"Even though it turns my stomach to pay a mother $10 to see a doctor," Chinese-American Planning Council executive director David Chen, a member of Bloomberg's poverty commission, told City Limits at the time, "in a practical sense it works."
Or maybe not. MDRC, the research group hired by the city to evaluate Opportunity NYC (funded, like the rest of the project, with private donations), issued its preliminary report on March 30, two-and-a-half years into the experimental "conditional cash transfer" program. And while Bloomberg chose to highlight the program's successes—a mayoral press release bragged that the program "has reduced poverty by 11 percentage points, and improved a number of health and education outcomes"—MDRC's conclusions were less rose-colored.
Though the results show that the "concept is feasible to implement and can make a difference in the lives of poor families," the researchers wrote, "the effects that have been observed so far are generally not large, and, so far, the program has not improved educational outcomes for elementary and middle school children."
When city officials followed up by saying that they do not plan to continue the program once it expires after this year, headlines rang out across the country declaring the experiment a failure.
So what went wrong? From one perspective, nothing. Mayoral spokesperson Jessica Scaperotti notes that Opportunity NYC was always intended to be a pilot program that would end after three years. "We learned some things work, and we learned some things didn't," she says. "And that's exactly what we set out to do."
The goal of pilot programs, though, is to find promising strategies that can be expanded into new permanent policies. And on that score, Opportunity NYC's results have to be considered disappointingly inconclusive.
The model for New York's conditional cash transfer program was Oportunidades, Mexico's large-scale cash assistance program that drew international attention for offering welfare payments with strings attached: Cash was handed out to poor families for specific behaviors deemed worthwhile, like having regular medical checkups and keeping their kids in school. The results were dramatic—poverty fell, and overall health improved. But because Mexico had no widespread welfare system in place beforehand, it was hard to say whether this was because of the incentives, or merely because the government had started giving poor Mexicans money.
In New York City, that wouldn't be a problem. In addition, to help further refine the results, Opportunity NYC program was designed with a control group. The 4,800 families applying for the program were randomly assigned to one group or the other, and only half received incentive payments. Both were then tracked to see how their relative outcomes differed.
