Cutting Child Poverty in Half: NAS Committee Roundtable

The US Congress in the omnibus appropriations bill signed into law in December 2015 directed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) to conduct a comprehensive study of child poverty in the United States. Specifically, the study is to “provide an evidence-based, non-partisan analysis of the macroeconomic, health, and crime/social costs of child poverty, to study current efforts aimed at reducing poverty, and to propose recommendations with the goal of reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half in 10 years.” This policy goal mirrors goals guiding anti-poverty initiatives that have been undertaken in other English-speaking countries in the past two decades, the most notable example of which took place in the United Kingdom beginning in 1997 (Waldfogel, 2010).

The NAS committee will issue its report in the Fall, 2018. The committee has four members that are associated with the social work profession. Each member brings differing skills and experiences to the committee:

• The Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems and co-founding director of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC). His research on child support and welfare influenced legislation in Wisconsin and other American states, the U.S. Congress, Great Britain, Australia, and Sweden. A social worker and an economist by training, his research focuses on poverty, income transfers, program evaluation, single parent families and child support, and the welfare state.

• Founder of a health and human services consulting practice in Tallahassee, Florida. He brings over three decades of state and federal experience in all phases of health and human services policy and practice to the firm. He is a nationally recognized expert on federal funding issues and has negotiated ground-breaking federal waivers in welfare reform and child welfare. He is one of only five recipients of the American Public Human Service Association Distinguished Service Award.

• President and chief executive officer of the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), the nation's oldest and largest membership-based child welfare organization. She has received numerous awards and recognition throughout her career, including the National Council of Negro Women's Mary McLeod Bethune Award, B'nai B'rith's Humanitarian Award and Operation Understanding's Distinguished Community Leadership Award.

• The Samuel F. and Rose B. Gingold Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, and Director of the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the social determinants of racial/ethnic inequities in health; the role of social policies in reducing those inequities; and the health and wellbeing of children with special needs.

I propose a roundtable consisting of these four NAS panel members who will discuss the costs of child poverty, the effectiveness and limits of current programs, and the NAS committee's recommendations for cutting child poverty in half within 10 years.