Social Programs: Learn, Work and Wed

By ALEX PRUD''HOMME

Keyola Lackey got pregnant in the 10th grade and dropped out of school. A year after her baby was born, she got pregnant again. With no husband and no job, she was living on welfare. Her mother begged her to go back to school, but Lackey wouldn't listen. Then, three years ago, Wisconsin state officials delivered a blunt message. "They told me I had to go to school to keep getting benefits," she recalls. "It was a big push." Last year she graduated from high school, and she is now studying to be an accountant at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

Lackey, 20, is one of the 1,000 Milwaukee County welfare recipients who have been sent back to school since Republican Governor Tommy Thompson launched his Learnfare program in 1988. Learnfare is one of a spate of carrot-and-stick reforms intended to break long-term dependency on state and federal handouts. It is a bold behaviorist experiment seeking to prove that, given the right rewards and punishments, even the most underprivileged can become productive, self-reliant citizens. And if it works in Wisconsin, argues Thompson, 49, who is in his second four-year term, his plan can be the model for a radical recasting of welfare programs nationwide. Says he: "Our welfare-reform initiatives are geared to help individuals help themselves. Some people think they're very harsh, and some are. They're toughlove."

Thompson's attempt at social engineering has touched off a debate over the virtues of economic carrots and sticks. "It's been demonstrated that incentives work," says University of Chicago economics professor Gary Becker. "The controversy is over magnitude." But some critics charge that Thompson's policies -- which basically seek to force welfare recipients to learn, work and wed -- smack of Big Brotherism. They also accuse the Governor of oversimplifying poverty and human motivation. Changing behavior, notes Theodore Marmor, a political science professor at Yale, "is a lot more complex than simpleminded microeconomics." Some even sense a veiled racism. "It's no longer permissible to make direct appeals based on race," says Mark Greenberg, senior staff attorney of the Center for Law and Social Policy, but "making the attack on welfare recipients has the same effect."

Wisconsin seems an unlikely laboratory for welfare reform. After all, the state offers some of the country's highest benefits and lowest poverty levels. But the ideologically driven Governor has aggressively pushed to get people "off welfare, and onto the elevator of opportunity." And he claims that < his toughlove works: while 40 states showed a 10% increase in the number of families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children between July 1989 and April 1991, Wisconsin's case load increased only 2.8%.

Learnfare is Thompson's flagship incentive program. Designed to keep poor kids in the classroom and off the streets, it has proved extremely controversial. In the 1988-89 school year, Wisconsin sanctioned some 6,600 truant teens, saving the state an estimated $3.3 million in AFDC benefits. Says Thompson: "The state of Wisconsin is watching them and saying, 'If your mother and father don't require you to go to school, the state is going to be there to make sure you ((do)).' "

For some, the program seems an unqualified success. Hugging her three-year- old son and two-year-old daughter, Lackey praises the harsh medicine that put her back in the classroom. Learnfare "should be put in all the states," she says. "The people who criticize it want the money free and do nothing for it. But nothing comes free."

Others are less sanguine. A 1990 audit by the state legislature found that 84% of the appeals made by truant teens were overturned because of errors in records kept by the schools or the welfare agency. Furthermore, the Employment and Training Institute of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that in Milwaukee County less than 30% of the kids whose families had welfare payments docked for poor attendance were actually in school two months after being sanctioned. Last summer U.S. District Court Judge Terence Evans ordered that Learnfare be suspended in Milwaukee. "Recipients," he wrote, "should not be made homeless and hungry in the name of social experimentation." In October, however, the judge reinstated Learnfare, after the city improved its record keeping and hired social workers to help truant teens.

The program's final report card won't be available until a federally ordered evaluation is completed later this year. Thompson declares that Learnfare "is encouraging teens to return to school and to attend regularly." But the evidence suggests otherwise. Whereas the dropout rate in Milwaukee was 10.5% in 1988, the year before Learnfare started, it skyrocketed to 14.7% in the 1989-90 academic year.

Thompson has also run into trouble with his proposed Parental and Family Responsibility Initiative, dubbed "Bridefare" by critics. The Governor prefers to call it "Make Room for Daddy" and insists that the program will make fathers more responsible for their children. Says Republican state representative Susan Vergeront: "The concept of trying to promote two-parent families makes good sense." But Democratic state representative Barbara Notestein brands it "a state-sponsored shotgun wedding," and adds, "No one objects to bringing fathers in, but should the government do something that encourages teenagers to get married and limit their options?"

The Governor gripes that his state has become a "welfare magnet" for out- of-state poor because Wisconsin -- despite a reduction of AFDC outlays of 6% to fund Thompson's reforms -- has some of the highest benefits in the nation. In 1989 he proposed a two-tier system that would peg newcomers' benefits to those in their home states during their first six months of Wisconsin residency. Advocates for the poor challenge the legality of the double-barreled scheme, pointing out that the Supreme Court banned residency requirements for welfare benefits in 1969.

Thompson's most radical proposals have not yet got off the ground. Last month the Democratic-controlled state legislature rejected the Governor's bid to expand Learnfare by applying it to children as young as six. Wisconsin lawmakers have similarly voted down the two-tier benefits system and weakened the Bridefare plan. Undeterred, Thompson announced last week that he would push for a Federal Government waiver that would allow for a modified version of Bridefare.

Though the practical results of Thompson's experiment are meager so far, other states -- like Ohio, Arkansas and Kansas -- are experimenting with economic incentives of their own. And under the influence of a Republican Administration that prefers self-help to government assistance, such ideas are likely to gain momentum.

Republican House whip Newt Gingrich has praised Thompson as an "activist conservative," and some tout the Governor as a rising G.O.P. star. There are even those Wisconsinites who, having watched ex-second baseman Thompson (he played for the Royall High School Hilltoppers) standing next to ex-first baseman George Bush at last month's major league All-Star game in Toronto, see their Governor as a possible future President. That may seem farfetched. But to many of those who elected Reagan and Bush, a man who tells welfare recipients to get off their rear ends and work for a living could have strong appeal.

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/Milwaukee