Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  As I pondered whether to take a sip of the drink I had been offered, and thus risk death by poisoning, an aide interrupted our discussion to ask if I could briefly step into the adjoining room. The governor had called from Washington to speak to me. Oh, this can’t be good, I thought. “Tom,” I could hear his familiar voice booming on the other end of the line, “are they treating you well out there?” I wanted to say something about being suspicious of this drink they handed me but instead said that all was fine. We went through a few more pleasantries as I wondered what this was all about. Then he ended with, “Now you call my appointment secretary and set something up. We have to have lunch when I get back.”

  What was that about? I thought. Clearly, he was buttering me up to defuse any mischief I might be entertaining. I did call his appointment secretary. I had to at least presume the man was serious. The secretary, however, sounded totally incredulous that a total lowlife like me could entertain the notion that the governor would waste any amount of time on such an absolute nobody. She and others probably had a good laugh on that one after I hung up. I did stammer something about it being his idea but all I got was a “sure, we’ll call you, don’t call us” response. Guess what, the call never came.

  One day in the future, Bobbi Wolfe and I did get invited to the governor’s mansion for lunch. Unfortunately, this was along with sixty or so other invitees to hear the governor talk about W-2. The occasion was a visit from British dignitaries who were interested in Wisconsin’s reforms and in stopping by the Poverty Institute. Thus, we believe the governor felt obligated to invite us. Bobbi recalls that Thompson stopped by our table, as he did all the tables. Her recollection is that his comments to us were not overtly hostile but neither did they convey any warmth. Our presence apparently was tolerated at best. In any case, it was not a heart-to-heart talk to thaw the State-IRP cold war but at least he did not yell at me.

  What I most recall from that day was his description of how he came up with his central ideas for W-2. He talked about inviting small numbers of Milwaukee welfare mothers to the governor’s mansion for lunch. He would ask them what help they needed to get into the workforce and become independent from welfare. He ticked off what he had heard—child care, continued access to health care, transportation help, and some skills training. He then pointed out how W-2 was designed to fill those needs. I thought, Good for him. Asking the customer is a wonderful way to think through what changes are needed. But I was also discomforted. I suspect it would never occur to him, or most policymakers for that matter, to look to the academy for advice or help. Most of my colleagues could have ticked off the same list of impediments along with reports and analyses about what to do. The distance between the State Capitol and the university is about a mile as the crow flies. In terms of psychic distance, the gap can appear insurmountable at times. There is a cultural gap that needs to be bridged, one that I address later in this book.

  W-2 ended welfare as we knew it in Wisconsin. What had been a cash income support system became a work-focused initiative with a small, residual cash assistance program for those obviously unfit for the workforce. Not long after W-2 went into effect, many smaller counties had a handful of cases left at most. Quite a few of the smallest ones no longer had a single case.

  Passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA), which Bill Clinton signed in 1996, appeared to end welfare as we knew it across the nation. Welfare for struggling families with children was turned from an entitlement to cash assistance into a fixed amount of money to be spent largely on getting (mostly) mothers into the labor market. Some remained on cash assistance but in much smaller numbers than before. After all the dust had cleared, the national TANF caseload was probably 40 percent of what the old AFDC caseload had been, not as big a decline as in Wisconsin but still eye-opening. Welfare, or at least the old AFDC program, had been ended as we knew it.

  It also was the end of an era but not the end of the debate. In fact, as we will see later, it was just the beginning of a fascinating dialogue about where to go next. That is the great thing about being a policy wonk, you never work yourself out of a job.

  CHAPTER 6

  SEARCHING FORTHE HOLY GRAIL

  Changing the culture means changing how we do business. Changing how we do business means changing how we organize within Human Service agencies and how we interact with the community and how we interact with our clients. It means partnerships. It means collaborations. It means relationships that didn’t exist before.

  —Joel Rabb (Ohio welfare official)

  My phone rang one day, probably in 1987. Of course, it now occurs to me that my life would have been a lot simpler had I not answered so many phone calls. When it rings at home I seldom jump to answer it. This irritates my long-suffering wife who gives me “the look.” “What?” I would respond (to the “look”), “it will either be for you or a call for me that I don’t want in the first place.” Somehow, though, I felt duty-bound to answer calls to my office phone.

  I wondered at times, “Do I have a job description?” More importantly, “Does it actually say I have to answer the phone?” Perhaps I am not obliged to pick up the receiver. Ignoring that irritating ring would have simplified my life immensely, particularly at the university. Surely, then, I would not have been distracted by so many nonacademic seductions like saving the world. Inevitably, though, I would answer the damn phone. It is that brooding responsibility thing we who were raised Catholic do so well—the omnipresent detritus of guilt. Plus, phone-ignoring is probably another venial sin. Just about everything is a sin.

  This caller was Jim Kennedy from Kenosha County in Southeast Wisconsin. I cannot recall where I first met Jim, but he had struck me as a nice guy, so maybe this call would be okay. “Tom,” he starts, “we are dying here.” Well, that grabbed my attention. Perhaps I would never save the world, but I would give saving Jim a shot, him being such a nice guy and all.

  “Gee, Jim, shouldn’t you be calling the paramedics instead of me?” He ignored me, as I find that most people do, and continued with a description of their plight. Kenosha was one of the five pilot counties that had been selected as WEJT pilots, an initiative with which I had been intimately involved in developing while working with the Wisconsin legislature. Many concerns I had when this reform was launched were coming to pass. The pilot counties were given broad guidelines and some resources. They were then told to go forth and do the Lord’s work. That is, they were charged with getting those welfare slugs into jobs. Regarding how to do this, they were left pretty much to their own devices other than collaborate with the local Private Industry Councils, the presumed labor market experts. Apparently, no one had given them my detailed plan for getting recipients into jobs that I had shared with the legislative committee.

  Jim went on to explain that they were welfare experts, not workforce people. They were trying, as instructed, to work with their peers from the Private Industry Council (PIC), the system with nominal responsibility back then to get those with labor market challenges into the work world. But it didn’t seem to be working. “Could you help us?” Jim pleaded. Whenever I get that kind of request, I am tempted to respond with a hearty, “Me? Are you smoking those funny cigarettes?” But I assured Jim I could find people who could help and would set up a meeting to chat further. I could not permit the concept I had worked to birth in the legislature die a stillborn death.

  Fortunately, at the time, IRP had two visiting scholars with the interest and skills to do the job. One was Larry Mead, the author of Beyond Entitlement, a conservative call for diminishing the entitlement character of welfare by introducing proactive initiatives to motivate socially approved behaviors. The other was Michael Wiseman, a labor economist from the University of California-Berkeley who had studied workforce development programs. The final member of the Kenosha team would be the same Bernie Stumbras you met in earlier chapters.

  At the time, Bernie was out stationed at IRP from his home state agency o
n an intergovernmental transfer arrangement. I do not know if this is what he wanted or if it was a form of bureaucratic exile. Bernie was smart and a visionary. He had a low-key manner about him with a soft, whispery voice. But he could be very stubborn when he thought he was right, as some talented people tend to be. I would not be surprised if he confronted the new powers that be who came with the Thompson gubernatorial team and had been banned to IRP as a form of punishment. In fact, numerous state employees sought me out over those years looking for a similar kind of refuge at IRP. Morale in public service was plummeting.

  Now that I reflect on it, this was quite a team. Larry Mead is a classic patrician, Harvard educated and an avid sailor who loved competing at a very high level in that sport. He tended to speak carefully and in measured terms. His thoughts were typically expressed in flowery language, almost as if he were reading from one of his published papers. Like virtually everyone who spent time in my candy store, Larry was very smart. And yet, he could be rigid in his thinking with his world view set and impervious to any change of views. Oddly, I found him quite insecure for a man who had already achieved so much acclaim. Now, I was the one who could lay claim to any legitimate insecurity in this group. Yet, I seldom let my lack of talent or skills get in my way of bustling my way through new policy china shops. Such hubris is a gift or, much more likely, a form of delusion.

  As mentioned above, Michael Wiseman filled out our little team. He is hard to describe, having a mercurial quality about him. He would be funny and insightful one day, then acerbic and withdrawn the next. But you wanted to grab onto the nuggets that flowed during the good times because few were better at spawning ideas and seeing things that mere mortals do not. Like Larry, he also could express himself in luxurious language that employed ingenious metaphors to make his points. Woe it be to any agency into which this group of misfits parachuted.

  Our Kenosha counterparts were a good match, however. There were three main players. Jim Kennedy was the quiet guy with an ever-present smile. He was on the nerdy side, preferring to be crunching numbers and analyzing stuff than doing anything else. George Leuterman headed the welfare side of things for the county. He was a strong, smart, manager type who exuded the kind of can-do confidence you want in an executive. E. Clarke Earle was the overall county director. He was a man of large, sometimes conflicting, qualities. He was brash, brilliant, uncompromising, and passionate. You did not want to stand between him and his goals. He also could be profane and very funny. We all wished we had written down some of his better lines, though we would have to delete a whole lot of profanity. We often referred to his better asides as “the sayings of Chairman Earle!”

  We spent a lot of time in Kenosha over the next couple of years. At first it was pro bono, who could resist a good challenge? Eventually the state kicked in to support our continued work as the project evolved into something exciting. The core of the problem was this: the welfare agency was in the business of handing out benefits. Their focus was on making sure that only eligible people got those benefits and in the right amount. It was a part auditing and part cop responsibility. You were always looking out for fraud, abuse, and waste. What welfare people did not do is get into the lives of their clients to try to learn their strengths and weaknesses, their motivations and limitations, their aspirations, and any obstacles to those dreams. Those were more professional tasks better left to others located in traditional social service agencies.

  The Private Industry Council (PIC), on the other hand, tried to get people into the workforce. Yes, their nominal focus was on populations that might face impediments to full participation in the labor market due to obsolete skills, age, minor physical impairments, diminished cognitive or mental capacities, or insufficient zeal. Their underlying focus was on getting as many successful placements as they could. To do that, they needed to curry positive relationships with local employers, which meant delivering desirable job seekers…those who were motivated, presentable, possessed necessary soft skills, and who could be trained to do the work. Thus, they were sensitive to the risks associated with pushing applicants who might fail and possibly undermine future relations with employers. In short, they did not want to push “losers” onto their key stakeholders.

  An institutional cultural disconnect existed. One system wanted to place so-called hard-to-serve clients. The other system wanted to place likely-to-succeed clients. One set of antennae focused on the welfare client while the other set was much more attuned to the firms hiring the client. One system spent more time doing auditing and monitoring functions while the other was involved in more counseling and rehabilitative tasks. Larry first termed this disconnect as a problem between competing ‘institutional philosophies.’ I later termed it as a problem across conflicting institutional cultures. Whatever it is called, neither side understood the other very well and when communications break down, suspicion and blame are sure to follow.

  Whatever the term used, the breakdown between the welfare and workforce development systems was complete when we got involved. Kennedy and Leuterman made somewhat moderate complaints saying that they would refer clients they thought were job ready to the PIC and never received any feedback after that. Their referrals simply disappeared into the other system as if it were a black hole. E. Clarke Earl, as was his wont, summarized the problem directly and succinctly. “Those f---ing b----rds lied to us.” I suspect most of you can do the translation.

  The relationship between the welfare and PIC systems was probably beyond life support. Almost instinctively, we started a process of turning the Kenosha folk into workforce-type people. If you cannot outsource the labor-market attachment responsibility, then build in in-house. Our little team split up and did different tasks. What I recall most vividly was spending hours with Leuterman, Kennedy, and assorted other county officials locked in a room with a blackboard. We started on a process that had no name at the time. Now, I would call it the “line of sight” or “visioning” process.

  At the time, I had no set methodology for what we were about to do. But when in doubt, wing it. After all, they thought we knew what we were doing. I recall asking a few initial questions and then built on their responses. What do you want to accomplish? You want more clients in the workforce, is that right? Well, what is it about the current way you do business now that would possibly help achieve that goal? Not sure? Then let us start at the beginning. What is the beginning you ask? Good question! Let me take a sip from my soda while I come up with an answer to that one.

  Making it up as I went along, I recall saying something like “Let us envision what a young woman might say to herself when she thinks about your agency.” She probably says something like, “I need money and that is where they give out money.” Is that what you want her to first think about? No! Would you rather have her think about getting help finding a job and later think about money? But why would she possibly think that, or at least in that order? What message are you, through the design of your programs and agency, sending out to this young mother, to all young mothers? What do you signal to her and the broader population of potential applicants about your mission and purpose?

  Then we kept moving through each step in the hypothetical life trajectory of a client or customer. A couple of discussion starter questions mutated into an ongoing analytical process. What are they thinking when they come through the front door of your agency? What does she see first? What might she do first? Who talks with her first? What does this person say and do? Are any decisions made at this point? What are they? Then what happens next and next and next? At some point we hit upon a key insight. The critical issue of work never comes up until way late in the sequence of events that the client experiences. It becomes an afterthought, a mere inconvenience and not something central to the agency’s purpose or mission.

  Okay, then, what happens when the work question does come up? You say that the client may get a letter telling her to make an appointment with another agency. Consequences are mentioned for n
oncompliance but who knows if they are believed. The client may or may not actually contact this other agency. If they do not, the welfare agency may or may not be notified of the transgression. Even when your agency is notified, a lot of time has passed already. When notified, your people probably do little more than send another letter. It is like spanking the pup a week after they pooped on the rug and just as effective.

  As our chalk diagram of circles and triangles and rectangles and lines spread across the board, the institutional life of a welfare client became clearer. Suddenly, or not so suddenly, we all could see the big picture. When all was said and done, it was all too clear the work message had no immediacy. It was, at best, a mild administrative irritant. When we tried looking at case files, we could see a huge “leakage” problem. Clients who were supposed to go from point A to B, from the welfare worker to someone who would help them get a job, too often never got to point B. In too many cases, it was hard to figure out what was happening.

  No wonder that few were getting into the labor market or, if they were, no one knew about it. When the agency began to look at its system from the customer’s perspective, the problems were obvious. The work message was delivered too late in the process, as we just saw. When it was raised, it simply looked like another speed bump to be hurdled by the client. There were too many transaction costs (calls to make, trips to make, appointments to schedule) just to minimally comply with what was being asked of the client. Finally, feedback mechanisms to monitor client progress were inadequate to nonexistent. They were simply getting lost somewhere out there amidst a byzantine, administrative labyrinth.