No one can say whether the nation reduced its number of welfare cases a couple of years ago to their lowest levels humanely likely or if a second five years of the reform that moved so many people from federal assistance to self-sufficiency can continue. But since 1996 Congress has learned an enormous amount about what works to help people and what doesn’t, which is why the welfare reform passed in the House and currently sitting in the Senate Finance Committee is so maddening.

The House version of the reauthorization of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families fails to adequately account for increasing child care costs, fails to cover these added costs even as it demands that parents work more hours, necessitating more child care, and fails to recognize that education does far more to ensure someone stays off welfare than the amount of time punched on a clock at a low-level job. There is hope that the reason the Senate has been slower to pass its own version is because it recognizes these failures and is trying to repair them.

More than 23,000 people in Maine received welfare benefits when the program was remade six years ago; it dropped to a low of 10,800 by January 2001, and has risen slightly to 12,300 now. The House wants to flat fund TANF’s child care benefits, and given the drop in the number of families receiving aid, the impulse is understandable, even generous.

Unfortunately, it is also wrong, if the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities is correct. It estimates that by 2008, the rising cost of child care would cause states to lose 361,000 places even without counting increased work requirements. If those rise, as contemplated by Congress and the administration, the number of child care slots lost would increase as the demand for hours of care per child rose.

Providing necessary child care so that parents can meet the work requirements in welfare is a matter of allowing its participants to be successful. It is costly – the additional money needed to maintain current services through 2008, the next reauthorization, is $5.7 billion – and it is not clear that those who successfully make the transition from welfare to work are materially better off. But self-sufficiency is a virtue with the added benefit of perhaps eventually leading to lower government-service costs for everyone. Maine would receive between $13 million and $22 million, depending on the funding formula, if the new money is included.

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On education, the president appears not to have understood Maine’s successful Parents as Scholars program when he disparaged it last year, and Sen. Olympia Snowe, the only moderate Republican on the Finance Committee and a supporter of Parents as Scholars, says she is determined to help him grasp its importance. She should be successful: Parents as Scholars, a higher-education program that would count toward fulfilling TANF work requirements, provides recipients with means to get a better job, at higher pay, and, crucially, results in their children raising their own career expectations.

A study last year by the Maine Equal Justice Partners showed that Parents as Scholars graduates earned a median wage of $11.71 an hour, compared with a median wage of $7.50 an hour for former welfare recipients in Maine without post-secondary degrees. Better, nearly all graduates reported receiving benefit packages through their employers, suggesting they were in the sort of jobs that can turn into careers. Nearly 90 percent of parents who went through the program left welfare and never returned.

The increased emphasis on education could be especially important as physical impairment becomes more of an issue for those receiving TANF. In 1994, a study in Maine found that 17 percent of families that had received welfare cited illness of a family member as a reason for not being able to work. That number had increased among TANF recipients to 35 percent by 1997, and a study last year by the Maine Center for Economic Policy put the number at 52 percent. Healthy people with healthy kids often found work and left TANF while an increasing percentage of those left have justified medical reasons for staying on. Generally, people with more family illness have a harder time meeting the work requirements under TANF and require more support as a result.

Like so much in a closely divided Congress, where divisive issues tend to get stalled, welfare reform was supposed to be completed a year ago and may not get done until this fall or even next year. But Congress now knows that state spending on child care and other services that remove challenges to getting parents to work allows their caseloads to fall. Sen. Snowe is right to insist that the level of services remains in the new bill and that Parents as Scholars be available to other states. TANF is not supposed to be punitive; the Senate can ensure that it remains a success instead of becoming a punishment.