R&D: The gold standard for evaluating comprehensive community initiatives

| Posted: June 17th, 2013

The HOST Demonstration is a place-based initiative testing an innovative approach to coordinating services for vulnerable youth and adults who live in public and assisted housing in four cities.

The things that make HOST exciting as a service initiative—being place-based and testing a range of whole family service approaches also make designing a credible and rigorous evaluation challenging. HOST does not fit the model of many evidence-based social service interventions; it is not a standardized program or curriculum that specially trained providers deliver. Rather, as our most recent blog post describes, it is a really a research and development (R&D) project, intended to fit the needs and dynamics of the specific residents who live in the four participating communities.

For HOST, the Urban Institute team provides a standard framework of for resources, activities, and desired outcomes as well as a set of mandatory components: intensive case management, low caseloads, employment and clinical services for adults, and innovative approaches for reaching children and youth. Beyond that, each of the four sites designs its own service model and uses its own approaches for outreach, programming, and youth interventions. The Chicago site is using a rewards model to encourage youth and parents to set goals and recognize achievements. The Portland site is developing culturally specific approaches for support groups and youth activities that will appeal to a largely immigrant population. And in D.C., which has extremely high rates of HIV and teen pregnancy, the youth programming focuses on sexual health and safety.

A “gold standard” randomized control trial evaluation is not appropriate—or even possible—for a complex, community-based program like HOST that is intentionally trying to develop creative new approaches. A better model for HOST—and for other comprehensive community initiatives—is an R&D, a rigorous implementation and outcome study that maximizes what we can learn from these promising and creative interventions.

For HOST, we collect administrative data from the sites, conduct quarterly site visits, and hold bi-weekly calls to monitor program activities and provide regular feedback. We also conduct focus groups with residents and twice-yearly interviews with program administrators and staff and are conducting a long-term outcome study with survey and administrative data.

The feedback from the research team has allowed the sites to continuously improve and refine their service models—and, we hope, ensure that they are delivering the most effective interventions possible. Some of the changes that have come about because of the research-practice partnership are improvements in coordination between service teams working with youth and those working with adults; lowered caseload ratios; adding more clinical staff; and innovations in youth outreach and engagement so that the programs can work effectively with children ranging in age from elementary to high school. Focus groups suggested that families in Portland needed more targeted youth programming; findings from the baseline survey highlighted the need for lower caseloads and more mental health services. Staff interviews in both sites showed that lower caseloads meant more strain on staff who had the time to uncover deep problems and indicated that staff required more emotional support.

While our research strategy may not be the Cadillac model of evaluation, we like to think of it as the innovative new hybrid car on the market that everyone has been waiting for – something that might change the field of social science research and make it more relevant for policy and practice.

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Treating the disease of child poverty

| Posted: May 29th, 2013

More than one in five children in the United States is growing up in poverty—a number that should alarm us. Even more alarming is that more and more of these children are living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and disadvantage, exposing them to serious risks that may trap them in lifelong poverty.

The health consequences of living in poverty are well-documented. We know that poverty places children at risk for a range of serious ailments, starting with premature birth and low birth weight and chronic conditions like asthma, obesity, diabetes, and mental illness.

Growing up in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and disadvantage compounds the risk. Children in these communities are exposed to chronic violence and disorder, leading to trauma and serious health and behavioral consequences that undermine their life chances. Researchers studying the effects of toxic stress on developing brains have shown stress creates developmental delays with lifelong consequences. These children face a high likelihood of academic failure, risky and delinquent behavior, and early sexual initiation, which brings the potential for teen parenthood and infection with HIV or other STIs. The costs to individual children and families—and to society—are profound.

Would treating childhood poverty as a disease finally generate the policy action needed to address this serious and growing problem? Author and pediatrician Perri Klass argues  that we need this kind of comprehensive effort to start reversing the worrying trends that are undermining the health of America’s children. She advocates for an approach like the successful effort in the United Kingdom that has reduced child poverty by more than half over the past decade.

Rallying support for bold policy action to stem the epidemic of child poverty will take time, especially in the current political climate. In the meantime, we need effective interventions that can alleviate the symptoms of the “disease.”

The Urban Institute’s HOST Demonstration is developing and testing the effectiveness of using two-generation “whole family” approaches to address the challenges of deeply poor, vulnerable families living in public and assisted housing. HOST services are intended to improve children’s health outcomes and reduce risky behavior, helping to overcome some of the disadvantages of growing up in chronic disadvantage.

But clearly, even the best interventions will not be enough to eliminate child poverty in the United States. I hope that Dr. Klass and her fellow pediatricians will take the lead in advocating for policy to treat child poverty-- an epidemic disease with serious social costs that requires a serious and effective public health response.

Basketball court photo from Shutterstock http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&search_tracking_id=D...

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Correcting Mischaracterizations in The American Prospect About Our Chicago Public Housing Research

| Posted: April 10th, 2013

A recent American Prospect article, “The Making of the Other Chicago” seriously mischaracterized the outcomes of my extensive research on Chicago public housing and has numerous serious factual errors, leading to a conclusion that bears little resemblance to my findings.

My latest report, released March 11, finds that Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) residents are, in fact, better off overall as a result of the agency’s Plan for Transformation that began in 1999:

• Most residents now live in decent housing in neighborhoods where they feel substantially safer.

• Those living in the CHA’s rehabilitated developments report better conditions than those who are renting private-market units with vouchers—a finding that speaks to the CHA’s investment and to the variability of its very large voucher program (which now serves 36,900 households).

• Residents who received intensive counseling services as well as new housing have significantly improved their mental and physical health and their employment status.

But there are reasons for concern:

• Although their parents are doing better, CHA children and youth continue to struggle.

• Voucher holders report trouble managing utility costs, which they didn’t have to budget for when they lived in public housing.

• While residents’ new neighborhoods are better than the old CHA developments, most are still racially segregated and poor.

Still, on balance, my research colleagues and I conclude that CHA residents are far more than “marginally better off” than they were before 1999. The American Prospect article implies the opposite and uses misleading statements to claim that we support this conclusion. Specifically:

• The article states that, “when public housing projects started coming down in 2000, more than 25,000 families were given vouchers to find housing in the private market.” In reality, just over 4,100 households have moved with vouchers since 1999. The full breakdown of where the residents have gone is in the CHA’s April 2011 “Update on the Plan for Transformation Relocation”.

• The article uses the following quote from our reports to argue that residents moved to neighborhoods that were just as bad as the CHA’s high-rises: “Sixty percent of the participants reported problems in their neighborhoods with gangs, 50 percent cited shootings and violence, and 78 percent reported drug-dealing.” These numbers are the perceptions of study participants in 2007—before they moved. When we interviewed them after they moved, in 2011, they reported living in dramatically safer neighborhoods, with less physical disorder (trash in streets, graffiti, and vacant apartments or houses) than their original neighborhoods. About a quarter of our respondents indicate that “groups just hanging out, people selling and using drugs, and shootings and violence are still big problems.”

• The article claims that, “Rather than reduce the violence, the tear-down of public housing redistributed it.” Our report on the impact of resident relocation on crime in Chicago and Atlanta reaches a very different conclusion. Chicago’s transformation efforts led to substantial decreases in crime in neighborhoodswhere public housing was demolished and to a small but significant citywide decrease in violent crime. The transformation did contribute, however, to slightly higher property crime overall in Chicago, and some neighborhoods in both cities have experienced problems with violent crime associated with concentrations of relocated households.

It is true, as the article states, that voucher holders renting private-market units “live in communities where about 41 percent of the residents have incomes below the poverty level and 87 percent are African American.” As noted earlier, this issue one reason that, despite the generally positive results, my colleagues and I remain concerned about the long-term success of the Plan for Transformation in improving residents’ lives. Nevertheless, most former CHA residents are better off, and using our research to conclude otherwise is misleading.

Chicago Housing Authority's Old Ida B. Wells Homes and new Oakwood Shores Mixed Income Development. Photo by Flicker user Zo187 used under Creative Common license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

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25 Years of Working with Chicago Public Housing: A History of Reform

| Posted: March 13th, 2013

Note: This is the third in a series of blog posts from Sue Popkin on her long history working with the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the results of a ten-year study  on the experiences of CHA families as they were relocated and their buildings were demolished and replaced with new, mixed-income housing.

Chicago Housing Authority's Old Ida B. Wells Homes and new Oakwood Shores Mixed Income Development. Photo by Flicker user Zo187 used under Creative Common license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

As noted in my previous posts, I first came to the Chicago Housing Authority in the mid-1980s as a graduate student working on my dissertation. I went in and out of CHA developments during that first spring, each time more convinced that these communities were so troubled that they were undermining the life chances of their residents.

Getting Away from the Shootings and Violence

When I finished my PhD, I had the opportunity to become the research director for several studies examining the Gautreaux housing desegregation program, which provided vouchers for current and former CHA residents to move to areas that were less than 30 percent African American. In practice, that meant most moved to the suburbs around Chicago, while a smaller number were allowed to use their vouchers in “revitalizing areas” of the city.

The study is famous for its findings that suburban movers ended up more likely to be employed and their children seemed to do better in school. But what struck me was the fact that the women we spoke to—some of whom had left CHA more than 10 years earlier—still talked about how glad they were to feel safe, to get away from the shootings and violence that had taken over CHA’s communities.

“The Sweeps”

In the late 1980s, the CHA began an intensive anti-crime effort. The most controversial component was what the agency called “the sweeps,” where CHA police and staff would literally shut down a building, go door to door checking for weapons, drugs, and illegal residents, install steel security doors and guard booths, and issue every resident an ID.

In 1992, I responded to a request from the CHA to evaluate their anti-drug initiative. That small project evolved into a seven-year study that tracked residents’ responses to the agency’s efforts to control crime and gang violence.

We watched as the CHA spent nearly $500 million on state-of-the art anti-crime initiatives that ultimately proved futile as the chaos and violence overwhelmed the combined efforts of police, security guards, and resident activists. By 1998, one of the most effective resident leaders we’d come to know told us that she was so distressed by the violence overtaking her development that she was chain smoking and had to take medication to “calm her nerves.”

Address Chronic Violence through Redevelopment

Toward the end of our research, the CHA began its first major demolition and revitalization efforts in the Henry Horner Homes—one of the three developments we’d been tracking. While residents were distressed about losing their community, for the first time, they saw real and sustained reductions in crime and disorder

We concluded that, sadly, the only way to address the chronic violence and chaos was to demolish the large developments and replace them with new housing. But we also wondered if the residents who had endured the worst days of CHA would really end up better off. It seemed unlikely they would meet the criteria for new, mixed-income housing, and there was a real possibility that this new effort would just be one more blow for these already-vulnerable families.

But the study we released this week shows that many of those fears were unfounded. Instead, residents are now far better off than they were.

Some of our findings:

• The majority of residents now live in decent housing in neighborhoods where they feel substantially safer.
• Those who live in the CHA’s remaining rehabilitated developments report better conditions than those who are renting private-market units with vouchers—a finding that speaks to the CHA’s investment and to the variability of its now very large (more than 36,000 unit) voucher program.
• Most exciting is that Demonstration participants’ mental and physical health has improved significantly and their employment gains have held.

But along with this good news are reasons for concern:

• Though their parents are doing better, children and youth continue to struggle.
• Voucher holders report trouble managing utility costs.

While residents’ new neighborhoods are better than the old CHA developments, most are still racially segregated and poor.

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25 Years of Working with Chicago Public Housing: Personal Stories

| Posted: March 12th, 2013

Note: This is the second in a series of blog posts from Sue Popkin on her long history working with the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the results of a ten-year study on the experiences of CHA families as they were relocated and their buildings were demolished and replaced with new, mixed-income housing.

Photo by Megan Gallagher, Urban Institute

As noted in my last post, I first came to the Chicago Housing Authority in the mid-1980s as a graduate student working on my dissertation, and I’ve been deeply involved in studying the CHA’s policies, and their effects on its residents, ever since. Most recently, my colleagues and I finished a ten-year study on the authority’s ambitious Plan for Transformation.

We found that while the redevelopment projects had mixed results for residents, behind the research were stories of gains and challenges.

Families Making Their Way

We’ve followed one mother and daughter from their days of misery in the Ida Wells Homes—where the mother complained about drug users being so thick in the hallways that she couldn’t get to her own door—to their new home in one of the mixed-income developments.

The mother has been working more or less steadily since the move; the daughter, now 20, has a baby of her own and is working and going to college. Their apartment is safe and clean, and there are no drug dealers in the halls—all of which mean better odds for the baby as she grows.

Another mother we spoke to over the years moved to the private market with her two sons. She told me that although she’d always worked, moving out with a voucher made her take real responsibility; she now had to pay her share of the rent reliably and couldn’t “take a break” when she felt like it.

She was proud that she was now paying more than $600 a month in rent, and both of her boys were attending private school. The last time we saw them, her older son had dropped out and was struggling, but her younger son seemed on track to finish high school and go on to college

Finally, we got to know a grandfather who was raising several of his grandchildren in Wells (his daughter was a drug addict who was unable to care for them). When I first met his granddaughter, she was 16 and involved in a gang, though still managing to do well in school.

The family first moved into mixed-income housing, but when the grandfather lost his job, they moved again to a rehabbed CHA development. In 2011, the granddaughter, now 20, had a child of her own, but was going to college and seemed to be doing well.

A need for Intensive Support

We also got to know families with challenges so severe that it seems like they will need intensive support indefinitely:

• an older father with an addiction problem raising an autistic son;
• a mother with a violent history and severe depression, raising a son who is becoming lost to the streets and a daughter facing sexual pressures and her own depression; and
• a single woman who has lost custody of her child because of her addiction and faces such severe health problems that she cannot hold even a part-time job.

These stories tell us that although life for CHA residents has improved tremendously since my first visit, the residents who endured the worst days still need our help to overcome the trauma and damage of living in chronic violence.

We need to ensure that they and their children have the opportunity to live in safe places that are safe, provide decent housing, and offer a better life chance. And we need to make sure that the significant investment the CHA—and the federal government—has made in helping that happen is sustained.

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25 Years of Working with Chicago Public Housing: A Decade after Chicago's Plan for Transformation

| Posted: March 11th, 2013

Note: This is the first in a series of blog posts from Susan Popkin on her long history working with the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the results of a ten-year study on the experiences of CHA families as they were relocated and their buildings were demolished and replaced with new, mixed-income housing.

Photo by Megan Gallagher, Urban Institute

The first time I visited a Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) development was in the mid-1980s, when I was a young graduate student interviewing welfare recipients for my dissertation. My friend—shorter and smaller than me, but along for the ride to “keep me safe”—and I pulled up to the Robert Taylor Homes on a windy spring evening.

There was no grass, so dirt was whirling around and making children’s eyes tear as they waited with us for the elevator—we didn’t yet know that it was better not to ride them.

When we got upstairs, the woman we were meeting asked us why on earth we’d come up—hadn’t we seen the police and the ambulance, the evidence of another shooting? We had to admit we were too naïve to know what they meant. She turned out to be a fascinating interview subject—one that sticks with me after more than 25 years. She was a community activist and a mentor of teen mothers.

While we talked, the wind kept blowing her door open; it felt like a metaphor for the way the chaos of Robert Taylor kept intruding into her clean and orderly home.

Since that time, I’ve enjoyed a long history of working with the CHA to understand the effects of housing policy on the city’s residents. I’ll detail that history in a future blog post, but today I want to focus on some of the findings we’re releasing today after more than 10 years of research.

A “Plan for Transformation”

In October, 1999, the CHA formally launched its Plan for Transformation, which called for demolishing the agency’s worst public housing properties and replacing them with mixed-income housing developments. The Plan also called for revitalizing thousands of units in senior buildings and less distressed developments.

In 2001, we began tracking 200 CHA families as part of the HOPE VI Panel Study.  Our first rounds of follow-up surveys in 2003 and 2005 showed real benefits for families who used vouchers to move to the private market and for the handful who moved to mixed-income housing. But these surveys raised real concerns about the substantial proportion of families stuck in the CHA’s remaining developments—places that were growing more dangerous as the Plan progressed and vacancies increased.

Because of these concerns, the CHA began collaborating with the Urban Institute in 2005 to develop a case management demonstration to address the needs of the most vulnerable families. After two years, the Demonstration showed positive results, with participants reporting higher rates of employment and better mental health—and faring better than those in the Panel Study, who did not receive intensive services.

Our Worst Fears, Unfounded

The study we’re releasing today reports on a 10-year follow up of the Panel Study families and a 4-year follow up of the Demonstration participants. Our results show that our worst fears – that that relocation would just be one more blow for residents who had endured the worst days of CHA– were unfounded. Instead, residents like the woman I interviewed in Robert Taylor nearly three decades ago are now far better off than they were.

Some of our findings:

• The majority of residents now live in decent housing in neighborhoods where they feel substantially safer.
• Those who live in the CHA’s remaining rehabilitated developments report better conditions than those who are renting private-market units with vouchers—a finding that speaks to the CHA’s investment and to the variability of its now very large (more than 36,000-unit) voucher program.
• Most exciting is that Demonstration participants’ mental and physical health has improved significantly and their employment gains have held.

But along with this good news is reason for concern:

• Though their parents are doing better, children and youth continue to struggle.
• Voucher holders report trouble managing utility costs.
• While the new communities are better than the old CHA developments, they’re still racially segregated and poor.

While these findings may seem abstract, behind each are the lives of people and stories of struggle and triumph. In my next post, I’ll share some of the stories that keep me doing this research.

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Envisioning Home: Telling the Story of Transformed Public Housing in St. Louis

| Posted: January 30th, 2013

Last spring, I got an invitation to appear in a documentary about the evolution of public and mixed-income housing in St. Louis. I lived in St. Louis when I was a teenager and have vague memories of the demolition of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe development. But while I know a lot about public housing transformation and HOPE VI in general, I knew very little about what had happened in St. Louis.

The film, Envisioning Home, tells the story of Richard Baron and Jean King and their involvement in a tenant rent strike that changed U.S. housing policy. In the 1960s, housing authorities in many cities were rapidly building large, new developments to house low-income families, but received no federal funds to operate or maintain these new properties. These high-rise towers had complex electrical and plumbing systems and elevators, all of which required significant upkeep. With tenant rents their only income stream, housing authorities continued to raise rents, even while failing to keep up with maintenance needs.

Jean King was a tenant leader, organizing a rent strike to force the St. Louis Housing Authority to improve conditions; Richard Baron was a legal aid lawyer representing the tenants. The two formed a partnership that eventually led to changes in federal law that capped tenant rents at 25 percent of income and created a system for providing operating subsidies to housing authorities. Baron went on to become a developer of low-income housing, and his firm—McCormack, Baron, Salazar— became one of the leaders in developing the kind of mixed-income communities that have replaced distressed public housing across the nation.

Baron and his partners saw that tenants needed employment assistance and other services, so they helped create Urban Strategies, a nonprofit that provides supportive services in communities across the nation. Sandra Moore, also featured in the film, is the director and driving force behind Urban Strategies; Jean King is one of their case managers and continues to work with low-income tenants in mixed-income housing developments in St. Louis.

So the invitation to be part of this film was not only a fun opportunity, but also a way to learn more about the history of public housing in the United States. It also gave me the chance to form new connections with Richard Baron and Sandra Moore. I am now working with Sandra Moore and her staff to bring St. Louis on as a fifth site for the Urban Institute’s HOST Demonstration. HOST is testing innovative two-generation case management models to provide intensive support to vulnerable families in public housing to help improve the life chances for children and youth as well as to help stabilize the community.  Urban Strategies will bring their years of experience in delivering services to HOST, greatly enhancing what we can learn from this demonstration.

Envisioning Home will be screened at an event cosponsored by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution on January 30.

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Finding Housing Policy Solutions in Shared Challenges across the Atlantic

| Posted: January 22nd, 2013

The United States shares a similar urban revitalization strategy with the United Kingdom and France, so studying their successes and challenges can offer lessons for housing policy in America. Last month, the Urban Institute cosponsored a conference with the Centre d’analyse stratégique, the French government’s research arm that studies urban problems. The conference highlighted the shared challenges that the United States and Western European countries face around aging cities with blighted neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and disadvantage. Like the United States, for the past decade, policies in the United Kingdom and France have emphasized demolishing distressed social (subsidized) housing and replacing it with new housing intended to attract higher-income residents, often coupling the revitalization effort with supportive services for residents.

The status of the urban revitalization efforts in all three countries reflects changes in the economy and in government ideology. Under the Labor government in place before the Great Recession, the United Kingdom invested heavily in housing regeneration in low-income communities, but now the programs have been so drastically curtailed that the panelists at the conference said the current government has virtually no housing policy. In the United States, with our divided government and modestly growing economy, the situation is not quite as dire. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has replaced the HOPE VI program targeted at distressed public housing with the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, which is more ambitious in its aims, seeking to spur revitalization of whole neighborhoods. But Choice is funded at a much lower level than HOPE VI was 10 years ago, and only a handful of sites have federal implementation grants. In contrast, France’s socialist government intends to make urban regeneration a priority, despite the ongoing economic crisis.

A key difference with subsidized housing in France, as opposed to the United States and United Kingdom, is that it isn’t located in the central city. Instead, French social housing is concentrated in the banlieu, the suburban ring surrounding Paris and other major French cities. As part of the conference, participants toured Bondy, a town of approximately 50,000 households, half of which is social housing that the city is revitalizing (see below). According to our guide, the French government provides ample funding for the physical renewal, but less support for the kinds of supports—such as literacy programs for adults—that would make the city successful. Unlike Paris, Bondy and other suburban ring towns are populated almost entirely by immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. French law forbids collecting data on race or ethnicity, so there are no firm statistics on segregation or even any serious policy discussion of the issue. But the magnitude of the segregation is readily evident once you leave Paris: on the 45-minute tram ride back from Bondy to Paris, almost all the passengers were immigrants. When we got on the Métro, within Paris, the situation was reversed—almost all the riders were white.

Social housing slated for demolition in Bondy

Our guide, the Bondy city manager, said that to be successful, towns like Bondy desperately need services like literacy programs for adults illiterate in both their own language and in French and, especially, school curricula that could be tailored to meet the needs of immigrant children. But because the French government is centralized, the local authority has no power to shape programs or schools to its needs. As a result, our guide told us, Bondy has the second worst-performing elementary school in France. The takeaway for me was that, as in the United States, the French will not be able to make much progress in addressing the problems of poverty and chronic disadvantage until the government—and the public—are willing to tackle the issue of race.

New housing in Bondy

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The Next Challenge for Public Housing

| Posted: November 15th, 2012

Over the past two decades, public housing in Chicago and other cities has undergone a remarkable transformation. Through the HOPE VI program, dilapidated developments that were blighting neighborhoods—and residents’ lives—have been replaced with new, mixed-income housing. Housing authorities have also made major investments in their traditional properties, improving management and security.

Our studies on the fate of the residents who used to live in the worst developments find that no matter what kind of housing they have now--whether they are living in a new development or in rehabilitated housing or are using a voucher to rent an apartment in the private market—most say they are now living in better housing in safer neighborhoods. The magnitude of this transformation is significant, reflecting profound changes in management and institutional capacity and evident in the more visible changes in the actual housing developments.

The question for housing authorities going forward is how to ensure a high standard of management and maintenance in the face of very real challenges to providing housing to the poorest, most needy households. In many housing markets, public housing is a major source of affordable multi-bedroom units; as a result, many developments are home to large numbers of children and youth. Further, many families who live in public housing face complex problems, such as serious mental and physical health conditions, substance abuse, and domestic violence—problems that simply improving their housing circumstances could not address. Both these factors can create serious management problems as it only takes a handful of problem tenants to create an atmosphere of fear for an entire development.

The Urban Institute’s HOST Demonstration, is testing whether providing intensive case management services to the most vulnerable families in public and mixed-income housing can help support the health of the entire community. The hope is that an investment in services like with wraparound case management, clinical and employment services for adults, and clinical support and positive activities for youth will pay off in terms of fewer management problems, reduced evictions, and greater safety and security overall.

In essence, we are hoping to demonstrate that using public housing as a platform for change can have a significant payoff as an asset management strategy for housing authorities. Beyond housing, we hope to demonstrate that this approach can reduce costs across systems—such as health care and criminal justice—much like the “housing first” approach to homelessness. Public housing transformation made significant strides in improving the way we provide assisted housing to the poorest households. But without substantial investments in human capital, we risk losing the hard-won gains of the past 20 years.

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