Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America.

• Author: Havemann, Judith

An amazing social phenomenon is occurring in this country. More than a million and a half welfare recipients have left the rolls in the past year. About 200,000 poor people are dropping off welfare every month. It is a development so extraordinary and unexpected that no one knows quite what to make of it. Except President Clinton: "The debate is over," he declared in a recent speech in St. Louis. "We now know that welfare reform works"

Not exactly. While the dramatic decrease in welfare recipients is wonderful news, we don't, in fact, know what is going on m the families and communities of people most affected by the new policies, nor do we know the fate of many of the people dropping off the rolls. What we do know, however, is that the old system was horrible, and that the effort to move poor families off the dole and into jobs--if in fact that is what's happening--is a step in the right direction.

The ideological engine propelling the dramatic reforms was a Republican belief that welfare caused the high rates of out-of-wedlock births and family disintegration that they consider responsible for the plight of the inner cities and depressed rural areas. Do away with welfare, they argued, and the problems will gradually, if painfully, be cured. This is a policy shift that runs exactly counter to what mainstream social science research has promoted for the past half century.

Lisbeth B. Schorr's new book, Common Purpose, flows out of that former mainstream. Uncovering social services programs that work without the strict cutoffs and tough penalties of the new law, Schorr analyzes the common qualities of these gentler efforts, figures out how they can be expanded, and then scathingly explains why they haven't been.

Some will say Schorr is too late. Even as she was researching her book, Congress reversed the social course of the nation, making her solutions seem less attainable than four years ago. To the architects of the new order, she will seem like a military theorist saying to the developer of the tank, "Wait, I have some smart new strategies to improve the horse cavalry"

But Common Purpose is still highly relevant. The book's scope is far broader than just welfare. To begin with, it deals with the grave problems in the nation's child protective services, in schools, and in disadvantaged communities in general. Furthermore, in ferreting out the elements of successful programs, the author has pinpointed precisely the areas where the current...