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Sociological Perspective on Child Poverty: A Critical Literature Review

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(Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi, Sosyoloji Bölümü, Çanakkale, Türkiye, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, Canakkale, Turkey)

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Philosophical Reflections on Child Poverty and Education

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• Published: 12 January 2023
• Volume 42 , pages 49–63, ( 2023 )

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• Lorella Terzi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2258-6888 1 ,
• Elaine Unterhalter 2 &
• Judith Suissa 2  

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The harmful effects of Covid 19 on children living in poverty have refocused attention on the complex nature of child poverty and the vexed question of its relationship to education. The paper examines a tension at the heart of much discussion of child poverty and education. On the one hand, education is often regarded as essential for children’s flourishing and a means by which children can “escape” poverty; yet on the other hand, education systems, institutions, and practices, often reflect and entrench the disadvantages associated with poverty. Narratives concerning education as an escape from poverty tend not to deal in any depth with the injustices associated with poverty, stressing instead the transformative potential of education. By contrast, largely sociological analyses of the ways in which schooling reproduces inequalities tend to stop short of developing a normative account of how education can contribute to transforming the structural injustices related to poverty and its effects on children’s lives. In working to move beyond this analytic impasse, the paper shows how the cluster of concepts, which Robeyns (2018) locates as central to the capability approach, give insights which help to address these two different lacunae. The notion of conversion factors highlights the significance of taking account of existing relationships in education, while the distinction between capabilities and functionings helps guide practices regarding the education of children living in poverty. Drawing on literature on the heightened inequalities associated with poor children’s experience of lack of schooling during the COVID pandemic, the paper sketches some of the ways in which sociological analysis and normative evaluation can be linked in taking forward an “ethically engaged political philosophy” (Wolff, 2018) to discuss child poverty and education in real schools.

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Introduction

While exacerbating many of the harmful effects of poverty on children’s lives, the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the complexities of relationships of poverty and education and the ethical issues they raise. Two events exemplify this.

In January 2021, with UK schools closed due to the pandemic, children were not able to receive free meals at school, an essential support to thousands of families living in poverty. The government contracted a private company to distribute food to families receiving benefits. The food parcels were, however, of low nutritional quality and not at all plentiful. Mothers posted pictures on the internet recording the extremely meagre weekly food parcels they received in lieu of free school meals. For children living in poverty in England, the fears and disruptions of school closures associated with COVID were amplified by hunger, and carelessness of those in positions of authority distributing food. They were given a minimal handout, but indignity and exclusion were underlined.

In January 2022 Xolani Mtshali, a South African student, waiting to receive his final school leaving results, noted how impossible it had been for him to access the material distributed on TV and radio by the government when schools were shut: “ Even though I know there were TV and radio programmes for extra lessons, we do not have a TV at my house and on the radio they concentrated a lot on physics (which I did not study) and because I stay in a rural area people who would be able to help me with certain subjects stay very far from me, so it was difficult” ( Equal Education 2022 ). As the pandemic claimed millions of lives across the world it raised questions about what forms of social protection societies could offer those who were subjected to intense overt and covert discrimination. As many have noted, it also amplified the inequalities in societies (UNDP 2022 ; UNESCO 2022 ).

These two instances of the effects of Covid highlight many facets of the relationship of poverty and education indicating how the lack of resources in the households and communities of poor children, is compounded by cumulative effects of inadequate policy and practice, and experiences of social division. These incidents during the COVID pandemic prompt the need for philosophical reflection on the nature of the problem and how to address it.

Many studies of the effects of COVID, together with much of the academic work on children, education, and poverty, (e.g., Holt and Murray 2022 ; Hevia et al. 2022 ; Brehm et al. 2021 ), draw attention to the layers of these manifestly unjust conditions but they do not address the normative questions they raise for education. Our discussion examines this tension at the heart of much work on child poverty and education. We note how, on the one hand, education is often regarded as essential for children’s flourishing and as a means by which children can “escape” poverty. Education is thus a locus of values but the facts that shape those values are often not fully considered. Yet on the other hand, many accounts document how education systems, institutions, and practices, often reflect and entrench the disadvantages associated with poverty. In these largely sociological analyses drawing on statistical and empirical facts documenting the ways in which schooling reproduces inequalities, a number of which were assembled during COVID to record the effects of the pandemic on children’s lives (e.g., UNESCO 2021 ), there is a tendency for the discussion to stop short of developing a normative account of how education can contribute to transforming the structural injustices related to poverty and its effects on children’s lives. A range of facts is analysed, but the values to be addressed are often assumed more than directly articulated. In this paper we discuss problems with both these narratives. In attempting to overcome the limitations of both positions we adopt an approach of “ethically engaged political philosophy” (Wolff 2018 ) and seek to articulate the values and the factors that may advance the debate and inform practice. Our analysis, including a brief critical consideration of the values advanced by ideal approaches to justice, suggests that an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, informed by a normative ethical framework, can broaden out our understanding of the relationship between child poverty and education in a way that transcends the focus on the causal mechanisms by which poverty serves as a barrier to educational achievement and educational opportunities offer an “escape” from poverty.

The first part of the paper counterposes the two narratives about children’s education and poverty which arise from different perspectives and disciplinary foci, such as sociology of education and education and international development. The second part of the paper, in working to move beyond this analytic impasse associated with the two perspectives talking past each other draws on a cluster of concepts, which Robeyns ( 2018 ) locates as central to the capability approach. We use these to develop insights which help to address these two different lacunae and build some interdisciplinary framing that can help to link empirical analysis and normative evaluation in an attempt to better understand the complex interplay of child poverty and education.

Two Narratives of Poverty and Education

The two narratives we have identified in the literature on poverty, education, and childhood, which came to be deployed in the policy discussions at the time of COVID, are firstly a narrative of children shut out of quality education by poverty, and secondly a narrative of children shut up in poor schools because of poverty. We lay out some key features of each narrative and highlight work which exemplifies this. Different disciplinary concerns shape these two narratives. While both narratives are infused with values of justice and equality, albeit considered and articulated in different domains, the different ways in which these values are positioned has implications, constraining a wider analytic engagement.

In the first narrative, poor children are locked out of the opportunities for knowledge, skills, understanding, attaining learning outcomes and qualifications, autonomy, wellbeing, and relationships of flourishing associated with formal education. In these accounts, the problem of poverty is presented as external to the school, and is associated, for example, with poor housing, run down or violent neighbourhoods, families who do not value education, or do not earn enough to pay for good education, harsh government policies or inadequate delivery of education reform, because of a poverty of ambition by officials (e.g. Barrett et al. 2019 ; Pritchett 2019 ; Azevedo 2020 ;). During the COVID pandemic this narrative was often deployed showing how poor girls had less access to mobile technologies than boys and missed much more schooling (UNESCO 2022 ).

In this narrative, schools can mitigate the effects of poverty, if they can improve their ‘quality’. Policy work drawing on this narrative emphasises that the learning outcomes of poor children are behind where they should be, giving rise to significant inequalities of educational attainment. This emphasis on the learning gap has had much attention as an outcome of schools being shut during the COVID period in the UK and internationally (Education in England 2020 ; World Bank 2021 ; House of Commons Library 2021 ). In these versions of this argument there is no normative question to be addressed regarding the nature of quality education, rather, the focus is mainly on a distributional issue, regarding how to improve school organisation, learning outcomes and close the attainment gap (e.g., Weidmann et al. 2021 ; Akmal and Pritchett 2021 ). Education is equated with learning outcomes in a narrow range of subjects, with little attention to a wider range of relationships, processes, experiences, and knowledge forms. Raffo et al ( 2009 ) nuance this narrative and identify the complexity of the relationships between poverty and learning outcomes, distinguishing between accounts which document forms of poverty at the micro, meso, and macro levels. They note that perspectives on education can be divided between those which are oriented to a more functionalist view of education serving society, and those which focus on how education might develop critical perspectives (Raffo et al 2009 , 11–13). A mainstream version of the narrative that poverty is a problem of children out of school or learning little of value in school, we suggest, is more aligned with a functionalist view of education.

This articulates a clear perspective on the ways in which poverty or dysfunctional elements are to be kept outside the focus of education planning, which itself does not engage with the purpose of education beyond ‘learning’. This learning is generally narrowed down to a very limited number of outcomes in literacy and numeracy (Smith and Benavot 2021 ; D’Agnese 2017 ), which further contributes to the existing inequalities.

Thus, in the narrative that poverty is the problem, and education is a remedy or a way out, there is little space, firstly for understanding the perspectives and nuanced experiences of poor children, and what they and their parents say about school, and secondly for understanding the interconnection between macro, meso, and micro level political, economic, and socio-cultural relationships to produce and maintain poverty.

In contrast to the above narrative, attention to empirical research into the experience of children in poverty within educational contexts, can contribute to developing more nuanced and appropriate responses at school, community, national, and the international levels to make education a means for addressing poverty, and redistributing power. For example, Moletsane and Mitchell ( 2018 ) report on the use of participatory visual methodologies developed in partnership with poor girls in South Africa and Canada. These have demonstrated potential to contribute to ‘intensifying effort in relation to addressing the lived realities of girls who are marginalized and who suffer from persistent insecurity, injustice and abuse of power at the local level in otherwise democratic states’ (Moletsane and Mitchell 2018 : 437). This analysis does not bracket poverty ‘outside’ educational experiences but looks at how a range of actors – teachers, learners, social activists—can reflexively work together to take account of its many effects and processes for change. The significance of teachers, and their positioning in this work, is noted in the work Moletsane and Mitchell have done over many years (Mitchell et al. 2020 ; Moletsane 2022 ). Recent studies of the response to COVID 19 school closures and other disasters revealed how schools in areas of socio-economic deprivation worked to offer material and practical support to children and their families in ways that went far beyond the simple requirement to ensure that poor children are able to access the formal elements of schooling (Moss et al 2020 ). The mobilization of school staff in deprived areas in the UK to organize food banks and supplies of basic IT equipment for families experiencing hardship during the pandemic highlighted the ways in which there were important links between education, mental health and poverty in which teachers, parents and learners’ experiences were implicated (Kim and Asbury 2020 ; Holt and Murray 2021 ; Martin et al 2022 ). Pre-pandemic research into the shame experienced by poor children (Chase and Bantebya-Kyomuhendo 2015 ) both illuminates the emotional cost of poverty and draws attention, once again, to the need to articulate a normative framework to address the complex moral demands posed by the existence of child poverty in an educational context.

If, as in the first narrative, poverty is bracketed analytically outside the school, and education is seen as a form of remedy for poverty, the analytic focus becomes how schools can compensate, rather than understanding the process of the construction of the injustices of poverty and working to enact values of justice at all levels of the educational experience.

The second narrative is associated with a wide range of work in the sociology of education (e.g., Apple 2018 ; Allais et al. 2019 ; Ball 2016 ). Here the analysis made is that schools reproduce poverty because of the policy frameworks and injustices of distribution inside and outside schools, the ways they interconnect, and sporadic, sometimes not well thought out ways of addressing this. The problem of poverty is inside and outside the school with significant effect on children, teachers, and families. Here there are normative questions about what constitutes a good education, and what forms of justice and obligations are required to secure it, but many of the studies do not engage with this fundamental dimension. For example, two of the key works that have had major influence on this area of scholarship—Bowles and Gintis’ study of how schools reproduce the class relationships and labour market dynamics associated with capitalism, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital, schooling and social reproduction – do not engage with questions of what some of the positive features of education might be (Bowles and Gintis 1976 , 2002 ; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990 ).

Research into the “pedagogy of poverty” (Haberman 2010 ), for example, has shown how access to schooling and to material resources supporting poor children’s education is not sufficient to address the educational disadvantages they face. Such research has highlighted the ways in which children living in poverty are subject to low expectations and particular styles of pedagogical interaction on the part of educators. Hempel-Jorgensen ( 2019 ) sums up this research:

The ‘pedagogy of poverty’ experienced by learners in poverty is characterised by a focus on discipline, low intellectual engagement and a focus on attainment in tests. A study conducted in England shows how this can differ significantly in schools in which most children are not living in poverty…. This evidence suggests that English schools with low-income intakes are far more vulnerable to the pressures of high-stakes testing than schools with higher-income intakes, as children living in poverty are known to have significantly lower prior attainment. (Hempel-Jorgensen 2019 np)

Furthermore, a number of studies highlight how teachers’ misperception of poverty as caused by parents’ actions leads to negative and stereotypical behaviours which negatively affect their relationships with children (Schweiger and Graf 2015 ; Thompson et al. 2016 ; Unterhalter et al. 2012 ). As Treanor notes, children living in poverty express frustration at being shouted at in school, often for factors related to not having the correct equipment, which significantly affects children’s well-being, and results in progressing disengagement from learning (Treanor 2020 : 83).

Several studies enhance our understanding by looking not just at the effects of poverty on children’s academic achievement, life chances, and ability to engage with pedagogical content, but at the affective significance of living in poverty (e.g., Aber et al 2007 ). Vizard and Hills ( 2015 ), in a comprehensive review of the social policy actions of the Conservative government in the UK from 2015 to the eve of the pandemic in 2020, note the interplay of many processes resulting in conditions for child poverty and poor educational experiences and outcomes. These include erosion of the protective capacity of the welfare state, as resource, workforce and capacity pressures across public services result in a failure to meet needs, compromising quality, and eroding the resilience of public service to shocks. Thus, the widening of inequalities across multiple axes of disadvantage set conditions for increasing poverty, which were to be accentuated during the COVID. This study highlights how it is multiple relationships in and around school that shape poverty. However, it is also distinctive for identifying a number of normative positions on top of securing adequate funding for public services, which include strengthened social rights and accountability mechanisms, such as enhancing the eroded process of democratic accountability for schooling and developing multi-dimensional strategies for change. Vizard and Hill stress giving priority to the needs of the most disadvantaged and to comprehensive public action to reduce social inequalities, together with a new values-based approach to social policy: dignity and respect, recognition and valuation (Vizard 2021 ). This presents a wide range of areas for normative engagement in education, made more urgent by the COVID years.

Any articulation of a normative framework for addressing child poverty as an issue of justice is clearly enhanced by a more informed and in-depth understanding of the multiple disadvantages faced by children in poverty. However, the different ways in which values are articulated and understood has implications for shaping the ethical frameworks selected.

We have highlighted how two widely circulating narratives of children, education and poverty each tend to make the normative ethical framework to understand this process somewhat fuzzy. In the next section we highlight some elements from political theory associated with the dispersed meanings of normative concern we have charted.

Political Theory and Political Imaginaries

To summarise the above discussion, our exploration has indicated that the tension between addressing the background structural factors that create and sustain poverty and addressing the immediate educational needs of children living in poverty is a constant backdrop to the choices and judgements made by educators.

All these discussions, as Brando and Schweiger ( 2019 : 5) note, are philosophically relevant in light of the moral questions arising from conditions of disadvantage and inequality. Normatively, ideal theories of justice, such as the prominent 1971 Theory of Justice by John Rawls , provide principled positions that can guide both the analysis of what constitutes disadvantage and ways to conceptualise it, as well as principles that can guide a fair distribution of resources. Although offering also important insights for education, a thorough discussion of these is not feasible in this paper.

What can be noted, however, is that while ideal theories of justice can go some way towards offering a normative framework within which to make sense of and guide such choices and judgements, they are limited in a number of ways. Firstly, they often universalise culturally specific models of childhood, including assumptions about children’s agency and vulnerability. Within most work in liberal political theory, children are seen as young people whose capacity for moral agency in terms of self-determination, arguably an essential feature of adulthood, is not yet fully formed. They are therefore considered vulnerable and dependent, to various degrees, on the decisions and actions of adults, both within their families and other institutions, including the school. This, in turn, determines a duty of intervention to secure their material and emotional wellbeing and to defend and promote their fundamental interests, both as children and as the future adults they will become. Recent research on child poverty and education, however, questions normative positions about the moral status of children as vulnerable and dependent. Researchers have argued that such normative positions are situated in a Western and often highly abstract conception, related to the cultural and socio-economic realities of the Global North (Hanes 2019 ; Yasmin and Dadvand, 2019). Hanes ( 2019 ), for example, argues that in most of the Global South, children in poverty are considered autonomous and resilient agents. He also highlights how children whose life conditions and experiences do not conform to idealized conceptions of childhood suffer from marginalization and exclusion leading, in some cases, to forms of oppression, such as those seen, for example, in relation to First Nations child removal policies in Canada or the practices of transnational adoptions, whereby children from minority ethnic groups were removed from their families and respectively placed in institutions or adopted by white families (Hanes 2019 : 23, 30). Thus, although different models of childhood inform all theories dealing with children, perhaps the problematic feature of highly idealized views, abstracting from empirical and contextual factors, resides in how they lead to policies that, instead of protecting children, end up further disadvantaging them.

Indeed, the very question of why we should focus on child poverty—i.e., whether the moral significance of child poverty, in and of itself, is qualitatively distinct from the moral significance of poverty—already hints at these underlying ideas about the meaning and status of childhood. Thus, child poverty as a social phenomenon can be seen to involve intersecting normative and empirical dimensions, and educational questions lie at the nexus of these different dimensions.

Secondly, theories of justice often bracket out questions about the background political structures within which socio-economic inequality and poverty are inscribed, suggesting that issues of justice are best addressed within the given political sphere through measures of redistribution and institutional reform (see Sen 2006 ). While we do not deny the validity of this political point, we suggest that political structures and systems are also sustained partly through a political imaginary (Taylor 2004 ) which legitimates and normalises certain assumptions about our social and political life. For instance, Rawlsian theories of social justice, which have significantly informed the work of both political philosophers and educational theorists concerned with educational justice and equality, assume the existence of a degree of socio-economic inequality. Relatedly, the assumption, that poverty is an inevitable part of social, economic, and political arrangements, rather than the result of political choices, is a feature of much work within the first narrative sketched above. Education systems are one of the places in which this imaginary may well be reinforced, whether through teachers’ and administrators’ attitudinal and unconscious biases, the curriculum, pedagogy, or parental choices. This is not to deny, of course, that many individuals working within these systems recognize the needs and aspirations of children living in poverty.

We have drawn attention to some weaknesses of ideal theories of justice not to reject them, but to highlight the need for such critical reflection, and to illustrate how these theories interact in complex ways when they are brought to bear on questions of how to address child poverty within an educational context (Peters and Besley 2014 ). Educational spaces, our analysis has suggested, are spaces in which the complexity between these different models is often most clearly illustrated and where an ethical framework is required that holds together questions of structure, agency, facts, and values. Furthermore, as the World Inequality Report ( 2022 ) states in reflecting on some of the issues that emerged during the COVID years, ‘Inequality is always a political choice and learning from policies implemented in other countries or at other points of time is critical to design fairer development pathways.'

An Ethically Informed Perspective on Child Poverty and Education

As the discussion so far highlights, questions about the interplay of education and child poverty, brought into sharp relief by the Covid years, are best addressed with an ethically informed perspective, where the normative assumptions underlying empirical research and complex intersections of factors, including structural, cultural, and pedagogical, can be interrogated and overcome. This section shows how the cluster of concepts identified by Robeyns ( 2018 ) as central to the capability approach offers both a normative rationale for evaluating the educational disadvantage associated with poverty and insights to guide educational practice. These insights are particularly important now, in light of the widening educational inequalities resulting from the effects of the pandemic and the limited and often unsuccessful measures adopted by many countries to counteract them.

As a normative framework concerned with people’s freedom to achieve well-being, Footnote 1 the capability approach focuses on what people can do and be with the resources they have, and what kind of life they can truly lead (Robeyns 2017 : 24). At the core of the approach is a conception of well-being in terms of people’s real opportunities (capabilities) to choose among different states and activities (functionings), those that they value (Sen 4 , 1992 ). Being a pacifist, working as a gardener or participating in the life of the community are all examples of functionings that people may value, and capability corresponds to the set of real opportunities from which they can choose (Robeyns 2017 ).

Normatively, the approach is used to evaluate individual well-being, relative advantage or disadvantage, the just design of institutional arrangements, as well as social policies. The distinctive contribution of the approach to these evaluations resides in considering inequalities and disadvantage in the space of capability, that is, in terms of limitations (or deprivations) of real opportunities for well-being. Questions of justice and equality, thus, are best addressed in relation to the set of opportunities available to people to lead good lives.

In addition, Sen draws attention to the importance of considering people’s different ability to make use of the resources and opportunities they have, or their conversion factors, in the evaluative exercise of justice (Sen 1992 , 1999 ). These different factors refer to individuals’ internal features such as physical and psychological traits, as well as to factors emerging from society, for example social policies, cultural attitudes and norms, and the physical and built environment. A book, for instance, is a useful resource for reading, but not for a visually impaired person who will need a Braille version to achieve that functioning. What is important about conversion factors is that they provide information on where interventions need to be made in order to assess people’s relative disadvantage, and to expand their capabilities (Robeyns 2017 ). At the same time, considering these factors implies a multidisciplinary analysis, which draws on insights from different areas such as socio-economic analysis, development studies, and education, to name but a few (Robeyns 2017 : 36).

The above conceptual framework brings to the fore the moral dimension of poverty, and the multiplicity of factors that contribute to it, while providing an understanding that goes beyond commonly endorsed notions of poverty in terms of lack of income and external resources (Sen 1999 ). As Sen notes, different sources of deprivation may compound the disadvantage associated with poverty, thus making ‘real poverty … much more intense than we can deduce from income data’ (Sen 2009 : 256). And furthermore, the understanding and remedying of the persistence of poverty can ‘both be helped by explicit consideration of the relation between deprivation in different spaces, especially between incomes and the capability to lead secure and worthwhile lives’ (Sen 1992 : 9). Poverty is thus defined as a deprivation of capability Footnote 2 (Sen 2009 : 254) and identified at the level of deprivation of basic functionings, such as being well nourished, sheltered, healthy and, importantly, educated. The moral urgency of addressing poverty resides therefore in the level of deprivation and deep inequality entailed, as well as in its detrimental effects on overall well-being (Burchardt and Hicks 2018 ).

As stated earlier, we believe that the conceptual apparatus of the approach thus outlined offers an ethically engaged rationale that brings together normative evaluation and sociological and educational analysis in addressing the disadvantage emerging from the interplay of child poverty and education, highlighted during the COVID pandemic, while going beyond idealised approaches to justice too. The notion of conversion factors highlights the significance of taking account of existing relationships in education, while the distinction between capabilities and functionings helps guide practices regarding the education of poor children. These features, as we shall see, make the approach specifically apt to counteract the aftermath of the pandemic in ways that go beyond existing measures.

We begin by noting that an understanding of educational inequalities in terms of capability limitations has the normative advantage of highlighting and considering elements of inequality that are not readily evident if we focus only on material or educational resources, such as funding (Terzi 2021 ). If we consider, for example, the inequalities pertaining to the experiences of schooling faced by poor children, it seems evident that no amount of additional resources, in itself, can account for the limited pedagogical interactions related to the ‘pedagogy of poverty’ which, as we have seen, can characterise poor children’s schooling. This element is best accounted for by considering the socio-cultural factors that may affect a child’s use of their educational resources and adults’ response to this. Similarly, the attitudinal and unconscious biases of teachers towards poor children cannot be appropriately addressed without considering them among the socio-cultural factors that affect children’s learning. The capability approach does not discount the importance of resources in tackling these inequalities. Rather, it draws attention to how the usefulness of resources is conditioned by a complex interaction of factors and how such complexity needs to be explicitly accounted for both theoretically and practically, in relation to appropriate interventions. Thus, the approach endorses the use of resources for additional training for teachers or public campaigns to tackle discriminating attitudes, Footnote 3 for example. It is in this way that the process of socio-political and empirical analysis of conversion factors, which constrain or enlarge the capability space, becomes part of the normative discussion. These factors are not bracketed or treated as background, as the first educational narrative or indeed some ideal theories of justice seem to do but are part of the structuring of the normative framework. At the same time, the inclusion of these factors within a normative terrain facilitates incorporating the richness of sociological approaches to child poverty within an ethical framework allowing for acute analysis of crises like the COVID pandemic.

This is not only a theoretical evaluative approach, but one that can be translated into practice too. Many scholars working with the capability approach are able to use this core idea to incorporate multidimensionality into normative notions, and to develop more nuanced evaluative approaches to assessing social relationships in fields of education, health, and housing, to name a few (Chiappero-Martinetti, Osmani and Qizilbash  2020 ). As much of the extensive scholarship on the capability approach and education illuminates (e.g., Terzi 2005 ; Walker and Unterhalter 2007 ; Hart 2012 ; Walker 2019 ), the first narrative we outline, which suggests a solution of enhancing education quality inside schools, does not sufficiently attend to the complex intersecting ways in which inequality is formed both within and outside schools which the capability approach does by looking at a range of conversion factors.

The concept of conversion factors, which are environmental, political, economic, and social, highlights that the dynamics of the constraints on and expansion of capabilities entails normative choices and practical interventions. For example, a child needs literacy to enable her to access the curriculum taught at school and pass the school leaving examination. Being able to read is both a functioning and a capability. Considering environmental and political conversion factors brings to the fore how, even if a child can read, if no school has been built in her neighbourhood, or the school that is available to her is a long distance away and is staffed with teachers who lack enough experience to prepare her to enter the examination, do not talk her language, and assume children from her background are ‘backward’, the child will not be able to learn. Economic conversion factors draw attention to factors such as having to do long hours of work in the home, assisting with childcare, chores, and basic survival. Social conversion factors highlight attitudes which question, for example, a child’s school attendance because she has ‘too much book’ and does not marry young, thus incurring stigma and the risk of sexual assault. These factors need analysis both in how relationships inside and outside the school, and their interconnection , are understood. The two narratives we have sketched work in opposite directions and thus do not foster consideration of the processes associated with conversion factors working together. Drawing on the capability approach, in developing a framework to analyse literature on the gendered effects of school closures and return to school after COVID, a UNESCO overview report noted a wide range of conversion factors at play (UNESCO 2022 ).

Paying attention to conversion factors is particularly helpful in highlighting the increased inequalities of capabilities experienced as a result of Covid. As Anand et al. ( 2020a ) highlight, while the capability of learning has been significantly affected for all children around the world, existing inequalities in access to technology, parental education, and available support have exacerbated the disadvantage of children living in poverty. Specific capabilities, such as opportunities for speech and language development have been affected, particularly in the early years and more significantly for children with special educational needs and those from the most deprived neighbourhoods (Castro-Kemp and Mahmud 2021 ). As noted above, these inequalities are the result of complex interconnected environmental, social, political, and cultural factors, which are foregrounded and assessed by the capability approach. Relatedly, the opportunities to make up for the so called ‘learning loss’ caused by Covid differ too. And while some governments have attempted to address the learning loss by providing additional funding for specific programmes, for instance additional one to one and small group lessons or extended school time, such as the National Tutoring Programme deployed in England, the underlying structural social, economic, and educational inequalities have remained unchanged or have worsened, thus leading to the potential limited success of such initiatives. Consider, for example, the case of Janice, a year 7 student with insecure literacy skills attending a school in a poor neighbourhood. Janice had problems accessing remote learning and her learning has suffered as a result; moreover, she does not qualify for free access to school meals and often arrives at school hungry. Although teachers’ intervention is crucial in providing Janice with appropriate learning support, it is questionable whether such support will work, if the circumstantial factors of Janice’s situation are not addressed, and, importantly, the teaching and learning are based on limited notions of ‘catching up’. Through its attention to conversion factors, we suggest, an approach based on capability draws much needed attention to the role of schools in addressing disadvantage in interrelation with policies addressing circumstantial factors.

Finally, we posit, the conceptual apparatus of the capability approach, and its distinction between functionings and capability, offers insights that may prove helpful for addressing the education of children living in poverty. The importance accorded by the approach to well being and to the opportunities to lead good lives suggests, first and foremost, a shift from a functionalist view of education and its emphasis on a narrow set of learning outcomes, to a view of education aimed at the expansion of children’s capabilities. This more expansive view of education could, perhaps, include an expansion of the social imaginary associated with the dominant normative frameworks that we have outlined above. Thus, education is recognised as having a fertile role in enhancing children’s present and future well-being and providing real opportunities to develop functionings that will enable them to participate in the life of their communities and their broader society, and in work and leisure activities (Nussbaum 2011 ). At the same time, education itself can be one of the ways in which possibilities for social change can be imagined. A number of accounts using the capability approach to analyse educational relationships highlight this (e.g., De Jaeghere 2021 ; Walker et al. 2022 ; Unterhalter et al. 2022 ). While not discounting the importance of achieving functionings pertaining to, e.g., literacy and numeracy, the approach suggests instead a much broader conception of education, one more akin to promoting the full functionings pertaining to local, national, and global citizenship and the capacity to reflect on one’s values and goals and those of the surrounding society.

Moreover, the broader scope of education in relation to the expansion of capabilities is antithetic to any form of reductionist pedagogy, such as the pedagogy of poverty outlined earlier, but supports instead forms of pedagogical interaction and co-construction of the learning and teaching process (Brando 2020 ; Adamson 2021 ).

Lastly, the focus on capabilities, at least at the level of policy, helps unmask the inequalities of children living in poverty by considering the real opportunities they have, beyond the actual level of functionings or learning outcomes they may achieve.

It can be seen that the capability approach provides insights that allow us to address the lacunae identified in the two narratives of childhood, poverty and education we have sketched, and which continue to inform policy after the Covid years. In the first narrative the space of education is conceived as separate from the contexts of poverty, while in the second narrative the space of education is submerged by the structures associated with the perpetuation of poverty. The capability approach identifies the space of capabilities as different to these conceptions. Education has the potential to be a space of capabilities and opportunities that is not separated from social conditions, as the approach acknowledges the salience of conversion factors. But the capability space is also not simply a reflection of what may be the narrow set of opportunities offered by a society that is structured to reproduce inequalities. The capability space may be understood as a site of agency and opportunity contoured by the many historical and contemporary conditions that shape child poverty.

An ethical framework informed by the conceptual apparatus of the capability approach shows how values and ideals informed by the invaluable insights provided by educational, sociological and empirical studies can contribute to an understanding of the complexity of child poverty and the role that education plays in children’s life.

The Covid 19 pandemic has starkly refocused attention to the pressing and growing situation of children living in poverty worldwide. Capabilities threatened during the pandemic include opportunities for health, wellbeing, equity and inclusion. Work on the Covid pandemic and the capability approach has prompted a rich investigation of the ways in which institutions and innovations should be approached (Venkatapuram 2020 ; Anand et al. 2020 ; Ferrannini et al 2021 ; UNDP 2022 ). Our discussion has explored two dominant narratives about child poverty in its interplay with education and it has highlighted how each overlooks the complex ways in which normative values and contextual factors are related. The interdisciplinary conversations that enable theorists and practitioners to develop adequate responses to the pressing reality of child poverty, which has been starkly emphasised by the recent Covid 19 pandemic, we have argued, demand that we adopt an ethically informed, normative position on the desirability and the feasibility of intervening in our educational institutions, in ways that promote people’s real possibilities for leading a flourishing life. The modest, but also the possible radical potential of this perspective is captured in Jonathan Wolff’s suggestion that, at least in principle, ‘it is possible to improve individuals’ opportunities, and hence their capability set, by doing any of three interventions: improving a person’s internal traits such as strengths, skills etc., or improving their external resources including income, entitlement to services etc., and finally improving the social and cultural environment in which a person lives, including social policies, cultural attitudes and norms as well as their built environment’ (Wolff, 2007, Wolff, 2020). The normative framework we have articulated is perhaps a first step towards such an improvement on the existing situation.

Amartya Sen originally formulated the approach as an alternative to predominant accounts of well-being based on utility (Sen 1985 , 1992 ), while Martha Nussbaum further articulated it through a list of ten central capabilities deemed necessary to live a truly human life ( 2000 , 2010).

Sen’s position has however been critiqued for obscuring material deprivation as fundamental to poverty. See Lister ( 2004 ), for an articulated discussion.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Gottfried Schweiger and Frank Jeffery, and all the participants to the Workshop on Ethics, children, education and the COVID-19 pandemic held on 28 and 29 September 2022 (University of Salzburg) for their comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the participants to the Seminar Series ‘ Child Poverty and Education: Philosophical Reflections ’ funded by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and held between January and June 2021 (University of Roehampton and IOE UCL’s Faculty of Education). We thank two anonymous reviewers for insightful questions and support.

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Terzi, L., Unterhalter, E. & Suissa, J. Philosophical Reflections on Child Poverty and Education. Stud Philos Educ 42 , 49–63 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-022-09865-1

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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Committee on National Statistics; Board on Children, Youth, and Families; Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years; Le Menestrel S, Duncan G, editors. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2019 Feb 28.

A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty.

• Hardcopy Version at National Academies Press

5 Ten Policy and Program Approaches to Reducing Child Poverty

The core of the committee's congressional charge is to “identify policies and programs with the potential to help reduce child poverty and deep poverty (measured using the Supplemental Poverty Measure or SPM) by 50 percent within 10 years of the implementation of the policy approach.” Our analyses and conclusions regarding these policy and program proposals are presented in the next three chapters.

The current chapter summarizes our ideas in 10 different program and policy areas, all of which could be simulated using the Transfer Income Model, Version 3 (TRIM3) microsimulation model. Chapter 6 presents four policy and program packages containing two or more of the options presented in this chapter. We find considerable merit to a “package” approach to child poverty reduction because it provides an opportunity to combine options that generate complementary impacts on poverty reduction, work incentives, and other important criteria. Chapter 7 provides a discussion of potentially meritorious policies and programs that, for various reasons, could not meet the high evidentiary standard set by the committee for its simulations.

As explained in Chapter 1 , the committee identified possible policies and programs by reviewing the evaluation literature and soliciting ideas from individuals and groups representing a broad range of political orientations and experiences in communities and in state and federal government (see Appendix C for a list of memo authors). As the committee sifted through dozens of policy and program ideas, it applied five key criteria to assess each policy or program it considered: (1) the strength of the research and evaluation evidence indicating whether the policy or program would in fact reduce poverty; (2) the size and magnitude of any poverty reduction suggested by the evidence; (3) the policy's or program's success in reducing child poverty within high-risk subgroups; (4) its cost; and (5) its impact on work, marriage, opportunity, and social inclusion. As throughout this report, we focus on packages of policies and programs that could produce short-run reductions in child poverty, owing to the 10-year window dictated by the committee's Statement of Task. Programs such as early childhood education and child development savings accounts therefore fell outside the committee's purview.

The high evidentiary standard set by the committee played an important role in determining which program and policy ideas should be included in the current chapter and which should be relegated to Chapter 7 (which describes program areas the committee considered but did not simulate). To take a few examples, concerning marriage promotion, family planning, paid family and medical leave, block grants, and mandatory employment programs, the committee judged the evaluation evidence to be insufficient for estimating impacts on child poverty (see Chapter 7 ). In the case of expanding programs such as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Program, evidence was lacking on the impacts of the freedom granted to states to spend their block grant funding in many different ways, and as a result we were unable to formulate options for enhancing TANF's impacts on family income and child poverty. In the case of Medicaid, the committee was constrained primarily by the difficulty of incorporating health insurance into poverty measurement (see Chapter 7 ).

The scope of the current policy evaluation literature also limited our choice of options in the current chapter. In the case of the minimum wage, for example, there is a fairly robust research consensus concerning the impacts of modest changes to the minimum wage ( U.S. Congressional Budget Office, 2014 ), but there is less agreement about the effects of some of the much larger increases now being implemented in a number of cities ( Jardim et al., 2017 ). Accordingly, we identified minimum wage options that incorporated relatively small increases.

• PROGRAM AND POLICY OPTIONS IN 10 AREAS

After reviewing a large number of program and policy options, the committee chose two program options in each of 10 program and policy areas. On the basis of research findings and other information on each program, the committee concluded that all 20 met at least some of its 5 criteria. All 20 could also be simulated with the TRIM3 microsimulation model.

The committee was guided by a number of considerations in setting benefit levels and other features of its programs and proposals. First, in many cases its benefit levels and other parameters had been suggested by outside experts. Second, as mentioned above, the committee avoided benefit levels that far exceeded the ranges examined in the behavioral effects research literature. This was done out of a concern that the estimated poverty reductions, employment responses, and budgetary costs would be unreliable. Third, the committee used expected budgetary cost as a criterion when choosing generosity levels. It should be emphasized, however, that the committee chose its generosity levels before it was informed of the poverty reductions, budgetary costs, and other results generated by the TRIM3 simulations. Finally, to gauge the sensitivity of estimated poverty reduction and other impacts to program design features, the committee developed two options within each program proposal, differentiated mostly by level of benefits and therefore by cost.

Of the 10 general program areas selected by the committee, 4 of them focus on policies tied to work, namely:

Modifications to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)

Modifications to child care subsidies

Changes in the federal minimum wage

A scale-up of a promising training and employment program called WorkAdvance

Three other program and policy areas involve modifications to existing safety net programs:

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

Housing Choice Voucher Program

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program

Two program ideas come from other countries:

A child allowance (which can also be thought of as an extension of the federal child tax credit)

A child support assurance program

Policy area (10) involves modifications to existing immigrant provisions in safety net programs. Finally, given recent interest in a Universal Basic Income policy, we also investigated two versions of this policy; these are discussed in Appendix D, 5-12 .

Following our statement of task, at the heart of this chapter are estimates of the poverty-reducing impacts of these policies and programs, including impacts on the levels of 100 percent SPM poverty and 50 percent SPM poverty (“deep” poverty). We also present estimates for impacts on the level of 150 percent SPM poverty (“near poverty”). Our estimates account for both the resource-enhancing impact of the policies and programs themselves as well as the families' likely labor-supply responses to them (see Box 5-1 ).

What Are Behavioral Effects?

Labor-supply responses can either magnify or lessen the poverty-reducing potential of programs and policies. An example of the former is the EITC: the policy acts as an earnings subsidy that is eventually phased out. The amount of the earnings subsidy is large—currently providing a 40 percent boost in earned income for a family with two children in the subsidy range. At the same time, the EITC's structure decreases the credit amount as earnings increase for higher-income earners in the phase-out range. For some nonworkers, the earnings subsidy makes the monetary difference between working and not working large enough to induce them to begin working. The research literature suggests that, on balance, the increases in work associated with the EITC are larger than the decreases ( Hoynes and Rothstein, 2017 ; Nichols and Rothstein, 2016 ). The increase in earnings (along with the credit amount) therefore magnifies the poverty-reducing impact of the initial increase in income and can therefore, in some cases, bring a family over the poverty line.

On the other hand, programs like SNAP reduce benefits in response to additional earnings, which may lead some families to cut back on work hours or drop out of the labor market altogether. This response would lower families' earnings, offsetting some of the initial increase in household resources that the program provided, thereby lessening the initial poverty-reducing impact. A more general explanation of the nature of work-related behavioral responses is provided in Appendix D, 5-1 , with details on the relevant behavioral assumptions made for each of the 10 policy and program areas discussed elsewhere in Appendix D and in Appendix F . Complete details on the magnitude of behavioral responses are provided in Appendix E .

For each of our 10 programs, we surveyed the existing research literature and assessed the evidence on behavioral responses and their magnitudes. We first used TRIM3 to simulate the poverty reduction, cost, and other impacts of each policy, not taking into account behavioral responses. Then, based on estimates from the literature, we repeated these simulation taking into account likely labor supply responses. Featured in this chapter are the estimated impacts on poverty, employment, and budgetary cost that account for the estimated behavioral responses generated for the 10 program areas.

• MODIFICATIONS EXAMINED FOR 10 POLICY AND PROGRAM AREAS

In this section, we describe proposed changes in the 10 different policy and program areas that we investigated.

1. Modifications to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)

We examined two expansions of the EITC. One modification expands the schedule for the lowest earners, while the second increases the generosity of EITC payments across the entire schedule while maintaining the current range of the phase-out region:

EITC Policy #1 : Increase payments along the phase-in and flat portions of the EITC schedule.

EITC Policy #2 : Increase payments by 40 percent across the entire schedule, keeping the current range of the phase-out region.

Details on these EITC-based policy options are provided in Appendix D, 5-2 .

The EITC is a refundable federal tax credit for low- and moderate-income workers. It was introduced under the Tax Reduction Act of 1975 and has since enjoyed bipartisan support, with expansions passed under each president beginning with Ronald Reagan. The EITC program has been highly successful at encouraging single parents to work 1 and at reducing poverty. Our TRIM3-based simulations in Chapter 4 show that, in the absence of behavioral responses, the child poverty rate of 13.0 percent would have been 5.9 percentage points higher if EITC and other tax credits had not been distributed to qualifying families. Additionally, as described in Chapter 3 , expansions of the EITC program appear to improve the longer-term health and human capital of children in families receiving the program benefits. All told, the EITC is one of the nation's most popular and effective poverty-reduction programs.

The EITC has the potential to reduce child poverty in two ways: by supplementing the household incomes of low-earning parents and by encouraging work and thereby increasing the earned income of parents. For workers with low earnings, the value of the EITC grows with each additional dollar of earnings, which creates an incentive for people to enter employment and, for low-wage workers, to increase their work hours.

Our first option was proposed in Giannarelli et al. (2015) , based on 2011 data. We adapt their proposal to our 2015 data. The revised credit would have a higher phase-in rate, reach the “plateau” region (where the credit does not increase with earned income) at an earlier point, and begin decreasing at a lower level of earnings (but at the same marginal tax rate). Our second option was chosen to gauge the poverty-reduction impacts of a substantial and uniform expansion of the credit.

2. Modifications to Child Care Subsidies

We examined two expansions of federal programs providing child care assistance, one involving the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) and the other focused on the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF):

Child Care Policy #1 : Convert the CDCTC to a fully refundable tax credit and concentrate its benefits on families with the lowest incomes and with children under the age of 5.

Child Care Policy #2 : Guarantee assistance from CCDF for all eligible families with incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line.

Details on these policy options are provided in Appendix D, 5-3 .

Child care expenses can be an immovable barrier to employment for low-income parents, particularly when their children are too young to enroll in elementary school. In the United States, the cost of child care for children under age 5 averages about $8,600 per year ( Child Care Aware of America, 2017a ). This average cost masks considerable variation among states and among regions in what parents actually pay for child care ( Child Care Aware of America, 2017b ; NASEM, 2018 ). Costs also vary by age of child (infant care is more expensive than care for older children) and type of care (center-based, home-based, relative or informal care). Between 2012 and 2016, poor families with children under age 6 who paid for child care spent about 20 percent of their income on child care—more than double the national average ( Mattingly, Schaefer, and Carson, 2016 ).

The federal government defrays the cost of child care to working families through two major programs, the CDCTC and the CCDF. The CDCTC is a nonrefundable tax credit that reimburses a portion of the qualifying child care expenses of working parents with children under age 13. Although the fraction of expenses that can be claimed with this credit declines as income increases, there is no income cap for eligibility. And because it is nonrefundable, the credit affects only tax filers with a positive precredit tax liability. In 2013, the largest average benefits of the CDCTC were received by families with annual incomes between $100,000 and $200,000 ( Maag, 2013 ).

The federal CCDF helps to defray child care costs for approximately 1.4 million children and 823,600 families every month ( Administration for Children and Families, 2016a ). States have the flexibility to determine eligibility criteria, family copay, and provider payment levels, so the costs to families further vary by state. The CCDF comprised two funding sources: discretionary funding provided to states for child care assistance, most of which goes to families with parents working at low-wage jobs (the Child Care and Development Block Grant), and mandatory funding provided outside the annual appropriations process ( Administration for Children and Families, 2018 ).

Existing research on child care programs suggests that any expansion of child care subsidies and vouchers would reduce child poverty, both because child care assistance adds to family resources and because that assistance can make it possible for families to increase their employment and earnings. In fact, higher child care subsidy expenditures by states are associated with increases in labor force participation rates among low-income mothers ( Enchautegui et al., 2016 ), particularly in the case of mothers with young children ( Morrissey, 2017 ) (other references to the research literature showing positive effects of child care subsidies on employment are included in Appendix D , Chapter 5 appendixes). In choosing its levels of expansion, the committee was influenced by proposals suggested by outside experts.

3. Modifications to the Minimum Wage

The committee simulated two minimum wage policy options:

Minimum Wage Policy #1 : Raise the current $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage to $10.25 (moving from the current level over the course of 3 years, 2018–2021, and indexing it to inflation after that).

Minimum Wage Policy #2 : Raise the federal minimum wage to $10.25 or the 10th percentile of the state's hourly wage distribution, whichever is lower, and index it to inflation after that.

Details on these two policy options are provided in Appendix D, 5-4 .

Increases in the minimum wage have the potential to boost the earned income of low-skilled workers, some of whom reside in families with children and below-poverty household incomes. But by raising the cost of low-skilled workers, minimum wage increases are generally predicted to reduce overall employment and thus also employment opportunities for some workers.

The federal minimum wage was set at $7.25 in 2009, but 30 states (or localities within states) now have higher minimum wages ( U.S. Department of Labor, 2019 ). In 27 of these 30 states, the minimum wage exceeds $10 an hour ( Neumark, 2017 , Fig. 1). After studying the impact of raising the minimum wage to $10.10, in 2014 the Congressional Budget Office projected employment reductions, although the aggregate earnings losses from this loss of employment would be more than offset by the aggregate earnings gains of higher wages ( U.S. Congressional Budget Office, 2014 ). Once a $10.10 federal minimum was fully implemented, the study projected that it would reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers, or 0.3 percent. But among workers whose earnings would increase to the $10.10 level, most of them—about 16.5 million workers in all—would experience earnings increases totaling approximately $31 billion annually by the end of 2016.

Because of the untargeted nature of current minimum wage policies, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the distribution of impacts among workers in low- and higher-income families. Several recent trends, however, suggest a relative increase in impacts for workers in lower-income families. First, the share of lower-wage workers who are in their teens has fallen and, at the same time, the average age of low-wage workers has risen, having increased by 2.6 years between 1979 and 2011 ( Schmitt and Jones, 2012 ). In addition, as shown in Chapter 4 , there has been growth in the number of unmarried parents in the labor market who are supporting children.

A higher minimum wage could also reduce the federal cost of supporting people who are poor, because higher earnings would reduce outlays on SNAP and housing programs while increasing payroll and income taxes. Conversely, a higher minimum wage could increase the cost of programs like the EITC. The impact of the minimum wage also depends on the overall state of the economy. In tight labor markets, labor shortages and immigration restrictions can push the wages of low-skilled workers above legislated minimum levels. On the other hand, raising the minimum wage too much or too quickly in areas not yet at full employment would likely increase job losses and reduce wage gains.

When determining the level of minimum wage expansion, the committee largely chose to follow the general range of increase suggested by the Congressional Budget Office ( U.S. Congressional Budget Office, 2014 ), which argued that research shows the strongest evidence for that level of expansion. Higher minimum wages have been suggested and have, in fact, been implemented in a number of cities, but the effects of such larger increases are much more uncertain (e.g., Jardim et al., 2017 ). The minimum-wage levels chosen were also influenced by other factors detailed in Appendix D , Chapter 5 appendixes.

4. Scaling Up the WorkAdvance Program

WorkAdvance is perhaps the leading example of the new “sectoral” training approach, in which program staff work closely with employers to place disadvantaged individuals with moderate job skills into training programs for specific sectors that have a strong demand for local workers. 2 We examine two policy options for scaling up the WorkAdvance Program to a national level. Because the research evidence on WorkAdvance is much stronger for adult men than for adult women, our proposals and policy simulations focus on men, with the understanding that actual policy would offer the program more broadly. Specifically, our simulations apply the program to all male heads of families with children and income below 200 percent of the poverty line.

WorkAdvance Policy #1 : All male heads of families with children and income below 200 percent of the poverty line would be eligible for WorkAdvance programming. Training slots would be created for 10 percent of eligible men.

WorkAdvance Policy #2 : All male heads of families with children and income below 200 percent of the poverty line would be eligible for WorkAdvance programming. Training slots would be created for 30 percent of eligible men.

Details on these policy options are provided in Appendix D, 5-5 .

As shown by the rates of “market-income poverty” discussed in Chapter 4 (refer to Figure 4-1 ), earnings alone are insufficient for many families to lift themselves out of poverty. While one strategy for boosting the incomes of low-income working families focuses on benefit programs such as the EITC and the Child Tax Credit, another involves training and employment programs designed to increase the job skills and employability of low-skilled workers, thereby boosting the market wages they can earn.

Aside from programs that provide work incentives in the form of benefit payments, most governmental efforts at increasing work have involved training and employment programs, some associated with the receipt of benefits from a welfare program and some not ( Barnow and Smith, 2016 ; Lalonde, 2003 ). The two best known among these programs are the Workforce Investment Act (WIA; now superseded by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, WIOA) and the Job Corps Program. Evaluations have shown that many of these programs have modest but positive impacts on employment and earnings among both youth and adults, but that neither the programs nor the evaluations focus on low-income parents with children.

The Career Academies Program was developed more than 40 years ago to keep high school students engaged in school and prepare them for postsecondary education and careers. 3 Evaluations of the Career Academies Program have shown positive earnings impacts, but here again the program does not focus on the group of interest to this report—low-income families with children—and there are also doubts as to whether the Career Academies Program can be scaled up to be a national program ( Schaberg, 2017 ). Apprenticeship programs have frequently been mentioned in recent policy debates, but virtually none of them has been evaluated in a rigorous way. Mandatory employment programs for welfare recipients have been evaluated rigorously, but only in the context of the now-defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program (see Chapter 7 for a more extensive discussion).

Despite that paucity of evidence, the committee judged that for one employment program—called WorkAdvance—the evaluation evidence was sufficiently encouraging that we could feature an expansion of it as one of the program and policy options in this chapter. The outside experts consulted by the committee recommended simulating the effects of implementing WorkAdvance.

The random-assignment evaluation of WorkAdvance showed that it increased work and earnings across most of its sites ( Hendra et al., 2016 ; Schaberg, 2017 ; see details in Appendix D, 5-5 ). The evaluations of WorkAdvance tracked the outcomes for enrolled men in all four sites, but for significant numbers of women in only one of the four sites. Moreover, the earnings impacts for men in the training site that also included women were very different from the impacts among men enrolled at the other three sites. The results for women were therefore considered too statistically unreliable to be featured in this report. We have no evidence-based reason to want to limit the chapter's program options to men, but the nature of the evidence required us to do so.

5. Modifications to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

We examine two alternative expansions of the current SNAP program.

SNAP Policy #1 : Increase SNAP benefits by 20 percent for families with children, make adjustments for the number of children age 12 and above in the home ($360 more per teenager per year), and increase the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer for Children (SEBTC) ($180 more per child per summer in prekindergarten through 12th grade).

SNAP Policy #2 : Increase SNAP benefits by 30 percent, make adjustments for the number of children age 12 and above in the home ($360 more per teenager per year), and increase the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer for Children (SEBTC) ($180 more per child per summer in prekindergarten through 12th grade).

Details on these two policy options are provided in Appendix D, 5-6 .

Evidence reviewed in Chapter 3 suggests that receipt of benefits from SNAP (and its predecessor program, Food Stamps) improves outcomes for children, adults, and families in their nutrition, food security, and health. Child health outcomes show improvements right away, while adult health shows improvements in the longer term. Additionally, as shown in Chapter 4 , SNAP lifts more children out of deep poverty than any other program, and only the EITC (and other tax credits) lifts more children out of 100 percent poverty than SNAP. SNAP is therefore of central importance for reducing child poverty.

The committee considered three policy elements regarding SNAP: adequacy of benefits, adjustment for ages of children, and children's extra food needs in the summer months. Here we provide a brief review of these elements; a more complete literature review is provided in Appendix D, 5-6 .

A growing body of evidence suggests that SNAP benefit levels are inadequate to provide most recipient families with food security. In 2017, more than one-half (58%) of families receiving SNAP reported food insecurity ( Coleman-Jensen et al., 2018 ), and many families exhaust their SNAP benefits before the end of the month. A second rationale for increasing benefit levels is that the time required for food preparation is too burdensome for working families. SNAP benefit levels are based on the USDA's “thrifty food plan,” which research has shown requires between 13 and 16 hours per week of food preparation ( Ziliak, 2016 ). 4 This is impossibly high for adults who are working full time; in fact, almost no parents currently spend anywhere close to that amount of time on food preparation. Adults who work must instead economize on their time, and this means purchasing more expensive, processed foods.

A second policy issue is that as currently designed, SNAP adjusts benefits to account for the age of the children in the home ( Ziliak, 2017 ). Dietary requirements for teenagers are almost as high as for adults, and food insecurity has been shown repeatedly to be higher among families with teenagers ( Nord, 2009 ). Anderson and Butcher (2016) suggest that an additional $30 SNAP benefit per month per teenager would meet those needs.

SNAP's SEBTC is designed to address food gaps for children during the summer, when they lack access to school-based food assistance programs. USDA pilot tests have found that a $60 per eligible child per month increment in benefits reduced food insecurity among children by 26 percent ( Collins et al., 2016 ).

The committee chose its levels of SNAP expansion based on several criteria. First, several outside experts recommended increasing the general range we had proposed, and much of the research literature on the positive effects of SNAP focused on increases within the proposed range. Another factor was expected budgetary cost; the committee believed that this should be considered in constraining the scope of our proposal increases. We also considered the range of behavioral responses estimated in the research literature, which the committee felt would not be sufficiently reliable at levels considerably higher than those it chose. The levels we ultimately chose were similar to those proposed to the committee by Ziliak (2017) . Further considerations used in choosing the levels are detailed in Appendix D , Chapter 5 appendixes.

6. Modifications to Housing Programs

We examine two expansions of the Housing Choice Voucher Program:

Housing Voucher Policy #1 : Increase the number of vouchers directed to families with children so that 50 percent of eligible families not currently receiving subsidized housing would use them.

Housing Voucher Policy #2 : Increase the number of vouchers directed to families with children so that 70 percent of eligible families not currently receiving subsidized housing would use them.

Details on these two policy options are provided in Appendix D, 5-7 .

The cost of housing plays a key role in the calculation of the SPM poverty thresholds, because adequate housing is essential to having an adequate standard of living for low-income families. Among low-income renters in the United States, 67 percent of their income went toward rent in 2012 ( Collinson, Ellen, and Ludwig, 2016 , Table 2.4), and such rising housing costs for poor families have resulted in a high rate of eviction and housing displacement among families with children ( Desmond, 2016 ).

Despite the dozens of federal programs designed to help meet the housing needs of low-income families, only one-quarter of eligible households participate in them ( U.S. Congressional Budget Office, 2014 ), the three largest being the Housing Choice Voucher Program, public housing, and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Although public housing has been declining for many years, in terms of both the number of recipients and expenditures, the housing voucher program has been expanding. The housing voucher program served a little more than 2 million families with expenditures of $18 billion in 2014. The LIHTC has also increased in size, with almost 2 million units placed in service at a tax expenditure cost of $7 billion in 2014 ( U.S. Congressional Budget Office, 2014 ).

The most vexing feature of housing programs is that only a fixed number of vouchers, public housing units, and LIHTC-built units are available. This has led to long waiting lists for assistance from these housing programs—particularly in the case of housing vouchers—to the extent that in some cases the waiting lists have had to be closed to additional applicants. In 2012, 4.9 million households were on waiting lists for housing vouchers and 1.6 million households were on waiting lists for public housing ( Collinson, Ellen, and Ludwig, 2016 ). About three-quarters of families who qualify for benefits do not receive them.

We limit the voucher take-up rate to 70 percent in Housing Voucher Policy #2, in keeping with a report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), showing that a maximum of 70 percent of families who are offered vouchers end up finding an apartment and actually using the vouchers ( Finkel and Buron, 2001 ). Our 50 percent simulation (Policy #1) is simply a smaller and less expensive version of the 70 percent policy. For both simulations, current income eligibility limits and rent payment formulas would remain as they were in 2015.

The committee chose to model expansions of voucher availability rather than other modifications, such as an increase in the level of housing subsidies, primarily because most experts agree that limited availability is currently the primary barrier preventing subsidized housing programs from having a larger impact on poverty reduction. As noted above, the 70 percent take-up rate chosen for simulation by the committee represents the maximum take-up rate possible, and hence no higher level could be simulated. In addition, there is as yet no consensus among researchers as to whether existing housing subsidy levels set by the government are sufficiently aligned with true market rents faced by low-income families; as a result, a simulation of changes in subsidy levels would produce uncertain results. The committee was also influenced by the recommendations of outside experts with respect to levels, as detailed in Appendix D , Chapter 5 appendixes.

7. Modifications to the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program

We examine two child-focused modifications to the SSI program, both of which involve increases to current child benefit levels:

SSI Policy #1 : Increase by one-third the maximum child SSI benefit (to $977 per month from a current baseline of $733).

SSI Policy #2 : Increase by two-thirds the child SSI benefit (to $1,222 from a current baseline of $733).

Details on these two policy options are provided in Appendix D, 5-8 .

SSI is a federal assistance program designed for three categories of low-income individuals: the elderly, disabled nonelderly adults, and disabled children. In 2016, about 1.2 million children under age 18 received benefits from SSI, with an average monthly payment of $649.58 ( U.S. Social Security Administration, 2017 ). As seen in Chapter 4 , the SSI program plays a noteworthy role in alleviating both child poverty and deep child poverty.

Child SSI benefit levels are low relative to the additional out-of-pocket costs families incur when providing care for a disabled child ( Kuhlthau et al., 2005 ). Families who care for a child with special health care needs also incur significant costs in the form of their own lost earnings. For instance, Romley and colleagues (2017) estimate that families provided 1.5 billion hours of health care annually to children with special health care needs, which in turn reduced their earnings by $17.6 billion (in 2015 dollars), or $3,200 per child per year.

Child SSI recipients are among the nation's most vulnerable children, with diagnoses such as intellectual disability, Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, and blindness (see Appendix D, Table 5-2 , for a list of diagnostic groups of 2016 child SSI recipients). Only 1.7 percent of all children receive SSI benefits; to qualify, children need to meet stringent medical eligibility criteria based on a physician's functional assessment ( Romig, 2017 ). 5 Moreover, family incomes need to be below 100 percent of the federal poverty line for a child to qualify for full benefits. Benefits decline as earnings rise, with eligibility phasing out completely at about 200 percent of the federal poverty level ( Romig, 2017 ). 6 In addition, family assets can be no higher than $2,000, if the child lives with one parent, and $3,000, if the child lives with two parents.

The levels of the benefit increases chosen by the committee are based on the recognition that current income eligibility levels in the child SSI program are only slightly above those for families without disabled children. Consequently, at present the program implicitly assumes that families with disabled children need very little in additional resources to care for such children. Increases in benefit levels would address that concern.

8. A Child Allowance Program

A child allowance is a monthly cash payment to families for each child living in the home. We consider two child allowance options:

Child Allowance Policy #1 : Pay a monthly benefit of $166 per month ($2,000 per year) per child to the families of all children under age 17 who were born in the United States or are naturalized citizens. In implementing this new child allowance, we would eliminate the Child Tax Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit as well as the dependent exemption for children. The child allowance benefit would be phased out under the same schedule as the Child Tax Credit.

Child Allowance Policy #2 : Pay a monthly benefit of $250 per month ($3,000 per year) per child to the families of all children under age 18 who were born in the United States or are naturalized citizens. (As with Child Allowance Policy #1, we would eliminate the Child Tax Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit as well as the dependent exemption for children.) The child allowance benefit would be phased out between 300 and 400 percent of the poverty line.

Details on these two policy options are provided in Appendix D, 5-9 .

A child allowance is a monthly cash payment to families for each child living in the home. When offered universally (to all families with children), child allowances do not stigmatize low-income beneficiaries, but instead have the potential to integrate them into the social mainstream ( Garfinkel, Smeeding, and Rainwater, 2010 ; Kumlin and Rothstein, 2005 ; and Rainwater, 1982 ). Because child allowance benefits are not reduced as earnings increase (at least not until incomes reach 300 percent of the poverty line in our Policy #2), they provide a more secure floor than means-tested benefits, one that does not penalize intermittent work. At least 17 rich nations (including all of the English-speaking countries discussed in Chapters 2 and 4 , other than the United States) have some form of a child allowance.

The U.S. federal tax system's current $2,000 child tax credit (up from $1,000 beginning in 2018) is akin to a once-a-year child allowance. Most families with children benefit from its $2,000 per child reduction in taxes. But these benefits are not universal: Families with no or very low incomes (and the very rich) are not eligible. We effectively convert the current Child Tax Credit into a nearly universal child tax credit by extending eligibility to receive the same ($2,000 per year) amount per child to include those with low or no earnings. Further, we convert the nearly universal child tax credit to a nearly universal child allowance by paying the benefit on a monthly basis, because doing so enhances a family's economic security (see Chapter 8 ).

When determining the appropriate level of the child allowance, it is important to balance poverty reduction and expected cost ( Schaefer et al., 2018 ). The levels we specify are modest relative to those in many other countries and are intended to limit budgetary costs. We propose two alternative levels and gauge their impact on the poverty reduction and cost.

9. A Child Support Assurance Program

The committee simulated two variants of a policy option proposed by Cancian and Meyer (2018) :

Child Support Assurance Policy #1 : Set guaranteed minimum child support of $100 per month per child.

Child Support Assurance Policy #2 : Set guaranteed minimum child support at $150 per month per child.

Details on these two policy options are provided in Appendix D, 5-10 .

More than one-half of today's children will likely spend some time living with a single parent ( Bumpass and Raley, 1995 ), mostly with a single mother ( Vespa, Lewis, and Kreider, 2013 ), and increasingly with mothers who have never been married ( Child Trends, 2016 ). Child support—financial support provided by the nonresident parent (most often the father)—is an important source of income for custodial parents ( Administration for Children and Families, 2016b ). However, the potential anti-poverty effectiveness of child support is undermined by the unstable employment of many nonresident parents and their failure to comply fully with child support orders. Our proposals here are for a publicly financed minimum child support benefit.

Single-mother households, and never-married mothers in particular, are much more likely to be poor than two-parent households ( McLanahan, 2009 ). Children in single-parent families are disadvantaged compared with children in two-parent families precisely because there is only one parent and hence only one potential earner. In the United States, individual states and the federal government have already substantially strengthened enforcement of noncustodial child support orders ( Garfinkel, 1994a ). Enforcing private support is important because it reinforces social norms regarding the obligations of parents to provide financial support for their children.

As an anti-poverty tool, child support enforcement is inherently limited, because child support from fathers with low and irregular incomes tends to be low and irregular. This is not to say that all fathers of the children who live with low-income mothers are themselves poor or near poor or that child support enforcement has no role to play. In 2015, private child support reduced the number of poor children by nearly 800,000 ( Renwick and Fox, 2016 ). Despite improvements in child support enforcement over the last 40 years, however, it is still the case that fewer than one-half of all custodial parents who are supposed to receive child support receive all the support that is due to them, and more than a quarter receive nothing in a given year ( Grall, 2018 ). An “assured child support benefit” would increase the amount and regularity of child support and also would likely reduce the dependence of single mothers on TANF and other safety net programs.

Drawing from the experience of Sweden ( Garfinkel, 1994b ), a publicly financed minimum child support benefit—one that is conditional on the custodial parent being legally entitled to receive private child support—reduces the poverty and insecurity of single mothers and their children. It also increases mothers' incentives to cooperate in identifying the fathers of their children, establishing paternity, and securing a child support award ( Cancian and Meyer, 2018 ; Garfinkel et al., 1990 ; Garfinkel, Meyer, and Sandefur, 1992 ; Schroeder, 2016 ). It may also reduce the father's incentive to pay child support. Little is known about the magnitudes of these incentive effects.

The $150 guaranteed minimum per child we propose is based on Cancian and Meyer (2018) , who argue that it would provide a minimum level of support for families with children, enabling them to meet monthly expenses in the absence of the same amount of support from noncustodial parents, but it would exceed the level of support based on other criteria. Cancian and Meyer also propose requiring a certain standard of support from noncustodial parents, but that part of their proposal is not directly related to our focus: the poverty rate of families with children. We also choose an alternative—slightly lower—level of minimum support, $100 per child, to gauge the effect of the level on costs and poverty reduction.

10. Modification to Immigrant Policies

Given the demographic importance of children of immigrants and restricted program eligibility for unauthorized and nonqualified immigrants, the following changes were simulated:

Immigrant Policy #1: Restore program eligibility for nonqualified legal immigrants. This option would eliminate eligibility restrictions for nonqualified parents and children in the SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, SSI, and other means-tested federal programs.

Immigrant Policy #2: Expand program eligibility for all noncitizen children and parents. This option would eliminate eligibility restrictions for all noncitizen parents and children in the SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, SSI, and other means-tested federal programs.

Details on these two policy options, as well as more information on the policy background regarding immigrant eligibility for anti-poverty programs, are provided in Appendix D, 5-11 .

Nearly one-quarter (24.7% as of 2014) of U.S. children live in an immigrant family, defined as a family where at least one parent is foreign-born and/or the child is foreign-born, and 10.2 percent of children live in noncitizen families, defined as families where at least one parent and/or child is not a U.S. citizen (Urban Institute, Children of Immigrants database). While the vast majority of children in the United States are themselves U.S. citizens, living in a mixed family (one where other members are not citizens) may affect children's receipt or level of benefits, because noncitizen immigrants are ineligible for various programs.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) established restrictions to immigrant eligibility, such as requiring U.S. residence for at least 5 years, for various categories of immigrants lawfully residing in the United States ( National Research Council, 1999 ; Siskin, 2016 ). (See Appendix D , Chapter 5 appendixes for details on immigrant eligibility before PRWORA and additional changes associated with PRWORA, such as the expanded definition of “public charge.”) Several of these restrictions were eliminated soon after welfare reform, but others remain ( Singer, 2004 ). The programs affected are SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, SSI, and in general means-tested federal programs. Even when immigrants are eligible, they may fail to apply for benefits because of their limited awareness of their eligibility or due to a fear of deportation or of compromising their ability to apply for citizenship if they become a “public charge” (e.g., Alsan and Yang, 2018 ; Watson, 2014 ).

With children in immigrant families representing one-fourth of the U.S. child population and having higher poverty rates than children in nonimmigrant families, the committee proposed two changes to immigrant program eligibility with considerable potential for reducing poverty among children in immigrant families. These proposals were also chosen to address another criterion the committee set for itself: social inclusion. Under the current policy regime, restrictions to legal immigrants' eligibility may increase poverty rates among children in immigrant families, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens. Additionally, some groups of legal immigrants who are income eligible are currently denied access to programs solely on the basis of their immigrant status.

• IMPACTS ON POVERTY, COST, AND EMPLOYMENT

With two options for each of 10 program and policy areas, we have offered many different ideas for reducing child poverty. Several key questions remain: If implemented, how successful would they likely be at achieving that goal? How do the costs of the various programs compare? And what would be their impacts on earnings and employment?

This final section provides a summary of the projected impacts of these approaches along three key dimensions: (1) child poverty reduction; (2) budget cost; and (3) earnings and jobs. We conclude with a summary and comparison of each of these impacts for all 10 of our program areas, including information on social inclusion, which was part of one of the criteria identified in Chapter 1 . Details on our simulation assumptions and results are provided in Appendixes E and F .

Child Poverty Reduction

The core of the committee's statement of task is poverty reduction. Which of the program and policy options, individually or in combination, would reduce child poverty by one-half in 10 years? The committee has considered three poverty lines, all defined using the SPM: 100 percent of SPM (“poverty”), 50 percent of SPM (“deep poverty”), and 150 percent of SPM (“near poverty”). As with the data presented in prior chapters, our estimates of poverty reduction are based on the TRIM3 simulation model, which adjusts for underreporting of a number of important income sources. 7

Figure 5-1 shows percentage point reductions in child poverty defined by 100 percent of the SPM threshold. While the committee's goal of reducing child poverty by one-half would require a 6.5 percentage point drop (from 13.0 to 6.5%), it is clear that none of the program and policy options we discuss was estimated to achieve this goal on its own. The more substantial child allowance option, which would replace the child tax credit and child tax exemption with a universal $3,000 payment per child per year, comes closest. It would generate a 5.3 percentage point reduction in poverty. The less substantial child allowance option (with a $2,000 annual payment, lower maximum eligibility age, and different phase-out) is estimated to produce a 3.4 percentage-point poverty reduction.

Simulated child poverty rates using 100 percent TRIM3 SPM under proposed programs. NOTE: EITC = Earned Income Tax Credit; SNAP = Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; SSI = Supplemental Security Income. SOURCE: Estimates from TRIM3 commissioned by (more...)

Funding housing vouchers to the point that 70 percent of eligible nonparticipating families with children would receive them would produce a 3.0 percentage-point poverty reduction, while the less substantial housing voucher program and the more substantial EITC and SNAP policy options would each reduce poverty by at least 2 percentage points. The less substantial proposals for expanding the EITC, SNAP, the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, and immigration eligibility would all reduce child poverty by at least 1 percentage point.

These differential effects reflect the varying size of the proposed increases in benefits for the programs in question, the varying breadth of program coverage, and behavioral effects. The larger effects achieved by the child allowance, EITC, and SNAP programs result in part from the significant increases in benefits in our program proposals. Those benefit increases are much larger than the increases proposed in the child support assurance proposal or the earnings increases that would accrue from a higher minimum wage. But the greater poverty-reducing impacts of these three proposals, as well as the 70 percent housing voucher program, also reflect their near-universal coverage of low-income families with children. Much smaller fractions of the target population—children living in low-income families—would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage, an expansion of the WorkAdvance Program, or our proposed expansions of the SSI program.

In the case of deep (under 50% of SPM) poverty (see Figure 5-2 ), the $3,000 child allowance option is estimated to produce the biggest impact by far. Reducing deep poverty by 1.4 percentage points would cut the estimated rate of deep poverty by one-half (from its initial level of 2.9%), thus all but meeting our mandated 50 percent reduction goal for deep poverty. The SNAP and housing voucher proposals, as well as the less generous child allowance proposal, would reduce deep poverty by at least one-half of a percentage point. The EITC and child care proposals have much smaller comparative impacts on deep poverty than on 100 percent poverty, because those programs are targeted toward workers, and families in deep poverty have less connection to the labor market. The minimum wage, WorkAdvance, SSI, and immigrant policy proposals would have little impact on the number of children living in deep poverty.

Simulated child poverty rates using 50 percent TRIM3 SPM under proposed programs. NOTE: EITC = Earned Income Tax Credit; SNAP = Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; SSI = Supplemental Security Income. SOURCE: Estimates from TRIM3 commissioned by (more...)

Figure 5-3 shows the impacts of the program on near poverty, defined as below 150 percent of the SPM. For the majority of the programs we have proposed, the reduction in poverty at this level is smaller than the reduction based on a 100 percent poverty line (and sometimes substantially so) because the income eligibility thresholds for the proposals are rarely much higher than 100 percent of SPM poverty. The programs with impacts on families living under 100 percent and under 150 percent of poverty that differ the least are the two child allowance proposals, both of which have high income thresholds and hence relatively large impacts on near poverty.

Simulated child poverty rates using 150 percent TRIM3 SPM under proposed programs. NOTE: EITC = Earned Income Tax Credit; SNAP = Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; SSI = Supplemental Security Income. SOURCE: Estimates from TRIM3 commissioned by (more...)

CONCLUSION 5-1: Using a threshold defined by 100 percent of the Supplemental Poverty Measure, no single program or policy option developed by the committee was estimated to meet the goal of 50 percent poverty reduction. The $3,000 per child per year child allowance policy comes closest, and it also meets the 50 percent reduction goal for deep poverty.

CONCLUSION 5-2: A number of other program and policy options lead to substantial reductions in poverty and deep poverty. Two involve existing programs—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and housing vouchers. The option of a 40 percent increase in Earned Income Tax Credit benefits would also reduce child poverty substantially.

Tradeoffs Among Poverty Reduction, Budget Cost, and Employment

The policy and program options we have analyzed present tradeoffs for policy makers to consider. Some options achieve greater reduction in child poverty but at significant budgetary cost, while other options increase employment and earnings but move fewer children out of poverty. We first look at poverty reduction and cost tradeoffs and then consider the tradeoffs between poverty reduction and changes in employment and earnings.

Figure 5-4 shows the poverty reduction/budget cost tradeoffs among the program and policy options developed by the committee by plotting budget cost on the vertical axis and the number of children lifted above the 100 percent SPM poverty line on the horizontal axis. Costs shown in Figure 5-4 are based on the tax code prevailing in 2015; costs using the 2018 tax code are provided in Appendix E and are generally quite similar. The trend line divides programs into those that cost relatively more per child moved out of poverty (above the line) and those with a lower-than-average cost per child (below the line). Program summaries and abbreviations are given in Box 5-2 .

Simulated number of children lifted out of poverty, by program cost. NOTE: CA = Child Allowance; CC = Child Care; CSA = Child Support Assurance; EITC = Earned Income Tax Credit; HV = Housing Vouchers; IMM = Immigrant; MW = Minimum Wage; SNAP = Supplemental (more...)

Summary of Simulated Programs and Policies.

As might be expected, there is a strong positive relationship between cost and the number of children moved out of poverty. Using the results across all of our policies and programs, moving a million children out of poverty (which reduces the current rate of 100% of SPM-based child poverty—13.0%—by roughly 1.3 percentage points) costs an average of about $15 billion per year. Some programs, such as the SNAP expansions, lie above the regression line, implying that they have higher-than-average costs per child moved out of poverty. This is due in part to the fact that the behavioral effects of these programs lead to reductions in earnings.

While Figure 5-4 focuses on the number of children brought above the 100 percent SPM poverty line, we note that our proposed expansions would help to narrow the “poverty gap” of poor children by raising their families' incomes even when the increases are not sufficient to lift them above the poverty line. Most of these proposed expansions would also raise the incomes of many families with incomes between 100 and 150 percent of SPM poverty. Program expansions with higher-than-average costs have different impacts on lower-income families (relative to higher-income families) than other programs have, and as a result they lift relatively fewer family incomes above the poverty line.

The EITC and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit expansions (the latter is labeled “CC1” in the figure) lie below the regression line. These programs cost less than average because part of their poverty-reducing impact comes from the behavioral effects of increased earnings. 8 Taxes paid on these earnings reduce net government costs, while at the same time the increased earnings triggered by work incentives add to family income. Similarly, the two minimum wage policies actually reduce net government expenditures, owing to the fact that they increase earnings, so tax revenues on the earnings increase and expenditures on benefits from transfer programs decrease. At the same time, these minimum wage policies do not lift many children above the poverty line.

The majority of the programs fall under one of two clusters: a cluster of policy and program proposals that not only cost under $10 billion per year but also move relatively few children out of poverty, and a cluster of proposals that not only cost more but also lift more children out of poverty. In the former category are the reforms related to SSI, child care, one of the immigrant reforms, minimum wage expansions, child support assurance reforms, and the less substantial EITC expansion. None of these programs was estimated to lift more than 1 million children out of poverty.

In the second cluster are the SNAP and housing expansions, the more substantial EITC expansion, and the $2,000 per child per year child allowance proposals. These programs would move between 1 to 3 million children out of poverty, at a cost ranging from $20 to $40 billion. The $3,000 per child per year child allowance would move almost 4 million children out of poverty, but it would do so at a cost of $54 billion.

CONCLUSION 5-3: Programs producing the largest reductions in child poverty are estimated to cost the most. Almost all of the committee-developed program options that lead to substantial poverty reduction were estimated to cost at least $20 billion annually.

Policy Tradeoffs with Earnings . Tradeoffs between poverty reduction and annual earnings changes are shown in Figure 5-5 . 9 As in Figure 5-4 , the horizontal axis shows the number of children brought above the 100 percent SPM poverty line by the given program or policy option, but here the vertical axis shows estimated changes in earned income brought about by the behavioral responses to the introduction of the respective program or policy. It is important to note that the earnings and employment changes plotted here are limited to workers in low-income families, defined as having family incomes below 200 percent of SPM poverty. This restriction was imposed because a few of the policy proposals—especially the two involving the minimum wage—would boost the earnings of workers in middle- and even high-income families. 10

Simulated number of children lifted out of poverty, by change in earnings. NOTES: Earnings changes are limited to individuals living in households with incomes below 200 percent of SPM poverty. CA = Child Allowance; CC = Child Care; CSA = Child Support (more...)

Earnings changes vary widely—from a nearly $6 billion drop in aggregate earnings in the case of Housing Voucher Policy #2 to more than a $9 billion increase in aggregate earnings in the cases of EITC Policy #2 and Child Care Policy #1. Apart from the minimum wage proposals, proposals for programs and policies that gear benefits to earned income are estimated to produce the greatest increase in earnings, in this case in the $4 billion to $10 billion range. By contrast, SNAP, subsidized housing, and child allowance programs are estimated to reduce earnings by amounts ranging from $1 billion to $6 billion.

An interesting combination of substantial reductions in the number of poor children and substantial earnings increases is projected for Child Care Policy #1, which converts the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit into a fully refundable tax credit. It would reduce the number of poor children by nearly 1 million and increase total earnings by $9.3 billion, an amount that would exceed the cost of the program (estimated at $5.1 billion).

Policy Tradeoffs with Employment . Tradeoffs between poverty reduction and changes in employment are shown in Figure 5-6 . As in Figure 5-5 , employment changes plotted here are limited to workers in families with income less than twice the 200 percent SPM poverty line. With one notable exception, the patterns are similar to those found for changes in earnings. In general, work-based programs increase employment and benefits-based programs reduce employment. More notably, our expansions of the CDCTC and the more generous version of the EITC would increase net employment by more than 500,000 jobs. 11 The exception is our minimum wage proposals, both of which increase earnings but are estimated to reduce employment in the 28,000 (MW2) to 42,000 (MW1) range.

Simulated number of children lifted out of poverty by change in jobs. NOTES: Job changes are limited to individuals living in households with incomes below 200 percent of SPM poverty. CA = Child Allowance; CC = Child Care; CSA = Child Support Assurance; (more...)

CONCLUSION 5-4: Projected changes in earnings and employment in response to simulations of our program and policy options vary widely, but taken as a whole they reveal a tradeoff between the magnitude of poverty reduction and effects on earnings and employment. Work-based program expansions involving the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit were estimated to increase earnings by as much as $9 billion and employment by as many as half a million jobs. Programs such as the child allowances and expansions of the housing voucher program were estimated to reduce earnings by up to $6 billion and jobs by nearly 100,000. The bulk of the remaining program and policy proposals are estimated to evoke more modest behavioral responses.

Impacts Across Demographic Subgroups

With 20 program and policy options and nine demographic subgroups of interest, it is difficult to summarize poverty-reduction patterns in a succinct way. Full details are provided in Appendix D, Tables D5-3 , D5-4 , and D5-5 , and in Appendix E . Perhaps the most important lesson is that all 20 program and policy options reduce child poverty across virtually all groups.

However, the poverty reductions induced by the various policy and program options vary substantially across groups and policies. Table 5-1 provides a summary of poverty reductions by subgroup. The first row of the table repeats the baseline poverty rates for particularly disadvantaged subgroups shown in Chapter 2 , which range from about 17 percent for Black children to more than 60 percent for children in families with no adult workers. Down the first column of the table are the proportionate reductions in overall child poverty associated with each of the program and policy options. For example, the “−9.4%” entry for the first EITC option indicates our estimate that implementing this policy would reduce the overall number of children with family incomes below the poverty line by 9.4 percent. 12

Simulated Poverty Reduction of Various Programs and Policies Across Demographic Subgroups.

The green and red circles and the vertical dashes across the first row indicate whether the percentage reduction in poverty for children from the first EITC option in the given subgroup is larger (green), about the same (vertical dashes), or smaller (red) than the 9.2 percent reduction among all poor children. 13 The table shows that the first EITC option, which expands the phase-in and flat portions of the EITC schedule, produces disproportionately large poverty reductions for Black children, children living with single parents, and children with relatively younger mothers. It reduces poverty relatively less for immigrant children, children not living with biological parents and—unsurprisingly, given the earnings orientation of the policy—children living in families with no adult workers.

A broader look at Table 5-1 provides several general lessons. First, some groups—Black children and children living with single mothers or young mothers—tend to benefit more than average from many of the program and policy options. On the other hand, other groups—in particular, children in immigrant families (even if the children themselves are citizens) and children in families with no workers—tend to benefit proportionately less. This is particularly worrisome, given that the poverty rates of these groups (shown in the first row) are already among the highest in the table. These patterns reflect the fact that many of our program and policy ideas are oriented toward working families, and in only one case (the second immigration option) are benefits extended to noncitizens.

A second general lesson is that few of the program and policy options provide substantially disproportionate benefits for most of the subgroups listed in the table. Exceptions are the two child allowance proposals, which disproportionately benefit all groups other than noncitizens and Hispanic children.

CONCLUSION 5-5: The 20 program and policy options generate disparate impacts across population subgroups in our simulations. Although virtually all of them would reduce poverty across all of the subgroups we considered, disproportionately large decreases in child poverty occur only for Black children and children of mothers with low levels of education. Hispanic children and immigrant children would benefit relatively less.

Tradeoffs Among All of the Committee's Criteria

In addition to impacts on cost, employment, and reduction in 100 percent SPM poverty, the committee judged it important to consider several other dimensions of possible program impacts. In response to the evidence cited in Chapter 3 regarding the detrimental impacts of growing up in a family whose income is far below the official poverty thresholds, the committee added to its list of criteria reductions in the number of children in deep poverty (under 50% of SPM poverty). To provide a more complete picture of impacts on the larger group of low-income children, we have also looked at reductions when the poverty threshold is set at 150 percent of the SPM poverty line.

In Chapter 1 , we also argued for the importance of promoting social inclusion, for example by reducing the sense of stigma among groups receiving benefits from social programs. We struggled to develop a strong measure of inclusion and, as explained in this chapter's appendix ( Appendix D ), settled for gauging the extent to which our policy and program options would promote social inclusion by looking at the reduction of poverty rates between groups. Policies that promote social inclusion show a reduction in the gaps in poverty rates between groups.

Table 5-2 provides a summary of the performance of our 20 policy and program options across all of these criteria, most importantly poverty reduction but also cost, work incentives, and social inclusion. Further information on our methods can be found in Appendix D, 5-13 , and in Appendix E . As detailed in Appendix D, 5-13 , we developed a score for each of the criteria listed across the top and then classified each program and policy option as very strong, strong, neutral, weak, or very weak in meeting the criteria. Light and dark green circles indicate above-average performance in meeting the given criterion, while light and dark red circles indicate the opposite.

Simulated Relative Performance of Program and Policy Options Across Committee Criteria.

For example, the second EITC option, which increases EITC payments by 40 percent, strongly encourages work (as indicated by the additional earnings associated with it). The light green circles for <100 percent and <150 percent SPM poverty reduction indicate modest relative success in reducing poverty under those two definition, while the two light red circles indicate above-average cost and somewhat worse performance in reducing poverty gaps for the demographic subgroups we have been considering.

Drawing from Chapter 3 , we indicate in the final column whether the research literature has provided strong evidence that the policy or program in question has been found to improve child well-being. Regardless of their performance on the criteria we have laid out, any policies or programs for which the literature shows such evidence deserve special attention.

Looking across the columns and rows of Table 5-2 , it is not surprising that the first four pairs of programs, all of which are oriented toward work, are the most effective at encouraging work. But none of them is particularly effective at reducing deep child poverty, and only the EITC options are above average in reducing poverty—and this comes at a fairly high budget cost.

The three sets of means-tested transfer program options—expansions of SNAP, housing vouchers, and the child allowance—are the most effective at reducing both poverty and deep poverty for children, but all are relatively costly and none encourages work. Most of the other options cost relatively little but also have little impact on child poverty, which is consistent with the positive slope of the cost/poverty-reduction relationship shown in Figure 5-4 .

CONCLUSION 5-6: The work-oriented program and policy options in our simulations would increase employment and earnings but are among the weakest options in reducing child poverty and, especially, deep child poverty. Three sets of means-tested programs—expansions of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, housing vouchers, and a new child allowance—would reduce poverty the most but would also reduce employment and earnings.

CONCLUSION 5-7: Across all of the criteria considered by the committee (poverty reduction, cost, impacts on work, social inclusion, and evidence of positive impacts on child well-being), several of our policy and program proposals stood out:

A 40 percent increase in Earned Income Tax Credit benefits would decrease child poverty and strongly encourage work and is also likely to improve child well-being. But it would cost $20 billion annually, have only modest impacts on deep poverty, and fail to promote social inclusion.

A $2,000 per year monthly child allowance would strongly reduce child poverty and deep poverty, which most research suggests would promote child development as well as social inclusion. It would also lead to modest reductions in employment and earnings. Its annual cost is $33 billion.

Our expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit would generate more annual earnings ($9.3 billion) than cost to the budget ($5.1 billion), although its ability to reduce child poverty and deep poverty is relatively modest.

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A large body of research shows that the presence (or the expansion) of the EITC leads to increases in employment rates of single mothers. For example, see reviews by Eissa and Hoynes (2006) , Hotz and Scholz (2003) , and Nichols and Rothstein (2016) and studies by Eissa and Liebman (1996) , Hoynes and Patel (2017) , and Meyer and Rosenbaum (2000 , 2001) . For example, Meyer and Rosenbaum (2001) find that the EITC raised annual labor force participation by 7.2 percentage points for single women with children relative to single women without children.

See https://www ​.mdrc.org ​/project/workadvance#overview .

For more information about MDRC's evaluation of Career Academies, see https://www ​.mdrc.org ​/project/career-academies-exploring-college-and-career-options-ecco#overview .

For more information about USDA's food plans, see https://www ​.cnpp.usda ​.gov/USDAFoodPlansCostofFood .

Child SSI eligibility rules have undergone several important changes in its history, including major changes in congressional legislation in the 1990s, that have generated extensive discussion regarding whether eligibility determinations should be altered ( Daly and Burkhauser, 2003 ; Duggan, Kearney, and Rennane, 2016 ). We confine our recommendations to changes in benefit levels and do not consider possible change in eligibility rules, which would be quite complex.

This varies by a number of factors including whether it is a one- or two-parent family, the number of children in the family, and by earned or unearned income.

Our poverty-reduction estimates are based on annual income. We therefore ignore issues related to the timing of income and benefits within the year as well as other administrative and implementation details surrounding each policy. See Chapter 8 for a discussion of the importance of intra-year income instability and of cumbersome enrollment procedures.

Details concerning poverty reduction, cost, and employment and earnings changes in the absence or presence of behavioral responses can be found in Appendix E . Some effects are quite substantial. For example, in the case of the first child care policy, which would expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, the induced employment changes not only increase poverty reduction but also increase government cost by roughly a factor of four but also nearly triple program costs.

As shown in Appendix E , tradeoffs between poverty reduction, earnings, and employment are affected very little by the 2018 tax reforms. Accordingly, only the 2015 tax law simulation results are shown in Figures 5-5 and 5-6 .

In the case of Minimum Wage Policy #1, for example, earnings would increase by more than $12 billion per year overall, but only a quarter of that amount would be gained by workers in low-income households. The committee judged that the behavioral responses among low-income families would be much more relevant to our study than the behavioral responses in other portions of the income distribution.

Jobs include full- and part-time jobs. For more details, see Appendix F , the TRIM3 Technical Appendix.

Table 5-1 mixes percentage-point poverty rates across the top row with proportionate reductions in the number of poor children in each group. Given the very different baseline rates of poverty across groups, it made the most sense to show proportionate reductions in the number of poor children within a group.

See Appendix D, 5-13 , for details.

• Cite this Page National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Committee on National Statistics; Board on Children, Youth, and Families; Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years; Le Menestrel S, Duncan G, editors. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2019 Feb 28. 5, Ten Policy and Program Approaches to Reducing Child Poverty.
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