Roundtable Recognizing the Scholarly Work and Mentoring of Sheldon Danziger

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Sheldon H. Danziger has been an active leader within APPAM for 40 years and the Fall Conference marks his retirement as President of the Russell Sage Foundation. This proposed roundtable will recognize Danziger’s support and training of several generations of social policy scholars over the course of his career at Russell Sage, the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin.

The roundtable will feature four distinguished APPAM scholars and colleagues of Sheldon Danziger, who will provide a short research presentation, then reflect on how professional mentoring has shaped their career path.

Maria Cancian (Georgetown University and past APPAM president) will present research around family policy mismatches that exacerbate inequality. As the prevalence of shared parenting among separated parents continues to increase for all families, and never-married families in particular, the mismatch in eligibility and design of family policy deserves attention. Findings will examine the mismatch between family and tax policies and actual patterns of care among divorced and never-married parents who live apart. Inadequate institutional supports for, and legal recognitions of, shared parenting arrangements among never-married or separated families are shown to disproportionately harm Black fathers, who are at greatest risk of child support orders and tax liabilities that fail to account for their contributions to care.

Rucker Johnson (University of California-Berkeley) will present from a project assessing the cumulative effects of three recent, large-scale efforts in California to reduce academic achievement gaps between socioeconomically disadvantaged children and their more advantaged counterparts: the Local Control Funding Formula; Transitional Kindergarten; and expansions of public investments in the state’s preschool program. This project, the first of its kind in California, assesses the relative roles that various school inputs, school practices and conditions, and student characteristics play in generating differences in effectiveness of preK-12 funding across schools. The study links school- and student-level information on public preschool program participation with longitudinal student data for the full universe of public school students to analyze the determinants of student trajectories over the course of their education. Findings shed light on pathways for promoting high achievement and best practices for use of school resources.

Jordan Matsudaira (American University) will present an overview of new work merging the original experimental files from multiple welfare to work experiments conducted by MDRC to administrative records to administrative data capturing the long-run outcomes of participants and their children to generate experimental estimates of the intergenerational effects of these welfare reform demonstration projects.  Mirroring the original experiments, the analysis highlights the impacts on especially disadvantaged subgroups and aims to generate evidence to support improvements to safety net programs.

Kristin Seefeldt (University of Michigan) will discuss findings from the qualitative component of the evaluation of Ann Arbor's Guaranteed Income Pilot. The presentation will highlight the storytelling component of the project, which seeks to let participants use their own voices to directly share their experiences and shape policy and to provide an equitable format in which their stories can be heard.

Policy Area

• Poverty and Income Policy

Secondary Policy Area

• Family and Child Policy

Moderator

• Scott Allard, University of Washington

Organizer

• Scott Allard, University of Washington

Speakers

• Maria Cancian, Georgetown University McCourt School

• Rucker C. Johnson, University of California, Berkeley

• Jordan D Matsudaira, American University

• Kristin Seefeldt, University of Michigan