This story appeared in the Fall 2019 Letters & Science magazine.
Since 2014, state legislatures across the country have spent time debating a policy question familiar to anyone who’s been following headlines: Should federal dollars be accepted in order to expand Medicaid coverage for individuals above the federal poverty line?
Here in Wisconsin, Marguerite Burns and Donna Friedsam, Madison-based researchers affiliated with the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), were hard at work, using state insurance-claims data to determine what happened to the group of Wisconsin residents who dropped out of the Medicaid program when the state changed the eligibility requirements in April 2014.
“We’re doing research on one of the most controversial questions facing our state,” says Friedsam.“ And not just for our state. This is of national import.”
This is nothing new for IRP, an organization that has been positioned on the cutting edge of poverty policy guidance and research since its inception in 1966 as the research arm of then-President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It’s enjoyed federal funding throughout its 52 years of existence. In fact, it is currently the only federally funded national poverty research center, having won the latest national competition for the five-year designation in 2016.
Centrally housed in the Sewell Social Sciences Building, IRP encompasses more than 200 affiliated researchers, both on the UW-Madison campus and across the country, as well as 20 dedicated support staff. Those researchers represent a dizzying array of disciplines, from economics, social work and sociology to nursing, population health and political science, pairing their perspectives to tackle a deeply complex and multifaceted problem.
“We’re really grounded in real-world, actionable research questions and two-way conversations between the policy world and the practice world,” says Lawrence Berger, who served as IRP’s director for the last five years before stepping down this summer. “We’re a really great example of the Wisconsin Idea.”
IRP tackles poverty from every possible angle and factor— child support, education, health, the justice system and more— but the big key to its sustained success has been its ability to remain studiously nonpartisan. Through Democratic and Republican administrations at the state and federal levels, the institute has maintained good relationships and remained effective.
“We make a strong point of not taking ideological positions, but rather presenting the evidence,” explains Berger. “Rarely do we say, ‘You should do this.’ Instead, we say, ‘Here is what the evidence says about what might happen if you do this.’”
Berger’s own research is a perfect example. For years, he’s been researching educational, economic and social outcomes for children in Wisconsin’s foster care system. Several other states had issued reports linking foster care to children performing poorly in school, but Berger and his colleagues, including former IRP director Maria Cancian and Jennifer Noyes, now the College of Letters & Science’s associate dean for operations and staff, suspected there was more to the story. Working in concert with the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and the Department of Public Instruction, Berger’s team compared the test scores of kids in foster care to groups of other disadvantaged kids, instead of comparing them to average kids. Suddenly, what seemed a massive achievement gap largely disappeared.
“The implication is that the whole group of kids who are involved in the child welfare system, whether they go into foster care or not, are at high risk of doing poorly educationally,” explains Berger. “You don’t have to wait for foster care to be a trigger. That’s not the moment to intervene. This is about a trajectory.”
A DATA JUGGERNAUT
Berger’s work, like most of IRP’s research projects, is made possible by the institute’s biggest asset: access to one of the most extensive networks of administrative, poverty-related data in America, dating all the way back to the 1980s. Drawing on strong, longstanding relationships with administrators of state and federal programs — many of whom have turned to IRP over the years for answers to their vexing, poverty-related policy questions — the institute is able to harmonize these data sets, giving IRP researchers access to the information they need. Armed with this data, researchers can follow families across generations, measuring the impact of policies and programs on the lives of low-income populations.
“The data expertise and infrastructure IRP has developed are unique,” says Burns, who relies extensively on both for her Medicaid waiver work. “They allow us to link data across these programs — Medicaid and the Department of Corrections, FoodShares — and learn how individuals move from one program to the next. We could not do that without the expertise and infrastructure IRP has developed. It’s just not possible.”
FEDERALLY FOCUSED
Like many of the researchers affiliated with IRP, Daniel Meyer came to the UW specifically to work with the Institute.
Meyer, a professor in the School of Social Work, has been here more than three decades and has seen IRP evolve from a state-focused organization to one that’s now equally focused on poverty- related topics at the federal level. Along the way, he’s seen IRP’s work become more quantitatively, qualitatively and ethnographically sophisticated.
Meyer’s work focuses on policies that affect the economic well-being of single-parent families. In his most recent study, Meyer collaborated with Cancian on a federally funded project called the Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED). Wisconsin was one of eight states selected to work with child support program administrators to measure the impact of providing additional services (employment and parenting support) to parents struggling to keep up with child support payments. While the results of the study proved ambiguous — there was a decrease in the number of child support orders issued but no increase in the amount of support paid — the level of satisfaction parents reported with the child support services dramatically increased.
“The fact that this intervention improved some things and not others shows us a sense of the next stage of the evolution in trying to make policy better,” says Meyer. “Policy makers need to figure out, is it better to not provide any services for this population?
Or should we try a more intensive (and expensive) intervention to get people on a different track? Now the choices are clear.”
Federal administrators were quick to recognize IRP’s contributions and the project’s worth. In the coming year, Wisconsin will expand the program from two counties to five.
EXPANDING THE VISION
In August, Katherine Magnuson took the reins as IRP’s 15th director. She’s been with the Institute for 15 years after coming to UW in the early 2000s, initially hired as part of a campus-wide initiative to recruit a cluster of poverty researchers. After years of serving as IRP’s associate director for research and training, she’s hoping to continue to build on the institute’s data resources, perhaps leveraging new types of data IRP doesn’t currently store — things like housing data — to examine public health and poverty questions such as the possible link between lead exposure and test scores among children.
“It’s sometimes easy to ask questions about existing programs,” says Magnuson. “Things like,‘ What happens if we increase food stamps?’ But I think one of the things IRP has been good at is saying is,‘What are the types of strategies that are not yet a program? What happens if we think about new ways to tackle poverty?’”
Magnuson is currently heading a project that does just that. It’s an unconditional cash transfer program in which struggling new mothers are given $4,000 (from philanthropic sources) to improve their family situations. Unlike some research projects, there’s a strong scientific angle:
Magnuson’s team plans to measure the brain waves of the children and stress levels of the mothers to determine whether the intervention has had a positive impact.
Other evolutions are also afoot. In July, the institute signed a $2.8 million contract to place Friedsam and Burns’ Medicaid work at IRP under the newly formed Medicaid Evaluation Research and Technical Assistance (MERTA) unit. The new arrangement substantially expands the partnership between UW and the state Medicaid agency in working with claims and other data.
“It is meant to be of service to the needs of the Medicaid program,” says Burns. “State agency officials can pose questions for IRP research and for improving Medicaid quality, efficiency and outcomes. UW researchers can initiate questions for Medicaid agency consideration that could benefit Wisconsin’s 1.2 million Medicaid members.”
Burns and Friedsam anticipate their first round of results in November, but it’s far from the last time IRP will provide a research-based answer to a critical and complex poverty question.
“The important thing about IRP is that it’s always forward-looking, despite its long history,” says Magnuson. “It’s a real national and state treasure.”
SIDEBAR: FOCUSED ON A DIVERSE FUTURE
IRP puts considerable resources into training a diverse new generation of poverty researchers to tackle the emerging policy questions of tomorrow. In the early 1990s, IRP began a visiting scholar program aimed at underrepresented racial and ethnic populations, attracting four to five students each year to study with IRP researchers. Three years ago, IRP formed a partnership with Howard University to train underrepresented PhD students, giving them extensive mentorship opportunities and helping them move toward their dissertations. Each year, more than 90 students apply.
“Poverty populations tend to be disproportionately of color,” explains Katherine Magnuson. “If we’re going to make inroads, it’s critical that we’re training a diverse set of scholars, providing them with opportunities to succeed and rise through the ranks.”
SIDEBAR: DREAMUP
As Berger noted, IRP’s focus has always been on actionable policy. Nowhere is that more evident than in DreamUp Wisconsin, the Alliance for the American Dream competition funded by Schmidt Futures, the philanthropic organization formed by Wendy and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. Teams were asked to brainstorm creative ways to raise the net incomes of 10,000 Wisconsin families by 10% by 2020. IRP solicited and administered proposals for the competition, which this year saw two UW-Madison based groups win significant funding for ideas related to civil legal issues and raising awareness of Wisconsin’s child care subsidy program.