ABSTRACT
Alvin L. Schorr is the Dean of Social Work at New York University. The selection which appears in this compendium is taken from his book Poor Kids (1966), which focuses on children in poverty and evaluates proposed remedies such as the negative income tax, fatherless child insuranceand family allowances. Many of the ideas presented in the book were developed while Schorr was working for the Social Security Administration and the Office of Economic Opportunity, where he was the Deputy Director of Research. Mr. Schorr’s proposal is a partial welfare reform plan in the form of a family allowance for preschool children, not a remedy for financial poverty in the United States. It is best understood as a means to replace the widely criticized AFDC program with a less stigmatized, though financially insufficient program.
