222 ❯ STEP 5. Build Your Test-Taking Confidence
4 US Census Bureau, Historical Poverty Tables, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov4.html.
5 Scott Winship and Christopher Jencks, “How Did the Social Policy Changes of the 1990s Affect Maternal Hard-
ship Among Single Mothers? Evidence from the CPS Food Security Supplement,” Kennedy School of Government,
Working Paper RWP04-027, June 2004 (ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP04027/$File/rwp04
-027-Winship-Jencks.pdf ). The comparisons between 1995 and 2001 use the common screen.
6 Tabulations by Scott Winship.
7 I am indebted to Joseph Swingle of Wellesley College for all the estimates derived from the Census Bureau’s Annual
Demographic Survey.
8 Friends of Boston’s Homeless, “2004 City of Boston Homeless Census: Homeless Families Increase Dramatically,”
available at http://www.fobh.org/census.htm, accessed August 26, 2004. The title of this report refers to an increase
between 2003 and 2004.51015202530[According to the US Census Bureau] The poverty rate for single mothers [who
headed their own households and had children under eighteen] was only 36 percent in
2003, compared to 44 percent in 1994, when unemployment was about what it had
been in 1996.^4
The official poverty rate has serious flaws. It omits food stamps, free medical care,
housing subsidies, and taxes. So it is important to see whether direct measures of
material hardship tell the same story. The Agriculture Department’s Food Security
Survey (FSS) is a good place to begin. It asks mothers whether money problems forced
them to skip meals or cut the size of their meals at any point during the previous twelve
months. Between April 1995 and April 2001, as the welfare rolls were being cut in half,
the fraction of single mothers who said they had to limit what they ate fell from 17.7 to
12.5 percent.^5 By 2003, with unemployment slightly above its 1995 level, the percentage
of mothers who reported cutting back what they ate had risen, but only to 13.8 percent.
The FSS also asked mothers whether there was a time when their children were not
getting enough to eat. The proportion who said this was the case fell from 10.6 percent
in 1995 to 7.8 percent in 2001 and had only risen to 8.0 percent in 2003.^6 Both of
these measures are consistent with the official poverty rate in suggesting that even when
unemployment was 6 percent, single mothers did better after welfare reform
than before.
The proportion of unmarried mothers living in someone else’s home is another
indicator of financial stress. Some mothers live in someone else’s home by choice, but
most get their own place when their income rises. Twenty-two percent of unmarried
mothers lived in someone else’s home in both 1989 and 2000.^7 When welfare reform
passed, its critics also predicted a surge in the number of families living in public
shelters. The United States does not collect national data on trends in homelessness,
but in Milwaukee, which cut about ten thousand families from its welfare rolls, [Jason]
DeParle reports that the number of families in shelters on an average night rose by only
forty-one. On December 12, 2004, Boston counted 1,157 homeless children in the city,
down from 1,274 a decade earlier.^8 Nationally, the proportion of children not living
with either their mother or their father was the same in 2004 as in 1994.
These measures of material well-being can be summarized in two ways. Defenders of
welfare reform stress the fact that the proportion of single mothers who cannot afford
to rent their own housing is no higher today than in 1996, and that the proportion who
report not having enough to eat has fallen significantly. Critics of welfare reform stressQuestions 45-54 are based on the following excerpt from a review and discussion by Christopher Jencks of
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare, written by Jason DeParle and
published by Viking/Penguin in 2005. The review appeared in the December 15, 2005, edition of The New
York Review of Books.