ROBERT REISCHAUER, Urban Institute: First Tuesdays are forums in which we try to showcase interesting work that is going on at the Urban Institute, get the perspectives of others who are working in the same area, or have direct experience in the real world, shall I say, with the same issues. And certainly we are here today to talk about an important topic, namely opportunities and challenges for healthy marriage services. As all of us are quite aware, over the course of the last half of the 20th century, there was probably more change in the prevailing living arrangements in this country and in the world in general than has occurred in any 50-year period in recent history. Divorces became much more prevalent, affecting close to half of all marriages. Out-of-wedlock births became more frequent. Currently roughly a third of births in the United States, and more in some Western European countries, are out of wedlock. Cohabitation became more acceptable. Openly gay and lesbian relationships also became more frequent.
As all these changes took place, policymakers became increasingly interested, and some would say concerned, about the way these changes were affecting society, affecting children, affecting the structure of communities, and attention focused both on the impact that government policies might have in spurring or retarding these changes and what policies there were that might reverse trends that certain policymakers found undesirable.
So this is a topic which fifty, sixty years ago wasn't of great concern for the policy community, and now is front and center. As all of you are probably well aware, three of the four goals of the 1996 welfare reform legislation related to marriage and family structure, and it continues to be an interesting—an area of interest in the reauthorization debate.
At the Urban Institute a lot of related research has been going on over the years on some of these topics. Gene Steuerle, Greg Acs, Elaine Maag, and others have examined the ways various support and tax programs favor or penalize marriage and cohabitation, and they've evaluated the correlates of family structure and family well-being with these provisions of law. Bob Lerman and his colleagues have documented marriage's role in reducing material hardship and interconnections between marriage and men's labor market success.
Last year, the Urban Institute published the first-ever national analysis of where gay and lesbian couples live and analyzed the economic well-being of these couples. Recently Urban Institute researchers have examined how the federal statistical system can improve the tracking of marriages and divorces and how surveys can improve the ways they capture complex and changing family relationships. We're involved in two important new long-term demonstration projects. One is testing whether intensive interventions around the time of the birth of a child can help new unwed parents improve their relationships, possibly marry, and improve the outcomes of the children. The other, for which Bob Lerman is the principal investigator, is testing how community-level interventions can change the norms around marriage and low-income communities, improve the access through relationship services, and increase healthy marriages overall.
We have a first-class panel here to discuss these and other issues. The discussion is going to be led off by Matt Stagner, who is the director of the Institute's Labor, Human Services, and Population Center. Matt came to the Institute from HHS five years ago, where he was director of the Division of Children and Youth Policies. He's also been at the National Research Council, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, and Chapin Hall.
Matt will be followed by Kathryn Edin, who is an associate professor of sociology at Penn but also taught at Rutgers and Northwestern. She is the author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage and is working on a book called Marginal Men, which has a subtitle, Fatherhood and the Lives of Low-Income, Unmarried Men.
Joseph Jones, who isn't here but is on his way here, he walks in at an opportune time, just as I'm introducing him—roll of the drums. Actually, he's been waiting out there for 15 minutes at the line. He is the founder and president and CEO of the Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development, which is a Baltimore nonprofit services organization. He previously established a men's services component of Baltimore's Healthy Start program and has served on President Clinton's workgroup on welfare reform, and has been a community leader and national activist in this area.
Last but not least is Theodora Ooms, who is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, where she's been for the last six years. Her research has focused on policies and programs to strengthen couples and marriage, with a special emphasis on low-income folks and the welfare populations. Before that, she was the executive director of Family Impact Seminar, a nonprofit institute.
So with that—oh, I almost didn't introduce the voice that we all know, but the face few of us have seen. And that is Steve Drummond, who will moderate this session. He is the education and welfare editor at National Public Radio. In 2003, he was the senior editor and afternoon program director for All Things Considered. He spent a number of years at Education Week and also worked for the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times, and wrote for a number of other newspapers.
With that, let me turn it over to you, Steve.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: As an editor, one of the things that changes when you go from being a reporter to an editor is that you don't get out very much, and I don't spend nearly as much time as I would like to any more in schools or in communities. So sort of a compromise, if you will, is coming to events like this; it's a way that I can keep on top of issues at the policy level, and I go to a lot of these things, and I always bring a notebook so I can steal story ideas. I will, as I do often, probably head back to the office with a long list of things and fire off a batch of e-mails to the reporters whose beat it is to cover them. So Joe, you can probably expect somebody heading up to Baltimore your way. We try not to do too many stories on NPR that come from Fairfax County or Montgomery County, so Baltimore is the next stop up there.
I've been following the welfare issue for about four years now and I think one of the things that people like me have done is sort of relegate this issue of marriage promotion to the sidelines a little bit. We've been so focused on the numbers game of how many people are on the welfare rolls, how many people are going to work, and also on the challenges that that task has brought with it—providing child care, providing substance abuse or mental counseling, seeing that recipients have transportation, those kinds of issues—that we haven't, I think, paid nearly enough attention to this particular issue.
One of the things that's troubling to me about trying to cover it is, I think, that when you start talking about changing fundamental human behaviors, things like marriage and relationships, I think that's historically not one of the things that government has shown that it can do a really good job at. I see it a lot in education, when you're talking about programs that talk about abstinence or teen smoking, or more recently on college campuses, trying to curb binge drinking. You see a lot of programs that to me seem kind of mushy, or there isn't a lot of solid research to back them up. I think it's hard to come up with the programs that work and hard to measure that success as well. So I think it's kind of exciting to be sitting here with these panelists and to hear that the discussion on marriage has moved a long way from where it was in 1996 and afterward, and that there's a lot of activity here in Washington, D.C., and the states to try and take this issue and move it forward.
For my purposes and my notebook, it's really exciting that all the people who would be able to answer all the questions I would have about that—what does the research show, how do you measure success, what are the most exciting things going on in the states—that they're all sitting next to me on the panel. So pretty much I'm here to learn, and with that I'll turn it over to Matt Stagner of the Urban Institute.
MATTHEW STAGNER, Urban Institute: Thanks, Steve.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: And Matt, I've got a stopwatch here. That's one of the tools of the radio professional.
MATTHEW STAGNER, Urban Institute: I imagine it hurts when it's thrown at a person. That's what happened to me at the last place I spoke. (Laughter)
Today I'd like to talk about a project that the Urban Institute completed recently to look at the landscape of marriage and relationship programs. These are skills programs and voluntary programs. Often you'll hear the language of marriage promotion programs. I think today you'll hear most of us talking not about promotion per se, but about giving couples skills and helping them in their relationships.
This report was written for the Administration for Children and Families and was led by Jennifer McComber and Julie Murray, who I believe are with us today, and I'd like to just highlight a few of the key findings from that before we go to Kathy and Joe and Theodora to talk about the population-level issues as well as the local and state perspectives.
We jokingly referred to this project as the Lewis and Clark project. It began around the time of the 200th anniversary of Lewis and Clark and we felt a bit like them, being sent forth from Washington to talk about an unknown landscape and report back on what we found. We didn't have a boat or a caravan or a dog along with us, but we had some guides who were experts who had spent years in marriage and relationship programs and understood them very well and could really help us get a handle on what was out there.
We called or visited over 80 programs in the United States, and we talked with them about how they were funded, their involvement with local initiatives, the structure of the organization, the collaboration, the format of services, and in particular, we were interested in how they connected with the poor population—whether they did now, whether they imagined that they could, and what issues would come up. And we also talked with a few programs that served low-income populations but
didn't yet incorporate relationship or marriage-skills programs but were at least thinking about it. And we talked with them about the challenges that they might see in bringing that type of program into what they were doing.
What I'd like to do is just hit on four of the key things that we found in doing that. There are several others, and the report is available. The first point is that relationship-skills programs are not new. They may be new to the policy conversation that we're having now, but these programs are not new or untested. They have generally not focused on the low-income or poor populations, and there are few programs that have that focus now. But there are programs that exist around the country in almost every community. There may not be enough of them around for folks who can afford them, but they do exist, and they generally are fee-for-service programs or things that middle-class couples seek out on their own when they see a need either prior to marriage for relationship skills, when they hit a rough spot in their marriage, et cetera. So these things exist and part of what we want to explore today is how to think about a new set of policy efforts that may be connecting to these things in a new way.
The second point is they are very varied. There are lots of approaches that have been used over the years, shorter term, longer term, in a wide variety of settings. And even when you think that you see one that is a program that is used around the country, you find that it gets adapted in the local situation; there are a lot of hybrid programs. A lot of people use curricula, for example, in their local program where they pull a little bit from this and a little bit from that. It's a way, I think, that local programs operate.
From a policy perspective, it raises important questions about what we expect to happen. If more federal money goes into this field, what types of activities do we think will happen, and how can we, as researchers and evaluators, understand the program and what we would be evaluating if they are both varied a little bit, slippery to get a handle on, and being combined in unusual and unique ways by local program providers?
Third, there's what I refer to as a tension between the norms promotion or the focus on the norms of marriage and the sort of classic, social-work approach of meeting clients where they are. As folks talked with us about interacting with low-income populations, those who do that on a regular basis are very sensitive to addressing the concerns as they are presented by their clients. Yet many of these programs do promote the idea that marriage is a good relationship for children, that one ought to consider marriage and make it last when one can, recognizing that it can't always last. But there's a bit of a tension that local providers feel about how much to accept where people are coming from versus push a little bit on that.
And then, finally, I think that there's another tension, which is the tension around the intensity of the intervention. A lot of marriage and relationship-skills programs are fairly light-touch interventions, a few hours in a fairly large group, learning some skills. The application of these programs and the ability of them to affect change in people are likely related to their intensity. That's true in most social service programs. Yet low-income families, as with all families, have a limit to the amount of time and attention they can afford to pay. Even if they're not paying in dollars, will they participate in a program that lasts for many months and dozens of hours, or does one have to try to bring them into less intensive programs, and how does that relate to the intensity? So as we move forward in this policy arena, the landscape is varied, and we'll have to really work on addressing, testing, and understanding these tensions.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: Great. Kathryn Edin?
KATHRYN EDIN, University of Pennsylvania: Ten minutes? Eight minutes?
Okay. Over the past few years, we've been talking to lots of the kinds of people that these programs are going to be addressing: low-income parents who are not married. I'm going to be speaking mostly today from a study I did in the Philadelphia area, which was the subject of the book, Promises I Can Keep, I wrote with Maria Kefalas. I'll also be drawing a little bit from a qualitative addition to the National Fragile Family Survey I've been involved with, following 75 couples over four years since the birth of their child, and also a larger study with Laura Lane and Tim Nelson on low-income, noncustodial fathers.
So over the last 10 years, I've gotten carried away utterly with this topic and we've ended up spending time in seven cities and interviewing almost 800 of these low-income unmarried parents, both men and women. And what we've found I think surprised us and may surprise many of you.
So I'll begin with pregnancy, because that's kind of where it all begins. Across these studies, the typical pregnancy that sort of leads a couple into the situation where they approach this magical moment of birth together—but unmarried is typically not a planned pregnancy. That won't surprise very many of you, but it's also not an avoided pregnancy. Most couples know where babies come from. Birth control is readily available. These couples say they've used birth control in the past; they have access to it, but they make a choice to take a chance, largely, we argue, because they really value children and value the kind of meaning and identity that the role of parent can bring.
Once faced with a less than perfectly planned birth, the young woman's responsibility is typically to deal with it. A young girl in the mainline, a middle-class girl might say the responsible thing to do would be to terminate the pregnancy, give the child up for adoption. But morality is really construed very differently in these communities, and the responsible thing to do is to take this baby to term and to show that you're responsible enough to live with the consequences of your action.
Boyfriends respond in a very wide variety of ways to the pregnancy. The pregnancy is the worst time in a couple's relationship. About half of fathers stick with the mom and are pretty supportive. For the other half, denial of paternity, pressure to terminate, abandonment, violence, cheating, and what we call general ripping and running—doing drugs, selling drugs, drinking alcohol—are very common during the pregnancy period.
Interestingly, though, as the fragile family survey has also demonstrated, most of these relationships do manage to survive or the couple reunites at birth. In about 8 in 10 cases, these couples describe themselves as together by the time the baby comes, and, even more interestingly, the fragile family survey has shown us that most see a good or certain chance that they'll marry each other at the time of the birth. This has been a very important finding, I think, in this field.
However, when we go and interview these couples in depth in their homes, ethnographically, what we learn is that a plan to get married is not exactly a plan of action. These couples see marriage as four, five, or more years off, a very long-term goal. They also have a very strong rejection of the shotgun marriage norm. They don't think it's a good reason to get married. In fact, it's a terrible reason to get married just because you have a child. But a shared child is a powerful reason to stay together.
So why are there so few marriages when the will to marry is apparently so strong? The first thing that we've learned across these studies is that childbearing and marriage are not decisions that are perceived necessarily to go together. Listen to Melissa, 19, white, with a three-year-old child: "You should get married when you're 40. That way you've got everything situated and you know what you're getting into by then." She pauses and then said, "I guess the kids come first. I don't know. I guess that's just the way it goes." And that's very typical.
Now Melissa's comment and those of her peers do not indicate a disinterest in marriage, but rather the high symbolic value they hold for marriage. When couples are asked what's keeping you from getting married, they talk about two kinds of barriers to marriage, both economic and relational. I'm going to spell out a little bit for you what each of those is like, and there's more information in your packet. The economic bar isn't about having enough money to support an independent household. Most of these couples, half of them are already living together, often in an independent household, by the time the baby comes into the world. Rather, marriage is equated with making it. And a couple is not deemed ready for marriage, and marriage is not proper, until the couple can accumulate the kind of symbols that symbolize to the community they're responsible, they can plan fiscally together, and they can work together toward common goals. So couples will tell us, we're not going to get married until we get that white picket fence lifestyle. They even say this in New York.
What they mean by this is not what we mean by this, but they mean a mortgage on a modest row home. In Philadelphia, you can get one of those for about $20,000. Some furniture, a car in working order, some savings, pay off debt, and enough left over to host a modest wedding, champagne.
A 17-year-old African American with a six-month-old child—I can get a lot in if I talk fast—says, "After everything is situated that I want to be situated, then I'll be ready to get married. After I have a house and a car and everything and I'm financially stable. Just a job and everything to pay for the wedding."
And it is not respectable to marry without meeting the bar. We had one young couple who actually told the fragile family survey that they were not married. They actually were secretly married but they were too embarrassed to admit it because they couldn't afford an independent household. So once they got that, they announced the news to their family, friends, and to us.
A little twist on this economic bar. Mothers feel it is vitally important that both they and their partners are economically set prior to marriage. There's a strong aversion to economic dependence on a man, and I can talk about that later if you ask me a question, which you should. But let's go on to the relationship bar.
Couples are not only worried about finances. These couples often have relationships of perilously low quality, and both mothers and fathers insist that he, she, and the relationship itself need to be ready for marriage. And this may take years after the birth of a child to attain. Women worry that men will feel more right to control them if they're married, and they also believe divorce is a sacrilege. Nikki, 18, African American, with a newborn, says, "The vows tell you everything. You have to be there for that person until death do you part. When you get into a marriage, you have to understand that it's a big step you're taking and that is the person you've chosen to be with the rest of your life. If you really know the words, the rest of your life, and you start getting that voice in the back of your head, oh, that's a long time, maybe you shouldn't get married."
So what accounts for breakup? We coded up all the break-up stories for the women in the book Promises I Can Keep. We're working on that with the other studies. Financial instability
or irresponsibility only came up 25 percent of the time, even though all of these couples are low income. Criminal involvement—and they could, you know, list more than one cause—was 30 percent. Incarceration was 20 percent; substance abuse, 35 percent; infidelity, 40 percent; and domestic violence, 45 percent. These couples are not breaking up because they don't take their
relationship seriously. Indeed, many of their relationships are of perilously low quality and for reasons that you and I might agree are good ones.
What about the kids? Whereas marriage is perceived as a lifelong quest, kids are something that one achieves along the way. Meanwhile, people find enormous—men and women—order, validation, purpose, and companionship from their children.
I'll end with a quote. This is Sonya, 23, Puerto Rican, with a 4-year-old son: "My son is my heart." By the way, she's about to marry her baby's father. They have a house, they have a car, they have some savings, and they have a nice wedding planned. And she tells us three days beforehand, "My son is my heart. When I have hard times, I always tell myself I wanted him. Even if I get that rock on my finger, that white picket fence that says—and that deed that says that the house is mine—I'll still have my son just in case anything goes sour. I'll say to my husband, you leave, this boy is mine."
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: Mr. Jones?
JOSEPH JONES, Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development: I'm going to have to talk real fast because he's real serious about this six to eight minutes thing here. I'm going to start with a test. To the audience—if I said the name Snoop Dogg, how many people would just recognize the name? If I said Tupac Shakur, how many people would recognize the name? I'll come back to the test at the end.
Personally, I want to make sure you understand why I am involved in this work and how I come to this work. I'm the product of a divorce when I was 9 years old. I began to use heroin and cocaine for 17 years, spent a good portion of that time in and out of the criminal justice system. With a large support system, I was able to turn that stuff around, and in 1988 began to get into the world of work, and, from a really practical standpoint, began my work with Responsible Fatherhood in 1993 at the Baltimore City Health Department, which sort of correlates with the modern-day era of the responsible fatherhood field. I began to deal with the issues of unemployment, child support, and other barriers that would prevent men from being engaged in the lives of their children. And over the years, I became more and more convinced that working with men in isolation of working with women was only a part of the strategy. But I really didn't know exactly what to do about that.
Fast forward a few years. We received some resources from the Ford Foundation to begin to work with couples, not in the sense of promoting healthy marriages but to get the mom and dad to work together so that the children would not plunge further into poverty. We developed a curriculum and we began the work with the moms and dads in separate gender groups to help them work through their issues, and then worked with them as couples, with the goal being at the end of that 10-week session—that 10-week engagement, they would complete with a coach a parenting plan. And we ran four groups of couples and we just completed that work last year. Then we became engaged in the work of promoting healthy marriages. We're now one of the BSF (Becoming Strong Families) sites in partnership with Mathematica and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
I want to talk to you a little bit about how we came to even begin to think about doing this. I'd like to first thank Kathy and Theodora, who are like two of my mentors, among others, who have helped my organization to think through that. And my first point is that we had to think about developing an organizational philosophy about this work. I go around the country and get exposed to so many things and come back excited, and because I sign checks, the 40 people who report to me probably will do on the surface what I ask them to do, right? But the reality of it is if they don't buy into it philosophically, they can undermine the best intentions.
So we developed an organizational philosophy. We brought in Kathy Edin, we brought in Theodora, and we brought in Ron Mincy and others to help my organization and my staff understand what the promotion of healthy marriage is, some of the data associated with it, looking at some of the qualitative work, particularly Kathy's work to help us form that foundation.
And then we began to think about, okay, we understand it within our organization, but what about the community of Baltimore where we reside? How do we then extend that conversation and that education to other community stakeholders, faith leaders, folks in the domestic violence community? We were fortunate from a national perspective to have other mentors like Jodie Rafael and Oliver Williams who from a domestic violence standpoint help us begin to incorporate those principles of domestic violence and safety into every aspect of our work. And again, we've run the Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development. So we're able to provide those other kind of wrap-around supports.
But one of the more difficult things as you get into this work that we've come across is the structural deficit that exists. And what I mean by that is, in terms of social welfare policy, there are very few access points for men to be engaged in social welfare delivery of services. And so as we begin to roll out this whole notion of working with couples around the notion of the magic moment in time when the children are born, most organizations and agencies employ predominantly female staff, and most folks don't have a clue as to how to engage men. And very few of them have—some have male staff, some have no male staff. And so while they want to do the work, there's a structural deficit. And I think of it in terms of the analogy. If you buy an American-made car and you have an auto mechanic who knows how to fix those cars, then buying an American-made car makes sense. But what if you buy a foreign car and there are no mechanics who know how to fix foreign cars? Well, you can have a great foreign car but when it breaks down, where are you going to go to get it fixed? So we had that structural deficit in terms of how we engage men.
Now as we move forward, I think there's a huge opportunity because we do find, as Kathy has found in her work, low-income couples who really want to be together with one another, but they don't have the skills. They don't know how to do it, and the products and materials that have been developed to support the promotion of healthy marriage to a great degree have not been developed in a way in which it's culturally relevant to people that we are talking about. So we really have to ratchet up. Right now I think we have somewhat of an industry where people, even as we speak, are beginning to develop those products, those tools and materials to help low-income couples from a culturally relevant vantage point begin to acquire the skills to negotiate the tough relationship issues that all of us face in our day-to-day lives.
I want to end by coming back to the Tupac and Snoop issue as we move forward and hope to be able to expand on some of the things that I mentioned in the Q&A session. Last year Tupac came out
with a movie called Tupac the Resurrection. Anybody familiar with that at all? Anybody seen it? Well, I don't think Elvis is dead and I don't think Tupac is dead because they keep coming up with new material, right? But at the end of the Tupac movie there's a series of commentaries, and one of those commentaries is with Snoop Dogg, and he's talking about his relationship with Tupac. And what he says is—and he's very emotional about this. He says, "You know, I was in a relationship with my girlfriend"—and it's laced with a lot of racy kind of comments, so if you put that to the side and just look at the substance of his comment, you can get this point.
But he said, "I'm out there with my boys and we're partying, right, big time. We've got money, we've got jewelry, we've got cars, and we're partying. But I'm in a relationship with my child's mother, right, and all my boys are telling me, man, you know, you need to dis that B. You don't need to be going on—you know, you just get rid of her." He said, "The one person who came to me and sat me down and said, you know what? That girl has been with you through thick and thin, right? You need to think about the relationship and the way in which your children are going to see you," and the one person who told him he needed to marry that young lady was Tupac, right? And that gives you some sense that folks out there in this hip-hop culture—and keep in mind we are now in an era where we almost have the second generation of people growing up in a hip-hop culture, right? Not just white boys and black boys, but Latino boys, Native American boys. The hip-hop culture transcends ethnicity and socioeconomic status.
When I talk about those tools and those products and materials that don't exist, they are culturally relevant to people who've grown up in this kind of environment. That's my point. Thanks.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: Theodora Ooms.
THEODORA OOMS, Center for Law and Social Policy: One of the really fun things about working in this new field is all the people that I've been learning from over the years, and they're on this panel and they're in this room, and there's really a lot of mutual learning and teamwork here, so it's great fun to be here.
I'm wearing two hats today. One is my sort of policy analysis wonk hat from the progressive organization, and the other is where I work part-time as a senior consultant to the Oklahoma marriage initiative, and I'll talk a tiny bit about that later.
I'm going to talk about what states are doing to promote and strengthen healthy marriage, and I'm going to share some of the key findings of this report that's in your packet, "Beyond Marriage
Licenses." It reports on government-related activities in all the states to the best we know about them. It was not a comprehensive survey, not the private-sector services that Matt was alluding to. It's a year old; it's pretty accurate. I'll try to update it a bit.
So what are states doing? More is happening in the states and communities than is generally realized. One point I'll make is that these state and community activities predated the federal
marriage initiative and were largely driven by concern about divorce rates and child well-being, and aimed at the general population. However, the advent of dollars through TANF and other federal vehicles has clearly fueled this new interest—money always talks, right?—and has begun to focus it more specifically on low-income populations.
There are four broad types of activities that we found states were doing. One would be called broadly "state policy initiatives." That is, states who have funded commissions on marriage, or campaigns, usually initiated by some high-level policymaker or legislator. These activities are for the most part largely symbolic, hortatory, but I think they do affect the culture. We're not very good at measuring that, but it's saying this is an important issue, we need to be doing something about it, typically. And you can tell—this is state by state—which state has done which, so I won't really mention that in this report.
A second set of activities is changes in state marriage and divorce law. Marriage and divorce law has always been the province of states. It's always been changing, but in particular two types of initiatives: a lot of states have tried to pass covenant marriage laws, which are really marriage heavy instead of marriage light, which might be called no-fault divorce or domestic partnerships, I guess, but only three states succeeded in passing those laws.
There have also been a number of states who have sought to reduce the marriage license fee if you show you've taken a course before you get married. So those are two types of legal changes. Then there's a large cluster that we'll put in the ones really—Matt was talking about programs and activities and services. They largely fit into this marriage and relationship education category of services, services for adults, for high school students, fatherhood programs that do coparenting and marriage activities. There are increasing numbers of programs beginning to do that. Military marriage-related programs—that's a big issue in the military, and there have been programs there for quite a long time. The state cooperative extension programs have been running these, and then there have been these community-wide marriage initiatives that Bob Lerman and colleagues are studying, and some of them are really of the public education type of activity as well, trying to change the culture.
Now, since 2001, ACF, because of their healthy marriage initiative, has used several existing funding vehicles to fund demonstration grants and all together about 30 states have these demonstration grants that use existing vehicles. So there are child support demos, child welfare, refugee and migrant services, Office of Community Services, the Compassion Capital Fund, all have healthy marriage programs or programs where there's a healthy marriage component.
So together there's been a significant investment already in states and communities with federal monies, sometimes complemented with state monies. The federal investment adds up to at least $100 million, so while we're waiting for this new money, there's quite a bit of money out there.
The fourth category of activity of policy changes in the TANF and child support program that we've tracked—36 states now treat two-parent families the same as single-parent families, eliminating some of the special eligibility rules. An additional 11 states have partially eliminated these requirements. A lot of people in the beginning of this initiative were worried that states would try to bribe couples to marry through monetary incentives, and in fact nine states have offered so-called marriage incentives, but the most egregious one, some would say, would be West Virginia, which gives $100 extra to a couple who are married, a benefit. But three states do something like disregarding spouse's earnings for a short period when they get married, which is sort of trying to deal with the cliff effect. So this hasn't been a huge policy trend.
In summary, all states have undertaken at least one of these activities, but overall their investments are fairly modest and so far reach few people. However, we do document seven high-activity states that have spent considerable amounts of money, and there's an extra one, since Texas has announced $3 million using state TANF funds for healthy marriage initiative, and a couple of other states are seriously thinking of doing so. And I think quite frankly some of them are really gearing up to apply for what they anticipate to be the state grants that will happen if TANF ever gets reauthorized and the healthy marriage money is still there.
So the recent trends have included expanding efforts to reach low-income couples in a variety of settings, and I think this means that the whole notion of healthy marriage is now incorporating relationships between couples who are not married. I think several people have said that, so this is perhaps a surprise to folks. Also states are definitely many—and communities working with domestic violence experts and advocates in states because this has been a real tension, and the domestic violence community has had appropriately many concerns, and in some states has voiced them very loudly. This has been a real barrier to healthy marriage initiatives getting off the ground.
Oklahoma. A couple of words about Oklahoma—I mention it because it's acknowledged to be the front-runner. Many exciting things are going on in these other states too, but this is the one I
know best, and it's been doing it the longest. It's spent the most money, and it has had the most diverse set of activities. And I think it illustrates many of the points that you've heard this morning.
I should mention that ASPE—I've had my consultant hat on—is going to fund a process evaluation of the Oklahoma marriage initiative because they feel there really are some lessons to be learned that could be shared with other states who are interested. It began in 1999 when Governor Keating launched it. He was determined to reduce the rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing and divorce because economists have found in a study that these negative social indicators, along with others, were associated with the state's poor economic performance and high poverty rate, so that's how it began.
From the start, it was conceived as a multisector initiative, but they deliberately chose a services strategy, not the high commission. And this initiative is run out of DHS by Secretary Howard Hendrick, who's personally very committed to this initiative, and it's managed by Public Strategies, a small consulting firm. After the first year of using some private funding, they decided to commit up to $10 million of TANF money to the OMI, to the marriage initiative. I think another interesting point is this initiative has survived a change in governorships. It started out with Republican Governor Keating. It is now being run under Democrat Brad Henry, and I think the longer this goes on, although the legislature has not gotten very involved, I essentially believe that the OMI is viewed not as a partisan initiative. It's too embedded in the state at this point.
Three key components: there's a strong commitment in this initiative to build on research. They have a very strong research advisory group; Kathy is a part of it. They did a state survey, they chose a program, PREP (Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program), which is research-based, and they're actively planning to become a BSF and SHM demo site. I think this has helped the credibility of the initiative.
They are best known for their statewide marriage and relationship education system so that now they have trained over 1,000 workshop leaders to deliver these PREP workshops in every county in the state, and they're making special efforts to reach minority and low-income populations. And they're actually developing a curriculum specifically for single mothers, so that's away from the couple notion. They're now integrating PREP workshops into many ongoing service systems, into the high schools. First offender programs (that's a youth first offender), prison inmates and their partners, that's a very exciting, interesting program. Adoptive parents are now participating in these marriage programs, and over 20,000 adults have actually completed these workshops.
There's a significant effort to build capacity for marriage services within the faith-based system as well, which you would expect in Oklahoma. What's interesting to me is that the Baptists have not wanted to receive any direct grants for this, so they have been involved by sending their pastors or their lay ministers to get free training, but they have avoided the church-state dilemma, and it's an interesting way of working in parallel capacity-building. Oklahoma has worked very closely with the Oklahoma domestic violence coalition doing cross-training and so on.
So my final point about Oklahoma—I could tell you a lot—they focused first on building supply rather than demand, in a sense. They didn't want to tell people marriage is a good thing; you need to learn how to do it and do it well. But they now need to really tell their citizens what's going on, and whenever I go to Oklahoma, I use the taxicab driver test. I said, "I've come to work on the Oklahoma marriage initiative. Have you heard about it?" And to this day they usually say no. I think last time one of them said, "Yeah, I think I did." (Audio break, tape change)—really know what's going on in Oklahoma with the marriage initiative. A lot of other
people don't, but the web site is beginning to really gear up and there's going to be a lot more information for everybody about what they're doing. We'll take questions later.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: Thank you all very much. We'll have questions now. Since I'm sitting here in front of a microphone, I'll ask the first one. But the question, and it's probably for Matt and Theodora, to me involves accountability, something I deal with all the time and I've just been through the process the last few months of covering the federal budget and taking a look at program cuts and looking at the administration's strong emphasis on accountability and showing that programs work. So I'd be interested in hearing from you about what the tools are of accountability and what the measurement is too. You know, are we talking about healthy marriages or talking about reaching out to couples, you know? How do you measure that or how do you define success?
MATTHEW STAGNER, Urban Institute: I guess I would break that into two pieces. One is the
accountability to do what you've said you would do with federal money, and I think as Theodora pointed out, the current healthy marriage initiative is funding through several mechanisms. So within each of those mechanisms is sort of the usual federal grant oversight to say, does this match our grant purpose? And you have said you will serve X number of people with certain types of services, is that happening? So I think that to me the accountability of the use of the funds will be fairly parallel to usual grant mechanisms.
The accountability of the sense of impact I think I would bring into the research field—and though I've heard people question a major initiative putting a lot of money into something that
is "untested," I tend to view this glass as being more than half full in the sense of significant upfront investment in demonstration research, where the definition of a healthy marriage is being worked on hard by a lot of smart people. There isn't a single definition of that, but I think that over the three or four years that these discussions have taken place, the issues around what a healthy marriage is have become much more refined and will ultimately be moved into measurement in a way that there will be a fairly collaborative process.
The second piece then is the relationship of demonstrations to funding, and I think that for everyone involved in this, this is really a very long-term effort. The ultimate aim is improving the next generation. It's a focus on children, and the demonstration results will obviously not be in before certain types of funding happen. But I think that there is a fairly positive cycle of funding research, looking hard at it, informing it, coming back, and bringing those results back in. But I think that, given that long-term perspective, it's not going to be "let's fund a 10-year demonstration, then wait and see what it says."
The parallel I would draw is the work in the welfare world, where there was a culture shift in welfare a couple of decades ago to emphasize work. There were demonstration projects at the same time that systems push toward improving the emphasis on work. We didn't, as a field, know how to do it, but we've learned a lot as we did it, and there was a fairly positive relationship between learning from the research and demonstration and doing it.
Theodora may have more to add.
THEODORA OOMS, Center for Law and Social Policy: The only thing I would add is another question of which you may have—is this marriage education stuff, what do we know about whether it works? And that's a longish question. Matt has done a paper on that subject, and done a very interesting systematic, meta-analysis on the paper that's on the web. We have a brief coming out on that, so I think it's a long subject we could go into, but we probably want to move on.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: Great. Other questions? Sir, here.
QUESTION: I have a question for Kathryn Edin. I read your book and as I told you earlier I thought it was excellent. On balance, do you find that these women are not marrying because the guys are bad or because they want independence?
KATHRYN EDIN, University of Pennsylvania: Good question. You know, it's really interesting. I think it will be 20 years ago, the way people in low-income communities were portrayed was kind of the man didn't want to get married, he was kind of duping the woman into having sex with him by promising marriage. She was dreaming of an economically dependent fantasy life in the suburbs and he was going to be Prince Charming. Then he ran out on his obligations. So much has changed in the last 20 years, at least if you believe the ethnographic record. It's really amazing. These young women are firmly in the driver's seat. If you look at the fragile families data, the men want to get married at least as much as the women do, and maybe even more. We run across women rejecting marriage proposals from men quite often, and more so than men rejecting the pressure from women to marry.
Women are saying, "I've got to have my own economic independence first because these are my children and I'm going to have to raise them, with or without him." And they're saying, "I'll never be economically dependent within marriage. That's too scary. I don't trust him enough." So these women are in the driver's seat in kind of a profound way that maybe they weren't 20 years ago. They're very mistrustful of men, often for good reason. And they think that their fragile hold on a sense of respectability really rests on this whole issue of not making a foolish marriage, not making a sacrilege of marriage. One woman very humorously quipped to us, "I don't believe in divorce. That's why none of the women in my family are married." There's this real reverence for marriage. Marriage is something you should do well and do once.
Divorce rates have changed dramatically over the last 20 years, but the marriages of the middle class have gotten much more stable during that time period, whereas the marriages of the poor have continued to become unstable, and are now very, very unstable. Divorce rates among the least educated approaching 70 percent. So you have very different marriage outcomes by class. The poor know this. They don't want to add to that statistic. But what they think it takes to get married, you know, does have these economic elements to it that speak to a sense of working-class respectability that's been harder and harder for low-income urban people to achieve.
Having said that, it's the relationship problems. It's the bad boyfriend problem that breaks couples up. But in the end, it's the lack of a purchase on the American dream that keeps them from getting married.
ROBERT LERMAN, Urban Institute: I'd like to ask both Kathy and Joe about the extent to which the people you run into either do or do not have examples from either their own personal families or uncles or neighbors that have had stable families, including stable families that have kind of built up over the years and didn't wait until the picket fence took place. And whether the potential—if the examples are limited, the extent to which that is a major issue?
JOSEPH JONES, Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development: One of the things just based on my experience is that, particularly looking at young men, there is really a void in having access to men who have been in the labor force, who've been engaged in our educational systems in a sufficient way to role model so that young men can pattern their behavior after it. And too often, their sense of manhood is defined by their peers, and you know when you depend on your peers to define something for you, it's a little bit different than having your father, your uncle, your grandfather help you define it. I see a lot of young men—there's an array of situations, so I don't want to pigeonhole, you know, any segment of the young men who I kind of have to represent. But there is somewhat of a notion that there's this young lady who I really care about and I want to build a future with her. But you juxtapose that against them thinking about life expectancy for them may end like tomorrow. And so how do you think about the future when you think life expectancy for you ends at 18, 19, 20 years old because that's so real to them?
So you know, you have these situations where a young man has a young lady who he cares about. He wants to be in an intimate, long-term relationship as they can define long-term, but he also wants to play around. You know what I mean? And he plays around not with the intention of having children by the women he plays around with, but he also doesn't think about preventing a pregnancy, you know? So you get into a situation where the young man has a young lady he cares about, may have a child by her, and he's committed to her as best he can define commitment, but he ends up having a relationship outside of that relationship that bears children and it gets completely confusing and complex.
The easiest thing to do when you get hit with that is to retreat and go off and go underground. And it's very, very difficult once you get into that underground situation for researchers and
policymakers to understand and comprehend how difficult it is to go into and extract from that situation the young men who we care so much about. That's not exclusive, but in the culture in which we now have young men growing up without fathers, that is significant, and I think it's something that if we are to move forward with significantly reducing out-of-wedlock childbirths, we've got to find a way to shore up the infrastructure of the responsible fatherhood field because it is a field that has some developmental points that could be an asset to the healthy marriage commitment.
KATHRYN EDIN, University of Pennsylvania: We asked young couples—not so young, actually, in their mid-20s—these fragile families couples, to name the best relationship they knew of. Most couldn't nominate anyone. Half nominated themselves; their own relationship is the best relationship they knew of. And very few—some had marital role models, but many of those marital role models were extremely negative, especially in the issue of domestic violence.
So this is a huge problem. They want long-term lasting relationships. They don't know how to get there. In some ways, they don't know what those relationships look like. That's why I'm so insistent that we think about bringing mentor married couples into these interventions, or mixing married and unmarried couples who are all low income in these interventions, to try to create some sense of role model. I think it's absolutely crucial. Good question.
KARA BECKMAN, National Council for Adoption: I hear you all mentioning things about a lot of times—although there's an intention to be married that they often see, there's something that may be a long way down the road, something they'd like to prepare for. Where do you feel in healthy families programs that adoption has a place, adoption promotion for the benefit of the child? Obviously long-term and long-road anticipation of the marriage can leave a child in a tumultuous situation, so I'm just interested—maybe particularly Kathryn can respond to this, but all of you please.
KATHRYN EDIN, University of Pennsylvania: I'm the adoptive mother of two, both from, you know, within the kinds of communities that we're talking about here. The reality is, as you know, that if you are the mother of an African American child, there is no one waiting for your baby. Now both of my kids are African-American. There is a foster care system that will take your child, but there's a deficit of potential adoptive parents for those kids.
We oftentimes think of adoption and wonder why people don't do it, but we don't consider the demand side. It's inconceivable to me why this is so. But young mothers like the mothers of our children, who really want to find adoptive parents and who are parents of color have a very hard time.
JOSEPH JONES, Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development: (Off mike)—to that that a group of national fatherhood leaders that I'm involved with have been discussing is when a child enters into the foster care system, particularly for poor fathers, he is almost always not recognized as a potential caregiver for that child. That means that 50 percent of that child's paternal assets are cut off. So when you talk about African-American children not having a place in our society where they're wanted in terms of adoption, when we have a structural deficit where we don't consider the father as a potential caregiver, then what happens to his parents, his aunts, his uncles? And typically when you think about the African-American community, we always have had extended family. But when we have a public policy that doesn't recognize, either directly or indirectly, the father as a caregiver, then you lose 50 percent of that child's resources.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: Yes, sir. Here.
JEFF WILLIAMS, Marriage Savers: My question is about what you have learned regarding the clergy's role to raise the standard for marriage and marshal the services of marriage-mentor couples referred to by Kathy just a moment ago, and your forecast for their role in the future to reach some of these couples in culturally relevant ways, as you indicated, Joseph.
KATHRYN EDIN, University of Pennsylvania: I'll just comment quickly that, in the main, the low-income couples that we talk to are not involved in faith communities. I'm a part of a
faith community personally, but in most of these communities there really aren't resources, either from the public or private sector, of the kind we're talking about here. For some reason the faith-based sector isn't doing it. I'm not sure why that is. Some are. Matt could probably speak to that. But by and large that isn't a role among low-income unmarried parents, at least, that the faith community seems to be playing.
MATTHEW STAGNER, Urban Institute: I guess I'd take a couple of takes on this. One is the variety of faith-based services, whether we're really talking about within a congregation, the services provided by a minister. In some of the community initiatives, there's a very pointed effort to reach out and leverage those folks as people who can both improve the way they interact with couples and help them learn skills, as well as have a role in the broader community.
There also are a lot of faith-based service providers, though not the congregations themselves but social service providers with some link to the faith system. And again, in the community
initiatives, those organizations are often seen as an important way to connect to the broader community. So it isn't necessarily, I think, the faith linkage itself. It's the fact that there are faith-related social service providers who have now been in the community for decades and understand the community, and the community understands them, so that as services of a new and slightly unusual type come in, they bring a lot of credibility to that. So there are, I think, a set of complicated answers to this.
THEODORA OOMS, Center for Law and Social Policy: A little bit to that. I think the faith-based community obviously has a critical role to play in increasing its capacity to offer
marriage and relationship services to congregations and communities, and they are beginning to do that. Marriage Savers is a nationwide program that's trying to mobilize the faith sector. But in terms of the low-income community, it's really a complicated issue, and there are people working on this. That's what I wanted to mention. The Casey Foundation, for example, has pulled together a
couple of focus groups with African-American pastors and, I think, is planning to do the same with pastors in Latino communities to try to raise the whole issue of their feelings, attitudes, and knowledge about how, you know, the issue of nonmarriage or divorce in their communities. And one of the principal findings—and the Casey Foundation has a couple of reports on their web site—is that even for those pastors who admit this is a troubling issue and want to do something about it, it's very difficult to know how to approach the congregation when so many of them are single parents and say marriage is a good thing, or when there's domestic violence or whatever.
But the main finding that I got from these discussions is they don't feel they have the capacity or the training to know what to do. They have very poor pastoral training themselves, just in terms of marriage counseling, let alone what to do with these complicated situations that Joe is in. So there's a side of a plea there that the faith community is an audience for some capacity-building. And some of them are beginning to go to Smart Marriages, which is this national annual conference, to try and get some training or to get people in their lay audience. Marriage Savers believes there are a lot of couples in churches who could be helping other young people with their relationship issues. So I think it's a real challenge actually. The issue partly is, what's government's role in helping the faith community, but they are beginning to think about it.
JOSEPH JONES, Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development: A little bit of what we do, we have a small group of churches and pastors that we're working with in Baltimore around all of our work. I say a small number, I'm talking about 15 churches who are, you know, not always all the time with us. They're in and out. And Theodora pointed about capacity, these churches are dealing with issues of HIV and AIDS, homelessness, hunger, and substance abuse, and you talk about one more issue—although theoretically you would think marriage is something they're already doing, and to some degree they are—but it's almost like the churches that we're talking about are overwhelmed, you know. So just providing resources is just not enough.
And one more thing, I like to think about the structural issue. I kind of refer to it all the time. Theodora mentions Smart Marriages. How many people here have been to the Smart Marriages conference? A handful or so. I want this to be taken in the right context, and I've been to Smart Marriages probably for the last five years. It will be occurring again this month, the 24th or right around the 24th. No, I won't be there this year, unfortunately. But what I wanted to point out, though, as we talk about the population that we're talking about today, low-income couples,
right, if you look at the audience at the Smart Marriages conference, it's probably close to being reflective of the ethnic makeup of the folks in this room. So as you think about increasing the capacity—and economically, right? So as you think about increasing the capacity for us to do this work in challenged communities, we've got to change that demographic. We have to have more people of color who are interested in this work go to Smart Marriages and be in conversations with Kathy, with Theo, and with others who have been in that arena. That is a huge, huge challenge for us.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: Great. Questions here?
AMELIA ROSE, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations: I have two questions, actually. The first question, our organization has been opposed to including marriage promotion funding through the TANF block grant, and I was wondering—I was intrigued when you talked about organizational philosophy because one of TANF's stated goals is not to reduce poverty. That's not one of its stated goals, but it just seems like the premise of TANF is to stop out-of-wedlock births and to promote healthy marriages. So is TANF the best vehicle that the government has to promote marriage? My premise, at least, is that poverty causes out-of-wedlock births and unhealthy marriages, not the other way around, if you get my meaning.
But then also you talked about how there are few access points for men to get into social services, and so maybe TANF can play a positive role in doing this kind of marriage promotion work and fatherhood initiatives, et cetera. So that's the first question. Joseph, if you could comment, and anyone else?
And also the second question. Kathryn, you mentioned that the men and women that you talked to knew about sex ed, knew about sexuality, knew about where to get access to birth control and condoms, all that kind of stuff. But I was wondering if you saw a difference between men and women and if that reflects anything?
JOSEPH JONES, Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development: First, I think that TANF, that it is a place, an appropriate place. Not the place but a place. Just a simple,
straightforward answer on that. But if you look at the way in which we reform welfare as we know it, we've challenged moms to go from welfare to work. But also within that dynamic we have done little to support the men who happen to be their partners to go from wherever they are to work. So you have a gap.
So what happens in that relationship as a woman's moving forward with additional education and training and into the workforce, and her male partner is stuck? What happens in the dynamic of that relationship, in that house, in that community when the men are left to fend for themselves? And we've had starts and stops and bits and pieces of WIA and other legislation that has attempted to address this issue, but really we have had no comprehensive strategy to work with both moms and dads in that trajectory to go from welfare or poverty to work.
KATHRYN EDIN, University of Pennsylvania: Just one word about that. I think all of us worry about spending money that's set aside for poor children on these kinds of programs, and all of us wish other monies were being made available for that. On the other hand, why shouldn't the poor have the same access to the kinds of things that the middle class can routinely afford to help make their relationships strong? So I can see both sides of that question.
About sex ed, condoms connote mistrust for both men and women. That means you're trying to protect yourself against an STD and you think your partner's cheating on you. So condoms are the first thing to go when a young couple decides they're an exclusive pair, or at least she thinks they're an exclusive pair and he thinks she's the main person he might be with. Then both men and women see birth control as the woman's responsibility. So there is a very gendered sort of view of what birth control is and whose job it is that really feeds in, I think, to some of the problems these couples have during pregnancy.
However, having said that, men are at least as likely to want a child prior to pregnancy as women, and they are more likely to be happy about the pregnancy once they hear about it. We've floated this up in the fragile families data. So men are very ambivalent about children. On the one hand, they desperately want them. As one young father told us, I just want some evidence that I was on the planet. But on the other hand—that's a really poignant—I mean, he was crying in the McDonald's when he told us this story. But on the other hand, they're terrified of the responsibility. We're doing a four-city study of child support enforcement of fathers. One of our sites is very high, very heavy-duty child support enforcement, but with a very strong economy. So you've kind of paired high obligation with high ability to pay. And fathers there, in contrast to our other three sites, really are counting the cost of childbearing. They're seeing their sexual behavior as potentially costly to them in a different way than sites do, let's say sites that have great economies but no child support enforcement, or great child support enforcement, as is the case in Philadelphia and Baltimore, but terrible economies.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: We have time for one last question. Yes, here, ma'am.
QUESTION: I'm struck by the fact that you've talked about initiatives that really focused on jobs and work for poor families. At one point in time, we know we had lots of initiatives to enhance economic well-being of particularly poor families. I know, Joe, you talked about the fact that recently we've had a few more initiatives related to fathers, although it may be with a smaller set of initiatives. And it almost seems to me like now we've got this third track now running with the marriage piece.
I'm wondering if you could comment on—given that you've talked about the fact that economics and economic well-being is so critically important, and that securing that, particularly in terms of what the women maybe are reporting, is really important prior to engaging in marriage. But we also recognize that engaging fathers and getting fathers more involved is important too.
How do you see, or if you see the attempt from a policy perspective to try to really integrate these three initiatives of work and fathers and then marriage? Or if we are going to end up with having these three tracks running parallel and, you know, one may become more successful than the other, or whatever? We won't end up with the final output of having better well-being for families.
THEODORA OOMS, Center for Law and Social Policy: The short answer is, yes, we have to do all of the above, and we have to integrate them, and I see some promising signs that people who are working on these issues are beginning to realize that. I think these new federal demonstrations, although they may come under the healthy marriage agenda, are figuring out ways through case management and integrating the programs in other existing services to integrate these approaches so that you really have both an economic strategy and a relationship strategy. I don't know if you all would agree, but I think that is where the field is beginning to go for the low-income community.
KATHRYN EDIN, University of Pennsylvania: We'll keep more of them together. You give them jobs and skills, you'll get more of them in long-term stable relationships.
JOSEPH JONES, Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development: What I would add to that is, as we support folks moving into the workforce and looking at their relationships, how do we help them understand the principles and concepts of financial literacy? For a lot of young men who we helped to get jobs initially, the first thing they want to do is go out and buy tennis shoes, you know? They want to buy clothes. They forget about asset building, forget about assets—they don't even think about it, right?
So when we start talking to them about compound interest in a way in which they can understand, little lights start to go off, you know? No one has conversations with these guys about that kind of stuff. And you couple that with opportunity for low-wage workers to become homeowners, then you have a strategy I think that will tie all of this stuff together. But this stuff is so developmental, right, it's going to take several years, several administrations, several different ideological bents to move this forward.
If we do it right, hopefully we can all come back here in 10 years and have a reunion, and if we do it wrong, we should all go put our heads in the sand because in this country there is no
reason why we shouldn't be giving this our best.
STEVEN DRUMMOND, National Public Radio: Great. That's a good ending. Thank you all very much.
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