About the Editors

Thomas Corbett has emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and remains an active affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty, where until recently, he served as associate director. He has long studied trends in welfare reform and how to better understand them. He has worked on reform issues at all levels of government and continues to work with a number of states through networks of senior state welfare officials in the Midwest and on the West Coast.

Mary Clare Lennon is a senior research fellow at the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. From 1997 to 2000, she was director for research at NCCP's Research Forum on Children, Families, and the New Federalism. Lennon has been on the faculty of the Mailman School since 1987 and is currently associate professor of clinical sociomedical sciences. Her current research focuses on social policy, family economic security, and child well-being.

About the Contributors

Catherine Born is research associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and director of the multidisciplinary Family Welfare Research and Training Group, which for more than 20 years has provided research, training, and technical assistance services to the Maryland public human services community and board members of the National Association for Welfare Research and Statistics. She has published materials on such topics as recidivism and the child welfare experiences of TANF leavers, agency-university partnerships, and social work education.

Evelyn Z. Brodkin is associate professor at the University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration, and lecturer in the Law School. Her major research interests include the politics of the welfare state, social policy, street-level organizations, and public management. She is codirector of the Project on the Public Economy of Work and a faculty associate of the Joint Center for Poverty Research.

Leanne Charlesworth has extensive experience with data collection in child welfare and welfare settings. Most recently, she directed a welfare reform implementation study focusing on intrastate variation in Maryland.

Fred Doolittle is vice president and deputy director of the Department of Education, Children, and Youth at the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC). Since his arrival at MDRC in 1986, he has worked on studies of welfare and employment reforms, with a special emphasis on programs serving youth. Recent publications include Matching Applicants with Services: Initial Assessments in the Milwaukee County W-2 Program, with Susan Gooden and Ben Glispie (MDRC, 2001) and Fathers' Fair Share, with Earl Johnson and Ann Levine (Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).

Kathryn Edin is an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She is best known for her influential book Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work, coauthored with Laura Lein (Russell Sage Foundation, 1997), which details the economic and social circumstances of working and welfare-reliant single mothers. Her research interests include poverty and social inequality, family and gender, and public policy. Currently, she is co-principal investigator for several qualitative, longitudinal, and ethnographic projects.

Robert M. Goerge is a research fellow at the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago and a faculty associate at the Northwestern University/UC Joint Center for Poverty Research. Central to Dr. Goerge's research is the goal of improving the available information on all children and families, particularly those who are poor, abused, or neglected or who have disabilities. A special interest is the issue of children receiving multiple services or benefits from multiple providers or agencies.

Pamela A. Holcomb is a senior research associate at the Urban Institute. Her research has concentrated on issues of evaluating and implementing social programs, particularly in the area of welfare reform. She has written extensively on welfare, welfare reform, institutional performance, and social services. She also was an analyst on special detail at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation, Department of Health and Human Services (1995-1997), where she worked specifically on welfare reform issues and policy development, and was a congressional fellow at the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Thomas Kaplan is associate director and senior scientist at the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has served as principal investigator for research projects on social policy and the evaluation of welfare reform programs and has written extensively on the implementation of recent welfare reforms. For 15 years he worked in Wisconsin state government, serving as deputy budget director, planning director, and director of Medicaid HMO programs in the state's Department of Health and Social Services.

Irene Lurie is a professor in the Rockefeller College Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and a research associate at the Rockefeller Institute of Government. She has examined welfare programs at the federal, state, and local levels, including a 10-state study of the implementation of the Family Support Act of 1988. She is currently studying the TANF implementation at the front lines of welfare and workforce agencies.

Rebecca A. Maynard is university trustee chair professor of education and social policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on education and welfare policy, with a particular emphasis on the design and field testing of innovative strategies to improve outcomes for poor children and their families. She has directed numerous large-scale demonstration evaluations, including evaluations of employment and training programs, alternative schools, dropout prevention initiatives, teen pregnancy prevention programs, and youth risk avoidance strategies.

Lawrence M. Mead is professor of politics at New York University. He is an expert on the problems of poverty and welfare in the United States, including the politics and implementation of welfare reform programs. His works include Beyond Entitlement (Free Press, 1986), The New Politics of Poverty (Basic Books, 1992) and The New Paternalism (Brookings Institution Press, 1997).

Demetra Smith Nightingale is a principal research associate and director of the Welfare and Training Research Program at the Urban Institute. Currently she is also adjunct professor of public policy at the George Washington University. Her research focuses on employment, welfare, and social policy, and she serves on numerous advisory groups, boards, and task forces. Among her publications are The Work Alternative: Welfare Reform and the Realities of the Job Market, coedited with Robert Haveman (1995); The Government We Deserve: Responsive Democracy and Changing Expectations, with C. Eugene Steuerle, Edward M. Gramlich, and Hugh Heclo (1998); and The Low-Wage Labor Market: Challenges and Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency, coedited with Kelleen Kaye (2000), all from the Urban Institute.

Joel Rabb is chief of the Bureau of Program Integration and Coordination in the Office of Family Stability at the Ohio Department of Human Services. He has been involved in planning the recent organizational and policy changes to implement welfare reform in Ohio. In his 18 years at the Department, he has been involved in developing, implementing, and evaluating policies affecting child welfare, child care, public assistance, food stamps, teen parents, and employment programs. He is currently developing and implementing an outcome management system for county offices in Ohio.

Kay E. Sherwood is a consultant and writer on social policy and education as well as evaluation issues. She has recently completed two teaching cases on evaluations of foundation initiatives for the Evaluation Roundtable, a foundation-sponsored project to improve evaluation practice in philanthropy, and is beginning work on a formative evaluation of a national foundation's community partners grant-making program.

Don Winstead is the deputy assistant secretary for human services policy with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the time chapter 2 was written, Winstead was welfare reform administrator with the Florida Department of Children and Families. He worked in Florida for 30 years serving in a variety of positions, from frontline caseworker to deputy secretary.

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