1
Introduction
Children are the future of every society. The more they live in economically secure, nurturing families, are healthy, receive high-quality education, and are otherwise supported to achieve their potential as adults, the better off that society as a whole will be. Over the past decade, an average of about 10 million U.S. children (14% of all children) lived in families with incomes below the poverty line.1 These children face a multitude of disadvantages that, taken together, ensure that they will not have the same opportunities to achieve adult success as will children from more advantaged backgrounds. Abundant research has shown that children living in households in poverty are more likely than their more affluent peers to struggle in school and to suffer from poor health and other problems (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [National Academies], 2019a, Ch. 3). Children living in economic poverty for most of their childhood are more likely to remain poor as they become adults and have children of their own.
Researchers have estimated that the societal costs associated with children growing up in economic poverty—for example, the costs of reduced adult productivity and increased costs of crime and health care—amount to 4.0% to 5.4% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product annually (National Academies, 2019a). This is roughly $1 trillion per year when applied to the current size of the U.S. economy. Children who remain poor into
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1 These data are based on Census data compiled over the period from 2012 to 2021 using the Supplemental Poverty Measure.
adulthood—that is, those who experience intergenerational poverty—risk transmitting their poverty status and its costs to their own children as well.
Intergenerational poverty is not only a burden for these families and the U.S. economy, but also a rebuke to the American ideal of upward mobility for every generation and to the dream of all American parents that their children will have the chance to prosper. The perpetuation of intergenerational poverty among children who happen to be born into low-income families is also fundamentally unfair, going against the widely agreed-upon moral imperative that all children should have equal opportunities for success.
Recent research documenting the scope of child poverty and its intergenerational transmission in America today provides reasons for both optimism and pessimism. The most comprehensive measure of child poverty used by the Census Bureau shows dramatic declines over the past several decades (National Academies, 2019a; U.S. Census Bureau, 2022). And the most comprehensive study of intergenerational economic disadvantage finds that nearly 40% of children who grew up on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder were well above that level when they reached their 30s (Chetty et al., 2020), although one-third of those children remained low income as adults.2 International comparisons of intergenerational mobility based on an absolute income standard for parents and children show similar patterns in the United States and Canada. In the United Kingdom and Scandinavian countries, in contrast, rates of intergenerational mobility are much higher than in the United States (Manduca et al., 2020).
Most striking in the U.S. data are differences in these intergenerational mobility rates across children in different racial and ethnic groups. Broadly speaking, rates of intergenerational poverty persistence are relatively similar for White, Latino, Asian, and immigrant children, but much higher for native-born Black and, especially, Native American children.3
A congressionally mandated National Academies study committee—the Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years—produced a report on short-term strategies for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States
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2 The “bottom rungs” refers to children growing up with family incomes in the bottom quintile of the distribution, and “well above” is defined as incomes in the top three quintiles of the adult income distribution when they were in their 30s. See Chapter 2 for details.
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 refers collectively to the inhabitants of the United States who are of Spanish or Latin American ancestry. The term “Native American” is used to be inclusive of Indigenous populations in the United States, including Alaska Natives. The term “Asian” is used to be inclusive of persons having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent.
(National Academies, 2019a). However, because that report focused on immediate poverty reduction, it did not attempt to identify policies and programs directed at children or their families that have been shown to be effective in reducing the likelihood that the children will grow up to be poor in adulthood.
In response to a second congressional mandate, and with support from the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Bainum Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, the National Academy of Sciences W.K. Kellogg Fund, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the National Academies undertook a study to examine the drivers of long-term intergenerational poverty and identify policies and programs with the potential to reduce it. The Committee on Policies and Programs to Reduce Intergenerational Poverty was appointed to carry out this charge. The committee includes 14 members with disciplinary expertise in 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 principal elements of the congressional charge were to identify key drivers of long-term, intergenerational poverty, including the racial disparities and structural factors that contribute to this cycle; to assess existing research on the effects on intergenerational poverty of major assistance, education, and other intervention programs; and, most important, to identify evidence-based policies and programs that have the potential to significantly reduce the effects of the key drivers of intergenerational poverty. Finally, the committee was asked to identify high-priority gaps in the data and research needed to help develop effective policies for reducing intergenerational poverty in the United States. The full text of the charge is shown in Box 1-1.
STUDY APPROACH
The committee proceeded on complementary tracks in responding to its charge. First, it conducted a review of the scientific literature related to intergenerational poverty and economic mobility. The committee supplemented this literature review with a commissioned paper on child welfare and special tabulations on child poverty based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
To broaden its understanding of the causes and impacts of poverty, the committee convened two public sessions and six closed listening sessions with key stakeholders. In these sessions the committee heard from
BOX 1-1
Statement of Task
An ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will identify policies and programs with the potential to reduce long-term, intergenerational poverty. This study is designed to complement and will build on the findings, conclusions, and recommendations in the recent Congressionally mandated report, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty. The committee will apply a racial/ethnic disparities lens in analyzing the literature on key determinants of entrenched poverty and the evidence on the effectiveness of programs designed to address those determinants. It will assess the implications of that analysis for policy and make recommendations to guide future federal investments in long-term measures to reduce intergenerational poverty.
Specifically, the committee will:
- Briefly assess the available research documenting the correlates and causes of the perpetuation of poverty from childhood into adulthood. The committee will evaluate the racial disparities and structural factors that contribute to this cycle. Based on that review of evidence, the committee will identify key drivers of long-term, intergenerational poverty.
- Assess existing research on the effects of major assistance, intervention, and education programs on intergenerational poverty. Based on the available evidence, the committee may assess relevant programs in the United States and other industrialized countries (such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland) and may consider both well-established programs and innovative ideas developed at the state or local level or in other countries that have the potential to be scaled up for use nationwide. In reviewing the literature, the committee will:
parents and caregivers;4 researchers with expertise in the child welfare and justice systems; community leaders and researchers with expertise on Native American communities; community-based service providers serving rural areas, Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian communities, and Latino communities; and federal-level public policy experts. A summary of these sessions is included in Appendix B. While the participants in these information-gathering sessions were not selected to be representative and do not reflect the full range of perspectives or experiences of those affected by intergenerational poverty, they provided the committee with important contextual information and key narratives for understanding the lived experience of families at risk of intergenerational poverty. These discussions served as a backdrop for the committee’s review and assessment of the
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4 Parents and caregivers involved in these listening sessions were primarily Black American individuals from southern urban areas.
- consider impacts on intergenerational poverty, if possible as defined by the Supplemental Poverty Measure;
- consider the distribution of poverty-reducing impacts across demographic groups (as defined by such characteristics as race and ethnicity, rural or urban location, immigrant status, age of parent, and age of child); and
- consider behavioral responses to these programs that may influence their poverty-reducing effects (for example, the Earned Income Tax Credit creates incentives to increase parental earnings).
- Identify policies and programs that have the potential to significantly reduce the effects of the key drivers of long-term, intergenerational poverty identified in question 1 above and for which there is strong evidence that they will reduce multi-generational poverty. The committee will consider expansions to existing federal programs as well as the possibility of developing new programs. The committee’s review will include analyses of program costs, benefits, and efficacy. The committee may directly compare programs with one another to determine which efforts make the most efficient use of funds and hold the greatest promise to end intergenerational poverty. In the case of programs identified as having strong potential to reduce intergenerational poverty, the committee will provide analysis in a way that will allow federal policy makers to identify and assess potential combinations of policy investments that can best meet their policy objectives. To the extent possible, the committee will also identify combinations of programs that may result in synergies or redundancies, in terms of either the programs’ effects or the populations targeted.
- Identify key, high-priority gaps in the research needed to help develop effective policies for reducing intergenerational poverty in the United States.
available empirical literature, as well as for its deliberations on “best bet” policies and programs for reducing intergenerational poverty. Appendix B provides more detail on key themes and quotes from those sessions.
ORGANIZATION OF THE REPORT
This report of the committee’s response to the charge describes its findings about the drivers of intergenerational poverty and conclusions regarding “best bet” policies that the committee judged worthy of consideration by policy makers and in public policy discussions. It has been divided into a set of relatively short chapters and a set of appendices that provide additional details to support the claims and analyses discussed in the main report. The committee urges interested readers to consult these appendices to gain a more complete picture of its work.
Chapters 2 and 3 offer contextual background: Chapter 2 is a demographic portrait of intergenerational poverty and income mobility in the United States, and Chapter 3 is an overview of the historical and contemporary experiences of Black and Native American people in the United States and the enduring effects of their disparate treatment. Chapters 4 through 10 present the committee’s findings and conclusions from the research on seven primary drivers of intergenerational poverty: children’s education, children’s health, parental income, family structure, housing and neighborhoods, crime and criminal justice, and child maltreatment. Chapter 11 briefly summarizes what the committee has learned and identifies the gaps in the data and research needed to develop effective policies for reducing intergenerational poverty in the United States that the committee regards as most pressing.
DEFINING INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY
The Statement of Task explicitly instructs the committee to use an economic definition of intergenerational poverty: the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). As explained in Chapter 2, the SPM defines poverty by comparing an individual’s household income with a poverty threshold that varies with household size and local cost of living. Poverty thresholds ranged between $25,000 and $30,000 for two-adult, two-child families in 2020 (Fox & Burns, 2021). Children and all other family members in households with incomes below the relevant threshold are considered poor.5 Using the SPM, which includes noncash sources of income, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 12.4% of U.S. children lived in families with incomes below the poverty line in 2022 (Shrider & Creamer, 2023; Box 1-2).
The Census Bureau first began issuing SPM-based poverty estimates in 2011, and prior to that time there was only limited work extending SPM-based estimates (Burkhauser et al., 2023). As the committee assessed the evidence concerning patterns of intergenerational poverty and policies and programs that might reduce it, it found no estimates of the SPM poverty status in adulthood of individuals who, as children, lived in household with incomes below the SPM-based poverty line. The committee turned to other income and mobility measures, for example looking at the share of children with families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution who remained in that income quintile as adults or who moved into a higher quintile. The committee also expanded its conception of economic success, or lack of it,
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5 The SPM differs from the Official Poverty Measure in a number of ways, most notably in that it includes “in-kind” sources of income such as tax credits and benefits from programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly Food Stamps) and because it is adjusted for the local cost of living.
BOX 1-2
How Much Child Poverty Is There?
Using a poverty measure (the SPM) that includes noncash sources of income, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 12.4% of U.S. children lived in families with incomes below the poverty line in 2022 (Shrider & Creamer, 2023). This poverty rate is nearly half its level in 2013. And this recent decline is on top of a 10 percentage-point decline in SPM-based poverty between 1967 and 2013 (National Academies, 2019a, Figure 2-11). These rapid declines in child poverty may lead some to raise the question of whether the United States is on the cusp of eliminating child poverty, and perhaps intergenerational poverty as well.
The committee’s view is that, despite these welcome reductions in child poverty, both current and intergenerational poverty remain urgent national problems. The primary reason is that single-year poverty rates fluctuate with policy changes and macroeconomic conditions. Child poverty rates in 2021 were only 5.2%, but that low rate can be attributed to pandemic relief policies, such as the expansion of the Child Tax Credit to very-low-income parents.
Moreover, many children not classified as in poverty are nevertheless living in families with incomes not far above the poverty line. Drawing the line at 150% of the current SPM poverty thresholds increases the number of children in low-income families by 60%.
SOURCE: Committee generated.
in adulthood to include strong correlates of family income, such as earnings from employment, level of schooling completed, health status, and involvement as an adult with the criminal justice system.
Most of the poverty standards used by the U.S. government are based on an absolute income standard that is adjusted for inflation and family size but little else. A broader set of measures conceives of economic position in a relative sense—where parental families and adult children are on the economic ladder relative to other families and adult children. Most parents hope that their children will do better than they have done by climbing up to the middle or even upper rungs of the economic ladder in adulthood (discussed in more detail in Chapter 2). These hopes are based on the relative economic position attained by their children. Much of the data in this report on intergenerational mobility has been compiled using a ladder-based relative standard; however, both relative and absolute conceptions of poverty were relevant in the committee’s search for evidence-based policies and programs that would reduce intergenerational poverty.
ORGANIZING OUR DISCUSSION OF DRIVERS AND INTERVENTIONS
The committee is asked to identify key drivers of long-term, intergenerational poverty and then identify policies and programs that have the potential to significantly reduce the effects of those drivers. In organizing its discussion of drivers and interventions, the committee found it useful to classify the many factors that influence the developmental trajectories of children living in households below the poverty line into seven domains:
- The educational system—early childhood through higher education;
- The health care system—health services for children of all ages and for their parents, especially during pregnancy;
- Family income and wealth as well as parental earnings and employment, including the labor market for low-skilled workers;
- Family structure;
- Housing, residential mobility, and neighborhood conditions;
- Neighborhood safety and the criminal justice system, particularly the juvenile justice system; and
- The child welfare system.
Drivers and interventions within each of these domains are presented in separate chapters (Chapters 4 through 10).
APPLYING A RACIAL/ETHNIC LENS IN ASSESSING THE EVIDENCE
The Statement of Task directs the committee to “apply a racial/ethnic disparities lens” in assessing the evidence on the determinants of and solutions to intergenerational poverty, and to “evaluate the racial disparities and structural factors that contribute to this cycle.” The importance of applying a racial disparities lens is highlighted in the research reviewed in Chapter 2, which shows that Black and Native American people are much more likely than White Americans to experience intergenerational poverty and downward economic mobility.
Several members of the committee have expertise in the study of race and racism, as did some of the invited scholars and community members who participated in the listening sessions. In discussing how to interpret this mandate, members of the committee expressed differing and sometimes competing views. Some argued that applying a racial lens requires calling into question the basic premise that intergenerational poverty is the overarching problem that needs to be solved. The low-income parents the committee heard from—most of whom were non-White—emphasized the
importance of noneconomic factors, such as family stability, health, culture, personal growth, and community. The Native American scholars and leaders stressed that it is crucial to start from “an Indigenous framework,” which requires an “understanding of being in relationship,” and a different sense of time in which one is “able to see ourselves in seven generations, the way our ancestors saw us seven generations ago.”
The committee recognizes the limitations of a narrower economic concept of poverty that would not reflect cultural, family, and community experiences or aspects of community and individual wealth that extend beyond income. Nevertheless, intergenerational poverty, as specified in the committee’s congressional charge, demonstrably affects children’s lifetime health and welfare in measurable ways, so the committee decided to use an economic concept of poverty as the main framework for its analysis.
Applying a racial/ethnic lens also caused the committee to think carefully about the standards of evidence and sources of knowledge, or what researchers call “epistemology,” that are accepted in different spheres of investigation (Collins, 2002). The committee engaged in spirited debates about what constitutes rigorous social science evidence. These discussions are not unique to this committee’s work. Experts on race and racism have long challenged the dominance of quantitative methods and the assumptions that underlie them (e.g., Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008). Many also challenge the view that only experimental and quasi-experimental quantitative research can reliably explain observed social phenomena and support the development of effective intervention strategies (Krieger & Smith, 2016; Kvangraven, 2020). This debate is ongoing and unresolved, and the committee opted to focus on quantitative evidence, ideally from randomized trials or other study designs that support causal inference, as its primary epistemology.
The committee’s use of both the term “race” and the contemporary labels of racial categorization within the United States should not be read as attributing any biological facts about or inherent characteristics of groups who have been racialized as White, Black, or Native American (National Academies, 2023). These categories are not direct measures of “cultural, social, biological, and economic processes” (Zuberi, 2001, p. 142). Instead, the signifier of “race” most commonly used in the social sciences imperfectly encodes the impacts of centuries of legal, social, economic, cultural, and biological processes of racialization.
The committee provides a citation-rich narration of this racialization of Black and Native American people in the United States as well as a review of continuing practices of disparate treatment and their impacts on intergenerational mobility in Chapter 3 and its appendix. Also, in Chapter 3 and throughout the report, we describe empirical trends and patterns in education, health, households, crime and incarceration, and the labor market that
often reveal stark differences by race. Finally, when possible, the committee assessed how various interventions have shown varying levels of effectiveness among different racial groups.
CRITERIA FOR SELECTING PROGRAM AND POLICY INTERVENTIONS
The committee examined research studies across the seven domains and used several criteria to identify policies and programs directed at children currently living in poverty that show strong evidence of reducing those children’s chances of being poor as adults. Within each of the seven domains, the committee cast a wide net for programs or policies that might reduce intergenerational poverty, both overall and among children in certain racial and ethnic minority groups. Some interventions, such as higher-quality or expanded education and health services, target children directly. Other programs, such as income support or residential mobility policies and programs, target families. Still others, such as neighborhood policing programs, target the neighborhoods where children grow up. Each of these types of programs has a potential role in targeting intergenerational poverty. Across these kinds of policies and programs, the committee used the following considerations to select the most promising:
- Strength of the research and evaluation evidence;
- Magnitude of impacts relative to costs; and
- Possible behavioral responses to policies and programs.
Strength of the Research Evidence
The most important criteria for selecting policies and programs were the nature and strength of the relevant research and evaluation evidence. Specifically, the committee considered the type of evidence, whether it was direct or indirect, and its historical timing.
Type of Evidence
The committee weighed a variety of views about the types of evidence that would satisfy the call for “strong” evidence in the Statement of Task. Mindful of the fact that policies and programs are intended to bring about change in the family, schooling, health care, or other environments in which children are reared, the committee opted to prioritize evidence from random-assignment program evaluations and methodologically strong natural experiments (studies that have examined the impacts on children and their families of unanticipated changes in the timing and structure of
policies). These methods are based on a comparison of the likely long-run consequences for children in both the presence and the absence of the policy or program. Random assignment to a program or policy versus “business as usual” conditions come closest to providing the needed comparison. High-quality quasi-experimental studies approximate random assignment conditions. Almost all of our featured policy and program ideas for reducing intergenerational poverty are supported by this kind of evidence.
In assessing the effectiveness of certain policies and programs, the committee was divided on the question of how to interpret and weigh evidence from correlational studies and qualitative studies about the lived experiences of the children and families who stood to benefit from those under consideration. It decided to feature these kinds of considerations in its discussion of policy and program implementation but not in its identification decision of featured programs and policy ideas supported by strong evidence.
Direct Evidence Policies and Programs
The committee reviewed both direct and indirect evidence on policies and programs that might reduce intergenerational poverty (Figure 1-1). It chose to feature program and policy ideas supported by direct long-term evidence, which requires that evaluations track the children into adulthood who were or were not affected by the childhood policy change or intervention. In contrast, indirect evidence on policies and programs comes from coupling shorter-run evidence on program effectiveness with other kinds of information on longitudinal linkages between these short-term outcomes and intergenerational outcomes. The difference between direct evidence and indirect evidence is discussed in more detail below.
SOURCE: Committee generated.
Direct evidence supporting a program or policy idea comes from an evaluation study that tracks children or youth involved in the program long enough to be able to observe outcomes—typically completed schooling6 or earnings but also adult health and involvement in the criminal justice system—that are closely correlated with adult poverty status. The committee considered direct evidence on program evaluations to be “strong” if it was based on a program that had already been scaled up to serve large numbers of children or youth or if positive results had been independently replicated at two or more sites. It judged evidence on policy evaluations to be particularly strong if it was based on a methodologically strong study using national or multi-state data.
Moreover, to be recognized by the committee as having long-term effects, a policy has to include a developmental channel. In other words, exposure to the policy during childhood would reduce the likelihood that a child would be poor as an adult, independent of any direct effect of an ongoing policy after the child reaches adulthood. For example, an income transfer policy would be judged to reduce intergenerational poverty only if it would result in a lower level of poverty among adults who were exposed to the policy during childhood even if that policy were no longer in place when those individuals were adults.
Programs supported by strong direct evidence include a number of high-quality youth occupational training programs that target high-demand sectors of the economy, such as IT and health care, and require and reward specific occupational skills (Katz et al., 2022.) As detailed in Chapter 4, random-assignment evaluations of a number of these programs have shown that they can boost earnings for up to 10 years beyond the end of the programs.
Recent work on state expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) provides another good example of strong direct evidence of the intergenerational effects of a certain policy. As explained in Chapter 6, Bastian and Michelmore (2018) found causal links between the timing and generosity of the state EITC supplements and children’s completed schooling, employment, and earnings in early adulthood. Other EITC-focused studies reviewed in Chapter 6 have found complementary state EITC impacts on children’s birthweight, test scores, behavior problems, and food insecurity. Overall, the evidence supporting further expansions of the EITC appears to be robustly positive. In other cases, direct evidence gathered on the impacts of policies and programs is less robust. A methodologically strong study
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6 We considered high school graduation as a close correlate of adult poverty because it serves as a gateway for additional training and more than 80% of adults with a high school diploma but no additional formal schooling had household incomes above the poverty line (Semega & Koller, 2021).
of the impacts of ninth-grade enrollment in Ethnic Studies courses showed improved rates of high school graduation and engagement of students in a large urban school district (Bonilla et al., 2021), but studies attempting to replicate these results in other districts are still in progress. This direct evidence is therefore considered “promising” rather than “strong” for the purposes of this report (see below).
Indirect Evidence Policies and Programs
Indirect evidence comes from coupling shorter-run evidence on program effectiveness with other kinds of information on longitudinal linkages between these shorter-run outcomes and intergenerational outcomes. For example, suppose that a health insurance reform is shown to be highly effective at reducing the number of low-birthweight births. Since other studies have shown that, on average, low birthweight is associated with worse adult labor market and health outcomes, one might conclude that the health insurance policy will indirectly reduce intergenerational poverty. Or suppose that rigorous evaluations of high-intensity tutoring programs produce convincing evidence that these programs boost achievement test scores for the next year or two. Because test scores in childhood and adolescence are associated with higher earnings in adulthood, one might conclude that these kinds of tutoring programs are likely to reduce intergenerational poverty. Unfortunately, many programs that have shown encouraging short-run effects on outcomes such as test scores have not yielded enduring benefits.7 Because such short-term effects may disappear in the long run, the committee decided that although it was important to consider such indirect chains of evidence, they did not constitute strong evidence.
Historical Timing of the Evidence
It was also important to the committee to consider the historical context in which the reviewed policies and programs were implemented. The only reason evaluators of the famous Perry Preschool program have been able to track outcomes through age 54 is that the program was in operation in the 1960s. Policies and programs begun in the past 20 years cannot possibly have generated such long-run evidence.
But long-run evidence suffers from a changing-context problem. In the case of Perry, the conditions facing the children who were studied and their families were vastly different from the conditions for children today
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7 Recent methodological work (Athey et al., 2019) has attempted to provide rigorous ways of using program impacts on short-run outcomes to estimate intergenerational impacts, but the committee judged that these methods were not yet reliable enough to feature in its report.
(Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). Safety-net programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and the EITC have been introduced and expanded during the intervening years. Expressed in 2021 dollars, annual federal expenditures on children rose more than sixfold, from $800 per child in 1970 to $5,270 in 2019 (Lou et al., 2022). Home environments have improved as well. The education levels of low-income mothers of preschool-age children have risen dramatically since the 1960s, while family sizes have fallen, which means that the quality and quantity of parental care for children in the comparison group are likely to have increased substantially. Moreover, low-income mothers today spend much more on enrichment goods such as books and toys, and have more access to center-based child care (Bassok et al., 2016; Duncan & Murnane, 2014). All of these changes raise the bar for current policies and programs. to demonstrate effectiveness, which makes it more difficult to identify the policies and programs that, if instituted today, would be likely to result in reduced intergenerational poverty several decades from now.
When are cohorts “recent enough” that counterfactual conditions are sufficiently similar to those facing today’s children? The committee drew the line at the year 1990, so even if policies and programs run prior to that year demonstrated intergenerational impacts, we required more recent evidence of effectiveness before including a program in our featured list of direct-evidence programs. For example, a large body of literature documents the health benefits for children of environmental changes wrought by the 1970 Clean Air Act (see Chapter 5). But the committee also looked for more recent evidence, finding it in evaluations of the child health impacts of the 1990 amendments to the 1970 Clean Air Act. The recent evidence increased the committee’s confidence that additional steps to improve environmental quality would also improve child health and reduce intergenerational poverty.
We also considered evidence to be direct if strong post-1990 evidence of impacts on pre-adult mediators was coupled with strong pre-1990 evidence on long-run adult impacts in the same domain. East (2018) provides an example with evidence of substantial SNAP impacts based on program changes in the period 1996–2003 on improvements in child health between ages 6 and 16. This post-1990 evidence, coupled with the Hoynes et al. (2016) evidence on adult health impacts from the pre-1990 Food Stamp program roll-out, was judged by the committee to be strong evidence in support of a policy idea involving expansions to the SNAP programs. Taken together, these rules regarding direct and indirect evidence seemed to the committee to strike a reasonable balance between the need for evidence on intergenerational impacts and the challenge of evolving counterfactual conditions.
Our 1990 cutoff interacts with the childhood timing of an intervention in ways that reduce our chances of finding direct evidence supporting early childhood interventions. Because our standards for direct evidence require documented impacts in late adolescence or adulthood, an early childhood intervention instituted in, say, 2010 would have no chance of documenting impacts on adolescent or adult outcomes. In contrast, an occupational training program for teenagers implemented in 2010 would be able to follow its participants well into their 20s and early 30s. This is important to bear in mind when considering our list of policies and programs supported by direct evidence.
Strength of the Research Evidence: A Summary
The committee built into its classification of policies and programs considerations of historical timing, distinctions between direct and indirect evidence, and the categorization of direct evidence as “strong” or merely
BOX 1-3
Standards of Evidence Used in Identifying Program and Policy Ideas: Strong Direct Evidence, Promising Direct Evidence, Indirect Evidence, and Other Evidence
Direct evidence – evaluation studies based on random-assignment or compelling quasi-experimental methods linking recent (post-1990) implementations of a childhood or adolescent program or policy to improvements in adult correlates of poverty status (such as completed schooling or earnings). Policies and programs supported by direct evidence are featured in this report.
- Direct evidence is considered strong if random-assignment evaluation evidence has been replicated across several sites or if quasi-experimental evidence is based on national or multi-state data or a scaled-up program.
- Direct evidence is considered promising if it is limited to program or policy implementation in a single site or jurisdiction.
Indirect evidence – evaluation studies based on random-assignment or compelling quasi-experimental methods linking recent (post-1990) implementations of a childhood program or policy to improvement in childhood or adolescent correlates of poverty status in adulthood (such as birthweight or test scores).
Other evidence considered – evidence from correlational and qualitative studies, as well as random-assignment and quasi-experimental studies of policies and programs implemented prior to 1990, was also considered.
SOURCE: Committee generated.
“promising” (Box 1-3). The report highlights policy and program ideas for which strong direct evidence, based on evaluations of relatively recent policy or program implementations, is available. It also discusses policy and program ideas supported by what it considers to be promising direct evidence, plus indirect evidence. Most of the details about indirect-evidence studies are provided in Appendix C.
In distinguishing among these evidence standards, the committee does not mean to imply that the highlighted programs that are based on direct evidence are necessarily more effective than the others. The distinction refers only to the nature of the evidence—direct or indirect—from the available evaluation studies.
The relative paucity of direct-evidence policy and program ideas was disappointing to the committee and points to the need for policy evaluation studies with intergenerational scope as well as enhanced data infrastructure that would make it easier to conduct such studies. These topics are discussed in Chapter 11, which covers research and data needs.
Magnitude of Impacts and Costs of Policies and Programs
With respect to assessing program costs, benefits, and efficacy, the committee recognized the advantages of a benefit/cost approach. However, it is difficult to translate the information provided in many of the policy and program evaluations into quantitative measures of program benefits and costs. Wherever it was possible based on available information, we discuss program cost information, including in estimates of the costs of the policy and program interventions and in discussions of how program impacts varied across different racial and ethnic groups.
Possible Behavioral Responses to Policies and Programs
The committee’s charge included a directive to assess possible behavioral responses to policies and programs. When the research literature includes information on behavioral responses, the report notes this in its policy and program descriptions. The responses studied are primarily labor supply responses—in other words, to find out whether the availability of a government benefit affects how much low-income people choose to work. In some cases, as with parental employment, these behavioral responses, and their consequences for children’s development, are important channels by which the policy in question might affect intergenerational poverty. Unfortunately, so few evaluations provided estimates of possible behavioral responses that we were unable to incorporate these considerations into our selection of “best bet” policy and program ideas.
Policy Conclusions
The committee used its direct-evidence criterion to identify policies and programs that have the strongest likelihood of reducing intergenerational poverty and presents the findings as conclusions about “best bets.” That is, we identified those policies and programs we judged most worthy of consideration by policy makers and in public policy discussions. But, like its predecessor at the National Academies, the Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty committee, our committee did not attempt to reach consensus on policy recommendations. We believe that those judgments require weighing not only evidence on effectiveness within and across domains, but also normative judgments about the kinds of policies that governments should and should not pursue.
Political Feasibility
All National Academies consensus committees are instructed to base conclusions and recommendations on the evidence. The committee interpreted this to mean a focus on the effects of policies, and not on the likelihood of their being enacted. It did not attempt to address the political feasibility of potential interventions.
Considering Combinations of Programs
The statement of task also instructed the committee to “identify combinations of programs that may result in synergies or redundancies, in terms of either the programs’ effects or the populations targeted.” As described below, we found it necessary to categorize evidence into specific domains (e.g., education, health) in part because policy making typically occurs within these kinds of siloes. For example, safety-net policies focused on income operate through the tax system and are administered by the Internal Revenue Service, while nutrition-focused programs are administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. However, both in listening sessions with low-income families and in reviewing the research, the committee found clear evidence of the multifaceted nature of poverty. Families struggling financially are often the same families that have limited access to high-quality health care, education, and neighborhoods, and that have increased negative interactions with the criminal justice and child welfare systems. It is therefore likely that programs in each domain will be more effective if delivery could be coordinated for the families needing multiple types of support. For example, attempts to increase employment among parents with young children may backfire if there is limited availability of high-quality child care. However, there is very little available evidence about the precise
nature of these program interactions. Thus, our discussion mostly considers interventions in isolation, though it does note (and values) potential cross-domain effects of the interventions.
A related cross-cutting theme was the administrative barriers to participation in the safety net programs featured in this report. Because of the siloed nature of policy making, low-income families are often forced to complete multiple redundant and complex applications, such as for SNAP, Women, Infants and Children, and the EITC, some of which require in-person interviews. This often results in low take-up of these programs among eligible families. To support the evaluation and implementation of combined programs called for in the statement of task, and more fundamentally to increase take-up of these programs to maximize their poverty-alleviating benefits, efforts are needed to streamline program applications with the end user in mind. Given the limited nature of evidence on the impact such interventions have on intergenerational poverty, evaluations of any such efforts are needed.
Some important issues spanned multiple domains. For example, child care needs and policies arise in discussions of education, health, parental earnings, family structure, and child welfare. In this report we discuss them primarily in the education chapter (Chapter 4), although we note cross-domain effects elsewhere. Other prominent cross-cutting issues are lead exposure and air quality, both of which are discussed in the health chapter (Chapter 5), and parental employment, which is discussed in the family income chapter (Chapter 6).
