“The poor you always have with you” is a law that the best efforts of all the king’s social workers have failed to revoke. The most ambitious welfare scheme to date may be the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP), a research project involving some 4,000 households across the country. After nearly a decade and 300 million tax dollars, the project is an utter failure.

The CCDP is not exactly a household acronym. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, which has run the program since 1989, has made little effort to publicize it, and with good reason: the results do nothing to enhance the reputation of the social work trade. On the contrary, social work’s most sacred cow, “case management,” has been slaughtered by the nine-year program.

In “case management,” a social worker guides a household (almost always a single-mother household) toward the wealth of services offered by the modern welfare state: everything from medical care to Food Stamps to “parenting” classes to “job training” to government-subsidized housing. It’s a mystery why anyone would conclude that helping people help themselves to handouts is a recipe for getting them on the right track. Nevertheless, case management has been the modus operandi of the social work industry for decades.

But for almost as long, the evidence has mounted that case management does not scare off any of the demons it purports to exorcise: poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, etc. In fact, the authors of the executive summary of the final report on the CCDP (available on the web at www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/rde) cite as failed case-management models the federal Even Start Family Literacy Program (kids in the control group saw their test scores go up, too), and the Army’s Fort Bragg Child and Adolescent Mental Health Demonstration, an $80 million “substance abuse” prevention program that showed “no positive effects on a wide range of child-level outcome measures” compared with children in the control group.

Nevertheless, CCDP was to be the mother of all case-management tests. Staffed and planned by a “who’s who” of social work, “it is the largest test of the currently popular model of case management.” And it came at the highest price: “the total cost of CCDP averaged $15,768 per family per year . . . or about $47,000 for each family in the evaluation, given an average length of participation of more than three years.” (Head Start, by comparison, costs roughly $4,500 per family per year.)

What happened when the best and brightest of the social work world were assembled and given more money than ever to devise and test a scheme to help “extremely at-risk low-income young children and families”?

“Exactly the same changes observed in CCDP families occurred in control group families.” The bottom line: over 4,000 low-income households received the special attention of a social worker and roughly $16,000 a year in benefits and services above and beyond what they had been able to obtain for themselves (subsidized housing, food stamps, Medicaid), and at the end of three years they had nothing to show for it. While it’s true that “children’s vocabulary and achievement scores” increased over time in CCDP families, “vocabulary and achievement scores increased for children in the control group just as they did for children in CCDP.”

Clients of the welfare state do not need to be tutored on how to exploit government programs. After all, the welfare riders who collect checks in Wisconsin and return on the same bus to Chicago have demonstrated their resourcefulness. The authors of the CCDP evaluation wonder whether “the case-management model is an ineffective approach,” but there is no sign that other welfare bureaucrats are willing to learn the lesson.

There is one form of ease management that does work. Dorothv Day proposed it: let everyone go out and find his own private pauper. Don’t expect the Department of Health and Human Services or its Administration on Children, Youth, and Families to endorse Day’s plan. If they did. Donna Shalala might have to find a real job.