About the Editors

Richard Kazis is senior vice president of Jobs for the Future, where he directs the organization's policy and research efforts. A former social studies teacher at an alternative high school for returning dropouts, he has also supervised a Neighborhood Youth Corps program, helped organize fast food workers, and written extensively on workforce, education, and economic development issues.

Marc Miller is director of publications at Jobs for the Future. Before joining Jobs for the Future, Dr. Miller directed publications and communications for Cultural Survival, an international human rights organization. He has also served as senior editor of Technology Review, MIT’s policy magazine. As managing editor at the Institute for Southern Studies, he directed major publications projects on a variety of topics, including working women, electoral politics, and Southern history.

About the Contributors

Gregory Acs is a senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Income Benefits Policy Center. His research focuses on social insurance, social welfare, and the compensation of workers. In recent work, he has studied the employment patterns of young women and the impact of disabilities on the duration of welfare receipt and on welfare recipients’ ability to work.

Amanda Ahlstrand is an associate in the research department at the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).

Max Armbruster is an MBA candidate at George Washington University and an intern in the research department of the American Society for Training and Development.

Laurie Bassi is the principal researcher on grants and the director of research for Saba Software. Before joining Saba, Dr. Bassi served as a vice president and general manager at the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), where she was responsible for research and enterprise solutions. Her achievements at ASTD included creating internationally recognized standards for measuring and valuing firms’ investments in education and training. Dr. Bassi is coeditor of What Works: Training and Development Practices (ASTD, 1997), and Change at Work (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Ray Boshara is program director at the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) in Washington, D.C., where he leads the corporation’s efforts on federal assets policy, including national policies for Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) and Children’s Savings Accounts. He is the principal author of several CFED publications, including Realizing the Promise of Microenterprise Development in State Welfare Reform (1997), 20 Promising Ideas for Savings Facilitation and Mobilization in Low-Income Communities in the U.S. (1997), and Building Assets for Stronger Families, Better Neighborhoods, and Realizing the American Dream (1998).

Anthony P. Carnevale is vice president for public leadership at the Educational Testing Service. He chaired the National Commission for Employment Policy during President Clinton’s first term, while serving as vice president and director of human resource studies at the Committee for Economic Development. He has held senior staff positions in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. While serving as a research economist with the Syracuse University Research Corporation, he coauthored the principal affidavit in Rodriguez v. San Antonio, a U.S. Supreme Court action to remedy unequal tax burdens and educational benefits.

Carol Clymer is a senior program director at Public/Private Ventures. She directs several workforce development projects, provides technical assistance to labor market initiatives, and develops curriculum products for practitioners in the employment and training field. She has also worked with numerous public and private organizations in designing and implementing job training and adult literacy programs.

Colleen Dailey is a program manager at the Corporation for Enterprise Development. She oversees information management and programmatic issues related to Individual Development Accounts. Ms. Dailey is also a primary researcher on projects related to children’s savings accounts and employer-based IDAs. She is coauthor of the fourth edition of the Individual Development Account Program Design Handbook (CFED, 1999).

John Foster-Bey is a senior associate and the director of the Program for Regional Economic Opportunity at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center. The program focuses on research that examines the factors that improve the access of low-skilled, low-income individuals and communities to economic opportunity with local regional economies. Before coming to the Urban Institute, he spent 11 years in philanthropy and 10 years working corporate finance, local government, and nonprofit youth programs.

W. Norton Grubb is the David Pierpont Gardner Professor in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley. His research includes the role of schooling in labor markets; the flow of students into and through postsecondary education; and the interactions among education and training programs, community colleges, the institutional effects on teaching, and social policy toward children and youth. His recent books include Learning to Work: The Case for Reintegrating Education and Job Training (Russell Sage Foundation, 1996) and Working in the Middle: Strengthening Education and the Training for the Mid-Skilled Labor Force (Jossey-Bass, 1996).

Heidi Hartmann is founder and director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Her work on issues such as welfare reform, pay equity, women’s wages, and feminist theory has been widely published. In 1994, Dr. Hartmann received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in recognition of her pioneering work in the field of women and economics.

Harry J. Holzer, professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute, is a former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor. He is also a senior affiliate of the Joint Center for Poverty Research, research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty, and a national fellow of the Program on Inequality and Social Policy. His books on the labor market problems of minorities and the urban poor include What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers (Russell Sage Foundation, 1996) and Employers and Welfare Recipients: The Effects of Welfare Reform in the Workplace (Public Policy Institute of California, 2000).

Vicky Lovell is a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. She focuses on issues related to women’s employment, including pay equity, discrimination, family and medical leave, and unemployment insurance.

Karin Martinson is a consultant for a number of policy research, advocacy, and public-sector organizations, including the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), the Urban Institute, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as policy analyst on a range of policy and research issues related to welfare reform and at MDRC as a senior researcher on several major welfare-to-work evaluations.

Daniel McKenzie was a research assistant at the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center, where he focused on welfare reform, while this book was being written. He conducted data analysis using information from the National Survey of America’s Families, and published several pieces for the Institute’s Assessing the New Federalism project.

Dan McMurrer is a research manager at Saba Software.

Edwin Meléndez is a professor of management and urban policy and the director of the Community Development Research Center at the Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy at the New School University in New York City. Dr. Meléndez has conducted research in economic development, labor markets, workforce development, community strategies and poverty, and coauthored In the Shadow of the Sun: Caribbean Development Alternatives and U.S. Policy (Westview Press, 1990) and La Empresa Comunal: Lecciones de Casos Exitosos en Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Community Foundation, 1999).

Charles Michalopoulos, a senior research associate at Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, is studying the effects of financial work incentives for welfare recipients in Canada, Connecticut, and Vermont. He has coauthored studies summarizing the effects of welfare-to-work programs studied by MDRC over the last 15 years, describing the effects of earnings supplements on employment and income, and studying what works best for whom in welfare-to-work programs. He has also published a number of articles on child care, welfare, and work policies.

Cecilia Muñoz is vice president for policy at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). She is the editor of Racing toward Big Brother: Computer Verification, National ID Cards, and Immigration Control (NCLR, 1995) and other NCLR publications. Her opinion editorials on immigration policy have appeared in the Washington Post and the Miami Herald. In 2000, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her work on immigration and civil rights.

Paul Osterman is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School and Department of Urban Planning. He is the author of Securing Prosperity: How the American Labor Market Has Changed and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press, 1999), Employment Futures: Reorganization, Dislocation, and Public Policy, and Getting Started: The Youth Labor Market (Oxford University Press, 1988). In addition, he has written numerous academic journal articles and policy issue papers on topics including labor market policy, job training programs, economic development, and antipoverty programs. He has worked as a senior administrator of job training programs for Massachusetts and as a consultant.

Sonia M. Pérez is deputy vice president for research at the National Council of La Raza. She is the editor of Moving up the Economic Ladder: Latino Workers and the Nation's Future Prosperity (2000), as well as other NCLR publications. She has studied and written extensively on the economic status of Latinos in the United States. Her articles have appeared in Double Exposure: Poverty and Race in America, Crítica, The Journal of State Government, Trotter Review, the Journal of Hispanic Policy, and other publications.

Katherin Ross Phillips is a research associate at the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. Her research focuses on low-income workers with children. She is currently studying the relationships between parental work and child well-being and the effects of family policy on parental work effort. She has published several reports for the Institute’s Assessing the New Federalism project, including "Who Knows about the Earned Income Tax Credit?" (2001).

Anu Rangarajan is a senior economist and associate director at Mathematica Policy Research Corporation, specializing in welfare and nutrition. She has worked on several studies examining the employment behavior of welfare recipients, and directed the evaluation of the Postemployment Services Demonstration, a program aimed at providing case management–based job retention services to help newly employed welfare recipients keep their jobs. She is a principal investigator on the Work First New Jersey evaluation, a five-year study, and is responsible for the longitudinal client study that tracks current and former TANF recipients in New Jersey.

Brandon Roberts is a workforce and economic development consultant who works with public and nonprofit organizations across the country. He specializes in policy and program development matters, as well as program evaluation.

Stephen Rose is a senior economist at the Educational Testing Service. He has conducted research on labor market trends, using cross-sectional and longitudinal data to track individuals’ career patterns. He has held policy positions at the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Commission for Employment Policy, and the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress. Earlier, in Seattle, he ran a consulting firm on public policy research and was a senior analyst with the Ways and Means Committee of the Washington State Senate. The fifth edition of his Social Stratification in the U.S., originally published in 1978, was issued in January 2000.

Julie Strawn is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, where she studies workforce development and welfare reform, with emphasis on helping parents who receive welfare sustain employment and qualify for better jobs. From 1993 to 1996, Ms. Strawn was responsible for developing policy and legislative positions for the National Governors’ Association in the areas of workforce development and welfare reform. She has also worked on welfare and workforce policy issues at the Welfare Information Network, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Carlos Suarez-Boulangger is a researcher on educational programs for underserved populations. He has worked as a consultant for a substance abuse–prevention program, and writes regularly on Latin American politics. He is the program evaluator for the Hyde Square Task Force in Boston, Massachusetts.

Brian Turner is the director of the Transport Workers Union’s transportation and technology and skills program and the Community Transportation Development Center, helping to develop opportunities for promotions and skill upgrades for transportation workers. He served as director of research and communications at the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute until 2001, focusing on developing union strategies to help workers move out of poverty. He was the founding president of the Work and Technology Institute (WTI), a union-sponsored research, development, and education organization supporting active union and worker roles in changing workplace technology, job design, and skills. Mr. Turner led the team producing Making Change Happen: Six Cases of Unions and Companies Transforming Their Workplaces (WTI, 1996).

Mark Van Buren is director of research at the American Society for Training and Development, where he has studied the effects of workforce development and creating information technology systems to more effectively support businesses.

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