of both Black and Native American children. It focused on seven specific domains:
NOTES: This figure shows the racial/ethnic composition of children with parents in the bottom income quintile who remained in the bottom income quintile in adulthood. Child income is measured as mean household adjusted gross income (AGI) in 2014–2015, and parent income is measured as mean household AGI in 1994–2000. Children were born between 1978 and 1983.
SOURCE: Data from Chetty et al. (2020).
Children’s Education and the Educational System5
By imparting skills and other capacities valued by employers, the U.S. education system—including early education, K-12, and postsecondary schooling, as well as career training—is a key driver of upward intergenerational mobility for many children, including low-income children. However, low-income children start school with lower levels of academic and social skills than other children, on average, and these average gaps do not close as they progress through school. Large gaps in school achievement and completed schooling also persist across racial and ethnic subgroups.
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NOTES: This figure shows the mean household income percentile of children with parents at the 10th income percentile. Child income is measured as mean household adjusted gross income (AGI) in 2014–2015, and parent income is measured as mean household AGI in 1994–2000. Children were born between 1978 and 1983.
SOURCE: Data from Chetty et al. (2020).
Child Health and the Health Care System6
Children in low-income families have worse health than other children, a disparity that begins at birth and increases as children grow older. Improving the health of low-income children improves their future educational attainment, employment, and earnings while reducing their reliance on public assistance. Three important mechanisms for improving child health and other outcomes are access to family planning services, health insurance coverage in pregnancy and childhood, and food and nutrition programs. A child’s environment (including pollution, stress, and violence) also has a profound impact on health and development during childhood and on the longer-run economic outcomes that lead to intergenerational poverty.
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Family Income and Wealth and Parental Earnings and Employment7
Low wages, earnings, and income among low-income families risk perpetuating the cycle of economic disadvantage, in part by leaving low-income parents unable to provide their children with proper nutrition, access to medical care, and enrichment and learning activities, along with a host of other factors that might promote intergenerational mobility. Evidence suggests that safety net programs during childhood and adolescence can improve children’s educational and labor market attainment, as well as their physical health, in adulthood. Studies covering policy changes over the past 25 years provide the strongest evidence for the beneficial intergenerational impacts of expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). In the absence of changes in household income, changes in parental employment alone do not have consistent positive or negative effects on children’s development.
Family Structure8
Over the past 50 years, single-parent families have become much more prevalent, but largely among parents who lack 2- or 4-year college degrees. The committee finds a strong association between growing up in a single-parent family and childhood poverty. The links between family structure during childhood and adult poverty (i.e., the transmission of poverty intergenerationally) suggest a causal effect.
Housing, Residential Mobility, and Neighborhood Conditions9
The places where children live—their homes and neighborhoods—are foundational for their health, education, and development. Consistent correlational evidence has linked intergenerational poverty with high lead levels, homelessness, overcrowding, moving frequently, and high housing costs relative to family income in childhood. Stronger evidence links improvements in low-income children’s long-term economic, educational, and health outcomes to moving to less disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Neighborhood Safety and the Criminal Justice System10
Crime affects children in two ways—through victimization and through involvement with the criminal justice system, whether the crime episode
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7 Adapted from Conclusions in Chapter 6.
8 Adapted from Conclusions in Chapter 7.
involved them directly or involved a member of their family. Low-income and younger people are most likely to report being victims of crime in their neighborhoods and schools. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among American children, with the highest rates among low-income, Black, and Native American children. Exposure to violence in childhood can have lasting adverse effects on children’s health, well-being, and achievement.
At the same time, despite generally declining rates of crime in recent decades, increases in incarceration rates (with small drops in recent years) disproportionately affect children in families with low incomes, with negative consequences for their healthy development and long-term economic success. Children in low-income families are more likely than other children to have a close relative who is or has been incarcerated, and they themselves are more likely to be involved in the juvenile justice system or to be incarcerated as adults. Experiencing juvenile detention has been linked to less completed schooling and more adult crime.
Child Maltreatment and the Child Welfare System11
Children who experience abuse, neglect, and/or involvement with child welfare systems have worse outcomes in adulthood than their peers who have not been maltreated or involved in the child welfare system. Furthermore, income and poverty are highly correlated with child maltreatment and child welfare system involvement. While there is a dearth of definitive causal evidence on the effects of the various components of the child welfare system on eventual adult poverty, research does point to some promising approaches to preventing child maltreatment in the first place.
RACIAL DISPARITIES AND STRUCTURAL FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THESE DRIVERS12
The challenges that Black and Native American families face in propelling their children into socioeconomic security result from contemporary and historical disparities, discrimination, and structural racism. Behaviors and choices can also have major causal impacts on intergenerational mobility. Many factors influence the behaviors and choices of, and therefore the outcomes for, Black and Native American individuals, including the experiences of historical violence, oppression, and marginalization. This history has shaped contemporary racial disparities in education, health, the labor market, housing, the criminal legal system, and child maltreatment.
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11 Adapted from Conclusions in Chapter 10.
Taken together, these factors have been crucial in shaping contemporary determinants of intergenerational poverty. The evidentiary base is strongest for Black-White disparities; additional research is needed on the causes and correlates of intergenerational poverty among Native American individuals. Given these persistent intergenerational disparities, improving outcomes for Black people and Native Americans will likely require some race consciousness in our policies and their implementation to ensure that impacts are as positive as possible for these marginalized groups.
Education Disparities
Despite decades of improving educational outcomes among Black and Native American individuals, achievement and attainment gaps remain. Forced assimilation, an absence of culturally relevant instruction, school segregation by race and class, and disproportionate punishment create learning environments that do not foster educational achievement and attainment. The most rigorous contemporary causal evidence points to the negative long-term effects of harsh school discipline.
Health and Health Care Disparities
A history of unethical medical experimentation, contemporary implicit bias among health care professionals, high uninsurance rates among Native American individuals, and greater exposure to chronic stress, racism, and environmental toxins all have a negative impact on the health of low-income Black and Native American children, reducing their chances of upward mobility.
Employment and Earnings Disparities
Even after improvements in their relative earnings over time, Black workers still have lower average earnings, face less predictable work hours and less stable employment, and reside disproportionately in states where the relatively low federal minimum wage is binding. Some of these differences can be attributed to their lower educational achievement and attainment, as well as lower labor force participation rates. At the same time, audit studies document the ongoing prevalence of racial discrimination against Black workers.
Housing Disparities
Despite recent reductions in race-based residential segregation, the long history of redlining in the United States is still affecting people’s lives
in the form of higher poverty rates, lower life expectancy, higher rates of chronic disease, greater exposure to pollution, and lower rates of upward mobility, among other outcomes. Discrimination against Black house seekers and renters is correlated with greater residential segregation and with larger Black-White gaps in intergenerational income mobility. Black and Native American children are significantly more likely to grow up in high-poverty neighborhoods, which is also correlated with lower intergenerational mobility.
Criminal Justice System Disparities
Substantial evidence documents racial disparities in both the commission of violent crime and victimization as well as in arrests, charging, convictions, sentencing, incarceration, and community supervision. Black and Native American youth experience disproportionate punishment in the juvenile justice system. Community violence poses a significant risk to health and well-being for Black, Native American, and low-income communities, while disproportionate system involvement and incarceration negatively affect young people’s later employment and earnings.
Child Maltreatment and Welfare-System Involvement Disparities
Black and Native American children have the highest rates of child maltreatment and are more likely to be referred to child welfare services. Such exposures correlate with worse educational and employment outcomes in early adulthood.
EVIDENCE-BASED POLICIES AND PROGRAMS TO REDUCE INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY
The committee sought to identify evidence-based policies and programs for low-income children that could reduce their chances of remaining low-income as adults. We identified three types of policies: (1) those that target children directly, such as higher-quality or expanded education and health services; (2) those that target families, such as income support or residential mobility policies and programs; and (3) those that target neighborhoods, such as neighborhood policing programs.
The committee reviewed evidence on both the short- and the longer-run impacts of these policies. In some cases, evaluators have been able to estimate impacts on intergenerational poverty by tracking the adult outcomes of children who were and were not affected by the policy change or intervention years or even decades before. The committee decided to highlight policy and program ideas whose effectiveness is supported by this kind
of direct intergenerational evidence (see Table S-1 for a summary of these policy and program ideas). Moreover, the committee developed rules for using the strength of the supporting evidence to distinguish between policies and programs supported by “strong” versus “promising” direct evidence.
The committee also reviewed policy and program ideas supported by indirect evidence. For example, if a program evaluation establishes effectiveness based on shorter-run outcomes such as school test scores rather than adult outcomes, that would be considered indirect evidence. Most of the details on programs supported by indirect evidence appear in Appendix C. We note that because our filter was designed to include only studies that offered rigorous long-run causal evidence, it is likely that many effective policies and programs that have not yet been evaluated for long-run effectiveness are not included in our list of highlighted policies.
The committee found direct evidence of success in reducing intergenerational poverty for five of the seven key drivers: education; health; income and parental employment; housing; and crime.
Education Interventions
Evidence for the value of early care and education programs, including parenting support programs such as home visiting, is mixed. Well-studied model programs implemented in the 1960s and 1970s generated impressive benefits that persisted well into adulthood. However, evidence on more recent programs is too weak and contradictory to identify profitable incremental federal investments in the early education area.
At the elementary and secondary education levels, too many low-income students attend schools with crumbling infrastructure and have inexperienced or poorly qualified teachers as well as curricula unlikely to prepare them for college. Recent studies have shown that increases in school funding directed at under-resourced districts are effective in promoting both higher student achievement and higher rates of completed schooling, so the committee proposes that policy makers consider increasing federal funding for school districts with the highest concentrations of low-income students.
Causal evidence also points to the positive effects of Black teachers on the high school graduation and college enrollment of Black students and the positive effects of Ethnic Studies course-taking for high school graduation, which suggests supporting efforts that increase teacher workforce and curricular diversity. Conversely, exclusionary school discipline increases students’ chances of dropping out of high school and criminal justice contact in young adulthood, and it also reduces their college enrollment rates. Policy makers should consider the development and evaluation of positive behavioral and alternative disciplinary interventions.
With respect to postsecondary education, the strongest evidence was for the programs to increase attendance and completion among low-income students. Specifically, programs designed to increase enrollment, improve relevant instruction and support services, and give students incentives to enroll in higher-value institutions and programs of study all show promise. The primary ways to accomplish these goals are through carefully targeted financial aid programs and increased funding for proven support services for low-income students (such as tutoring and case management).
Strong evaluation research on career training programs also points to promising approaches, including career and technical education pathways beginning in high school as well as sectoral training programs for youth and adults that develop occupational skills valued by employers in key growing sectors of the labor market.
Child Health Interventions
Child health interventions that appear likely to reduce intergenerational poverty include federal programs that have funded family planning and Medicaid services, including medical services provided by the Indian Health Service. Strong evidence also links reductions in pollution to improvement in child health and future earnings. Finally, although the strongest evidence on the long-term impacts of child nutrition is based on historical data, more recent evidence links nutrition programs in childhood to medium-term outcomes such as health in early adolescence.
Family Income, Wealth, and Parental Employment Interventions
Evaluations of expansions of the EITC have produced strong direct evidence that intergenerational poverty can be reduced through earnings subsidies that increase both family income and parental employment during childhood and adolescence.
Family Structure Interventions
While two-parent family structures may protect families against intergenerational poverty, the committee could not identify proven policies and programs that promote such structures.
Housing, Residential Mobility, and Neighborhood Interventions
Emerging evidence suggests that programs to stimulate housing production and neighborhood improvement may hold considerable promise. The
strongest causal evidence supports housing choice vouchers coupled with assistance moving to low-poverty neighborhoods.
Neighborhood Safety, Prevention, and the Criminal Justice System Interventions
A diverse array of interventions to address violence and victimization show promise, as do interventions addressing the ways the criminal justice system affects youth outcomes and intergenerational mobility. One approach is interventions designed to reduce future juvenile offending by means of investments in child human capital, reducing children’s exposure to lead, and scaling-up successful therapeutic interventions. Another approach is to strengthen communities by reducing violent crime, victimization, and gun violence, for example through effective policing strategies, such as expanding police presence and supporting community policing in high-crime neighborhoods.
Child Maltreatment and the Child Welfare System Interventions
Research has identified a number of promising programs focused on reducing the risk of child maltreatment. Evaluation evidence on the longer-run impacts of these programs is too weak to identify profitable incremental federal investments in the child maltreatment area.
Reducing Racial Disparities
Racial disparities are relevant to virtually any intervention aimed at reducing intergenerational poverty, so the committee also looked for evidence about programs specifically designed to reduce them. The committee was unable to identify long-term evaluations of programs that would specifically address racial disparities in intergenerational poverty. It did, however, find that a number of the programs listed in Table S-1 would disproportionately benefit Black children (see Table C-3-1). These include increasing K-12 school funding, having more Black teachers, reducing harsh school discipline, strengthening financial aid and student support programs in postsecondary education, establishing career training programs, expanding Medicaid access, reducing pollution, funding nutrition programs, expanding the EITC, reducing juvenile incarceration, supporting therapeutic programs such as Becoming a Man, engaging in vacant lot abatement, and policing in high-crime neighborhoods. It also found direct evidence of programs that promoted the intergenerational mobility of Latino children: funding nutrition programs, reducing harsh school discipline, and offering Ethnic Studies courses.
CROSS-CUTTING POLICY AND PROGRAM ISSUES
The committee also considered how the seven drivers of intergenerational poverty—and the interventions that might address them—might be interrelated. It identified several cross-cutting issues.
First, it recognized that interventions designed to address any one driver might have spillover effects for other drivers. For example:
- Health interventions early in life, including access to family planning services and health insurance coverage in pregnancy and childhood, have been shown to improve children’s educational attainment, employment, and earnings as well as employment outcomes for mothers.
- Increases in school funding have been linked not only to improved educational and labor market outcomes for children, but also to reductions in juvenile and adult crime.
- Reductions in lead exposure have been linked to long-run improvements in educational, criminal, and health outcomes.
- Reductions in harsh school discipline have been linked with higher educational achievement and attainment, lower usage of safety net programs, and reduced involvement in the criminal legal system later in life.
Second, the committee found that some important issues that arose in our listening sessions did not fit neatly into just one of the seven intervention domains. A prominent example is the struggle many families face in securing high-quality early care and education (ECE), particularly for their youngest children, in order to enter or remain in the labor market or secure additional schooling. The lack of affordable ECE can interfere with the effectiveness of many programs designed to address intergenerational poverty. Children themselves need ECE that promotes their health, safety, and school readiness. Reliable ECE is also important for parents because steady employment requires affordable and reliable ECE. The Child Care and Development Block Grant program has provided subsidies to many low-income working mothers, and while it has been shown to promote parental employment, it has been less successful at promoting children’s school readiness. Finding affordable approaches to promoting both parental employment and children’s school readiness is a key policy research priority.
A third cross-cutting issue, which was also stressed by community members in our listening sessions, is the need to ensure equitable and ready access to programs. Unnecessarily burdensome administrative procedures discourage families from receiving benefits for which they are eligible.
Burdensome requirements can also interfere with parents’ ability to secure steady employment.
A final cross-cutting issue, which was raised in the committee’s statement of task, is related to children’s ages: Are incremental investments in a particular childhood stage (preschool, middle childhood, or adolescence) consistently more effective than investments in other stages? A look at Table S-1 shows that this is not the case; promising investments were identified in all childhood stages.
PROGRAM COMBINATIONS THAT REDUCE INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY
The committee’s charge also included a request to identify combinations of federal policy investments that could reduce intergenerational poverty persistence. Given the high standard of evidence the committee adopted, this task proved difficult because virtually all of the policy and program evaluation literature focuses on individual policies, rather than on combinations of such policies. Nevertheless, the report does speculate on the efficacy of some program combinations—in particular those combining work incentives, income supplementation, and ECE support. It also concludes that studies of the effectiveness of program combinations are urgently needed.
RESEARCH AND DATA NEEDED FOR UNDERSTANDING AND REDUCING INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY
Although the committee was able to identify a number of policies and programs that appeared to be effective in reducing intergenerational poverty, it lacked high-quality evidence on the intergenerational impacts of many other promising programs. This is sobering but not surprising, given the expense and difficulty of scaling up promising interventions identified in controlled experiments, the length of time required to see the effects of interventions on intergenerational poverty, the difficulties of assembling data for historical, retrospective analysis, and the costs of obtaining adequate sample sizes for the populations most at risk of intergenerational poverty, especially Native Americans.
The committee therefore offers recommendations to funders concerning the highest priorities for research related to intergenerational poverty, and to federal agencies responsible for collecting the data researchers need to analyze the likely impacts of promising policies and programs.
Research Funding Guidance
Research aimed at identifying proven programs for boosting every child’s chances to succeed should conform to the following three principles:
- Prioritize strong research designs that provide causal estimates of long-term program impacts.
- Set aside funding not only for rigorous small-scale experiments, but also for replications and long-term follow-ups of promising programs at scale.
- Fund research arms for specific communities at highest risk.
The committee suggests, in addition, that new research and ongoing surveys, both cross-sectional and longitudinal, add samples of high-risk population groups to the extent feasible, gather detailed information about race and ethnicity, and include questions about where respondents were born and grew up. Finally, the committee notes the potential utility in evaluation research of involving members of the communities under study, understanding the implementation challenges, and adding mixed-method and interdisciplinary approaches to the research designs.
Creating a Federal Data Infrastructure for Research Use
Existing census, survey, and administrative data—linked for families over time and across subject domains, including income, wealth, demographics, health, and education, and with appropriate confidentiality protection—would be invaluable for cost-effective research on intergenerational mobility. At present, much of the data for studying intergenerational poverty and related topics are controlled by various federal and state agencies and are difficult to link or use for academic research or policy evaluation. Recent efforts to ameliorate this situation include the Foundations for Evidence-based Policymaking Act of 2018, which presumes access to federal data by statistical agencies for evidence-building; supportive reports of the Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking and other organizations; and innovative projects at the Census Bureau and other agencies to build linked datasets.
To address the significant limitations on researcher access to linked datasets, which include technical and feasibility issues, the need to balance privacy protection appropriately against data accuracy, and legal barriers:
Recommendation 11-1: The Chief Statistician at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to facilitate research on economic opportunity, intergenerational poverty, and related topics, should:
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Work within OMB and with relevant agencies and congressional committees to amend the Foundations for Evidence-based Policymaking Act to:
- include a presumption of secure access to confidential data for academic research and policy evaluation, explicitly superseding provisions in U.S.C. Titles 26 and 13, which require research to benefit the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Census Bureau, respectively;
- provide secure access for statistical use, academic research, and policy evaluation to records of state benefit programs that receive federal funds (e.g., the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program);
- require federal agencies with custody of confidential datasets to use a risk-utility framework for determining appropriate privacy protection methods for their data; and
- impose penalties on researchers and other data users for willful, harmful disclosure of confidential data, similar to the penalties imposed on statistical agency staff;
- Work with the IRS Statistics of Income Division and the Census Bureau to expand the tax items available to the Census Bureau under regulation 6103(j)(1)-1 for research use;
- Work within OMB and with relevant agencies and congressional committees to secure sustained funding for data linkage projects, Federal Statistical Research Data Centers, and technical capacity in the states to share records to support cost-effective research on intergenerational poverty, economic opportunity, and related topics; and
- Work with relevant agencies to establish guidelines for consent and data storage that will facilitate the re-use of survey and intervention data, linked to subsequent administrative records, for long-term follow-up and for studies not yet anticipated at the time of the original study.
| Driver | Program or policy idea (* indicates that the supporting evidence was particularly strong) |
|---|---|
| Education | |
|
None identified in recent research |
|
Increase K-12 school spending in the poorest districts* Increase teacher workforce diversity* Reduce exclusionary school discipline* Increase access to Ethnic Studies courses |
|
Expand effective financial aid programs for low-income students* Increase campus supports (such as tutoring and case management)* |
|
Expand high-quality career and technical education programs in high school* Expand sectoral training programs for adults and youth* |
| Child and Maternal Health | |
|
Increase funding for Title X family planning programs* Ensure that Medicaid beneficiaries have access to family planning services* |
|
Expand access to Medicaid with continuous 12-month eligibility and 12-month post-partum coverage* Expand access to Indian Health Services for all eligible mothers and children |
|
Support the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to work with local partners to adopt and expand efficient methods of monitoring outdoor and—especially in schools—indoor air quality |
|
Remove the 5-year waiting period of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility for legal permanent resident parents* Eliminate the proration of SNAP benefits for citizen children with undocumented parents |
| Family Income, Wealth, and Employment | |
|
Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit by increasing payments along some or all portions of the schedule and possibly by providing a credit to families with no earnings* |
| Family Structure | |
|
None identified by research to date |
|
| Driver | Program or policy idea (* indicates that the supporting evidence was particularly strong) |
|---|---|
| Housing and Neighborhoods | |
|
Expand coverage of the Housing Choice Voucher program and couple it with customized counseling and case management services to facilitate moves to low-poverty neighborhoods |
| Neighborhood Crime and the Criminal Justice System | |
|
Use juvenile confinement only for youth who pose a serious and immediate threat to public safety* |
|
Improve school quality and reduce lead exposure in ways identified in the education and health categories* Scale up evidence-based therapeutic interventions such as the Becoming a Man program |
|
Scale up programs that abate vacant lots and abandoned homes* Increase grants to community-based organizations* |
|
Expand funding for policing in high-crime neighborhoods* Expand use of effective strategies like community policing* |
|
Improve gun safety in ways that pass constitutional review* Promote child access prevention laws and restrictions on right-to-carry laws, limit access to guns by domestic abusers* Promote sentencing add-ons for violence involving firearms* |
| Child Maltreatment | |
|
None identified by research to date |
|
| Racial Disparities | |
|
A number of the policies and programs listed above have been shown to be effective for Black children and families (See Table C-3-1)* |
|
NOTES: “*” indicates that the program’s or policy’s impact on intergenerational poverty is supported by random-assignment evaluation evidence that has been replicated across several sites or by compelling quasi-experimental evidence based on national or multi-state data or a scaled-up program. Table entries without an “*” represent programs or policies for which the evidence has not been replicated or the policy has not been scaled up.
