DOCUMENT RESUME
CE 078 040
ED 427 172
AUTHOR
TITLE
INSTITUTION
SPONS AGENCY
Grubb, W. Norton; Badway, Norena; Bell, Denise; Chi,
Bernadette; King, Chris; Herr, Julie; Prince, Heath; Kazis,
Richard; Hicks, Lisa; Taylor, Judith Combes
Toward Order from Chaos. State Efforts to Reform Workforce
Development Systems.
National Center for Research in Vocational Education,
Berkeley, CA.
Office of Vocational and Adult Education (ED), Washington,
DC.
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1999-01-00
155p.
V051A30004-98A; V051A30003-98A
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Western Illinois University, 46 Horrabin Hall, Macomb, IL
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Reports - Research (143)
MF01/PC07 Plus Postage.
Adults; Change Strategies; *Employment Programs; *Federal
Legislation; *Federal Programs; *Job Training; *Labor Force
Development; Program Effectiveness; Program Implementation;
*State Programs; Welfare Recipients
Workforce Investment Act 1998
ABSTRACT
This book describes a 10-state study of work force
development efforts in Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan,
North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin. The book is organized
in eight sections. Section 1 describes the overall visions and practices that
states have created, examining the difficulties in implementing these visions
in section 2. Section 3 analyzes the local-state relationships in the 10
'states. Section 4 then details the roles of employers, whose participation is
often seen as critical. Section 5 examines the special place of welfare
"reform," which has been particularly mandating to state efforts to create
coherent work force development programs. Section 6 summarizes the different
meanings of coordination and system-building, presenting a hierarchy of
coordination efforts as well as highlighting issues of quality. Section 7
clarifies the contradictions in state policies, pinpointing the special
difficulties that have affected many states. Section 8 outlines the
implications for state and federal policy, including a note on the likely
effects of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. (Contains 79 references.)
(KC)
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Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made
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National Center for Research in
Vocational Education
University of California, Berkeley
Toward Order from Chaos
State Efforts To Reform
Workforce Development Systems
W. Norton Grubb
Norena Badyvay
Denise Bell
Bernadette Chi
Chris King
Julie Herr
Heath Prince
Richard Kazis
Lisa Hicks
Judith Combes Taylor
I
0'
'
II
.
. -.
.11
00
s
-10
Supported by
the Office of Vocational and Adult EduCation,
U.S. l)eparthierit ol Educati60,
This publication is available from the
National Center for Research in Vocational Education
Materials Distribution Service
Western Illinois University
46 Horrabin Hall
Macomb, IL 61455
(800) 637-7652
3
NCRVE-MDS@wiu.edu
N GRV
National Center for Research in
Vocational Education
University of California, Berkeley
Toward Order from Chaos
State Efforts To Reform
Workforce Development Systems
W. Norton Grubb
Norena Badway
Denise Bell
Bernadette Chi
School of Education
University of California, Berkeley
Chris King
Julie Herr
Heath Prince
Center for the Study of Human Resources
University of Texas, Austin
Richard Kazis
Lisa Hicks
Judith Combes Taylor
Jobs for the Future, Boston
MDS-1249
January 1999
National Center for Research in Vocational Education
University of California at Berkeley
2030 Addison Street, Suite 500
Berkeley, CA 947201 674
Supported by
The Office of Vocational and Adult Education
U.S. Department of Education
FUNDING INFORMATION
Project Title:
National Center for Research in Vocational Education
Grant Number:
V051A30003-98A/V051A30004-98A
Act under which
Funds Administered:
Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act
P. L. 98-524
Source of Grant:
Office of Vocational and Adult Education
U.S. Department of Education
Washington, DC 20202
Grantee:
The Regents of the University of California
do National Center for Research in Vocational
Education
2030 Addison Street, Suite 500
Berkeley, CA 94720-1674.
Director:
David Stern
Percent of Total Grant
Financed by Federal Money:
100%
Dollar Amount of
Federal Funds for Grant:
$4,500,000
Disclaimer:
This publication was prepared pursuant to a grant with
the Office of Vocational and Adult Education, U.S.
Department of Education. Grantees undertaking such
projects under government sponsorship are encouraged
to express freely their judgement in professional and
technical matters. Points of view or opinions do not,
therefore, necessarily represent official U.S. Department
of Education position or policy.
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in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color,
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under any program or activity receiving federal financial
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5
Related Readings from NCRVE
for Toward Order from Chaos: State Efforts To Reform
Workforce Development Systems (MDS-1249)
by W Norton Grubb, Norena Badway, Denise Bell, Bernadette Chi, Chris King,
Julie Herr, Heath Prince, Richard Kazis, Lisa Hicks, Judith Combes Taylor
Evaluating Job Training Programs in the United States:
Evidence and Explanations
Statistics show that most job training programs do not succeed in moving recipients
out of poverty, off welfare, or into long-term, stable employment. Why? Norton
Grubb, NCRVE's Berkeley site director, offers some local explanations but suggests
that the root problem is the disconnection between education and job training.
Grubb recommends an overall reform for job training programs based on guidelines
from the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, so that these programs incorporate
integrated vocational and academic content; work-based education coordinated
with school-based learning through connecting activities; and the connection of
every program to the next in a hierarchy of educational opportunities. Warning us
that a piecemeal approach will fall short, Grubb concludes that only such a
fundamental revision will improve the meager results of job training programs.
This study was prepared for the International Labour Congress in Geneva. By
W. N. Grubb.
MDS-I047/December 1995/$12.00
Readin', Writin', 'Rithmetic One More Time:
The Role of Remediation in Vocational Education
and Job Training Programs
This report examines the expanding programs that provide remedial education to
individuals enrolling in various forms of job-related education and training,
including postsecondary vocational education, JTPA programs, and welfare-towork programs. Based on interviews with providers of remediation, the current
system is one with large numbers of referrals among programs, but with few
mechanisms to ensure progress through the system and almost no information
about effectiveness. The report concludes with recommendations for reforms in
remedial education. By W. N. Grubb, J. Kalman, M. Castellano, C. Brown,
D. Bradby.
MDS-309/September 1991/$15.50
Turn over for more related readings.
Order Amidst Complexity:
The Status of Coordination Among Vocational Education,
Job Training Partnership Act, and Welfare-to-Work Programs
This report to the U.S. Congress, the Secretary of Education, and the Secretary of
Labor analyzes the coordination between vocational education and Job Training
Partnership Act (JTPA) programs. Because of the growing importance of welfareto-work programs in the vocational education and job training systems, this report
also examines the ways emerging welfare programs have been collaborating with
educational institutions and existing job training programs. A set of case studies
(MDS-214) provides more detailed evidence about this coordination. By W. N.
Grubb, C. Brown, P. Kaufman, J. Lederer.
MDS-0631August 1990/$8.50
ow Call 800/637-7652 to order.
Check out NCRVE's complete Products Catalog at
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7
Acknowledgments
Our greatest debt is to the many local and state officials who provided
their time and information for this study. They were uniformly helpful in
providing not only information about state developments, but also their
perspectives about how these changes originated and what they are likely
to mean in the future. In addition, many of them read the individual state
case studies written in late fall 1997, as well as an initial draft written in
spring 1998, checking them for accuracy and balance. There are too many
such officials to name individually; we can only hope that we have gotten
everything right and have provided a balanced account of state
developments.
We began this research by soliciting advice from several sources about
the most appropriate states to examinethat is, about the states that have
been most active in reforming their workforce development systems. For
their advice, we particularly want to thank Evelyn Ganzglass of the National
Governors' Association; Bob Visdos of Network, an affiliate of the American
Association of Community Colleges (AACC); Esther Rodriguez of the State
Higher Education Executive Officers Organization (SHEE0); and Charlie
Lenth of the Education Commission of the States (ECS).
a
Toward Order from Chaos
i
Executive Summary
During the 19th and 20th centuries, a complex system of education has
developed in this country. Over a considerably shorter periodsince the
early 1960sa different system of workforce development has begun to
emerge, including various programs intended to prepare individuals for
the labor force. The programs include vocational education, short-term job
training, adult education, specific programs for certain populations (like
welfare recipients and dislocated workers), state-funded training for specific
employers, and the training employers provide themselvescreating a
complex and ill-defined system, often charged with overlap, duplication,
waste, and sheer confusion.
Recently, states have taken more active roles in reforming their workforce
development systems. This report examines ten relatively active states
Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina,
Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsinthrough interviews with state officials
and then with local administrators in at least two localities within each
state.
In general, states have initiated reforms either because of economic
decline, because of their own concerns about chaos and duplication in their
workforce programs, or in anticipation of federal legislation. While there
has been considerable variation among states, most have adopted a statelevel administrative or advisory group, with a local or regional counterpart
to plan and oversee local services. To be sure, both local and state agencies
vary in the programs they include and the power they have, but the overall
purpose is to establish more rational state policy and then to implement it
at the local level.
States have also varied in the instruments they use to achieve their goals.
Some have made extensive use of institution-building mechanisms, like
advisory committees, consolidation of programs, technical assistance to
the local level, and efforts to change the culture of local-state relations.
Others have invested more in market-like mechanisms: performance
measures and standards; performance-based budgeting; competition
among providers; competition through subcontracting; voucher
mechanisms; and better information to consumers, especially through onestop centers. The new Workforce Investment Act of 1998 may also encourage
vouchers through the Individual Training Accounts it encourages.
Most states have also recognized the need to stimulate the demand for
employment, and have developed a variety of programs (including those
providing training for specific employers) to stimulate demand. While there
are fledgling mechanisms to coordinate demand-side policies with
workforce development, these are still inconsistent in most states. However,
the mere fact that policies stimulating employment demand have emerged,
9
Toward Order from Chaos
iii
and could be coordinated with policies providing more education and
training, is a hopeful sign.
Not surprisingly, states have various challenges in implementing their
reformed "systems." The most important of these is the instability which
has occurred when new governors have changed policy direction. In
contrast, states that have relatively consistent policies with bipartisan
supportlike Florida, North Carolina, and Oregonhave made the most
progress. Other barriers to implementation have included resistance from
education providers, inconsistencies in state practices, competing priorities
for programs, the continuation of multiple advisory committees and
substate entities, and the continued restrictions of federal programs and
regulations. Thus, consistent policies, over longer periods of time, are
necessary to overcome barriers to implementing a state's vision.
In addition, the development of active state policies is a departure from
the past, when most states were content to let local programs coordinate as
they desiredor not coordinate at all. By and large, states have not taken
many directive measures, recognizing that local autonomy is both necessary
and politically unavoidable. (The one great exception comes in welfare
reform, where many states have required local communities to adopt a
uniform state approach.) The most common policy has been one of "central
guidance, local direction," where the state provides a vision, some guidance,
and encouragement through funding for local communities, which, in turn,
direct their efforts to plan and coordinate local programs. In this process,
the development of one-stop centers has been a great help, since these have
required a number of local programs to work together.
Not unexpectedly, local responses to state initiatives have been mixed.
Some communities want to move faster than the state, and complain that
state inaction has sometimes thwarted local initiative. Some, on the other
hand, do not want to change their practices at all, and resent any
encouragement or directive from the state. Overall, however, with much
pulling and pushing on all sides, the entire structure of local and state efforts
seems to be moving in the direction of greater coordination.
In these efforts, the roles of employers are widely thought to be crucial.
Employers can play many different roles in workforce development, and
states have adopted a variety of policies encouraging their participation.
On the other hand, the tendency of some states to concentrate on welfare
recipients has discouraged employers, who generally want to have little to
do with this group; and inconsistencies in state policies have contributed
to confusion over employer roles. This remains an area where substantial
improvement is possible.
Many states had begun their reform efforts in anticipation of federal
consolidation of vocational education, job training, and adult education in
1996. But consolidation did not pass; instead, Congress enacted a substantial
reform of welfare, instituting many practices to get welfare recipients into
10
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NCRVE MDS-1249
employment as quickly as possiblethe philosophy of "work first," as
distinct from the belief in employment and training that underlies the
workforce development system. In many states, education and training
programs have welcomed the transformation of welfare agencies from
places which merely certify individuals eligible for benefits, to ones that
try to move welfare recipients into independence. However, in several ways,
welfare reforms have undermined the efforts to improve workforce
development systems. They have undermined the rhetoric about high skills
and high wages, since they usually provide very short and low-level
training. They have reversed the tendency to develop holistic and universal
approaches, since "work first" efforts generally provide limited services to
the welfare population only. They have distracted local and state
policymakers, and, in some places, changes meant for welfare recipients
have driven changes for the nonwelfare population as well. The welfarerelated changes have also alienated employers and exacerbated local-state
tensions. While it is too soon to know what the ultimate effects of welfare
reform will be, its spillover into other dimensions of workforce development
have been largely negative.
States mean different things when they reform their workforce
development systems. In the variety of state efforts, we can discern a rough
hierarchy of efforts to link programs. These range from information-sharing
among programs, to referrals of individual clients or students, to joint
service delivery where programs collaborate in providing employment
services. Joint planning, the deliberations around one-stop centers, and
various state inducements have all helped local and state programs move
up this hierarchy of coordination, while shifts in state policies and the
preoccupation with "work first" have stalled these efforts.
A different dimension of system-building is the improvement of the
quality of individual programs. It is much easier to coordinate programs
that are of high quality; conversely, other programs do not like to work
with those perceived to be of low quality. Many states are trying to improve
quality through performance measures, while othersnotably North
Carolinahave increased technical assistance. In general, however,
dimensions of quality have not been especially prominent in state reforms,
and most local and state officials could not provide well-considered
conceptions of quality or name exemplary programs. This remains a central
issue to address in the future.
Other unresolved issues include the continued separation of education
from training, the difference between the rhetoric about a skilled workforce
and the reality of low-quality programs, and the debate between
institutional versus market-like approaches to reform. However, compared
to a decade ago, there is considerably more discussion of all these issues.
The reforms that states have tried so far have clarified the options they
face, and federal policyparticularly in the Workforce Investment Act of
11
Toward Order from Chaos
v
1998is likely to encourage further state efforts at coordination. To be sure,
the development of coherent workforce development systems is far from
inevitableafter all, some states have reversed their progress, others have
barely begun, and there is considerable skepticism that greater coordination
is worth its political costs. Nonetheless, the direction of movement toward
more coherent systems is unmistakable.
12
vi
NCRVE MDS-1249
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
iii
Acronyms
ix
Introduction: The Growing Concern with Workforce
Development
1
Section 1: Recent State Reforms: Visions and Strategies
13
Section 2: Implementation at the State Level: The Challenges
of Innovation
39
Section 3: State Policy and Local Responses: The Balance
of State and Local Initiatives
55
Section 4: The Complex Roles of Employers
69
Section 5: The Role of Welfare "Reform" and "Work First"
79
Section 6: What Is the Meaning of System-Building?
Linkages and Quality
89
Section 7: Unresolved Issues: The Contradictions in State
Policies
109
Section 8: The Implications for State and Federal Policy
121
References
133
Appendix A: Local and State Protocols
141
Appendix B: Localities and States Examined
145
13
Toward Order from Chaos
vii
Acronyms
Aid to Families with Dependent Children
Advanced Technology Center
Community-based organization
Center for Employment Training (San Jose, California)
Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1973)
Department of Business and Economic Development (Maryland)
Department of Human Resources
Department of Labor
Economic Development Job Training Program (Michigan)
Employment Service
ES
English as a Second Language
ESL
FETPIP Florida Education and Training Placement Information Program
FSETP Food Stamp Employment and Training Program
GWIB Governor's Workforce Investment Board (Maryland)
Human Resource Investment Council
HRIC
HS/HW High-Skills/High-Wages initiative
International Labor Office, Geneva
ILO
Individual Training Account
ITAs
Job Opportunities in the Business Sector (1988)
JOBS
Job Training Partnership Act (1981)
JTPA
MESA Michigan Employment Security Agency
Michigan Jobs Commission
MJC
Michigan Opportunity System
MOS
NCRVE National Center for Research in Vocational Education
(University of California, Berkeley)
National Skill Standards Board
NSSB
OECD Organization for Economic and Cultural Development (Paris)
On-the-job training
OJT
Private Industry Council (JTPA)
PIC
Regional Advisory Board (Iowa)
RAB
Regional Employment Board (Massachusetts)
REB
RWQC Regional Workforce Quality Council (Oregon)
Service Delivery Area (under JTPA)
SDA
SJTCC State Job Training Coordinating Council (under JTPA)
SOICC State Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
School-to-work programs, especially as funded by the SchoolSTW
to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families
TANF
TCWEC Texas Council on Workforce and Economic Competitiveness
Texas Workforce Commission
TWC
Unemployment Insurance
UI
AFDC
ATC
CBO
CET
CETA
DBED
DHR
DOL
EDJT
14
Toward Order from Chaos
ix
VET
W2
Vocational education and traMing
Wisconsin Works!
WAGES Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency
WDB
Workforce Development Board
WDI
Workforce Development Institute
WIA
Workforce Investment Act of 1998
WQC
Workforce Quality Council (Oregon)
WtW
Welfare-to-Work
15
x
NCRVE MDS- 1249
INTRODUCTION
The Growing Concern with
Workforce Development
During the 19th and 20th centuries, an imposing system of public and
private education developed in this country. After two centuries of slow
changes, the result is a complex of schools, colleges, and universities, larger
than in virtually any other country. This system is marked by substantial
regularity, with specific institutions (high schools, say, or community
colleges) relatively similar across the country and with well-established
patterns of progression among institutionsalmost as if it were developed
by a grand vision. But there has never been such a vision. Instead, a much
more fragmented process has built this structurelocal institutions starting
and stopping, fifty states developing their own approaches, and the federal
government providing smaller amounts of support. Over the years, millions
of citizens, educators, policymakers, and reformers have pulled and tugged
at different components, reforming institutions, creating linkages among
them, and molding the complex system we now have.
Over a considerably shorter period of timelittle more than three
decadesa different system of occupational preparation has begun to
emerge in much the same way, from state and federal support, local
experimentation, and considerable wrangling about the results. This
"system," as befits its relative youth, is not as settled as formal education
has become. Its purposes are often muddled, its institutions and programs
are more fluid and varied, the linkages among its components are largely
undeveloped, its boundaries are murky, and its effects are much less clear.
The variations among localities and states are even more substantial than
they are in the education system, with differences shaped by the relative
power of governors and legislatures, the balance of local and state funding
and authority, local and state economic conditions, and population
characteristics. This complex of programs includes postsecondary
vocational education, adult education, short-term job training programs
(including some for specific populations such as dislocated workers or
welfare recipients), private providers of training, and training for the
existing workforce. (As we will see, the boundaries of this systemwhich
programs are considered part of it, and which are notare fluid and vary
from state to state.) This system has emerged in part because existing
education programs have not met certain needs, and so there is substantial
demand for the services provided by workforce development programs.
But the chaotic nature of this system.of workforce development has been
an endless source of frustration for individuals trying to gain access, for
16
Toward Order from Chaos
1
employers looking for well-trained workers, and for policymakers trying
to understandand perhaps even improvethe system.
In this monograph, we examine one moment in time, within the longer
evolution of workforce development, by analyzing ten statesten relatively
active statesthat are trying to reform their education and training systems.
The changes that are being attempted are illuminating both because they
illustrate the variety of approaches that localities and states can take, and
because their successes and failures indicate which reforms might improve
effectiveness and which are counterproductive. But no one should have
any illusions that any single vision will emerge, or that any state can be
completely consistent. Even as clarity is emerging in some states, the process
is complex, slow, and incomplete; as a policymaker in Oklahoma described
the problem, "You can't eat an elephant in one bite." And the process of
reform continues: Even though we hope that our general conclusions are
correct, the details of what states are doing are already out of date.
The Growth of the Elephant: Defining the Workforce
Development System
We first need to define the systems that we will examine and that states
are trying to reform. The programs1 we examine all intend to provide
individuals with the competencies necessary for employment; unlike
education, they are usually unconcerned with political, moral, and
intellectual purposes. The vocabulary by which this emerging system is
described varies; sometimes state officials refer to it simply as "training,"
sometimes as "vocational education and training" (or VET), and
increasingly as "workforce development." A conventional history starts
with manpower programs established by the federal government in the
early 1960s to combat the unemployment and poverty of that period.
Establishing a pattern that has contributed ever since to the complexity of
the system, the early manpower programs viewed schools and community
colleges as inadequate for providing short, job-specific training for
individuals who had not done well in their formal schooling. Therefore,
services were provided outside the education system, particularly by
' There has been some fruitless discussion about the differences between programs
and institutions, since workforce development systems may encompass a variety
of institutions, like community colleges, as well as programs, like JTPA, that typically
contract with CBOs, adult schools, proprietary schools, community colleges, and
other providers that are not generally considered institutions because their practices
are not uniform or well-codified in state statutes, national organizations, or
organizational norms. This is not the place to debate the differences between
institutions and programs, so we will refer to all providers of education and training
as programs.
117
2
NCRVE MDS-1249
community-based organizations (CB0s). The early manpower programs
proliferated and were then consolidated in the Comprehensive Employment
and Training Act (CETA) of 1973. This cycle went around one more time as
the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) of 1981 consolidated and
reorganized these short-term job training programs. Programs such as the
development of training targeted towards dislocated workers continued
to multiply. Most recently, the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998
was signed into law in August 1998, a development we examine briefly in
Section VIII.
Another line of development involves education, training, and other
services for welfare recipients. First articulated in the 1962 Work Experience
and Training program and in the "services strategy" of 1967, this system
provided services like child care and transportation so that welfare
recipients could find employment. This approach was expanded upon in
various welfare-to-work experiments of the 1980s and in the Job
Opportunities in the Business Sector (JOBS) program incorporated in the
Family Support Act of 1988, providing state and federal revenues for job
training, work experience, remedial education, and various supportive
services. This cycle, too, has gone around one more time, as the welfare
"reforms" embodied in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities
Reconciliation Act of 1996 have imposed new requirements to move
individuals off welfare, creating new pressures on state education and
training systems. (This issue is examined more carefully in Section V.)
Over time, federal legislation has tended to increase the particular groups
eligible for short-term job training programs, including such categories as
dislocated workers unemployed because of sectoral shifts, food stamp
recipients, those injured on the job and needing vocational rehabilitation,
veterans, and a bewildering variety of others. Federal legislation has also
tended to go beyond high schools and colleges for the kinds of institutions
that provide VET, sometimes because of the understanding that existing
institutions have been unresponsive to the needs of populations such as
the poor, the unemployed, or the disabled, for example. In addition to shortterm programs considered training and administered by the Department
of Labor, various education programs supported by the Department of
Education overlap in their purposes.' Adult education providing remedial
2 The distinction between education and training is itself a difficult issue. Typically,
job training is much shorter, and focuses on relatively job-specific occupational
preparation; whereas education usually includes a variety of intellectual, political,
and moral goals as well, or broader conceptions of occupational preparation.
Training is usually provided only to individuals who are eligible in some way
for example, by virtue of being long-term unemployed, a dislocated worker, a
welfare recipient, or an employee of a particular firmrather than being available
to all. Training takes place in a variety of organizations, including CB0s, unions,
Toward Order from Chaos
3
education and English as a Second Language (ESL), vocational education
in area vocational schools and community colleges, and grants and loans
for higher education students (which support some students in community
colleges and proprietary schools) are particularly likely to overlap withjob
training. Other federal agencies have jumped into the act, including the
Department of Housing and Urban Development which supports
Youth Build, a program to train youth in construction skills, and other
training efforts for residents of public housing. Still other federal programs,
while they do not provide education or training, are related to employment;
for example, the Employment Service (ES) has provided information about
job vacancies and limited job counseling, and the Unemployment Insurance
(UI) provides short-term income support for unemployed workers during
a period of job search. As a result of these many strands of development, a
bewildering array of programs related to employment and training exist.
When the General Accounting Office (1995) examined them in 1995, it
counted 163 programs spending $20.4 billion.
In the meantime, states have elaborated their own programs. Area
vocational schools serving both high school students and adults, community
colleges serving a multitude of students, and adult education with
substantial state as well as federal funding are the most obvious institutions
providing education and training for work, and these have expanded
substantially since the 1960sespecially community colleges. States have
provided their own funds for welfare-related training and supportive
services, with federal matching funds under Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC) and, since 1996, with a federal block grant for Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Almost every state has enacted a
program of training linked to economic development, providing public
subsidies for the training of existing employees. Some of these operate
through community colleges, as we will see; while others allocate funds to
employers themselves or to CBOs. Therefore, like the federal government,
states have found themselves with a plethora of programs, some stateinitiated and funded, and others largely federal. Like the GAO (1995) report
mentioned above, states have often tried to count the number of education
and training programs in their own studies of proliferating programs. When
North Carolina carried out such a study in 1992, for example, both legislators
and the public were amazed to discover that the state spent $800 million
on 49 different education and training programs administered by eight
separate agencies, and that no one agency has authority over or information
and firms, as well as educational institutions. Training programs are more likely to
provide a variety of services (like child care and transportation) than most
educational institutions, and they have historically been supported more by federal
rather than state funding. On the nature and usefulness of the distinction between
education and training, see Grubb (1996a), Chapter 1.
4
NCRVE MDS-1249
1,9
about all of these programs. Arizona counted 26 major state and federal
programs, under four federal and at least six state agencies, with both the
number and funding of programs increasing substantially. In Oregon, a
1989 study by the Legislative Fiscal Office found at least 13 agencies
managing 50 separate programs related to job training, retraining, and
placement.
Because workforce development programs have developed in largely
unplanned and uncoordinated ways, the boundaries of the system are
unclear. Some efforts are essentially private and outside of government
responsibility such as the training efforts by firms of their own employees;
some are private but weakly regulated such as the training offered by
proprietary schools. While these are important components, in this report
we concentrate on the public programs established by state and federal
governments, since they are the heart of the workforce development
systems. In addition, there is substantial overlap between workforce
development and education, particularly in community colleges, technical
institutes, and area vocational schools that participate in both. Indeed,
boundary issueswhat's in and what's out of workforce development
are very much at stake, particularly in considering local and state governing
mechanisms.
The multitude of purposes complicates the issues of boundaries. In
contrast to most education, which concentrates on preparation before
individuals enter employment, the workforce development system includes
at least four types of preparation3:
1. Pre-employment education and training prepares individuals for initial entry
into employment, and is often aimed at younger individuals.
2. Upgrade training provides additional training for individuals who are
already employed, as their jobs change or as they advance.
3. Re-training provides training so that individuals who have lost their jobs
can find new ones, or so that individuals who seek new careers can
develop the competencies necessary for other employment.
4. Remedial training provides education and training for individuals who
are in some way at the margins of or out of the mainstream labor force
typically those who have been unemployed for long periods of time,
those who are underemployed and in poverty despite employment, and
welfare recipients.
Some institutions in the workforce development system, particularly
community colleges, provide all types of preparation; others specialize in
3 This typology comes from Grubb and Ryan (1999, forthcoming). It is similar to
various typologies of programs used in the international context, like those
developed by OECD and UNESCO.
Toward Order from Chaos
5
one or two. Finally, most of these programs emphasize postcompulsory
education and training. While we will sometimes refer to school-to-work
programs aimed at high school students because they have been used to
bring different providers together, we concentrate in this monograph on
programs for adultsagain, because they are the core of workforce
development.
When state and federal governments contemplate what they have
created, the same complaints emerge over and over. One is simply that the
variety of programs and purposes is difficult to comprehend, so that both
individuals seeking education and training and employers looking for
skilled workers (or seeking to upgrade the skills of existing workers) do
not know where to turn. Another is the concern with the duplication of
services and the consequent wasting of public funds. While complaints
about duplication and waste are often exaggerated,' policymakers are
understandably disconcerted when they see several programs providing
similar job training, or when adult education, community colleges, and job
training programs all provide remedial education in different forms. A third
potential problem is that individuals may need several complementary
services but be unable to find them in one place; thus, someone who needs
vocational skills, remedial academic skills, and supportive services like child
care may be unable to get all three from one program. From an
administrative perspective, the need to adhere to detailed federal
regulations or, even worse, to obey several conflicting sets of state and
federal regulations, may force programs to become rigid, bureaucratic,
unresponsive to local conditions, and generally ineffective. A final concern
is that certain programs and institutions may be of low quality, partly
because they have never faced any competition or mechanisms of
accountability and partly because they may be poorly designed in the first
place.
The process of creating new programs has formulated some selfcorrecting mechanisms intended to foster coordination. At the federal level,
the consolidation of training programs in CETA in 1973 and JTPA in 1982,
and most recently the WIA of 1998, reflected in part the exasperation with
the proliferation of training programs. JTPA has allocated funds specifically
for the coordination of vocational education and job training, and federal
legislation often requires agencies to approve the plans of others. In a similar
vein, the 1992 JTPA amendments encouraged states to develop Human
In NCRVE's examination of the coordination of JTPA and vocational education,
we were unable to find much waste and duplication because different programs
providing what appear to be similar services often serve different populations with
somewhat different approaches, and because demand is greater than supply for
many services (e.g., ESL and remedial education). See Grubb, Brown, Kaufman,
and Lederer (1989, 1990a, 1990b); see also Grubb and McDonnell (1996).
6
NCRVE MDS-1249
Resource Investment Councils (HRICs) to plan and monitor federal training
funds for job training, vocational education, and adult education. In an
effort to cut the Gordian knot of proliferating programs once and for all,
Congress contemplated a consolidation of vocational education, job training,
and adult education funds in 1996, a process that would have virtually
eliminated federal regulations and would have allowed states to fashion
their own systems combining state and federal resources. The 1996 efforts
failed, however, and the most recent Congressional effortsthe WIA of
1998, and legislation for vocational education being considered in fal11998
maintain the divisions in funding among job training, vocational education,
and adult education.
At the state level, frustration with the chaotic system has led many states
to begin their own forms of coordination or consolidation; other states
initiated consolidation in anticipation of federal workforce legislation, as
we shall see in Section I. Indeed, the pace of state interest in reform has
increased considerably. Ten years ago, most states were content simply to
follow federal regulations about coordination and spend federal
coordination funds, but they rarely added any initiatives of their own; they
generally allowed local control. Most successful forms of coordination and
most program innovations were local, with local officials vociferous in their
complaints about both state and federal constraints.' Currently, however, a
number of statesincluding the ten we examine as well as many others
with new advisory committees, state HRICs, and super-agencies overseeing
both education and training programsare experimenting with state
policies designed in some way to consolidate, coordinate, or otherwise
reform their education and training systems.
The time is ripe, therefore, to examine these state activities, to understand
what they are and to examine what influence they have on local programs.
In emphasizing state reforms, we are implicitly assuming that state rather
then federal initiatives will continue to dominate. Partly this reflects the
political realities of the past several decades, when federal legislation has
increasingly provided states with the authority to make decisions through
various block grant and consolidation proposals. Even where federal
funding and regulations persist, waivers of federal regulations have become
increasingly common, and even (as we will see in the case of Oregon)
institutionalized in durable agreements. The importance of states also comes
from the fact that most programs considered educationincluding
postsecondary vocational education in community colleges, as well as adult
educationto be largely the responsibility of the states, so that creating a
5 See especially the earlier NCRVE reports by Grubb et al. (1989, 1990a, 1990b),
Grubb and McDonnell (1996), the NCRVE report for NAVE by Grubb and Bailis
(1993), and the literature review by Bailis and Grubb (1993).
Toward Order from Chaos
7
coherent education and training system requires the active engagement of
state governments.
We can have no way of knowing whether developments in state
workforce development systems will continue to parallel those in education.
We may be witnessing a period of rationalization and system-building based
on state initiatives that will eventually result in better articulated programs
and more effective systems, though it is also possible that the state reforms
we examine reflect only temporary interest on the part of a few states. As
we will see, some states have made substantial progress only to have a
new governor change course abruptly, or a new priority (like welfare
"reform") supersede earlier innovations. But we can at least see some
directions that, if developed consistently over the coming decades, could
well create much more coherent and effective workforce development
systems. The direction of change is unmistakable: the structure of local
and state efforts is moving in the direction of greater coordination and
coherence, even if, as in the development of the education system, it is
uneven and varied from state to state.
The Methodology and Scope of Our Inquiry
Initially, we chose ten states to examine, drawing upon our own
knowledge of state developments6, on information from other national
organizations, and on preliminary phone calls to a few states whose reforms
were unclear. We were looking for states that had made a conscious effort
to reform their workforce development systems in some way, that had
emphasized reforming more than one or two programs, and that had ideally
been engaged in reform for several years. We also wanted a variety of states,
and a variety of approaches to reform. We ended up rejecting several widely
cited states with planning councils that were advisory only and relatively
powerless, and states that were in the midst of political upheaval precluding
any real reform. The following were the states we chose:
1. Florida, which began its reforms in the late 1980s and has consistently
promoted a series of performance-based and market-like reform
mechanisms.
2. Iowa, which also began its reforms over a decade ago and has been
making steady progress, specifically with innovations in funding
economic development.
6 At the Center for the Study of Human Resources, a study in 1996-1997 examined
six states after considering more limited workforce reform efforts in 15 states (see
King & McPherson, 1997). The NCRVE research on coordination among vocational
education, job training, and welfare (see footnote 2) provided us other background
information, though much of that was dated.
8
NCRVE MDS- l 249
23
3. Maryland, which had begun a series of reforms under the Governor 's
Workforce Investment Board (GWIB) dating from the late 1980s, and
then reversed course.
4. Massachusetts, which had begun a series of reforms in the mid-1980s,
interrupted them during a period of economic decline, and then
resumed reforms in very different ways under Governor William Weld.
5. Michigan, which developed the innovative Michigan Opportunity
System in the early 1990s and then reversed its efforts from a bottom-
up, client-oriented system to a top-down, employer-driven system,
more concerned about welfare and business pressure for short-term,
job-specific programs.
6. North Carolina, which has followed an economic development policy
since the late 1950s, with novel approaches to both workforce
development and its community colleges.
7. Oklahoma, which has adopted a unique voluntary approach to
coordination.
8. Oregon, which has a strong reputation as a state emphasizing workforce
development, fostering collaboration, and implementing innovations
(like the Oregon Option and Certificates of Initial Mastery).
9. Texas, which began its efforts in 1989-1991 with several studies and
then consolidated numerous programs in the Texas Workforce
Commission.
10. Wisconsin, a strong-governor state that has been widely cited as being
in the forefront of workforce development reforms, but has since turned
its attention to welfare reform and "work first."
In addition, several individuals suggested that we visit Arizona,
particularly to look at the variety of activities in the community colleges
there. Arizona has concentrated on economic development and establishing
one-stop centers as joint planning mechanisms. The Maricopa County
Community College District provides an interesting case of community
colleges playing central roles in a local workforce development system,
and so we will mention it from time to time.
These states are not a random sample of states, but they do display
considerable variation. They span all regions of the country, and most of
them include a mix of urban and rural populations. Several (Massachusetts,
North Carolina, Oregon, and Wisconsin) have enjoyed particularly low
unemployment rates recently; none of them is a particularly hightmemployMent state, though Texas has pockets of very high unemployment
in the Rio Grande Valley (along the Mexican border). Several (Florida, Iowa,
Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Oregon) have been engaged in reforms
for a decade or more; while others are newcomers. Several (like Iowa,
Michigan, North Carolina, Oregon, and Wisconsin) are states with strong
governors, while Oklahoma and Texas are widely recognized to be
Toward Order from Chaos
9
weak-governor states. For our purposes, they are sufficiently varied so that
any conclusions are unlikely to depend simply on the particular sample
chosen.
In each of these states, we interviewed state-level officials responsible
for community colleges and technical institutes, JTPA, one-stop centers,
welfare-to-work programs, adult education, and state-funded economic
development initiatives, and we interviewed officials of any state-level
coordination councils or super-agencies. In addition, we spoke with
legislative staff for the committees with responsibility for education and
training. These interviews were designed to clarify the origins, structure,
and effects of any reforms, the political issues at the state level, and the
problems in implementing state initiatives. (The protocols for these
interviews are included in Appendix A.) They provided good overviews
of state reforms and a variety of perspectives, though officials tended to be
descriptive rather than evaluative, and many could provide neither
historical nor comparative perspectives across states.
In order to get a local perspective on state reforms and on the balance of
local and state initiatives in these reforms, we chose two communities in
each state to visit. We chose these communities using several criteria. We
included at least one community that was reputed to be well along in
implementing state initiatives, based on information from state officials;
we sometimes included a local community with a reputation for strong
local coordination, regardless of whether it developed in response to state
initiative or was locally developed. We also tried to pick a typical or
dominant urban area (like Baltimore or Boston) and a more rural area (or,
in the case of Massachusetts, a smaller city). Appendix B lists the local
communities we examined. We interviewed the heads (or other
knowledgeable individuals) of local community colleges; adult education
programs; the JTPA administering agency; welfare offices; local or regional
coordination boards; and, where they existed, one-stop centers. These
interviews concentrated on local perceptions of state reforms, the nature of
local changes, and the balance of local and state initiatives. The protocols
are contained in Appendix A. Because we guaranteed confidentiality to
those we interviewed, we do not identify any of them when we quote them
except by a general description.
A third component of our study did not work well. At both the local and
state levels, we asked officials to nominate exemplary programs (see
question 9 in both protocols). Our purpose was both to get some idea of
how local and state officials conceive of quality, and to gather nominations
for exemplary programs that we might then examine more carefully.' As it
' During 1998, we will continue to expand this list of nominated programs and will
visit a number of them, analyzing what they do and how they measure up against
the criteria of quality we have outlined in Box VI.2.
10
NCRVE MDS-1249
::25
turned out, most local and state officials could not respond in an informed
way to this question (see discussion in Section VI). Aside from legislative
requirementsenrollment targets, or performance measures in JTPA, for
examplethey had few clearly defined ideas of what high-quality programs
might be. They generally did not spend enough time visiting programs to
be knowledgeable about their core components.
Not surprisingly, we found substantial variation among the ten states
we examined. Someparticularly Florida, North Carolina, and Oregon
have made real progress in a relatively consistent direction over a number
of years. Others are making progress, but at a much slower pace; still others
have changed course so that earlier changes have been undone, or
contradicted by new directions. But we remind readers that, regardless of
the progress they have made, these ten states are among the most active in
the country. If many of these states have failed to change very much, we
suspect that this is doubly true for most of the 40 states we did not observe.
The workforce development system is a moving target, and some of our
facts are already out of date. We interviewed local and state officials in the
summer and fall of 1997, and checked our conclusions in winter and spring
of 1998. However, particularly in states with fast-moving developments
like Florida, some of the policies we describe have already been superseded
by others, or problems in implementation have been overcome, or other
changes have developed. For example, in Massachusetts, Governor Weld
reorganized state government in fall 1997 and created a new agencythe
Department of Labor and Workforce Developmentwith responsibility
for many programs (see Table 1); the Massachusetts Jobs Commission, which
had previously been quite influential, is no longer setting the policy agenda
for the state. And such changes will continue to take place in almost all the
states we examined. We, therefore, place our emphasis not on the small
details of different local and state practices, which are bound to change,
but on the larger patterns among these ten states.
In Section I, we describe the overall visions and practices that states
have created, examining the difficulties in implementing these visions in
Section II. Section III analyzes the local-state relationships in the ten states.
Section IV then details the roles of employers, whose participation is often
seen as critical. Section V examines the special place of welfare "reform,"
which has been particularly damaging to state efforts to create coherent
workforce development programs. In Section VI, we summarize the
different meanings of coordination and system-building, presenting a
hierarchy of coordination efforts as well as highlighting issues of quality.
Section VII clarifies the contradictions in state policies, pinpointing the
special difficulties that have affected many states. The final section outlines
the implications for state and federal policy, including a note on the likely
effects of the WIA of 1998.
Toward Order from Chaos
11
SECTION 1
Recent State Reforms:
Visions and Strategies
Our ten states have taken different directions in reforming their
workforce development systems. Fortunately, that variety is instructive
about the efficacy of different approaches. In this section, we concentrate
on what states have intended to do, leaving the implementation issues to
Section II and the effects on local programs to Section III. We first review
what caused states to initiate reforms. We then describe the reforms
themselves and the mechanisms, or "instruments," that states have used
to change their workforce development system. The progress that states
have made turns out to depend heavily on the stability and consistency of
their efforts over time, as we clarify toward the end of this section, and so
the importance of political factors is clear.
The Impetus for Reform
During the 1980s, very few states had thought much about reforming
their workforce development systems in systematic ways. Since then,
several developments have prompted states to become more active:
Declining economic conditions forced some states to take a more active
role in improving their economies, and enhancement of education and
training became one of the policies to reverse declining conditions and
enhance competitiveness. For example, Oregon's timber and wood
processing industries suffered badly in the 1980s, and unemployment
rose into double digits. In response, a strategic planning process led by
Governor Neil Goldschmidt produced a 20-year plan, Oregon Shines, with
workforce development as one of its three priorities. Massachusetts
released a report called Choosing To Compete, also stressing the role of
education and training. Similarly, the decline in Iowa's agricultural base,
along with a major reorganization of state government, caused the
Department of Economic Development to prepare a strategic plan to
include business and industry, educational institutions, and local
economic development officials. The initial plan, New Opportunities for
Iowa, released in 1987, included various recommendations to refine the
state's education and training programs. And when Arizona identified
ten economic clusters for recruitment and expansion in the early 1990s,
education was earmarked as one of seven mechanisms to achieve this
kind of economic development.
27
Toward Order from Chaos
13
Some states discovered on their own the bewildering variety of workforce
development programs, and took steps to reduce the chaos and
duplication well in advance of any federal initiatives. For example, a
study conducted in 1985 by the Wisconsin Department of Industry, Labor,
and Human Relations found over 40 programs scattered in 12 agencies.
In response, Governor Tommy Thompson created the Wisconsin Jobs
Council in 1987 to develop a framework for coordination and began
supporting job Centers, Which were early versions of one-stop centers.
The earlier mentioned studies in Arizona, North Carolina, and Oregon
are other examples.
Some states began their coordination efforts in anticipation of federal
consolidation in 1996. In Oklahoma, a weak-governor state, state agency
directors had been discussing the need for some kind of coordination;
the prospect of federal consolidation strengthened their resolve to initiate
a voluntary Workforce Quality Compact starting in January 1996. Their
efforts have continued with gubernatorial support despite the failure of
federal legislation.
Some states reflect a mixture of influences. In Texas, for example, a
legislative mandate and some "good government" Republicans
recognized the lack of coordination among programs and generated
several reports in the early 1990s. Legislation was then introduced in
1993 and finally passed in 1995, spurred in part by anticipation of
consolidation. The reforms enjoyed bipartisan support, first with a
Democratic governor (Ann Richards) and a Democratic legislature in
1993, and then under a Republican governor (George Bush Jr.) and a
more mixed legislature in 1996.
To some extent, the states that began their reforms in anticipation of
federal consolidation were left high and dry when consolidation failed to
pass. They found themselves trying to coordinate federal programs but
still operating under federal rules and regulations. For example, the Texas
Workforce Commission's (TWC) effort to provide ES funds to local agencies,
to use as they saw fit, was thought by Texas policymakers to require
permission from the regional office of the U.S. Department of Labor, which
refused this permission. More generally, state efforts to develop flexible
programs that are oriented to employer needs and reliant on employer
advice have been impeded by the continuation of federal rules and
regulations. As a community college administrator in Florida mentioned,
"It's really hard to tell someone at Southern Bell we can't do that because
our regulations won't allow it, or we must wait for approval which takes
four to six weeks." However, we note that the federal efforts at consolidation
have still had a positive effect on reform because they have forced states to
consider what they might do if they were free of federal regulations.
14
NCRVE MDS-1249
28
Overall State Strategies
The dominant state strategy can be simply described, though it has an
infinite number of variants. In general, a state agency or office is created
with a certain set of statewide responsibilities. Thenpartly because state
offices can rarely be in close touch with local labor market conditions
local or regional counterparts are established with responsibilities for
implementing state policy in local labor markets. For example, in one of
the earliest such efforts, Massachusetts created the Massachusetts Jobs
Council in the late 1980s to review all work-related education and training
programs, replacing the State Job Training Coordinating Council (SJTCC).
Then Private Industry Councils (PICs) were transformed into Regional
Employment Boards (REBs) in each of the 16 Service Delivery Areas (SDAs),
with a wider range of responsibilities than PICs had. Similarly, Michigan
created a HRIC called the Governor 's Workforce Commission, an advisory
body with administrative responsibilities carried out by the Michigan Jobs
Commission; then local Workforce Development Boards (WDBs) were
created to plan the allocation of funding for workforce development. Oregon
has the state Workforce Quality Council (WQC), with 15 regional councils.
Texas initiated the TWC, replacing the Texas Employment Commission and
incorporating other programs such as JTPA, JOBS, and child care, along
with local WDBs. In North Carolina, the governor created the Commission
on Workforce Preparedness by executive order, abolishing the state councils
for vocational education, JTPA, and basic skills and literacy. Most of these
local and state bodies were created by legislation, replacing earlier SJTCCs
with HRICs and expanding their mandates. A fewfor example, advisory
councils like Michigan's Governor's Workforce Commission, and North
Carolina's Commission on Workforce Preparednesswere instituted with
executive authority.
One other exception to the pattern of legislatively developed state
councils is the Oklahoma approach, which is a voluntary effort so far. In
January 1996, a group of state agency heads began meeting to start
addressing the obvious need to coordinate the state's programs, regardless
of what the federal government did. Based on "on-the-street research" about
other state efforts, the participants decided not to seek formal consolidation
because this just creates "another layer of government, bureaucracy, and
costplus people don't like to be taken over, and that's a takeover, and in
most cases we found it was a hostile takeover." Instead, the group formed
the voluntary Workforce Quality Compact, which met informally on
Saturdays and developed a "Memorandum of Agreement Regarding the
Creation of Oklahoma's Workforce Development System" in June 1996.
The state group hopes to develop at least 21 local Compacts to bring together
various education and training providers, butsince there is no legislation
Toward Order from Chaos
29
15
with enforcement powerthese local Compacts must be voluntary, at least
for the moment.
While the overall pattern of a state agency with local counterparts is
widespread, they vary substantially from state to state in their
responsibilities, their influence, and the programs they incorporate. (Table 1
summarizes many of these differences among states.) One important
distinction is between state agencies that are advisory with responsibilities
for planning and oversight, and those that are administrative, with the
authority to allocate funds. In some states, both an advisory council and an
administrative agency coexist. For example, Texas has the advisory Texas
Council on Workforce and Economic Competitiveness (TCWEC) alongside
the administrative TWC; and in Michigan, the Governor 's Workforce
Commission is advisory and the Michigan Jobs Commission (MJC) has
administrative responsibilities. In North Carolina, the Interagency
Coordinating Council, comprised of representatives from state agencies,
provides advice to the Governor's Commission on Workforce Preparedness,
which is comprised mostly of businessmen (sic).
In general, advisory councils are less powerful and influential than
administrative agencies. Several states with purely advisory state councils
were not included in this study when it became clearer that the councils
were powerless; and Oklahoma's voluntary efforts have found it difficult
to make changes at the local level. But some advisory councils have
considerable power nevertheless; for example, while Michigan's Governor's
Workforce Commission is strictly advisory, its creation by the governor
and its roles in reviewing state policy and in approving local workforce
development plans have made it highly influential. In contrast,
administrative agencies often have their hands tied, and therefore have
less authority to reform programs than one might expect.
State-level agencies vary substantially in the programs they include, and
in their real authority over these programs. For example, the TWC was
originally conceived as an agency that operated an integrated job training
and employment-related education system; but, in practice, the TWC
includes JTPA programs; the ES, which DOL claims cannot be integrated
with other programs; the JOBS program, which because of the state's
emphasis on "work first" provides minimal education and training; the UI
system, which provides income support for the unemployed but has little
connection with education and training; the Child Care Management
System, which consolidates child care services from various other programs
but again has little to do with training; and several smaller programs like
the Food Stamp Employment and Training Program (FSETP) and the Senior
Texans Employment program. TWC has placed different programs in
separate administrative divisions so that the decisions across programs that
might enhance coordination are difficult to make. Furthermore, the large
education programsadult education, the community colleges, and
16
NCRVE MDS-I249
30,
vocational rehabilitationare under TCWEC's purview for planning and
evaluation, but they continue to be administered independently of TWC.
In effect, then, TWC has gained the authority to coordinate JTPA with a
number of small and peripheral programs, but, in general, the large
programs it consolidates are either too dissimilar to coordinate to any great
extent, are protected by continuing federal regulations, or have been
insulated by administrative structures.
Similarly, in Maryland, the Governor's Workforce Investment Board
(GWIB) has limited administrative authority, and administrative power
rests with separate state agencies. Unlike other states (including Michigan),
the current governor has been unwilling to put his authority behind the
GWIB, which, therefore, has neither statutory nor political influence. In
addition, all but one of the community colleges are locally directed, with
relatively weak state oversight (as is true in most states), again making it
difficult to coordinate across state agencies.
In the dominant pattern, local or regional councils are responsible for
carrying out policy at the local level and, therefore, are responsible for
creating the "system" that potential clients (or students) and employers
encounter. At this level, a number of metaphors govern what localities and
states are trying to accomplish, which, like all metaphors, provide a simple
though incomplete vision of what a state is trying to accomplish. One is
the image of the "seamless system." In Iowa, this means that the provision
of a variety of services to particular individuals is invisible to them, even
though the provider agencies themselves may have to go through
substantial contortions to combine services from different programs with
different eligibility and regulations. The idea is the same in North Carolina's
one-stop centers:
We don't talk to clients about programs, but it is up to our staff to
find the pots of money that might pay for child care, transportation,
which part the client should invest in. We keep up with changes in
regulations.
Other popular metaphors have relied on the imagery of doors. In
Michigan, the notion of "no wrong door" implies that, no matter what state
agency individuals first approach, they will be directed to the appropriate
provider; Michigan has called its one-stops No Wrong Door Centers and,
similar to Oklahoma, has specified three models for achieving this: (1) one-
stop integration, in which agencies are physically located in the same
building as well as being linked electronically; (2) multiple points of entry,
in which agencies are linked electronically, even though they are separated
geographically, and may serve as feeders to other programs; and (3) the
hub and cluster plan, in which there is a main center of co-located programs
as well as programs located elsewhere that refer clients to the "hub." During
3 1 I',
Toward Order from Chaos
17
the 1980s, Massachusetts developed a similar image of "one system, many
doors," assuming that individuals finding their way to any program could
get the right information about appropriate services (Grubb, Brown,
Kaufman, & Lederer, 1990b, p. 24).
Florida has developed a "zipper" metaphor to describe its coordination
effort which links agencies together at both the local and state levels:
Consolidation is trickier. . . . . We decided not to strip the money
out of the agencies and we decided to encourage the agencies to
collaborate at the state level. At that point, you say that an employee
over at Labor, for example, is going to have a stake in the success
or failure of an employee over at the Education Department, and
they will both share what is the interest of two or three agencies at
the local level working together. This is called the "zipper" strategy.
It translates the same way locally. What you've got at the local
level are . . . the boards and commissions that are responsible for
strategy and policy. So, we've had to link them together with the
"zipper." Mainly what we try to do is to have some kind of linkage
at each level that tends to move people in the direction of
succeeding if they collaborate well, and without a frontal assault
on any one institution try to press them toward adopting the best
outcome strategy.
A third pattern has focused on creating a single point of entry to a state's
system. In most states, one-stop centers provide the single point of access.
In Massachusetts, the local REB is the central agency that charters the
regional one-stop center, which is supposed to be the central point to which
all individuals and employers come for referral to any services they need.
The creation of a single point of contact is a response to the &iticism that
the proliferation of programs has made the system so confusing to its
potential clients that they cannot find their way to the programs they need.
Something similar may be achieved when programs systematically refer
individuals to one another. In North Carolina, for example, one local official
noted,
Our staff pick up the phone and call other agencies and say, "We
think we have a good referral," and we set up an appointment
right then. Some agencies have said, "If you get a person in your
chair that is a good referral, call us and we will come right out."
These are not written in contract agreements, but that is part of
our customer perspective.
18
NCRVE MDS-1249
32
The ability of local councils or boards to achieve "searnlessness," or to
act as a "door" to all other programs, depends on the responsibility and
authority given to these local entities. When certain programs are outside
the scope of local responsibilityas is usually the case with the major
education programs, as we will seethen local workforce development
councils do not formally have the ability either to refer individuals to
education, to create vertically integrated programs (e.g., from short-term
job-training to longer-term education), or to craft a multiple-services
strategy that relies on the extensive resources of programs outside their
scope of authority.
Michigan has taken a
new approach in designating three tiers of programs for which the local
WDBs are responsible. Tier
One programs are under
direct control of local WDBs,
and, in addition, must be
accessible through the No
Wrong Door Centers. Local
WDBs have only planning
authority over Tier Two
programs, and only some of
these programs must be
included in No Wrong
Door Centers. Finally, local
councils or boards are
expected to use their local
knowledge and contacts in
....
Box 1.1 Michigan's Three Tiers of Local
Coordination
Tier One: These programs are under the
control of local Workforce Development
Boards, including JTPA, "work first," Schoolto-Work, No Wrong Door grants for one-stop
centers, and the Employment Service.
Tier Two: Local WDBs only have planning
authority over vocational rehabilitation,
vocational education, adult education,
Veterans' Employment Services, and the
Senior Community Services Employment
Program.
Tier Three: Local WDBs are supposed to use
their influence to coordinate these programs,
including K-12 education: public transportation:
substance abuse programs: and other local or
state programs that affect the education,
training, and employment of the workforce.
the community to influence
Tier Three programs, which include those that are less directly related to
workforce development (like K-12 education and public transportation).
The designation of three tiers, therefore, defines a continuum of local control,
with local boards having the most authority over Tier One programs and
the least over Tier Three.
In practice, many states are relying heavily on one-stop centers as the
linchpin of local coordination.' Very often, local workforce development
councils have been given responsibility for one-stop centers as a way to
begin the process of local coordination, thereby melding a federal initiative
with a state process. These centers, initiated in 1994 by the DOL, represent
See also the evaluation of one-stop centers by Kogan, Dickinson, Fedrau, Mid ling,
and Wolff (1997), who came to similar conclusions about the central roles of onestops.
8
EST COPY AVMLABLE
33
Toward Order from Chaos
19
the federal government's most substantial effort to coordinate disparate
federal programs. In a system where resources are usually committed to
direct services and cannot be reallocated to a coordination role, federal
funding for one-stop centers represents some of the only funding for system-
building activities. However, it is crucial to identify precisely what these
centers do because the rhetoric around them is much more expansive than
the reality of what they accomplish. In general, we found that one-stop
centers at the local level do one of three things9:
1. Information: By far the most pervasive role of one-stops is simply to
provide information about the services available in a local area. Often
these are describedas "self-service," which means that individuals can
gain access to descriptions of local programs and to labor market
informationfrequently in computer-based archivesthat they use on
their own, without much guidance from a counselor or caseworker. Much
less often, one-stop centers provide workshops about how to use such
information, or provide direct help in locating informationparticularly
to specific client groups like welfare recipients. The provision of
information in one place, particularly where information has been hard
to find, is a step in the right direction, and is crucial in states that are
beginning to use market-like mechanisms that presume a well-informed
"consumer" of education and training. But whether the least
sophisticated individuals searching for education and training programs
can find their way to_ one-stop centers, and whether they can take
advantage of information resources (particularly unfamiliar computerbased resources) without help, are difficult questions that have rarely
been asked, much less answered.
2. Co-Location: A smaller number of one-stop centers co-locate offices of
education and training providers in one space. This provides information
about the services available, but it represents a step forward because an
individual can get personal information and advice (rather than merely
text- or computer-based information), can ask questions and explore
alternatives, and can fill out applications on the spot. Co-location still
places the burden on the "consumer" to find the one-stop center and
decide among the services available, but it provides much richer
information resources. For example, Iowa's network of workforce
development centers was established to provide a range of services in a
customer-oriented, business-like atmosphere. These centers, about half
of which are administered by community colleges, provide customers
9 Again, our findings are relatively consistent with those of Kogan et al. (1997).
While they did not state how common various kinds of services in one-stops are,
their discussion emphasizes different kinds of information provision, from which
we infer that this has been the most common approach by far.
34
20
NCRVE NIDS- 1249
with various services (including basic skills) through agencies such as
Promise Jobs, JTPA, ES, Veterans Employment Services, Senior Services,
UI, and Vocational Rehabilitation. Often adjunct services, such as
Goodwill, Green Thumb, and other CBOs, occupy space within the
center, providing customers with a true one-stop opportunity for services.
3. Service Coordination: A still smaller number of one-stop centers have
started to coordinate the services in their area. For example, the Newmark
Center in Oregon coordinates services provided by Adult Basic
Education, Adult and Family Services (the TANF program), and sixteen
other public and private agencies within a single building. All these
programs participated in developing the mission of the center, which
focuses on accessibility, convenience for clients, and providing multiple
services in addition to training (like child care and family abuse
prevention). Individuals seeking assistance fill out a common in-take
form and attend orientation sessions, that provide an overall view of all
services provided and then direct individuals into particular classes or
programs. The philosophy of the center emphasizes "really looking at
the whole aspect of moving people into first jobs and then selfsufficiency."
However, the number of one-stop centers that play a role in coordinating
services is still small. In most cases, the local councils are still feeling their
way, learning about local participants and programs, and they lack both
the moral authority and the administrative power to require coordination.
In some cases, state bureaucracies seem to have impeded the development
of one-stop centers. In Maryland, for example, some local job training
officials were disappointed in the state's one-stop system, and viewed the
state bureaucracy as an impediment to greater integration of local efforts.
They also viewed the state's welfare initiative as "not helping the system
work better together."
As we will see more clearly in Section III, the development of locally
coordinated systems is something that, as local administrators all
acknowledge, requires a long period of time. Stability in program rules
and regulations; good personal relationships among administrators;
programmatic flexibility; and, ideally, support from the state level are all
necessary (Gula & King, 1990). It is, therefore, unrealistic to think that one-
stop centers, which are relatively recent and provide limited funding
without any direct leverage over other programs, can instantly improve
local coordination. As a mechanism to enhance information about existing
programs, and as a process for getting local programs to begin working
together, they are universally regarded as steps forward. But if they are
confined to a role in information provision, then they will never be the
mechanisms of coordination that most states envision.
Toward Order from Chaos
3 '3
21
The Instruments of State Policy: The Variety of Approaches
In reforming their unwieldy systems of workforce development, states
have used a variety of mechanisms. In this section, we contrast several
different approaches to state action: institutional approaches that try to
strengthen the quality of public institutions, as distinct from market-oriented
approaches that use competition and other market-like mechanisms to
induce change; and mechanisms that use various inducements, including
funding and technical assistance, contrasted with those that try to impose
change via mandates, sanctions, and other punitive measures.
Institutional Versus Market-Like Mechanisms
A decade ago, most efforts to improve state systems emphasized
institutional mechanisms of changeefforts to improve the quality of public
programs and the connections among them, through public policy that
required government programs to reform in particular ways. Since then, a
greater interest has developed in the policies that mimic markets instead,
through price-like incentives for programs to change through competition,
and through voucher-like mechanisms that make consumers rather than
governments the real decisionmakers. The rise of market-like mechanisms
has been due, we surmise, to dissatisfaction with the slow pace of reform
via institutional mechanisms, and to the ascent of free-market ideologies
over faith in government.
Among the institution-building mechanisms that states commonly use
are the following:
Advisory committees are designed to provide information to programs,
particularly about what employers want most. Following the example
of PICs, a clear trend is to require the majority of advisory committees'
members to be from the private sector. For example, Florida's regional
WDBs require 51% participation by local business leaders at the Chief
Executive Officer (CEO) level. These regional WDBs also have the option
of including the local WAGES (Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency)
Board, and often use the same membership to address the needs of
welfare recipients as well as the local workforce. In other cases, business
groups have a substantial influence. In Maryland, for example, the
Business Roundtable has been particularly active in informing the state's
school-to-work (STW) efforts.
Consolidation may improve the quality of public institutions by allowing
particular state agencies to make decisions involving more than one
program, so that judgments can be made about relative strengths and
weaknesses, and about appropriate patterns of cooperation or
integration. Of course, as we pointed out above, the effectiveness of
22
NCRVE MDS-1249
36
consolidation depends on which programs are included and excluded,
on whether some programs included cannot be changed for political or
regulatory reasons, and on whether a consolidated state agency, in fact,
makes joint decisionsrather than programs in different divisions being
administered separately as in the TWC.
Oregon has taken the idea of consolidation one step further by making
all state decisions with crossfunctional teams. These teams have
representation from all the major state agencies concerned with
workforce development, on the assumption that "by combining together
we have better results than we do alone." Teams focus on particular
issues to do "the detailed
policy work that's neces-
sary, rather than throwing people together and
hoping it works out."
Each state agency has
members on such cross-
functional teams; for
example, the Human
Resources team in the
Office of Community
College Services repre-
sents community colleges in all initiatives, and
thereby develops expertise on statewide issues.
These teams have developed the state's plans for
innovations like the
WQC, one-stop centers,
STW, and welfare reform.
In addition, state personnel tend to work in
several agencies during
their careers, again sup-
porting crossfunctionality in their approaches
to decisions.
Technical assistance, or
advice from state agen-
cies to local providers,
is comparatively rare.
Box 1.2 Technical Assistance in North Carolina
North Carolina has funded the Workforce
Development Institute (WDI) with JTPA funds. It
provides workshops delivered by a cross-section
of state agency personnel on topics like
"Orientation to the One-Stop Concept." "Creative
Planning Solutions." and "Customer Satisfaction
Focus Groups." The WDI also subcontracted
with a consultant group to spend about 11 days
at each one-stop center to facilitate planning
and conduct staff development. Local
administrators noted how critical it was to
receive information at the local site, since the
consultants literally walked through the one-stop
centers to identify customer problems and to
negotiate among partners. The WDI also
developed informational materials about how
community colleges could participate in "work
first," in order to persuade colleges to
participate with welfare recipients and employerbased training, and the state-level vice president
for instruction has delivered a series of
workshops at local colleges.
In addition, the Commission on Workforce
Preparation sponsored a Best Practice
Symposium in 1995, featuring teams from four
cities outside of North Carolina with longer
histories of one-stops centers. The conference
has since been continued as a way of sharing
information between the local and state
colleges, and among colleges about innovative
workforce practices. The Commission also
developed a Speaker's Tool Kit for anyone
addressing groups about the state's we)fare
initiative, Job Ready.
'
37
Toward Order from Chaos
23
Technical assistance presumes that state agencies have developed some
expertise about quality to share with local agencies, andas we will see
in greater detail in Section WIstate officials often have little idea about
the key components of a "good" education or training program, aside
from those expectations embedded in state performance measures.
However, North Carolina has increased its technical assistance,
particularly in the form of staff development provided through the
Workforce Development Institute (WDI), as described in Box 1.2. Oregon
has also developed staff training for program managers on various
statewide priorities; this provides not only information about emerging
issues but also a "signal that everyone needs to change in order to be
successful." Maryland has provided professional development through
its Department of Education, and convened local leadership to provide
opportunities for shaping strategies, under the assumption that it is a
local responsibility to define models of high-quality services. In addition,
the Department of Human Resources (DHR), which oversees welfare
reform, describes itself as a "technical assistance/consulting unit and
partner" rather than a monitoring agency, and has provided some
support services, initiated pilot projects around collaboration, and
facilitated local partnerships.
State agencies are in good positionscertainly better than local
programsto collect information about effective practices around the
state (and from other states), to evaluate claims of effectiveness, and to
disseminate information about these practices. However, technical
assistance requires a different kind of expertise than the "traditional"
state activities of approving, monitoring, and coordinating local plans,
and many state agencies have found it difficult to make the shift. While
a few states are trying to be more service-oriented rather than regulatory,
this approach to improving quality has been tried in only a few states.
As states move toward greater accountability, technical assistance
becomes, somewhat paradoxically, more important. If programs are held
accountable to state standards, but lack the capacity to change, then
accountability can only identify poorly performing programs without
improving thema politics of humiliation rather than improvement.
But if local programs can develop the capacity to change through
technical assistance, then accountability can stimulate improvement in
the workforce development system. In effect, there are two tenets of the
new approach: there shouldn't be public funding without accountability;
and, in turn, there shouldn't be accountability without technical
assistance. Or, to put it simply: no funding without accountability; no
accountability without technical assistance.
24
NCRVE MDS-1249
38
0 Cultural change lies at the heart of Oregon and Oklahoma's efforts. In
Oregon, the state is trying to move away from a traditional model
funding for relatively specific services with regulation and compliance
review to make sure that funds are appropriately spent. In its place, the
Oregon Option has articulated a "redesigned system" with four
principles: (1) focusing on results rather than inputs; (2) promoting
integration of services across agencies; (3) investing in prevention; and
(4) delegating responsibilities for service to front-line, local providers.
The approach may be described as one of policy leadership, rather than
mandated coordination or consolidation. As one state official noted, what
the state has done is to "make the most of the state policy leadership's
interest in a quality workforce in Oregon through the influence of how
we make decisions rather than how we organize." This vision provides
greater authority to local WQCs, under the assumption that they can be
more effective in following these four principles rather than simply
obeying regulations.
Similarly, in Oklahoma, the state Workforce Quality Compact has
developed a set of principles and goals that each member agrees to,
though there are no sanctions except peer pressure. The principles
represent an effort to get all state agenciesand, over the long run, local
programsto operate in different ways. These are cultural changes
because they attempt to influence the basic approach of local and state
agencies without coercion; they do not rely on the usual model of funding
and regulation, and there are no sanctions if local governments do not
comply.
Increasingly, however, market-like mechanisms have become popular
mechanisms that try to mimic the incentives in markets, where profit
incentives, competition and customer choice, and the fear of going out of
business increase the effectiveness and efficiency of providing various goods
and services. Among the most widely used market-like incentives are the
following:
0 Performance measures and standards create measures of performance
of ten, in workforce development programs, placement rates, earnings
levels, or rates of leaving welfareand then establish appropriate
standards that local programs should meet. First introduced for JTPA in
1983, measures and standards simultaneously provide information to
policymakers about performance, to administrators for use in program
improvement, and to consumers about effectiveness. They shift the
emphasis from inputs to outcomesat least in theory. Florida has
developed one of the most extensive system of performance measures,
described briefly in Box I.3as befits its continuing interest in creating
39
Toward Order from Chaos
25
market-like incentives for
high performanceand has
Box 1.3 Florida's Performance Measures
Florida has developed several different systems
of performance measures:
Performance-Based Budgeting for community
colleges and technical centers allocates a
percentage of funding on the basis of the
previous years' performance, as measured by
a series of benchmarks, including enrollment.
completion, and rates of job placement.
Other possibilities may include length of time
on the job, earnings increases, or promotion.
In 1998, legislation passed creating the
Workforce Development Capitalization Incentive
Program, which provides school districts and
community colleges with the opportunity to
compete for grants to fund costs associated
with the expansion of workforce development
programs that serve specific employment
workforce needs.
The Florida Education and Training Placement
Information Program (FETPIP) links records of
students and program participants to various
state and federal data (especially Ul data) to
provide information about the employment
and earnings of all participants.
The Occupational Forecast System identifies
industries and occupations with high rates of
growth, relatively high rates of pay (over $7
per hour), and hiring requirements of less than
a baccalaureate degree. Various state programs
such as Quick Response Training are limited
to these high-demand, high-pay occupations.
The state Jobs and Education Partnership is
creating measures to be used for all programs.
including employment in high-demand, highwage occupations from the Occupational
Forecast System: continued employment after
1, 6. 12. and 24 months: reduction in welfare
rates: employer satisfaction: and composite
measures demonstrating return on investment.
More specific measures are also being devised
for STW, welfare-to-work, one-stops, and the
High-Skills/High-Wages (HS/HW) initiative.
now moved to perform-
ance-based funding. North
Carolina has urged the
formation of a state skill
standards board through its
Workforce Preparedness
Commission.
However, performance
measures can be valuable
even if they are not used as
the basis of funding. Texas
has developed a system to
evaluate and manage its
workforce system, enacted
in 1997, that applies to all
education and training in
the state, not just JTPA or
TWC-administered programs. Based on a project
carried out in six states by
the National Governors'
Association (Trott & Baj,
1996), and work by the LBJ
School's Center for the
Study of Human Resources
(King & McPherson, 1997),
two key performance meas-
ures have been adopted
for every program in the
system: (1) employment
rates and (2) post-program
earnings measured by UI
wage record data.1° For the
moment, these measures
are being used only to
monitor strengths and
weaknesses in the state
'° Similarly, the state of Washington has development several excellent reports on
the employment benefits of its programs using UI data; see especially Workforce
Training and Education Coordinating Board (1996).
26
NCRVE MDS- I 249
'4;
U
system, not to fund or eliminate programs. Yet another example is
Oregon, which developed a set of performance measures in 1989 for
statewide priorities such as education, economic development, and
environmental protection. Called benchmarks, the measures provide a
common language to determine progress. Despite this system of
measures, state agencies in Oregon do not allocate funding based on
local performance as Florida does.
Performance-based budgeting is the next logical step once performance
measures have been created. In a sense, JTPA incorporates performance-
based funding because programs that fail to meet their performance
standards two years in a row face reorganization of the PIC. In practice,
however, states rarely impose these sanctions, and they affect
organization rather than funding.
In the ten states we examined, Florida has gone the furthest to implement
performance-based budgeting for its community colleges. In 1996,
colleges "contributed" $12 million (out of a $40 million discretionary
fund), and colleges could then earn these funds back on the basis of
students completing associate degrees and vocational certificates, with
double incentives for economically disadvantaged students, dislocated
workers, and welfare mothers. Initially, participation by community
colleges and technical centers was voluntary; however, Florida is
planning to phase in Performance-Based Budgeting over the next few
years, which will make participation mandatory and will increase the
amounts subject to performance-based funding to 15% of all funding
though the measurement of performance is still under discussion. In
addition, for its welfare "reforms," Maryland has introduced pay-forperformance contracts to private providers at both the local and state
levels.
In other states, performance-based funding is still under discussion. In
1995, the Governor's Commission on Workforce Preparedness in North
Carolina recommended shifting from enrollment-based to outcomebased funding. The state community college system is conducting a selfstudy for recommendations about how current funding formulas based
on enrollment might be modified by performance-based mechanisms.
Competition among providers is a way of breaking up the monopoly of
public providers and the supply-driven pattern of education and training
programs. Florida has taken this the furthest, with provisions in 1996
legislation that tried to create a level playing field, encouraging
competition among programs. If a local provider is not meeting the needs
of business, another program (public or private) may offer a similar
41
Toward Order from Chaos
27
program andpotentially, at leastdrive lower-quality programs out
of business. As one community college administrator noted, "Under this
bill, there isn't a hiding place for programs of low quality." Similarly,
Iowa would like to introduce competition among service providers, with
the state government shifting from being a provider of services to being
a broker of services provided by a variety of public and private agencies.
However, early efforts to introduce competition raised the ire of state
employees unions, and progress has been slow.
o
Competition through subcontracting is a mechanism for providing services
under more competitive conditions, where public and private providers
compete for public funds to provide specific services. Subcontracting
has a relatively long history in local and state government, where
highway construction, garbage collection, janitorial services, bill
collection, and other similar services have been contracted to private
firms. In the education and training sphere, a few school districts have
made headlines by subcontracting some schools to private firms like
the Edison Project, or services to other businesses like Score! and Sylvan
Learning Centers. In workforce development programs, local JTPA
programs commonly use subcontracting mechanisms, presumably
choosing among different bidders for specific services on the basis of
price and quality. Currently, subcontracting is being extended to welfareto-work programs, where certain states (like Maryland and Florida) and
localities (like Milwaukee) have subcontracted with private providers
for specific services. In addition, as part of its promotion of competition,
Florida and Texas are requiring their regional boards to subcontract for
services as a way of increasing competition. Many local boards have
been designing a "simulated block grant" approach, consolidating
separate funding streams (including STW grants, welfare-to-work funds,
and HS/HW Incentive Funds) and contracting out the provision of direct
services. For example, in Palm Beach and Dade Counties in Florida,
Lockheed Martin has contracted to provide case management services
for WAGES recipients. Michigan requires its local Michigan Works!
boards to subcontract for services, under the belief that this will yield a
more efficient delivery system. The core of Massachusetts' coordination
policy relies on a subcontracting mechanism: it funds new career centers
by redirecting funds away from agencies that have traditionally received
them to new centers competitively selected to meet customer needs.n
The state's experience so far is that, while the one-stop centers established
through competition are of high quality, the intra-state conflict created
by the process may have undermined their long-run base of support.
" Traditional agencies and programs can still win these contracts, but they must
compete for such funding.
28
NCRVE MDS-1249
Similarly, Texas requires its local WDBs to subcontract the management
of its One-Stop Career Centers, and in Dallas County that provider is
Lockheed Martin, a private, for-profit firm. The common statement that
governments are turning into brokers of services, rather than direct
providers, is usually a reference to the increasing use of subcontracting.
O Voucher mechanisms are ways of providing individual consumers with
the purchasing power necessary to make choices. These vouchers, of
course, have little effect if choices do not exist, and, therefore, their
effectiveness depends on the existence of competition among public and
private providers. The largest voucher mechanisms in the national
education and training system include federal grants and loans to
postsecondary education, including Pell Grants to low-income students,
the new Hope Tax Credits, and the Lifelong Learning Credit, all of which
can be spent in community colleges and proprietary schools (but not for
adult education or short-term job training). The WIA of 1998 also places
greater emphasis on Individual Training Accounts, which may turn out
to be like vouchers. Voucher-like mechanisms have been contemplated
at the state level as well, including a pilot voucher project under JTPA in
Baltimore that provides "customized management accounts" to eligible
clients, allowing them to select among training providers with a lifetime
cap of $7,000 per individual.
O Consumer information is a widely accepted requirement of market-like
systems, since uninformed consumers cannot possibly make rational
choices. One-stop centers are the most obvious mechanisms for increasing
consumer choice. In addition, several states are planning to make
information available from their performance measures. However, it is
important to note that one-stop centers and other public sources of
information usually refer individuals only to certified public providers,
rather than to a broader array of providers as a true voucher system
would (Barnow &r King, 1996). It is possible, however, that this will
change under the WIA.
O Other market-like policies outside the realm of education and training
programs include tax incentives for business and regulatory relief, both
of which figured prominently in Governor Engler's reforms in Michigan.
The tax mechanisms included the creation of tax-free Renaissance Zones
in economically depressed areas, with businesses being promised ten to
fifteen years exemption from local and state taxes. However, the effect
of such policies on education and training programs is indirect and
difficult to trace, and, in any event, is contingent on whether such policies
have any effect at all, which is often quite doubtful. Particularly in
market-oriented states, workforce and economic development can be
43
Toward Order from Chaos
29
promoted through tax and regulatory mechanisms rather thanor in
addition tointerventions into education and training programs.
There is, of course, a long history of debate about the efficacy of each of
these mechanisms of state policy. Many of the debates restate the
conventional claims for and against market mechanisms, without providing
much empirical evidence about how they operate in practice, particularly
in the education and training field. In the case of subcontracting, there is
evidence that the presumed efficiencies of subcontracting are often illusory,
since the costs of contract monitoring often outweigh any savings. In the
areas of education and training, the evidence from Englandwhich has
tried a broad variety of market-like mechanisms under the Thatcher and
Major governmentsindicates that such devices do not increase the exercise
of choice except among the most sophisticated and well-informed
consumers, and that they tend to exacerbate inequalities just as their
opponents in this country claim (Finkelstein & Grubb, 1998). We note,
therefore, that many arguments in favor of market-like mechanisms are
really untested claimsthough state practices are now providing
opportunities to evaluate these claims.
Of course, some states combine both mechanisms of institutional
improvement and market-like practices. One-stop centers are examples of
mixed policies since they provide information to consumers, both directly
and through co-location, but they may also facilitate coordinationa form
of institutional improvementthrough co-location and through more direct
activities with providers. Performance measures can be ways of improving
consumer information and choice, though when they are used exclusively
by state administrators to scrutinize local programs they are primarily
mechanisms of accountability rather than consumer information.
In general, states have been moving toward greater use of market-like
mechanisms, though only a few states have adopted the most powerful
forms: competition and performance-based funding. The ten states we
examined can be roughly placed along the continuum depicted in Figure 1.
At one extreme, Oregon has depended almost entirely on institutionbuilding practices, including some consolidation; coordinated services for
Figure 1. A Continuum of State Practices
MD
IA
MA
MI
NC
OR OK WI
Institutionoriented
30
NCRVE MDS-1249
TX
FL
Marketoriented
welfare clients provided by JTPA and community colleges; crossfunctional
teams to develop new state initiatives, described above; the development
of indicators of quality (e.g., customer satisfaction, retention, and skill gains),
not for punitive or funding purposes but to signal the need for improving
quality; the development of statewide benchmarks, used not for mandates
and sanctions but to "create an environment that supports performance
and measurement," a "shared set of expectations" (Oregon's Benchmarks:
Setting Measurable Standards for Progress,1991, pp. 1-2); and the development
of long-range plans (like the 20-year strategic plan in Oregon Shines [1989]
and Oregon Shines II [1991]), recognizing that workforce development and
coordination are complex issues requiring long periods of time and stable
leadership. In general, Oregon tends to distrust competition and other
market-like mechanisms as methods of driving reform. Several pilot projects
using market mechanismsfocusing on vouchers and competitive
purchase of services using JTPA fundshave been tried, but the dominant
sentiment is that "throwing it open to competition gets us just another
version of chaos."
At the other extreme, Florida has consistently followed the approach of
enhancing market-like mechanisms. It has introduced competition into the
system by developing three tiers of performance measures, which are at
different stages of development and still require refinement:
1. Customer outcomes as measured by employment in an occupation,
demonstrating growth, continued employment, reduction in and
elimination of public assistance, employer satisfaction with level of
preparation, and return-on-investment.
2. Program outcomes with specific outputs in each of the four workforce
strands: STW, welfare-to-work, one-stop centers, and the HS /HW
initiative. Each component will calculate such odtput measures as the
number of dropouts, leavers with marketable skills, program completers,
and job listings filled.
3. Program measures that measure services to enrollees, service recipients,
and individuals moving among service components.
In addition, Florida has forced all public and private providers of VET
to compete with one another; it has had performance-based funding in
vocational education since the late 1980s,12 now extended to community
colleges as described above and being phased into other VET programs;
the state's Jobs and Education Partnership is developing still other
'2 Florida has required all vocational programs, both in community colleges and
technical centers, to have 70% rates of placement in related occupations or face
having that program eliminated. There have been various debates over the years
about the data necessary to enforce this provision.
45
Toward Order from Chaos
31
performance indicators, to be used to develop future strategic plans; and
FETPIP, which links records from various institutional sources, and provides
information on outcomes. The state has been quite consistent, over more
than a decade, in developing these market-oriented initiatives andwhile
it still has a range of more institutional mechanisms, including a local-state
structure to administer programs like STW and one-stop centersit uses a
wider variety of market-oriented mechanisms than any other state.
In between, as Figure 1 indicates, states use a wide combination of
institutional and market-oriented mechanisms. For example, North Carolina
has placed great emphasis on its technical assistance, but it has also stressed
information through one-stops as a way of enhancing coordination among
programs. In general, many of these states are moving toward limited
coordination of programs (particularly those considered training rather than
education) and reconstituted advisory committees on the institutional side.
At the same time, many have adopted outcome measures and information
provisions (particularly through one-stop centers) on the market-oriented
side. Whether through planning or happenstance, most states have avoided
the extremes of one approach or another, preferring a mixture of policies to
improve their workforce development systems.
We stress, then, that states have developed a variety of approaches to
reform and coordination. Aside from the nearly ubiquitous use of a statelevel agency with local or regional counterparts, there is hardly a single
practice that has been adopted by all these states, and it is certainly incorrect
to think that simple consolidationthe combination of programs with some
incorporated into othersis a dominant strategy. Furthermore, the
exceptionsthe innovations that particular states have undertaken, like
North Carolina with its technical assistance, Florida with its market
orientation, and Oregon with its array of institutional mechanismsare in
many ways more interesting than the common practices. There is certainly
no notion among the states that one size fits alleven in a relatively limited
number of states.
Economic Development Efforts: Recognizing the Demand
Side
In addition to reforming their workforce development systems, many
states have initiated policies to stimulate the demand side of the labor
market. The underlying logic is that developing a more educated labor
force, without increasing the demand for well-trained workers, is likely to
be ineffective. Among the most important demand-side strategies are the
following:
o Most states have programs to provide short-term customized training
to specific employers, partly as a way of luring employers from out of
32
NCRVE MDS-1249
46
state or keeping existing industry from leaving. Many of these take the
form of state grants for firm-specific training, often operated through
community colleges. In Maryland, the Department of Business and
Economic Development (DBED) is collaborating with the DHR to assist
businesses locating in Maryland, doing "whatever is needed to get
businesses to locate here," and has also initiated collaboration with local
SDAs and Job Service offices to assist with corporate expansion and
recruiting. Iowa has taken a novel approach in allowing its community
colleges to float bonds for firm-specific training; the bonds are then paid
off by earmarking the income taxes paid by the corporations
participating. This is essentially a way of allowing local colleges and
employers, rather than the state legislature, to determine the spending
for such activities, and Iowa's efforts are thus better funded than in most
states.
North Carolina has been particularly active in promoting economic
development as the goal of all state policies, and has created community
colleges that are specifically active in occupational education, in
workforce training for employers, and in providing training for JTPA
and welfare clients. Numerous community colleges have become active
in such workforce development activities, including small business
development centers funded by state resources in Oregon and North
Carolina, providing information and (if necessary) training to small
businesses about new technologies, business procedures, quality
requirements, health and safety issues, and other issues relating to
profitability that might otherwise escape their attention.13
As part of its efforts to diversify the state's economy, Oregon's Economic
Development Department has designated Key Industries, and each local
Regional Strategies Board has selected three of these to emphasize in its
six-year economic development plan. Some Key Industries have formed
industry associations that, in turn, have become important in
communicating sectoral needs to providers of education and training.
For example, the Semiconductor Workforce Consortium of Oregon and
Southwest Washington has defined a standardized set of job skills and
developed industry-specific courses at the high school and community
college levels. Several other associations are developing their own
statements of skill requirements, and the state has begun to develop a
database that would give VET providers access to information about
job openings described by standardized skill and training requirements.
There are, then, some steps being taken by states to stimulate demand
for well-trained workers as well as to supply more education and training.
"On the roles of community colleges in workforce and economic development, ee
Grubb, Badway, Bell, Bragg, and Russman (1997) and Dougherty (1998).
47
Toward Order from Chaos
33
Like state efforts to reform workforce development systems, these demandside strategies hardly existed a decade ago. However, the effectiveness of
these policies remains unclear. Many of these are still efforts to engage in
"smokestack chasing," or efforts to lure mobile industry from other states
a tactic that is not very effective. In many cases, states do not discriminate
between cases that might justify public funding for training and cases where
employers should provide their own training because there are unlikely to
be public benefits; often, a great deal of state money is being spent to little
effect.'" Certain other policies seem more promising, like the Oregon efforts
to organize industry associations, but these are still not widespread. Finally,
some community colleges' efforts in economic development (including
small business centers to improve the efficiency and longevity of local
businesses) provide help to employers while they supply any necessary
training to new employees (Grubb, Badway, Bell, Bragg, & Russman, 1997).
For example, the Maricopa Community College District brought together
employers in several sectors, and now promotes its Semetech Network of
semiconductor producers and suppliers:
We tend to be the state's neutral meeting ground for a number of
employers. Instead of competing with one another, they're working
together with us in a safe zone to pool resources in order to develop
the technical capacity in our community to serve them with
employees. Instead of stealing employees from one another, they
work with us to develop technical capacity within their firm to
train their employees. We focused on areas of mutual concern,
mainly marketing the industry as a viable career. We needed
students in the front door, and the firms needed students out our
back door, so we cooperated.
In such approaches, the conditions for economic expansion are effectively
coordinated with the provision of an educated workforce.
In addition, economic development efforts in most states are not wellcoordinated with education and training. Usually they take place in different
departments. In Maryland, for example, Governor Glendenning's
administration has deliberately separated economic development from
14 For an analysis of the conditions under which states should and should not
subsidize firm-based training, see National Center for Research in Vocational
Education and the Center for Labor Research and Education (1994), a study
prepared for the Employment Training Panel in California. Aside from Iowa's
prohibitions on subsidies to wholesale and retail trade and professional services
(since they are not mobile in response to subsidies) and California's restriction of
funding to firms engaging in export out of the state (or import substitution), from
what we can ascertain from this study, states do not appear to distinguish worthy
from unworthy subsidies.
34
NCRVE MDS-I249
4'8
employment and training: job training is administered by the Department
of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation, while the new DBED handles all
economic development. There is no consensus within the state about the
rationale for this division, and many administrators are simply mystified.
In Michigan, the extensive economic development efforts through
Renaissance Zones and the Economic Development Job Training Program
are uncoordinated with workforce development. As one researcher
mentioned about the division between the Economic Development Service
Division, which routinely calls on businesses but fails to develop job slots
for JTPA clients, and the Workforce Development Division,
In theory, the workforce development people within the Job
Commission essentially run their own programs, and they don't
interact with the people who are calling on business. It's a sham.
It's an agency running economic development and workforce
development in parallel, without any synergy between them.
In theory, the great variety of state-funded training for employers supports
economic development and, therefore, employment demand, while the
training simultaneously creates the supply of trained workers necessary.
In practice, however, states have given little thought to the conditions under
which such programs stimulate demand and, therefore, they often provide
subsidies for training (supporting the supply side) without enhancing
demand.
In general, therefore, there are no mechanisms in place to match supply
with demand, even in a rough way. For example, most states would like to
see high-productivity, high-wage employment move in or expand, but that
is inconsistent with the need for more jobs for the least skilled welfare
recipients going through "work first" programs. Similarly, most states have
paid more attention to coordinating their short-term job training programs,
but these are again aimed at relatively low-level jobs rather than the highproductivity jobs that most states want. Most states continue to talk about
the skill requirements of the 21st century, and most ,state reports have a
section repeating the need for higher-order skills, communications skills,
and problem-solving abilities, as well as better preparation in basic verbal
and mathematical competencies. However, aside from STW initiatives and
'standards-based reform in K-12 education, there has been almost no
attention in state efforts to the kinds of curriculum and teaching methods
that would ensure that such competencies are taught, especially in the shortterm job training programs and in "work first" programs that provide no
education or training whatsoever. At several different levels, therefore, there
is a real mismatch between the emphasis of state economic development
efforts and the reforms in workforce development systems.
4 9,
Toward Order from Chaos
35
As always, there are important exceptions, usually in conditions where
the same program participates in both economic development and in
providing education and training. For example, small business centers in
community colleges often identify technology and training needs within
small firms, and also identify sources of supply. The area vocationaltechnical centers in Oklahoma support economic development by providing
firm-specific training, and they have become one of the main strategies to
attract business into particular regions of the state. The Regional Strategies
Boards in Oregon identify Key Industries for local areas, and then are
expected to link with regional WQCs to develop integrated plans for both
workforce and economic development. In Maryland, DBED is trying to
better integrate its economic development with education and training
needs, trying to bring a business focus and demand orientation to the
workforce development system. Texas has a process of identifying labor
market information into planning models issued by local boards and
community colleges; this process is intended to help them choose highdemand occupations and industries. Iowa community colleges can both
identify needs for training among new and expanding industries and
provide that training directly. North Carolina has tried to integrate the two
by including community colleges whenever there are efforts to lure industry
to the state; as a local official noted, "Economic development used to be
location; now it's education." This is often accomplished by creating job
training programs within community colleges, both through the short-term
noncredit vocational programs called occupational extension and through
special centers. As one administrator said,
We try to sell a unified vision of what economic development means
in Columbus County, including an industrial park, good-paying
jobs, and our Industrial Skills Training Center we built with the
community college. The lack of a skilled workforce is a weakness
when we try to attract new industry.
Baltimore County provides an interesting local example of the integration
of demand-side and supply-side policy. In the past, the Baltimore County
office had created "speculative" training programs, without having jobs in
hand. Now, they initially meet with employers through economic
development partnerships, and then develop customized training programs
to ensure that trainees have the competencies employers need so that they
will be hired. The office contracts out its training to outside providers,
believing that it can thereby serve better as an "honest broker," bringing
together a range of services (including training) for employers.
There are, then, a number of fledgling efforts to coordinate demandside and supply-side policies. In the absence of such mechanisms, states
36
NCRVE MDS- I 249
are all too likely to engage in economic development efforts that bear little
relationship to reforms in workforce development systems.
On a more positive note, however, these state economic development
strategies are quite new. Just as coordination among education and training
programs takes considerable time, it may be unrealistic to expect that
economic development efforts are at this point well-integrated with
education and training reforms. As states continue to develop their
"systems," however, this is one form that future coordination could take.
Toward Order from Chaos
37
Implementation at the State Level:
The Challenges of Innovation
In the previous section, we outlined the strategies and visions that states
have articulated. Putting these visions in place has not always been easy,
however, since they require departures from past practices and new ways
of working. The power of entrenched bureaucracies and established
constituencies to resist change is an old story in both state and federal policy,
and the education and training arena is certainly no exceptionparticularly
because the proliferation of programs that has caused problems in the first
place has created small armies of resistance to rationalized policies. In this
section, we outline some of the major challenges states have faced in
reforming their workforce development systems, some of which are
essentially unresolved.
Of course, many implementation problems have stemmed from oldfashioned errors of one kind or another. For example, the Texas Workforce
Commission (TWC) suffered from poor leadership choices in the early
stages, a sluggish start-up, and unclear and inconsistent guidelines to local
boards, all causing a delay in getting started. The state's plans were quite
ambitious, and a report noted that "such massive reforms can take years to
fully implement" (King & McPherson, 1997, p. 43)a point we make in
this section about the need for stability and longevity in state efforts. Such
problems are familiar in virtually every area of government, and we have
nothing special to say about them: incompetence and instability will always
undermine changes, no matter how well-designed. Instead, we outline a
number of implementation problems specific to workforce development
that appear to be systemic, that have occurred in several states, and that
will continue to occur in others if efforts to anticipate such problems are
not made.
The Importance of Stability
While many states have developed a local-state structure for workforce
development programs, there are remarkable differences in the progress
states have made in implementing their visions. The most crucial element
in this development is simply the longevity and stability of state efforts.
The states that have pursued improvement relatively steadily, despite
changes in state political leadership, are usually well-ahead in the
implementation of system-building. In contrast, those states that have
changed course dramatically are well-behind. States that are essentially
52
Toward Order from Chaos
39
new to these efforts (like Oklahoma and Texas) face significant challenges,
given the difficulty of the process and the need for sustained efforts.
The best examples of states that have stuck to a basic strategy over
relatively long periods of time are Oregon, North Carolina, and Florida:
O Oregon first developed a 20-year strategic plan under Governor Neil
Goldschmidt in 1989, and it has been continued under Governor Barbara
Roberts (1991-1995) and now under Governor John Kitzhaber. In
addition, while debate about workforce development has been political
in the sense that it has involved substantial political interests and values,
particularly since the late 1980sit has not been partisan; Democratic
governors have worked well with local Republican employers as well
as an influential Republican Senator (Mark Hatfield), creating goals that
all groups embrace; maintaining a stable and diversified economy;
maintaining the quality of life, rather than becoming another California
"or even Seattle"; investing in strong public institutions rather than
creating "unhealthy" competition; and improving the effectiveness of
what had been viewed as "a $265 million rathole" of state and federal
programs (as one state official phrased it). The process of creating federal
waivers and of establishing benchmarks for progress has continued
steadily over the years.
O North Carolina has displayed a consistent commitment to economic
development as a goal driving all other policies. It first provided
customized training for new and expanding industries in 1958, and has
elaborated such firm-based training since then. Its community colleges
are focused on workforce development to an extent matched in few other
states. The current governor, Jim Hunt, has been in office for four terms,
interrupted by one term of a Republican governor who continued Hunt's
initiatives, in particular working hard to systematize the various
workforce development programs. As in Oregon, there has been
bipartisan support for more effective and customer-focused education
and training programs, ensuring progress even when the legislature and
the governor have been of opposite parties.
O In addition to its efforts in the 1980s to create a comprehensive economic
development plan, the Florida legislature created Enterprise Florida, Inc.,
a public/private partnership between the state's business, government,
and education sectors dedicated to expanding economic development.
This partnership, together with strong support from Governor Lawton
Chiles and bipartisan legislative support, paved the way for Florida's
innovation. The state has consistently followed a path of emphasizing
outcomes rather than process, creating both positive and negative
sanctions for high performance. More recently, it has adopted a broader
variety of market-oriented policies (see Box 1.3). In many programs
especially postsecondary education, including community colleges and
40
NCRVE MDS-1249
adult educationFlorida has been more directive-oriented than most
states, creating coherent state policies where other states have let local
control dominate.
In contrast, several other states have had inconsistent approaches to
workforce development, where promising earlier practices have been
reversed by new political leadership. In several cases, particularly Wisconsin
and Michigan, welfare reform and enthusiasm for "work first" policies have
hijacked earlier efforts at reforming state systems:
0 Wisconsin has long prided itself on being a leader in workforce
development. The Wisconsin Jobs Council (now the Council on
Workforce Excellence) was created in 1987, following a report critiquing
the proliferation of employment and training programs. It emphasized
long-term services for those having trouble finding or keeping
employment, rather than "quick fixes."" The Wisconsin Job Centers,
begun in 1985, were forerunners of one-stop centers. In 1997, 101 human
service and workforce development programs were consolidated into
the Department of Workforce Development. However, the development
of "work first" approaches to welfare (known as Wisconsin Works, or
W2) and Governor Tommy Thompson's obsession with replacing welfare
with workwhat one technical college administrator called "welfare
demolition"are undermining the commitment to education and
training as a strategy, and drawing the attention of policymakers away
from the majority of clients and students in the workforce development
system.
0 In Michigan, Governor James Blanchard created the Michigan
Opportunity System (MOS), which restructured government agencies
and provided individuals with a computer card allowing them credits
for job training or retraining. However, when Governor James Engler
won the 1990 election, he threw out the MOS and began instituting a
different set of more market-oriented reforms. His efforts at reforming
state government were spearheaded by the Michigan Jobs Commission
(MJC) that consolidated more than 30 economic and workforce
development agencies, with local Workforce Development Boards
(WDBs) (covering the regions of the former SDAs) given responsibility
for all Tier One programs. Engler also created tax-free Renaissance Zones
intended to attract business from across the country and retain existing
industrycontradicting his earlier claim that business incentives were
15 See, for example, the case study of Wisconsin in Grubb et al., 1989: "There was an
emphasis in the state agencies and local programs on long-term services for many
job training clients. More than once we heard that there are no 'quick fixes' that
would help JTPA clients" (p. 117).
Toward Order from Chaos
41
ineffective. Most recently he has been an ardent advocate of "work first"
policies; the state's strong economy has allowed many recipients to find
jobs, allowing him to claim credit for reducing welfare. But many of
these efforts are contradictory. Severalparticularly "work first"
programs and Economic Development Job Training (EDJT) programs
focus on short-run needs rather than on the long-run development of
skills; and state mandates around "work first" contradict state efforts to
transfer decisionmaking and planning to local boards. Engler's decision
to start from scratch in 1990 meant that most of the initiatives launched
by Governor Blanchard were thrown out; and his policies have generated
precisely the kinds of turf battles that Blanchard had sought to avoid.
In Maryland, Governor William Donald Schaefer (1988-1994) pressed
for integration and interagency collaboration, creating the Governor's
Workforce Investment Board (GWIB) as a guiding force at the state level.
However, the current governor, Parris Glendenning (also a Democrat)
took a very different approach, placing significantly less emphasis on
interagency collaboration and appointing new agency heads who needed
to establish their own turf. As a result, GWIB has been weakened, and
an earlier movement toward consolidation has been reversed.
Glendenning also separated economic development from education and
training; and the consolidation of job training for welfare recipients has
caused a separation of welfare-related training from other workforce
development initiatives. State agencies appear to be initiating
collaboration independently, rather than through central mechanisms
like GWIB, and newer federal initiatives (e.g., one-stop centers and STW)
are pushing integration forward, but these are independent efforts rather
than a coherent state policy of system-building. As one official mentioned,
"integration is not [Glendenning's] deal"; he has "gone back to a more
traditional outlook on government services," based on independent state
agencies.
In Massachusetts, Governor Michael Dukakis first established the
Massachusetts Jobs Council and Regional Employment Boards (REBs)
in 1988 to rationalize education and training. However, a recession
which had begun in Massachusetts by 1988, and which was longer and
deeper than in most statesforced retrenchment of most government
programs and brought coordination to a halt. When the Weld
administration took over in 1991, it used the Massachusetts Jobs Council/
REB structure but in a very different way, developing the competitive
model first used in the process of creating one-stop Career Centers.16
But because Massachusetts has been engaged in such efforts for only a
16 The market-like approach in Massachusetts was explicitly based on David
Osborne's (1992) Reinventing Government, an interesting and unusual example of
trying to create a set of coherent principles for workforce development.
42
NCRVE MDS-1249
i5 5
short time, and with less consistent emphasis on reform than in the 1980s,
much of the commitment to a "market-based workforce development
system" is still rhetorical and has not found its way into practice;
Massachusetts is nowhere near the stage of Florida, for example.
Now it is possible that, even in states that reverse their policies, there
are still important legacies of earlier periods of coordination. Maryland is
the most obvious case in point: although the GWIB has been substantially
weakened, it did initiate a collaborative planning process that continues to
influence the development of new programs, like one-stop centers and STW.
Collaborative local planning efforts are widely thought to be more common
than before the development of GWIB; the real difference, under the current
administration, is that such collaboration is based on perceptions of local
needs rather than top-down directions from the state. Furthermore, several
state agencies have come to see the need for cooperation: the Department
of Human Resources (DHR) and the Department of Business and Economic
Development (DBED) are pooling resources to assist businesses relocating
in Maryland; DBED has initiated collaboration with SDAs and the
Employment Service (ES) to help with corporate expansion; some DHR
and ES staff are being co-located at the local level. And there are some
current efforts to revitalize and reshape the GWIB's mission.
Thus, it is possible to argue that, once a state begins to change the ideas
and cultures around cooperation, these efforts will live on informally even
after more formal state efforts have waned. This may be true to some extent,
but the "more traditional outlook on government services" is likely to lead
over time to the "traditional" independence of government agencies. As a
local official noted, anticipating that local coordination efforts would
decline, "Integration takes energy. Unless you apply an input of energy,
[the system] is not naturally integrated. The only way it gets integrated is
if there's some force field." Furthermore, cooperation will remain uneven
when some agencies don't care to cooperate, lack the resources to do so,
ormost commonlyare prevented from doing so from conflicting state
and federal requirements.
At the local level, VET administrators in states with frequent changes
often complain about the "reform du jour," as we will see in Section III.17
This had led local administrators to be less willing to work hard to
implement state reforms. Like reform in K-12 education, instability has a
large cost in making local resistance a self-fulfilling prophecy.
17This sentiment is reminiscent in K-12 education of similar complaints when there
are too many overlapping reforms, coming thick and fast. Under these conditions,
classroom teachers can simply outwait any reform they dislike, certain that it will
be superseded by another.
A
.
Toward Order from Chaos
43
Overall, then, stable conditions in state government have been important
to progress in creating more coherent workforce development systems. In
states where there have been abrupt reversals in policy, or flagging attention
to reform, progress has substantially slowed. In addition, the states that
have made the most sustained progress have managed to develop bipartisan
support for reforms, rather than making education and training a political
issue in the narrowest sense. The obvious advice is that state leaders are
usually better off focusing on a common vision of what changes are needed,
building on the efforts of the past rather than taking entirely new directions.
Resistance from Education Providers
Many states began with a vision of including education programs
particularly postsecondary vocational education and adult educationinto
their reforms, since the boundary between education and training is a fluid
one. Adult education provides a great deal of remedial education and ESL
that are crucial for other vocational preparation, and community colleges
provide both remedial and vocational skills training that can be used in
other programs. However, in the states we studied, these early plans were
often thwarted by the resistance of education providers in one of several
ways. In Texas and Michigan, for example, adult education fought to
maintain its independence. Because adult educators can mobilize legions
of former and current students, they were able to prevent being included
in the TWC and the MJC, respectively." In Massachusetts, adult education
is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Education; as a result, the
Massachusetts Jobs Commission has no real authority over it.
Of course, there are a few counter-examples. For example, Oregon's adult
education programs have been widely incorporated into state plans;
Maryland has made workforce development and welfare reform priorities
for adult education; and Oklahoma's voluntary efforts include all education
agencies in the state. In general, however, adult education programs have
kept out of workforce development initiatives.
Similarly, community collegesthe major providers of adult
occupational education in virtually every statehave not been part of these
reforms except in North Carolina, where community colleges have been
oriented to economic development for a long time; in Florida, where both
community colleges and technical centers operated by K-12 districts have
been included in regional planning efforts; in Oregon, where the Office of
Community College Services has been active in statewide coordination and
where local colleges have provided job training under subcontract and been
18 Adult education in Michigan is a Tier Two program, so that local WDBs can still
plan how their funds are used locally, even though funding comes from the state's
department of education.
44
NCRVE MDS-1249
5
C
active in regional WQCs; and in Oklahoma's voluntary Workforce Quality
Compacts. SometimesTexas is a good examplecommunity colleges
fought successfully to stay independent of a central state agency, just as
adult education did. As a Texas state official mentioned,
I think colleges would just as soon that government gets out of
their way and lets them alone to do their own thing. There has
been resistance [to coordination and consolidation] because colleges
wanted less oversight . . . . The community colleges in this state
come from a very strong junior college background, where they
are providing academic transfer kinds of stuff. Some colleges have
been a little slow in coming around to the development of that
[workforce development] part because they have so many people
who come in and want to take an academic program.
In Wisconsin, local career development centers and community colleges
were often independent of one another, even though they were located
within blocks of one another. In other cases, as in Iowa and Maryland,
community colleges were not part of initial planning efforts; and because
they were not part of discussions, it has been difficult to incorporate them
into a developing process.19 In some statesparticularly some states that
we did not visitcommunity colleges continue to view themselves as
academic and transfer institutions, rather than as embracing a wide range
of purposes. In these cases, linking community colleges with other training
and economic initiatives has been particularly difficult.
Even when community colleges have participated, their entrenched
practices have often limited the extent of the participation. In North
Carolina, with its occupationally oriented colleges, an initiative from the
Department of Human Services sought a more holistic approach for welfare
recipients than colleges were then providing, based on the model of the
Center for Employment Training (CET) in San Jose.2° When no college had
developed such an encompassing approach, one was "drafted" to participate.
So far, it has been able to incorporate only some of the CET elements.
19 However, Maryland has a new initiative for Advanced Technology Centers, and
there is hope for bringing more community colleges into the overall system.
20 The CET is an exemplar that has twice been found through random-assignment
studies to be more effective than other training programs; see the JOBSTART
evaluation by Cave, Bos, Doolittle, and Toussaint (1993) and the Minority Female
Single Parent Demonstration evaluation by Gordon and Burghardt (1990). However,
the reasons for its effectiveness are unclear and sometimes disputed: one "official"
story is that it works because it integrated both vocational and academic education
(Rockefeller Foundation and Wider Opportunities for Women, 1989), but our
observations suggest that the combination of real work (in a day care center,
58,
Toward Order from Chaos
45
In addition, many colleges have weak links to local employers; they are
often driven by the demand for enrollments rather than the demand for
placements." Thus, even in the highly regarded North Carolina system, a
director of economic development criticized over-enrollment in a
cosmetology program while other jobs were going unfilled; a dean of
occupational education complained that employers were crying for
multiskilled welders while the college was unable to recruit students
because of its inflexible schedules, and the dean of continuing education
reported increasing enrollments in short-term welding classesflexible but
inappropriate to preparing multiskilled welders. Community colleges have
sometimes knocked themselves out of coordinated systems because of their
inflexibility; the time they require to initiate new programs; and, in some
states, their disdain for occupational preparation and noncredit courses.
In Section VII we will examine more carefully the negative consequences
of maintaining a division between education and training. In general, our
evidenceand the implicit views of states that have intended to include
them in reform effortssuggests that both education and training would
benefit from additional coordination, that each has much to learn from the
other, and that greater coordination between them would help individuals
and employers alike. For the moment, it is sufficient to point out that a
seamless system has in many states been thwarted by the resistance of
education providers.
Occasionally other programs have been known to resist integration. In
Wisconsin, for example, vocational rehabilitation unsuccessfully opposed
being included in the state's consolidation efforts from the beginning. These
programs felt that their clients needed special assistance that would be
threatened by their incorporation within a larger Department of Workforce
Development. In Oklahoma, the JTPA system has been viewed as resistant
to change by advocates of broader system reform. However, most resistance
appears to have come from education providers.
cafeteria, and other small businesses that CET operates), ancillary support services
including placement, a special emphasis on the needs of Spanish-speaking
immigrants, and long-standing ties to employers are responsible as well (Grubb,
1996a, pp. 81-82).
" These findings echo those in Grubb (1996b), especially Chapter 6, which examined
community colleges in four local labor markets and found connections to employers
much weaker than colleges claimed.
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Inconsistencies in State Practices
Even though many states are moving to coordinate policies through state-
level councils, they have sometimes failed to iron out inconsistencies in
their own policy developments. These contradictions then send confusing
messages to both local and state administrators, and may complicate
coordination just as a state is trying to enhance such reforms. The following
are some examples of these inconsistencies:
States continue to proliferate traditional categorical programs, despite
commitment to coordination and consolidation. In North Carolina,
community colleges have been centers for providing a wide variety of
services, including literacy programs. Yet when the state received a
federal grant for a literacy resource center, it created independent centers
apart from the college centers. This created a new constituency with
political clout (the largely volunteer resource centers), further divided
scarce funding, and muddled coordination efforts. In Texas, the
legislature created the Texans Work Program for welfare recipients, which
some see as yet another job training programthough it also provides a
variety of subsidies to employers (who need not pay payroll taxes, UI,
health insurance, or pensions for trainees).
Many efforts to enhance coordination do so by creating a new agency or
advisory body, contributing again to the proliferation of programs. For
example, while one-stop centers are intended to make the workforce
development system function more smoothly, their creation at the same
time means that new programs arise in new locations, with new names
and identities. It has been difficult to determine exactly what they do,
and we suspect that potential clients have the same problem. In
Oklahoma, with its nascent Workforce Quality Compacts, leaders in two
of the three local areas we visited saw some value in establishing a local
Compact but also commented that this could end up as "just another
meeting" or "another layer of bureaucracy."
Some states have been unable to make up their minds about the
composition of state-level coordinating agencies. For example, Michigan
has changed course several times in its treatment of UI and ES. In 1991,
Governor Engler tried to place the two in the new Michigan Employment
Security Agency (MESA). This change was challenged legally but upheld
after a six-year battle. The two programs were then moved under the
authority of the MJC. Unsure about how to integrate MESA into the
MJC, Engler hired a consulting firm. As a result of their report, UI will
be transferred to the Department of Consumer and Industry Services,
ES will remain under the MJC's Control, and MESA's other functions
will be delegated to local WDBs. Seven years after the creation of MESA,
UI is now independent and the integration of ES has only begun.
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Toward Order from Chaos
47
Turf battles and rivalries are almost inevitable as states begin to
coordinate. In Oklahoma, JTPA considered itself one of the few existing
workforce development programs, and felt excluded when it was
represented on the state-level Workforce Quality Compact through the
director of the Employment Security Commission rather than through
the state JTPA director. Other state directors were skeptical of JTPA claims
to being the centerpiece of workforce development. In their view, JTPA's
statutory focus on serving specific populations meant that it did not
provide universal services accessible to all job seekers and, therefore, it
could not constitute the principal system. As one mentioned,
The demand of the marketplace is bigger than any one institution
can supply. So when one institutional person stands up and says
"we're it," that's a very provincial, self-serving, narrow perspective
on their part, and I want to say "you're part of it but you're not it."
States are sometimes unwilling or unable to impose a uniform policy on
different programs with federal funding. In Massachusetts, the funding
for the new career centers came from several sources of federal funds
flowing to various state agencies, which then needed to develop complex
interagency agreements to transfer funds to local career centers. The
process of negotiating these agreements has been one in which separate
agencies continue to impose their own service and performance
requirementsa process that, from the perspective of career centers,
represents the "revenge of the bureaucrats." From the perspective of
overall state policy, this conflict represents an inability or unwillingness
of the state to force state agencies to follow a uniform policy consistently.
The voluntary efforts in Oklahoma create their own special problems.
Communication with the public has not been particularly strong,
breeding some question about the motives of state officials. Because of
the informal meetings, some people perceive the state Compact as
exclusive and secretive. Employers were not involved at the early stages
because state directors wanted to develop their own working
relationships before opening up the group to employers. The state
directors view it as simply a matter of time before private sector
employers as heads of local Compacts will be included in the state-level
groupwhich, in fact, took place in late 1997. But this postponement of
including employers led some detractors to claim that the state did not
intend to include employers, and that the state was "not modeling what
it expects the locals to do." There are advantages to an informal and
voluntary beginning, but this way of working is deeply contrary to
established practice and generates its own resistance.
The largest contradictionone we will explore in greater detail in Section
Vis between "work first" policies and the impulse to provide education
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61
and training in the workforce development system. Community colleges
and job training programs are designed to help relatively unskilled
individuals get into the labor force by improving their work-related
competencies, but if an individual is on welfare, they cannot use these
services in "work first" states. Many state officials expect that, without
adequate education and training, many current welfare recipients will
continue to be cyclically unemployedwith little hope that the state
programs will be able to help them. As one community college president
in North Carolina mentioned, welfare recipients "are going to get dead-
end jobs to start with, and they can't live off that. And they lose their
benefits, and where are we?" The conflict between these two approaches
is also evident in some of the One-Stop Career Centers in Texas, which
have placed greater emphasis on identifying individual needs and
referring them to appropriate education and training despite the state's
"work first" policy.
These inconsistencies illustrate the many kinds of changes that states
need to make if they are to effectively coordinate their workforce
development programs. Of course, working out such problems may simply
require time and stability in policy direction. It is unrealistic to assume that
the many problems that have accumulated over three decades of
proliferating programs can vanish quickly.
Competing Priorities for Individual Programs
Although there has been a long history of complaints about the lack of
coordination, a common problem is that coordination is near the bottom of
every program's priorities. Particularly in a period of substantial change,
each program has its own problems to worry about, long before it turns its
attention to its relationships with other programs. Thus, welfare
departments in every state are worrying about conforming to new federal
requirements for welfare "reform," and have little energy to think about
coordination. In North Carolina, community colleges are converting from
quarters to semesters, have just adopted a common statewide set of
approved courses, have received large increases in funding for employer
training through occupational extension programs, and are participating
in a new follow-up system operated by the Employment Security
Commission. In Florida, community colleges are grappling with the first
stages of incentive funding, as well as occupational forecasting, the
development of an integrated information system, statewide articulation
mechanisms, and the integration of two delivery systems: (1) the technical
centers of the K-12 system and (2) the community colleges. In Oklahoma,
the state's coordination effort is voluntary, so it is not surprising that it is
often a secondary priority. Coordination may enhance the effectiveness of
.6 2 Toward Order from Chaos
49
a system, but because individual programs and institutions are often caught
up with other changes more closely related to their core purposes, it must
sometimes wait until more pressing issues are resolved.
Multiple Advisory Committees and Substate Entities
While many states have consolidated advisory boards in state HRICs,
there remain many separate programs with different advisory committees,
each pulling in different directions, each with its own political base and
interests. When many boards and commissions coexist, the result can be
stasis. As an administrator in North Carolina noted,
You have a lot of politics in all of this. You've got the folks that
want to be on the workforce development boards and don't want
the community colleges to get all the money. You've got a lot of
political contributors to the Governor and the legislature. . .. And,
although community-based organizations do not make large
contributions, they do have a lot of volunteers.
. .
. Everybody is
protecting their turf, their jobs, their community-based
organizations. Nobody has taken a statewide initiative to really
pull this together. The only person who could truly do this is the
Governor. And the Governor is not willing to take on the politics
of this.
Similarly, in Texas, there is an ongoing feud between the Department of
Human Services and the TWC about who controls policy for welfare-related
changesdespite the presumed consolidation of such training in TWC.
Because states have not been able to consolidate all their education and
training programs, multiple substate regions still exist with inconsistent
boundaries. For example, in Oregon, Regional Strategies Boards, Regional
Workforce Quality Councils (RWQCs), Community College Districts,
Education Services Districts, and SDAs for JTPA all coexist, each with
somewhat different boundaries. This complicates all issues of coordination.
For example, the boundaries of a Regional Strategies Board may lie in two
different RWQC regions, requiring that staff members attend two sets of
meetings. These problems become particularly difficult in rural areas. In
addition, different programs have their own advisory committees. While
some regions in Oregon have managed to have overlapping membership
on advisory committeesso advisors as well as staff become aware of
coordination issuesin other cases, different groups of individuals in a
region meet to advise programs about their directions, potentially pushing
them in very different directions.
In Oklahoma, the voluntary Workforce Quality Compact has established
boundaries for the local WDBs, but their boundaries do not match those of
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the one-stop centers established by the Employment Securities Commission,
which is a member of the state Compact. The lack of common boundaries
and some confusion about which agency is responsible for one-stop centers
has caused local confusion. In Muskogee, for example, the Workforce
Development Program anticipated that it would have substantial control
of the one-stop center, but, in fact, the one-stop center was the responsibility
of a different board under the state's Employment Services Commission,
and the two came into conflict about direction and purpose.
Changes in Roles
Finally, some of the changes in state reforms require new roles for state
personnel, and state personnel may be slow to change their direction. The
most pervasive example is the shift to "work first" programs. In North
Carolina, the state agency had hired many new social workers to provide
case management under the JOBS program. Under "work first," there is an
excess of social workers, so some are being retrained as job developersa
slow process, and one that not only duplicates the efforts of many other
agencies with job developers for low-skilled clients, but also circumvents
the one-stop centers whose responsibilities include placement. Other
changes include the different behaviors required of state officials involved
in technical assistance, with a shift from monitoring to providing help; the
tasks involved in the development and dissemination of information about
programs; and the shift required in moving toward market-like policies
with their requirement of competition. In the absence of staff development
which, as we mentioned in Section I, is comparatively rareit may be
difficult for state administrations to change their roles in these substantial
ways.
These systemic problems that states have had are all quite predictable.
They are all rooted in the underlying problem: thirty years of proliferating
education and training programs have created programs with different
clients, different purposes, and inconsistent forms of administration. It is
not surprising, then, that undoing these differences takes time; requires
revising established patterns; and, in the process, creates considerable
political turmoil. Precisely for this reason, stability is crucial to reform efforts.
The Continued Restrictions of Federal Programs
In the efforts of states to develop more coherent workforce development
systems, the role of the federal government has been decidedly ambiguous.
There continues to be substantial state-federal conflict (mirroring local-state
conflict, in many ways). States often complain about the continued
restrictions of federal rules and regulations, even when there are ways for
states to take more initiative; they sometimes seem to blame federal
G4Toward Order from Chaos
51
regulations when local or state politics are more to blame. In many cases,
training programs that are wholly federally funded, like JTPA, have been
treated by states as federal and, therefore, outside their purview, even when
federal regulations allow substantial amounts of state control and
modification.
In addition, states with a history of reform efforts have relied extensively
on waivers from federal regulations. The best example of this strategy came
in Oregon, where the Oregon Option included a Memorandum of
Understanding signed in 1994 by various state and federal officials "to
redesign and test an outcomes-oriented approach to intergovernmental
service delivery." In essence, the federal government agreed to relax its
regulations for the state, and the state, in turn, would relax its regulations
for local governments, in exchange for measures increasing the performance
of the system, including six benchmarks for improvement. Following this
agreement, a set of waivers called Workflex has allowed up to six states
(including Oregon) to waive federal barriers to greater flexibility. (The WIA
of 1998 allows all states to apply for Workflex.) In effect, the waiver process
allows states to bargain with the federal government over what
improvements they make in exchange for relaxed regulations; therefore,
federal regulation need not be as restrictive as states sometimes describe
it.22
Nonetheless, federal regulations continue to have a restrictive influence.
One source of trouble comes not so much from the existence of regulations,
but from serious uncertainty about the interpretation of regulations. Many
local and state officials complained about the difficulty of getting clear
pronouncements about what is allowable. State officials, regional DOL
officials, and federal DOL officials all make pronouncements on particular
regulations, often inconsistent with one another and inconsistent from
region to region; few are able or willing to refer to written documentation
or prior decisions. Unlike entitlement programs like UI and Social Security,
which have developed a system of administrative laws and judges to
interpret them, there is no record with the force of law to rely on. Instead,
there are a series of DOL "clarifying" documents, without the force of law
or regulation, that seem to be used randomly and inconsistently. And delay
in writing regulations is epidemic: two years after the passage of welfare
reform in 1996, the federal Department of Health and Human Services has
still not issued final regulations, adding to the uncertainty. In this
22 From the federal perspective, the waiver process allows the federal government
to negotiate about state improvements, while the route of consolidation simply
eliminates regulations (along with some federal funding) without any guarantees
about how federal funds are to be used. From the viewpoint of enhancing
effectiveness, the waiver approach may make more sensethough the choice
between the two has rarely been posed in this way.
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65
Kafkaesque situation, it can be impossible to get a clear answer about
whether a particular practice is allowable or not, and waivers are
inconsistent among regions and among states.
The clearest example of this administrative chaos came in the use of ES
funds. Many states would like to use these resources in conjunction with
local coordination efforts to provide information and counseling to a variety
of potential clients, in ways different from the practices of ES with its
reputation for low quality and its insistence on eligibility determination
and lengthy registration procedures. However, when Texas tried to use
funds in these ways, its waiver was denied by a regional DOL official.
Michigan attempted to do something similar and was opposed by DOL; a
lawsuit followed, where Michigan won the first round. In contrast,
Massachusetts did not ask for a waiver and has used ES funds for its local
career centers; and the need for a waiver has not been raised by the regional
DOL. Similarly, Wisconsin has blended ES and TANF training funds
together and contracted out all employment services to the best bidder, as
Massachusetts does, again without DOL objection. Thus, the question of
whether ES funds can be used in subcontracting arrangements, with the
possibility of reforming how such services are provided, does not have a
consistent answer: it depends on the region, on the willingness of a state to
bring a lawsuit, and on the willingness of a state to proceed with its plans
without notifying DOL of its actions.
Of course, federal regulations themselves cause endless problems in state
coordination. The complaints from local and state officials about inconsistent
requirementsgoverning eligibility, advisory committees, reporting
periods and requirements, allowable expenditures, contract years, the
boundaries of regional entities, planning procedures, and a myriad of other
administrative detailsare virtually endless. Here, for example, is the
complaint from a North Carolina official about the lack of a common federal
vocabulary:
The Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education,
Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, and Agriculture all
have different poverty levels. This one word causes more confusion
in programs than any other word in the world. Each Department,
each worker calls something different the poverty guideline. But
they are not the same. So somebody says about their client, "I've
certified them eligible; they meet the poverty guidelines in the JTPA
program." And they send them over to Headstart, who says the
client really isn't eligible at all, because no one understands the
numbers are all over the place. . .. It certainly seems to me that, at
the very least, the feds could have one poverty guideline.
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53
The efforts of local one-stops in Iowa to create a "seamless" system,
combining funds from several programs without the client having to jump
through separate eligibility and assessment procedures, is essentially a
statement that the task of reconciling these conflicts has been a substantial
barrierto potential clients and local programs alike. While we did not
ask state officials for a detailed accounting of the federal regulations that
are the most burdensome, it is clear thatas an alternative to
consolidationthe streamlining of federal regulations would provide a
great boost to local and state coordination efforts.
Finally, the enactment of welfare "reform" has brought a new set of
federal rules and requirements to state workforce development systems.
We will document the negative effects of these changes more carefully in
Section V. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that they introduced new
kinds of rigidity and requirements and constrained state options, rather
than enhancing state control. As many state officials noted, while they had
anticipated consolidation of federal programs and the alleviation of federal
regulations, they, instead, got welfare "reform" with quite the opposite
consequences.
Overall, federal rules and regulations have a negative effect on state
efforts to coordinate their workforce development programs. We also
suspect that they contribute to differences among states. Those states (like
Oregon) that are most active in developing their state plans seek out waivers;
other states (like Michigan), sure of their direction, are willing to challenge
federal restrictions. Less activist states are less willing to challenge these
rules and regulations, howevereven when they are based on the
interpretations of regional officials, or are poorly codified and inconsistent
and so these states make fewer efforts to coordinate programs governed
by federal funding. The result over time is likely to be a greater variation in
what states do.
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SECTION 3
State Policy and Local Responses:
The Balance of State and Local
Initiatives
Workforce development programs are delivered at the local level. No
matter how coherent and rational state policies may be, they make little
difference if local programs do not implement these changes. In this section,
therefore, we examine first how states have tried to implement their policies
at the local level, and then examine what changes have taken place locally
in response to state initiatives based on our examination of two localities
in each of the states we visited.
A decade ago, the most active forms of coordination among workforce
development programs seemed to originate at the local level. Sometimes
these efforts were helped along by state and federal requirements for joint
planning and local advisory committees, to be sure, but they were
dependent more on the ways local administrators and institutions saw their
interests in either joining forces or remaining independent.23 In such cases,
successful coordination was idiosyncratic rather than systematic, occurring
in a few local communitiesthe ones consistently held up as exemplars
while many more simply failed to create much coordination at all. The
question, then, is whether the more recent efforts of states to create more
coherent workforce development systems have had more effect at the local
level, and whether we can detect any tendency for more local communities
to enhance their coordination as a result of state policies. This is, of course,
a much larger question than we can answer by examining only two
communities within each state, and for many states it is still too early to
expect many local responses to state initiatives. Nonetheless, information
from the local level provides some indication of which state policies are
more and less likely to have local effects. And from studying the interactions
between local and state governments, it seems apparent that the structure
of local and state efforts is moving in the direction of greater coordination,
albeit slowly, fitfully, and with complaints on both sides.
23 See, again, the NCRVE reports cited in footnote 5, particularly Grubb and
McDonnell (1996), which identified five local functions influencing the extent and
nature of local coordination.
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55
A Continuum of State Strategies
The different states that we examined vary substantially in the degree of
direction over local programs. Some of them arewhether from a
philosophical belief or political necessityhighly respectful of local
autonomy, and have tried to improve workforce development through
additional funding, exemplars and technical assistance, and other efforts
that change the local culture around education and training programs by
clarifying the local self-interest in doing so. Others, often more insistent
that education and training are state rather than local prerogatives, have
introduced more directive measures intended to force localities to comply
with state policythat is, more stick than carrot, more top-down than
bottom up. The states we have examined fall roughly into three different
strategies: (1) laissez-faire approaches; (2) "centrally guided, locally
directed" efforts; and (3) directive state policies.
Laissez-Faire Approaches
Some states have done little to encourage local programs to coordinate
in any way. Because we deliberately chose a sample of states known to be
actively reforming their workforce development systems, a laissez-faire
approach is rare among these ten states. However, Arizona provides a good
example of a state that has let local communities set their own direction.
Aside from the implementation of one-stop centers, which provide vehicles
for joint planning if local programs choose to do so, there isn't much state
direction. Laissez-faire approaches generate the results that have been
typical in most states: local initiative in coordination, with wide variations
among communities in the extent of joint activities and planning.24
"Centrally Guided, Locally Directed" Efforts
By far the most common approach to local implementation in the ten
states we examined was the approach that Oklahomans describe as centrally
guided but locally directed. This approach tends to avoid mandates on
local governments, recognizing that local autonomy is both necessary and
politically unavoidable. However, the state provides some guidance and
encouragement (including fiscal encouragement) for local communities to
plan and coordinate their programs. The Oklahoma effort is marked by
voluntarism at both the local and the state levels because of the belief that
enforced consolidation merely creates new layers of bureaucracy, conflict,
24 In a few cases, states like Texas have developed clear visions for a workforce
development system, though problems in implementation have prevented the
vision from being realized. While the effect for the moment may be the same as a
laissez-faire policy, over the long run such states may find ways to implement
their vision.
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60
and resistance. The Workforce Quality Compact supports the state vision
that changes will be centrally guided but locally directed. Central guidance
means that state members (state agency heads) will try to adhere to the
principles of the Compact "before they start another program or run another
contract," and the state agencies will provide "a great deal of training, of
field support for the paradigm shift away from the traditional, and a
willingness to promote and publicize the positive aspect of that change,"
as one state official mentioned. Local direction is necessary because local
providers need to be responsive to local employers in reshaping their
programs because communities across the state are very different, and
because reform "would only work if it was bottom up instead of top down
because if they're not interested in doing this, it will never happen."
Ultimately, the state-level Compact in Oklahoma expects direction from
local Compacts in the form of suggestions for changes at the state level to
allow coordinated delivery at the local level. The state has hired two
"evangelists" to travel around the state to raise awareness of the need for
greater coordination. However, there are currently few mechanisms to
require local Compacts to be formed; and local Compacts, taking their cue
from state efforts, will bring together education, training, employment, and
welfare providers but without directive power. We can anticipate that
like in Oregonenthusiasm for these efforts will vary considerably around
the state.
In Oregon, the state is trying to establish a culture of coordination without
sanctions in which expectations and peer pressure encourage local
communities. The state's effort to develop a comprehensive data system
and the Oregon Benchmarks may make it more obvious when a community
is falling behind its peers, though there are no coercive mechanisms. Its
theory of change, relatively simple to express though difficult to implement
consistently, supports locally planned and administered programs. The
primary strategy to change locally is peer pressurefrom employers, other
service providers, and even other regionswith the help of state
benchmarks and performance measures that create measures of outcomes
and progress visible to all. But if a region chooses not to link its programs,
there are no sanctions; if it fails to meet performance targets, the response
is technical assistance rather than reduced funding. The idea is "not to force
people, but [to] have people want to do it," as one state administrator
declared, because "if they don't buy it, they won't do it." State leadership
is important, to be sure, to communicate to business leaders that government
is serious about change, and to create the expectationscommunicated
through benchmarks and performance standardsfor improvement, but
local control is important because "needs are local and resources.are local."
The downside of this policy is that there has been uneven implementation
of state directives. State administrators estimated that about half the state's
regions embraced the purposes of the regional Workforce Quality Councils
7poward Order from Chaos
57
(WQCs) in some meaningful way. Other localities were just "dadgum
resistant," not wanting the state to tell them what to do, or perceiving
coordination to be unnecessary.
Massachusetts has taken the same approach, though some feel that the
balance between the local initiative and the state's role has gone too far in
the local direction; for example, when the state allowed centers to develop
their own data systems, the result was a set of incompatible systems that
prevent comparisons among regions. Similarly, in Maryland, Governor
Schaefer's Workforce Investment Board did not dictate who provided
services locally, but, rather, encouraged collaborative planning. Particularly
when new money became available, common planning was encouraged
or, as one local policymaker commented approvingly, "the state demanded
planning," trying to bridge the "we/them" mentality in local programs.
However, under Governor Glendenning, the Governor's Workforce
Investment Board (GWIB) has been substantially weakened, and in one
sense Maryland has gone back to being a laissez-faire state. One local
administrator mentioned that the state had created "no new barriers, but
no new support either" for local coordination, so that "the state allows
locals to work out integration issues themselves"; in the creation of onestop centers, the state has disbanded the state team promoting greater
integration of one-stop services and has stopped "beating locals into onestop formation." However, the state is also moving toward more marketoriented mechanisms that are in some ways more directive, as we will see
shortly.
Iowa's approach has been similar, though it has been trying to use state
policy to create local action where little has existed before (at least in some
regions). The hope is that the new Regional Advisory Boards (RABs) create
a new set of stakeholders who will drive developments first at the local
level, and then at the state level. As one state official commented, the goal
is "to give the local center operators, the Regional Advisory Boards, and
the coordinating services in each region a sack of money and tell them,
'you invest this where you think it's needed most in your community"
though subject to state approval. In part, this appears to have given many
outlying regions in the state a greater chance for autonomy. As one local
RAB member mentioned,
I think one of the most innovative things the state has done was
the fact that they decided it was time to consolidate efforts and
services and the fact that they broke the state down into regions.
We always feel like, outside of Des Moines, that if something's a
statewide effort, it means it's in Des Moines; otherwise, you see a
little dribble here and there. So I think the fact that they did give
regional control and regional input as to how the system is set up,
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71
how it will be monitored, is probably the best innovation in 20
years.
Evidently states can manage to delegate their powers, and in creating an
effective workforce development system this may be virtually necessary.
Other states have relied on supportive mechanisms and encouragement:
As we have pointed out (see Box 1.2), North Carolina has made extensive
use of technical assistance. The state Workforce Quality Compact in
Oklahoma hired staff to support the development of local Compacts. In
Maryland, one purpose of the GWIB under the previous governor was to
encourage collaborative planning and decisionmaking at the local level,
particularly by encouraging collaborative planning for new programs, but
the state did not dictate who would provide services. This worked well as
long as programs were expanding, but the momentum of such efforts
diminished when the 1990-1992 recession made less state funding available
for new programs; as one local administrator noted, "joint planning for
existing programs didn't work as well." More recently, Maryland has started
to use financial incentives and performance measures to drive local action,
though these more directive efforts are just beginning.
In these essentially voluntary efforts, new initiatives can still carry the
state's imprint, even if the state shies away from forcing old programs to
coordinate. Thus, one-stop centers have provided opportunities to create
local agencies concerned with coordination from the outset, and STW grants
have also enabled states to provide incentivesparticularly fundingfor
local collaboration even where none has existed before. Oregon and
Oklahoma, with their essentially voluntary efforts, have also incorporated
the one-stops into their broader efforts to increase coordinationthough
one-stops have also provided opportunities for old turf battles to re-ignite.
In Maryland, the collaborative planning process has continued to operate
with planning for one-stop centers and STW. But using new programs to
carry the burden of coordination is not necessarily an effective approach
because new programs, by definition, represent a small fraction of overall
resources in workforce development. In addition, some new programs do
not last long and, therefore, do not sustain collaboration.
Directive State Policies
Some states have developed policies that are more directive, and
intentionally or notrequire local communities to respond in various ways.
The market-like mechanisms adopted in Florida and elsewhere are good
examples: while performance-based funding was initially voluntary,
participation will be mandatory in 1999 and will apply to 15% of state
funding for community colleges and technical centers. Local institutions
have no choice about responding to the incentives embedded in the funding
system. As one local WDB director noted, "We're really just getting hit over
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59
the head. PBIF [Performance-Based Incentive Funding] and other measures
are really driving performance. We have to do it."
Similarly, provisions allowing programs to compete with one another
set in motion a process of competition that local officials cannot control,
and they m'ay be forced into competitive relationships with one another. In
Massachusetts, for example, the Michigan Jobs Commission's (MJC's)
requirement that local Regional Employment Boards (REBs) use an open
and competitive bidding process to establish one-stop centers not only
created conflict among local agencies and providers, but also resulted in
winners and losers. In part as a result of this local dissatisfaction,
Massachusetts has modified its stance, allowing local REBs to choose either
a competitive or a collaborative model for establishing one-stops. They are,
thus, forced into competitive relationships. In- Michigan, the state has
required local workforce boards to contract out all services, generating local
opposition as well. As one local official noted,
One of the state policies to ensure that a workforce board has
complete autonomy in making policy is that they will sever
relationships with providing direct services to clients. Our staff
used to provide many services out of our office. The state then
said we could not do it anymore because there was a conflict of
interest. But what is upsetting is that they did not give credible
institutions an opportunity to prove that they could do it without
entertaining the appearance of a conflict of interest. So we had to
farm out services to inexperienced agencies within the community
to run the system; a viable delivery system was, in essence, torn
apart. You can expect to see a drop in performance just because of
the transition.
When states have developed more directive policies, they are sometimes
trying to change business as usual. For example, requiring local boards to
subcontract large amounts of education and training accomplishes two
goals: (1) it replaces the tendency to fund small, narrowly targeted mandates
(like training for a specific entry-level occupation) with the resources to
accomplish broader changes; and (2) it can break up conflicts of interest
when members of a PIC represent providers bidding for funds. These are
cases where local boards have ceased to represent the interest of local clients
and employers, and state activities are intended to instigate more effective
practices.
In the current climate of devolution of authority to more local levels,
there has been little appetite for more directive state policies aside from
market-like mechanisms and the large exception of welfare policy, which
we examine shortly. However, policymakers do recognize that the approach
of central guidance and local direction allows some regions to coordinate
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while others do not. In Oregon, for example, local officials noted that if the
state really wanted to achieve coordination more uniformly, "it's going to
have to mandate it" in order to prod the more resistant individuals and
organizations; mere encouragement might take too long compared to firmer
state leadership and more "top down" strategies. Similarly, policymakers
in Oklahoma have voiced some uncertainty about the effectiveness of purely
voluntary efforts. As one local official noted,
The one big problem with the Compact right now, from what we've
seen, is you've still got at the state and federal levels a lot of money
in the form of grants. . . . As long as they do that and the state
doesn't take a hard stand and say, "no more monies unless you
cooperate," it's not going to work. And every time we turn around,
there's going to be something else going on we didn't know about.
But the overall tenor of most state activities has been to forego such directive
efforts on the grounds that they cannot be very effective anywayat least
not at this stage of system-building.
The one great exception to the avoidance of directive mechanisms has
come in welfare policy. States that adopted aggressive "work first" programs
(like Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin) have given
local agencies no choice about adopting such policies. Typically, the only
activities that count as required work in these states are short (e.g., twoweek) job search assistance activities followed by work placementsso
local authority to provide longer education and training, or to tailor
programs to the needs of individuals, or to accommodate individuals who
have already enrolled in education or training programs and want to
complete them is completely curtailed. In turn, this kind of state directive
has alienated a number of local programs that have been committed to
providing more education and training for welfare recipients, not less. In
Michigan, one local official noted the conflict between the state's "work
first" policy and its commitment to local autonomy:
When the state introduced its Work First program, it was pretty
clear to most of us at the local level that there was a strong political
agenda. The rule was to get people placed as quickly as possible
with as little cost as possible. The state didn't care what type of job
it was. That really went against the grain of what the board has
been working on for the last 20 years, which is to provide quality
services to individuals and to assist clients in obtaining long-term,
self-sustained employment by providing good assessments upfront and addressing the barriers. Obviously this is an instance
where the WDBs are not having much autonomy.
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61
Similarly, officials at the local level in Texas objected to the state's "work
first" policy. One complained that "the biggest complaint [from employers]
has been that TWC sends people without a lot of skills." Another
administrator at a local job center noted the conflict between local and state
policy:
I don't think that is doing a service to the employer or to the
And if I had that attitude of not wanting to seek
retention on the job, I would lose the employers who are the
individual.
.
.
.
customers of the centerand I can't afford to lose them. The [local]
board will fire [us] if we're just throwing bodies at employers.
In Maryland, SDAs administered job training for welfare recipients for many
years; but under the recent governor and "work first," the state decided
that SDAs would no longer play that role. In turn, some SDAs have become
highly critical of the recent welfare "reforms," arguing for the need for pre-
and post-employment training despite the state's commitment to "work
first." As one local administrator noted, the state in the past developed a
coordinated workforce development system; now "the state has forced a
parallel delivery system, one for welfare recipients and one for everybody
else."
It's still too soon to know what the resolution of this conflict will be;
obviously the future of welfare "reform" will be a hotly debated topic at all
levels. For the moment, however, changes in welfare-to-work programs
have generated some of the most heated conflicts between local programs
and state policy, and some of the most obvious contradictions between
state commitment to local autonomy and the prescriptiveness of state
welfare policy.
State Creation of Local Autonomy
In between the two extremes of local control and more directive state
policies, Iowa is an example of a state where policy has been centrally
developed, though it is trying to create a more locally directed system that
can respond to local conditions flexibly. One goal of recent legislation is to
have the RABs create their own policies, and over time develop a new set
of stakeholders who will then drive state policyinstead of having state
policy drive local decisions. This overall plan has won some support from
the local levelexemplified by the RAB member quoted above who said
that "the fact that they did give regional control and regional input as to
how the system is set up, how it will be monitored, is probably the best
innovation in 20 years."
However, realizing this vision will take a long time and will require
substantial changes in the roles of local administrators. Because there is no
history of local autonomy (except in community colleges), the RABs must
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be developed and nurtured to fulfill their new responsibilities. For their
part, RAB members complained about inadequate funding for the
requirements imposed by the state, lack of authority over programs (like
the inability to force programs to co-locate in one-stop centers), different
schedules and conceptions of purposes coming from different state
programs, and the special problems of location and distance in rural areas
all except the last being problems created by the persistence of state rules
and practices despite a decision to develop more local autonomy. Of course,
the process of developing local autonomy will require a series of small
tests of local decisions against state policies. With stability and time, such a
locally driven system might develop, though changes and inconsistencies
in state policies can easily undermine such a vision.
Local Anticipation of State Changes
States can have some influence on local activities, even in the absence of
encouragement, simply by discussing potential changes in state policy. In
Michigan, for example, Governor Blanchard's efforts to create the Michigan
Opportunity System (MOS) in the late 1980s and into 1990 caused many
local areas to begin moving toward greater cooperation in anticipation of
changes. Then, when Governor Engler unexpectedly won election in 1990,
the MOS itself was eliminated but the local planning created the conditions
for further local coordination, particularly around one-stop centers. Now,
some localities, having moved to greater local coordination, perceive the
state as "heavy-handed" and overly directiveparticularly in the areas of
"work first," competitive subcontracting, and other market-oriented
reforms. However, others seem pleased with what the state has done. Thus,
the train of local planning, once set in motion, may generate its own
momentum independently of state efforts. Something similar has happened
in those states, like Texas, that anticipated federal consolidation: their
coordination efforts live on despite the failure of federal legislation.
The independence of local efforts can also be seen in Maryland, which,
like Michigan, reversed its state efforts. The local planning set in motion
under Governor Schaefer seems to have had a lasting influence, particularly
in local planning of STW and one-stop centers; several local policymakers
we interviewed were indifferent to, and not fully aware of, changes at the
state level and were continuing with local cooperation despite any changes.
But others resented the fact that the state is "regressing" in its efforts; as
one complained, the state, "which not too many years ago was seen clearly
as a leader in workforce development, is going in the wrong direction."
The comment already citedthat "integration takes energy" or "some force
field" to maintain italso came from a local Maryland official. Without
the governor's commitment and backing, therefore, "things go back to the
way they were."
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63
The Special Role of One-Stop Centers
Finally, federally funded one-stop centers have played a role in
promoting local coordination, almost despite state policy. In many cases,
state policy about one-stop centers has not been especially active. But the
very process of forcing programs to come together, even around the
provision of minimal information, has forced local programs to work
together around a specific project, in ways that consultation requirements
and sign-offs never have. The very act of agreeing to share information
and location exceeds any previous level of communication; joint planning
is a new activity for many programs, and a foundation on which other
activities can be built. As a community college administrator in North
Carolina noted about the local one-stop,
We've been living together before, but now we're married. There
are different rules now. In a marriage, one set of strengths
complements weaknesses in another partner. We use informal
negotiations to reach decisions. Our matured partnerships
overcome making sure everyone contributes exactly the same
amount.
And where one-stops have moved beyond information provision to colocation, then the extent of interaction has increased even more. In this
way, federal policy has contributed to greater coordination at the local level.
As a local official in Michigan noted,
No Wrong Door is really forcing us all to sit down at the table and
figure out how we can maintain a system and still provide what
we think are essential services to a universal population with
reduced budgets. . . . In a year or two down the line, I think that
we'll really be doing more for the population with less effort and
they'll still get the quality that they want.
Now, it is easy to oversell the reality of one-stop centers. In some places,
they provide information only in "self-service" mode, often in computerbased systems that are unlikely to be useful to unsophisticated consumers.
In other cases, they have been so engulfed by responsibilities for welfare
recipients that they are likely to be shunned by other potential clients and
employers. But where states have managed to consider them more
expansively, their potential for knitting together local programsincluding
those like community colleges and adult education that are poorly
integrated at the state levelis substantial. The Newmark Center in Oregon,
described above in Section I, provides an excellent example.
:
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,
Local Responses: The Varieties of Resistance and
Resentment
When we examine local responses to state initiatives, we obviously find
a continuum. Some communities are not particularly interested in
cooperation and coordination, and of course they resist whatever the state
is trying to doparticularly if the state uses any directive mechanisms. On
the other hand, communities that are trying to coordinate actively are likely
to be ahead of the state, and they may resent state policy for failing to clear
away the inevitable barriers to coordination, or for failing to give them the
freedom to cooperate more completely. There is a broad range of local
disagreement with what states are trying to dotherefore, although it is
important to identify the stage of local coordination before interpreting
local reactions.
In Florida, for example, there is noticeable resentment from local
providers toward the state's imposition of performance-based funding,
which is clearly interpreted as coercive. The same feelings, about the state
being "heavy-handed," exist in Michigan toward the requirements for
subcontracting services and in Massachusetts toward the requirements that
job centers be created through competitive bidding. In Texas, local programs
have resented the late and inconsistent state guidance about
implementation, stringent contracting rules, slow turnaround on contracts,
and the overbearing "work first" approach for all education and training.
In Wisconsin, local reaction to state changes has been decidedly mixed,
and there is considerable "state-bashing" by localities. One state official
characterized it as an attitude of "leave the money at the border of the
county and then go back to Madison," and another claimed that there had
been collusion in some counties to thwart state efforts at uniformity across
job centers:
It's been a studied decision and, you know, purposeful approach
not to do things in an SDA-wide manner.... They're all very happy
to sort of coexist next to each other, but separate from the state.
In some cases, state policies that are initially resented by local providers
develop their own constituencies. For example, performance-based
budgeting was viewed with some trepidation in Florida; however, the
community colleges that have increased their resources through high
performance are quite pleased with themselves and with the new form of
budgeting, and they will certainly continue to be supportive of performance-
based budgeting. In Massachusetts, where resentment of competitive
bidding forced the state to allow local REBs to use either competitive bidding
or cooperative procedures to establish job centers, about half of the REBs
continued to use competitive bidding. So, resented though these directive
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65
policies may be initially, they have ended up changing practices for at least
some localities, and they create their own political support as well.
On the other hand, localities that are trying actively to coordinate resent
it when the state is not moving fast enough (or not moving at all). In
Maryland, local officials generally resented the move "backward" in terms
of state support for coordination. One mentioned that the state had
previously "looked at setting overall policy," but under Governor
Glendenning there are "almost six state agencies with a piece of the
workforce development pie, and no one is in the lead. . . [This makes it
difficult to operate locally because I don't know who's calling the shots."
In North Carolina, there was general agreement from both local and state
.
officials that the real initiative for innovation is local. One state official noted,
"I find that the locals figure out ways to do it. . . [The locals are doing it,
maybe because they have less resources or their communities are small. I
.
think they're going to succeed in spite of the state." There was some
sentiment that the state could be much more helpful. One local official
commented, "the local partners call for state-level consolidation, but most
of the innovative plans are coming from the local areas." Similarly, in
Arizona, the state was viewed as a serious impediment to local innovation.
As a local official noted,
We've taken the position that we ask for forgiveness, not
permission. . . . We have all learned that if we ask for permission,
it's going to take forever, and we can't wait. We used to ask .the
state, "Look at this and tell us what we can do." Now we say, "Let's
look at it," and then we propose a solution. This is how we can do
it without the regulation.
But under these conditions, local efforts can push the state itself. A local
one-stop director mentioned,
The local government and their community-based organizations
always had a better link with each other because they were directly
dealing with a whole person. But the state has a different view. It
fragmented things. One office just did food stamps, or they only
just did unemployment. They didn't look at the whole person at
all. They only looked at their federal program requirements. So
what I see as the biggest advantage of coordination is getting the
state to talk to itself.
In many of these ten states, one particular inconsistency in state policy
causes near-universal resentment from the local level: requirements for local
coordination, while policy encourages fragmentation at the state level. In
one community in Iowa, for example, the efforts to create a one-stop center
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with co-located services were being thwarted by state policy which gave
some local programs autonomy and enabled them to avoid being co-located:
"If their administrator doesn't want to move their folks into a building that
can handle the whole thing, how do you get it done? And that needs to be
done at the state levelyou can't do that at the local level." In Maryland,
the state-level planning team originally established to promote greater
integration of local services within one-stop centers was disbanded. There
is now no state effort "beating locals into one-stop formation," and local
officials complained that this has prevented them from integrating at the
local level. Similarly, an official with a local Workforce Quality Council
(WQC) in Oregon complained that they had "very little authority at the
local levelvery little control over the JTPA dollars, very little control over
the ABE dollars"in contradiction to the mandate to coordinate locally. In
many of these states, education programs, in particular, enjoy local
autonomy, since they come from a history of local creation and control. In
contrast, many job training and economic programs originated at the federal
level, without a history of local control. Thus, local WDBs confront local
colleges and adult education providers for whom independence and "local
control" have long been articles of faith. The continued separation of
education from job training that we explore further in Section VII comes at
least in part from this disjunction.
A number of technical and bureaucratic details originating in state and
federal policy also make local coordination more difficult. At one of the
local boards in Texas, officials expressed frustration with the state's lack of
clarity about governance models and with its failure to develop common
intake forms and a common automation system. As one official noted, "It
is frustrating to want to move ahead and have the infrastructure not be
ready." The lack of common boundaries in regional units; the inconsistency
in eligibility; different schedules, fiscal years, and accounting mechanisms;
and different definitions of terms in separate reporting requirementsmany
of which are federal rather than state policiesare frequently cited
complaints about state and federal policy, where states have been unwilling
or unable to clear away these bureaucratic barriers to coordination. And
unfunded mandatesan inconsistency between what a state requires and
the funding it providesalways generate local resentment. For example,
Iowa's requirement that job centers provide a list of specified services, and
a presence in every country, has generated discussion about the merits of
thinly spread services versus providing more concentrated services in
population centers, since the state's requirements were not adequately
funded.
The finding that some localities resist state efforts to impose greater
uniformity and coordination, while others trying to move ahead resent that
states have not done more to remove barriers to coordination, is hardly
surprising. Obviously there is a continuum of local approaches, some ahead
,
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67
of and some behind where a state wants to be. What seems to be happening,
in the awkward and disjointed way typical of American federalism, is that
the entire structure of local and state efforts seems to be lurching fitfully in
the direction of greater coordination, pulled along by some localities who
push their states, pulled along by some state and federal policies (especially
one-stops), and dragged back by other policies and recalcitrant local
communities. State policies contribute to this, by carrots and sticks. Even
though some of these efforts are resented, they end up being adopted in
some places, and championed by those who benefit in others. Local
initiatives contribute to this process, too, as local communities try to stretch
their own resources and rationalize services for their citizens and employers,
and local initiatives then push the state to do more. One-stop centers are
providing new forums for local discussion, and other new programsSTW
and welfare reform are the most obvious examplesprovide projects
around which local programs communicate with one another. Data systems
and performance targets help nudge the whole enterprise along, since they
provide new information about what different localities and programs are
doing. To be sure, some localities will always be ahead of others, and some
will always resist change; it is always possible to undo changes, as Maryland
and Michigan in particular have done, and to take different directions, as
welfare "reform" has forced upon states. Overall, however, the direction of
lurching is unmistakably toward greater coordination.
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SECTION 4
The Complex Roles of Employers
Policymakers at all levels as well as researchers have debated the
appropriate roles for employers in workforce education and training
programs for decades. However, many think that employers should play a
larger roleas in the German-speaking countries, with their dual system
of trainingand nearly three decades of government efforts have tried to
expand the roles of employers. President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the
National Alliance of Business/Job Opportunities in the Business Sector
(NAB/JOBS) program in 1968, imploring employers around the nation to
make pledges to hire the economically disadvantaged. In 1972, NAB's thenPresident, William Woodward, offered the following observation on the
tenth anniversary of the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962:
The role of private industry in manpower policy is only at its
beginning. We have come far from the day when employers just
put a sign at the hiring gate when they wanted workers and then
complained about the educational system if the men and women
were not already trained and ready to go to work. We have come
far from the day when we wanted to stand as far away from possible
from government and as far away as possible from social problems.
We have learned that we can work effectively with government
and with local education and with community groups; we have
learned that we have a major role in manpower programs. We have
learned that we have a responsibility to work together in solving
these problems. (Wolfbein, 1973, p. 131)
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter lent his support to an initiative from
Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall to establish advisory private industry
councils (PICs) chaired and dominated by business leaders in local labor
markets.25PICs, together with the chief elected officials in their geographic
areas, ultimately took on oversight, planning, and administrative
responsibility for local job training programs, even as many of them lost
the participation of top-level business leaders.
The problems of youth and their often difficult transitions from school
to successful careers led to the passage of the School-to-Work Opportunities
25 The PIC concept was developed by Stan Arabis, an executive on loan to the DOL
from what was then Sun Oil Company, based on practices in Chicago. This was
itself an interesting illustration of ways to involve employers in publicly funded
workforce efforts.
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69
Act of 1994, which has attempted to develop work-based leaning
opportunities to complement school-based programs. In addition, in 1997
President Bill Clinton resurrected the NAB/JOBS approach in order to get
employers around the country to hire welfare recipients. All of these
initiatives have paid much greater attention to developing opportunities
for work-based learning, at the same time that there remains persistent
concern that we have not yet fully "engaged" employers as much as we
need to (King, McPherson, Long, & Norris, 1996; McPherson, Long, & Sim,
1997).
From our work in ten states, it is unclear whether real progress has been
made in securing substantive involvement of employers in workforce
development. Some states appear to have at least articulated more clearly
the roles which employers should play in their workforce systemseven if,
aside from an exemplary project here or there, few have made any headway
in implementing these roles systemwide. For the most part, however, we
have observed quite traditional roles carved out for employers in these
states. This section briefly characterizes the potential employer roles which
state workforce development systems have identified, and then provides
examples of the actual roles they play in practice. It concludes with several
issues related to engaging employers in workforce development.
Possible Employer Roles
There are many possible roles for employers in state workforce
development systems. They can be simultaneous rather than mutually
exclusive. Some of the more common employer roles include the following
(King et al., 1996; McPherson et al., 1997; U.S. Department of Labor, 1996):
Policymaking and Governance: An earlier and still common role for
employers was participation in either shaping workforce policies or
governing programs. This has ranged from serving on or chairing
councils which were advisory in naturelike the early PICs and the
Employment Service's local Employer Advisory Committeesto those
that established workforce policy or that governed programs to some
extent.
Identification of Training Occupations and Industries: Employers have
advised workforce programs concerning the occupations and industries
which should serve as the basis for training. Since local program
operators generally can forecast growth occupations and industries (and
wage levels) from existing data sets (often from State Occupational
Information Coordinating Committees [SOICC]), employers are often
consulted about "emerging" occupations, ones which by definition
cannot be projected from existing information. For example, even in the
early-to-mid-1990s, few programs would have considered offering
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training opportunities for "website developers" with their public training
dollars; knowledgeable employers, however, might have identified such
an occupation and advised local programs to begin pilot training efforts.
Identification of "Soft" Skills: In addition to identifying growth occupations
and "hard" or technical skills, employers have also played a major role
in the 1990s in identifying so-called "soft" skills needed in the labor
market. The most widely known of these was the Secretary's Commission
on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) (1991), though others have dealt
with the issue recently as well (e.g., Holzer, 1996; Stasz et al., 1993).
SCANS surveyed employers to determine what employers really wanted
from workers on the job in a series of key occupations, and identified
key skills such as thinking skills (including problem solving and creating
thinking) and personal qualities (like integrity and responsibility) in
addition to basic cognitive skills. This led workforce programs to focus
their training efforts on such competencies, in addition to specific
occupational skills. States and some local programs have attempted to
validate these skills with their own employer surveys.
Curriculum Development: Increasingly, acknowledging that employers
know their own workforce needs better than outsiders ever can, some
local programs have engaged them in developing training curricula. Such
involvement can help to ensure that, once trained, a student or participant
has a better chance of securing the job for which he or she has trained.
Standard Setting: More recently, employers have begun to play a role in
setting skill standards (or performance standards, incentives, and
sanctions) for local or state workforce development. Both the National
and State Skill Standards Boards created by the Goals 2000: Educate
America Act of 1994 offer examples of this particular role. Without some
independent "benchmark" of the labor market's expectations, especially
of employers who ultimately control jobs, training efforts might well
meet their program standards, yet still be producing students who cannot
be hired (Barnow & King, 1996).
Employers-as-Contractors or Service Providers: Employers are increasingly
serving as training contractors and workforce service providers. This is
not a new role, since Xerox, RCA, and other large companies have long
served as Job Corps contractors, running residential training centers for
severely disadvantaged youth. In addition, on-the-job training (OJT),
customized training, and employer-based activities such as work
experience and cooperative education all place employers in the role of
trainers. Most states have established special training fundstypically
financed with some combination of UI taxes and state general revenue
to support employer-based or other forms of customized training, often
involving community and technical colleges. Moreover, many localities
and states now are rapidly privatizing their workforce services, involving
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71
firms such as Lockheed Martin, Maximus, and others directly in service
provision.
Employment: The final role listed here is the most obvious: Employers
are the ultimate target of workforce development programs, since they
employ their students. In some states, this role has been articulated clearly
with employers considered the primary customer of workforce services.
Others (King et al., 1996; McPherson et al., 1997) have suggested that
employers might engage more fully in workforce development if they
see their role as consumers of students from high-quality programs,
including public schools, community and technical colleges, CB0s, and
other training providers. Increasingly important worldwide, ISO 9000
requires producers, as well as their major suppliers of inputs, to ensure
that their workforce is trained to certain standards in order for them to
be certified as eligible to do business in and with European Union
member nations (see Sheets, 1992).
In considering these potential roles, it is useful to distinguish between
involvement versus true engagement of employers. Employer involvement
is relatively easy to obtain, whether through some degree of participation
in advisory committees, pledging to hire trainees, serving on a skill
standards board, or other such activities. However, engagement tends to
be substantive, all-encompassing, and ongoing (McPherson et al., 1997,
p. 4ff). Engagement is usually based on economic need rather than social
welfare concerns, and results only when employers perceive direct benefits
from the relationship. For there to be real engagement, employers must
play a large enough role to engender a sense of ownership.
Varying State Policies and Practices
In the relatively active states we examined, the rhetoric of engagement
far exceeds the reality, and the states are all over the map in terms of actual
participation. There is a relatively clear demarcation between those states
that emphasize building the human capital of workersespecially
Oregonand those which cater more to employers' needs and might be
described as truly "employer-driyen"for example, Florida, Michigan, and
North Carolina. The rest of the states fall somewhere between these poles,
either because the weight they place on workers' and employers' needs is
more balanced or because their employer-driven rhetoric has yet to be
realized in practice. The states we examined have pursued various
workforce development roles for employers, including the ones discussed
below.
Policymaking/Governance
All these states are involving employers in shaping workforce policy,
some more actively than others. They have established employer-chaired
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and employer-dominated Human Resource Investment Councils (HRICs)
which have varying degrees of authority over their state's workforce
services.
Several states exhibit high degrees of employer orientation in shaping
their workforce policies. Nearly all of Florida's programs reflect a strong
market- and employer-driven flavor, despite the concern that employers
are not always fully prepared for this role. Florida's Jobs and Education
Partnership features employers as part of a broad partnership guiding
economic (and workforce) development statewide; moreover, the new
business-dominated WAGES Boards for welfare-to-work services have
primary responsibility for training and employer incentives. As one analyst
suggested,
For the first time, business and industry are not just being asked to
sit in an "advisory" capacity, but they are being asked to become
decisionmakers for the future of Florida's workforce. Many of the
business representatives do not have experience with social welfare
or education/training issues or entitlements.
Michigan now places primary emphasis on serving the needs of the
employer community in nearly all program aspects. Moreover, economic
development takes precedence over workforce development strategically.
Michigan's policies reflect a dominant business/employer influence,
featuring tax-free Renaissance Zones as well as significant stress on
customized training via its Economic Development Job Training Programs
and the Youth Registered Apprenticeship Tax Credit initiative. As one
observer noted,
The state believed strongly . . that helping employers meant
helping workers as well. By attracting greater numbers of new
.
businesses, and by preventing established ones from moving away,
more jobs would be created, and the state's economy bolstered.
North Carolina's workforce efforts, based in its extensive system of
community colleges, have long been solidly employer-oriented, dating from
1958's New and Expanding Industries Act which provided state support
for economic development through services to business and industry.
In other cases, however, states have articulated a role for employers, but
have been unable to implement their visions. Oregon, despite pursuing a
student-focused approach for the most part, relies on employer-dominated
advisory committees for shaping state workforce policy. As part of its Key
Industries program, it also has created industry associations to provide
feedback on employer needs. Oregon has had difficulty maintaining
substantive involvement by employers on its local and state advisory
Toward Order from Chaos
73
committees, however, in part due to the perception that they are largely
"rubber stamps" for decisions made by program staff. One of the criticisms
of Oklahoma's voluntary Workforce Quality Compact approach to
workforce reform at the state level has been that employers have been totally
excluded from the process, due to an expressed desire not to discourage
them with government's slow pace.
Texas has clearly articulated the vision of a market- and employer-driven
system. State legislation and subsequent policy documents characterize
employers as one of the two primary customers, mandate their dominance
in advisory and oversight committees, and require the provision of business
services. Initially, Texas even turned to the private sector rather than
government for executive leadership in the newly created Texas Workforce
Commission (TWC), a choice which proved less than successful. Getting
beyond the rhetoric to implement an employer-driven system and to
provide an appropriate array of business services has proved difficult,
however.
Identifying Market Needs
Most of our states also rely on employers or employer associations to
identify growing and emerging occupational and industrial needs. Some
of the more remarkable systems are exemplified by Florida, Oregon, and
Texas. As part of its High-Skills/High-Wages (HS/HW) initiative, Florida
conducts an annual Occupational Forecast Conference to identify emerging
high-wage, high-growth industries and occupations requiring less than a
baccalaureate degree. The results of this conference, along with the
Performance-Based Incentive Funding component of the HS/HW initiative,
drive work-related education and training offerings throughout the state.
In addition, Orlando's Valencia Community College also convenes an
annual President's Luncheon comprised of the CEOs of leading area
employers. These CEOs are asked to work with the community college in
conducting an "environmental scan" to describe major three- to five-year
trends, identify current and projected workforce needs, suggest how the
college can work with employers to meet their education and training needs,
and recommend ways for the community college to proceed.
The Oregon Legislature designated 14 Key Industries to serve as the
basis for a six-year state economic development strategy. The state's
Economic Development Department administers the program, with regions
allowed to decide which of the 14 industries to emphasize. A number of
industry associationsfor example, the Semiconductor Workforce
Consortium of Oregon and Southwest Washington, and similar ones in
plastics, manufactured homes, and food processingwere formed in
response to the 14 Key Industries initiative, to organize and communicate
industry needs to workforce providers as they define the jobs, skill
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87
competencies, skill requirements, and career ladders for potential
employees.
Texas was one of the first states to move decisively in establishing a role
for employers in this area. In the early to mid-1980s, the state crafted a
State Labor Market Information Plan which called for the creation of a long
list of Labor Market Information (LMI)-based tools for local program
planners (and counselors) over a period of several years. This LMI Plan
was carried out under the auspices of the Texas State Occupational
Information Coordinating Committee (now part of the TWC). Over the
years, information gathered from administrative data (e.g., the Occupational
Employment Survey) as well as structured focus groups with employers
have identified high-demand and emerging occupations which local
programs must use as the basis for most of their training. Some areas of the
state have been even more aggressive in using an enhanced version of these
tools to determine what training to offer (King, Lawson, & Olson, 1995).
Curriculum Development
In many of our states, employers are assisting with or directly designing
training curricula. This is especially true in those states which have fostered
customized training and similar approaches to workforce development.
States with extensive customized training offerings include Florida's Quick
Response Training, Iowa's bond-funded program offered through
community colleges, Michigan's $31 million Economic Development Job
Training Programs, North Carolina with its heavy reliance on community
colleges, and Texas through its Smart Jobs Fund for training grants direct
to business. In many states, customized training tends to be geared towards
more experienced, less disadvantaged workers, rather than the more
disadvantaged ones. Some noteworthy examples include the following:
Valencia Community College in Orlando's use of the DACUM process
for course development and design relies heavily on employer input.
Michigan's Trade Academies prepare eligible high scbool students for
high-skill/high-wage jobs, integrating school with work-based learning
designed by employers. Employers also finance a large portion of the
operating costs for the state's academies.
Wisconsin has a Work Opportunity Tax Credit for firms which hire or
train eligible workers. Wisconsin's Regional Training Partnershipa
Milwaukee-based consortium of 22 charter firms and unions from the
metalworking, machinery, electronic controls, and related industries
which largely operates outside the state's workforce system funded by
member firms' dues and local grantsinvolves employers in every stage
of the training process, including training design.
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75
Standard Setting
Curiously, few states have elaborated their emerging skill standards
initiatives and the part employers might play in them. Wisconsin and Iowa
have done so, while Texas and Oregon are also in the process of establishing
explicit employer-based measures of performance, reflecting their view of
employers as "customers" to be given some accountability responsibilities.
Moreover, the states with the greatest employer orientation may well be
responding to what thq perceive to be employers' views of program
mission, goals, and standards for performance. In many states, the heavy
emphasis on "work first" and welfare reform has shaped the attitude toward
less well-prepared students and participants.
Contractors/Service Provision
Finally, many of our study states are turning to employers as training
contractors, directly involving them in the provision of workforce services.
This role is most evident in the provision of customized training, often for
more experienced and incumbent workers. Such training is being financed
both via states' regular work-related education and job training programs,
but it is also increasingly financed by special dedicated training funds as in
Texas (featuring the Smart Jobs, Skills Development, and Self-Sufficiency
Funds), Michigan, and Wisconsin, among others.
In addition, the private sector (e.g., Lockheed Martin, Maximus, and
others) is playing an increasing role in providing pre-training and other
services, such as as§essment, counseling, information and referral services,
and job search assistance, often serving as one-stop or career center
operators. Private firms have also become major players in welfare-to-work
service delivery.
Unresolved or Continuing Issues
This appears to be a time of significant change in the roles various actors
play in emerging workforce systems. This is particularly true for employers
in an era which emphasizes work over training. At this point, there are a
number of unresolved or continuing issues surrounding the roles of
employers:
With "work first" as a growing emphasis in some states, there remains a
need to more directly address post-employment access to education and
training opportunities. Few states have moved to do so, however; and
many employers are reluctant to work with welfare populations.
There is now a wide gap in access to work-related education and training
once workers are on the job. Workers higher up the occupational pecking
order tend to have greater access to employer-financed training (Bassi,
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89
1997; Cappelli, 1995; Carnevale & Goldstein, 1990). This gap may even
be widening, and it exacerbates inequalities in earnings.
Finding the right blend of economic and workforce development policy
has been difficult. Many states have not integrated their economic
development efforts with workforce development. Their incentives (such
as tax incentives) to lure employers into the state are often ineffective,
and the subsidized training they provide employers as incentives often
simply substitutes public funding for employer training (NCRVE and
the Center for Labor Research and Education, 1994). These policies may
be politically popular, particularly in an era when states are trying hard
to meet the needs of employers, but they are often ill-considered.
The rhetoric of employer engagement still exceeds the reality in nearly
all of our study states, and criticisms about weak linkages to employers
made in the late 1990s are virtually the same ones made more than three
decades ago. This raises the question of whether states really want
substantial employer engagement in their workforce systems and whether
employers are willing to participateor whether, instead, they are simply
having a hard time working out the best mechanisms for accomplishing
such participation.
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SECTION 5
The Role of Welfare "Reform"
and "Work First"
Welfare reform, both at the state and national levels, is having a
substantial effect on states' efforts to reform their education and training
systems. This is not really surprising, since the question of how to deal
with welfare and disadvantaged populations within existing education and
training efforts has been a vexing one since at least the mid-1960s. Even so,
the degree to which it is affecting more systemic workforce reforms in these
states is both remarkable and disturbing.
In part, these developments reflect bad timing. Just when states had
become serious about the need for thoughtful, comprehensive changes in
their workforce development systemswhether in response to economic
distress or as the culmination of deliberations about ways to streamline
and make them more efficientalong came the most massive restructuring
of the state and national welfare systems since they were first created in
the mid-to-late 1930s. Moreover, this round of welfare changes has been
driven far more by ideology and single-minded visions of what reform
should be, in sharp contrast to the bipartisan Family Support Act of 1988
and its Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) training program, the
product of broad-based analysis and careful evaluations.
As welfare reform came along, economic conditions made it appear that
employment and "work first" could succeed. Between 1990 and 1997, more
than 13 million jobs were created by the U.S. economy, pushing the civilian
unemployment rate down to the 4.5 to 5% range last seen almost three
decades ago. Unfortunately, many of these jobs are in the low-paid service
sector, with few opportunities for advancement; and large numbers of these
jobs may be the result of splitting existing full-time jobs, especially in
services, into two or more part-time renmants (Thurow, 1997). Still, states
whose economies are booming and whose labor markets have been tight
for several years are convinced that "anyone who wants a job can find
one. /I
For welfare recipients, these developments have translated into a singleminded rush to implementing "work first" strategies, along with time limits,
as the centerpiece of welfare reformtreating welfare recipients in ways
substantially different from other students and clients.26 In many states
" It is worth noting that we have always treated welfare recipients differently. It
has generally been acceptable, if not standard practice, to "regulate the poor" in
most aspects of their behavior (see Piven & Cloward, 1971), when such restrictive
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though not allthe obsession with "work first" has carried over into and
even begun to dominate broader workforce development reforms. The
central theme of this section, therefore, is the emergence and implementation
of "work first" strategies as states move into welfare reform, and how this
is affecting their broader attempts to reform their workforce development
systems. First, we clarify what we mean by "work first." Then, we
characterize where the states we have examined are in their implementation
of "work first" and related welfare reform initiatives. We go on to explore
a number of key welfare and workforce development issues, after which
we offer several conclusions.
"Work First" Clarified
"Work first" clearly means different things in different states, and there
is no one standard model or approach. However, there is at least a common
philosophy undergirding all of the approaches now parading under the
"work first" banner, which is that "any job is a good job and the best way
to succeed in the labor market is to join it, developing work habits and
skills on the job rather than in a classroom" (Brown, 1997, p. 2; Weissman,
1997).
Typical features of "work first" programs include the following:
They seek to move individuals from welfare into unsubsidized work as
soon as possible.
Job search tends to be a central activity, though many are quick to point
out that "work first' is more than just job search" (Brown, 1997, p. 2).
Job search ensures that the labor market, rather than a host of program
counselors or other staff, is the mechanism for testing an individual's
employability.
For those not found to be ithmediately employable in the market, "work
first" models may provide subsequent activities to address barriers to
employment such as education, training, work experience, and others.
These activities tend to be closely monitored and may be combined with
or followed by job search.
A fairly common "work first" participant flow (see Box V.1) has
individuals proceeding from job search to orientation and assessment;
followed by job club; another more in-depth assessment; and finally some
combination of added job search and short-run education, training, or
work experience (or subsidized work). Individuals may leave for
approaches would be rejected for most others. In fact, efforts for welfare recipients
have never really been part of the broader mainstream workforce development
system in most states.
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employment at any step along the way, and are certainly expected and
encouraged to do so.
Some examples of "work first" programs include the following (Brown,
1997, pp. 2-3):
"Labor force attachment" sites in the ongoing JOBS evaluation (those in
Riverside, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and Grand Rapids, Michigan),
in which group job search is the first activity for most participants,
followed typically by short-term education and training and subsequent
job search for those remaining unemployed.
Florida's Project Independence, in which those identified as job ready
via their education and work experience (most of the recipients)
performed self-directed job search, then job club and another search,
generally followed by some education or training for those still
unemployed. Those not job ready were instead assigned to education or
training as their first activity.
San Diego's Saturation Work Initiative Model (SWIM), in which most
participants were first assigned to two weeks of a job search workshop;
followed by (if still unemployed) three months of unpaid work
experience concurrent with job club; and, ultimately, education and
training.
Box V.1 Common "Work Firsf Program Participant Flow
Job Strarch
Orienrtion
Initial Assessment
Job Club
In-Depth Assesstrrent
It
t1
Additional
Job Search
Education
(short-term)
IL
Vocational
Training
(short-term)
Work Experience/
Subsidized Work
(short-term)
Source: Brown (1997), Figure 1, p. 13
Arkansas' WORK Program, in which all participants were assigned to
job club followed by up to three months of individual (self-directed) job
search, then (if still unemployed) unpaid work experience.
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"Work first" often is implemented with a variety of "diversion" initiatives
which seek to keep families from going on welfare. For example, Florida,
Texas, and several other states have recently linked the two in an approach
some have termed "diversion squared." In these states, families that apply
to their human services agency for public assistance are first diverted to a
resource room to seek assistance such as shelter, food, or even employment
from nongovernmental sources, before their applications will be accepted.
If unsuccessful in their efforts and still in need, they can return to the agency
to pursue applying for aid. Then, once their application is accepted, it may
be "pended" while the potential aid recipient is sent to the workforce agency
for orientation and job search assistance. Often this takes the form of selfdirected job search. Once the individual can show evidence of a bona fide
effort to find work, his or her application for aid is finally processed. This
diversion process may take weeks or even a month. While it is taking place,
the potential welfare applicant is diverted both from public aid as well as
to more intensive workforce development services.
State Approaches to "Work First"
Even though there are some consistencies underlying "work first," such
programs exhibit large variation in terms of the services they provide, the
sequencing of those services, the extent to which participation in those
services is required (and enforced), and their specific goals and approach
to meeting them (Brown, 1997). In the states examined in our study, there
is a continuum of approaches to serving welfare recipients. On one end of
this continuum are states that, despite considerable pressure to join the incrowd by jumping onto the "work first" bandwagon, are holding to a human
capital approach and attempting to maintain more holistic systems for
workforce development. Of the states we studied, Iowa and Oregon are
representatives of the human capital end of the continuum. Oregon espouses
a "blended" approach, favoring elements of "work first," but with
considerable stress on preparation for work that pays a living wage for all
residents. Oregon policymakers have not bought into the notion that "anyjob's-a-good-job," but, rather, they emphasize the kinds of competencies
defined by America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages! , the 1990 report of the
Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. At the local level, a
number of administrators were glad that welfare is moving from a system
that simply determines eligibility for benefits to one that encourages (or
pushes) recipients to attain self-sufficiency. Their main concern has been to
ensure that there is a continuum of further education and training. As one
staff member said, she "still saw a lot of people getting stuck in the welfare
system, in the ABE classroom, in a first job that was not going to lead them
to self-sufficiency"; and the one-stop center planning committee "really
saw a need for that continuum of services to help them move along." So
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94
pressure from welfare reform is beneficial but not sufficient; it also requires
an array of education and training.
At the other end of the continuum are the overwhelming majority of
states which have fully embraced "work first" as the only vehicle for welfare
reform. These states might further be divided into those which have let
"work first" and welfare changes subsume their broader systems for
workforce development, including Texas and Wisconsin; and those which
have isolated it and maintained the rest of their workforce system intact,
including Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, and North Carolina.
Effects on Workforce Development Programs
The efforts of states to implement welfare reform have had several effects
on broader efforts to reform workforce development. Examples of these
effects are described below.
Undermining the High-Skills/High-Wages Agenda
For most participants who have skill deficiencies, state workforce systems
seek to enhance their skills and to assist them in finding suitable
employment which will offer opportunities for career advancement and
increased earnings. In contrast, for welfare recipients the message is that
they should be seeking a job, "any job." In Massachusetts, one local provider
said,
Job training doesn't figure in current Massachusetts thinking. This
is especially true regarding welfare. I've heard both [the] governor
and the lieutenant governor say, "Allowing job training [to
substitute for required work experience] would gut the system."
The welfare agency has no interest in anything beside getting
people off the welfare rolls.
Similarly, a state official complained,
Welfare reform in Massachusetts came one year before the federal
legislation, at a time when job training funds had shrunk to a
ridiculously low level. It overwhelmed us. [State welfare officials]
have said that no longer-term training will be available for
recipients, and almost no education. Post-employment services
aren't even on their radar screen.
North Carolina may be a partial exception, providing ladders from its
second-chance systems into occupational skills training in its respected
system of community and technical colleges. However, even here, "work
first" was cited as presenting an important barrier to integrating
9 5 Toward Order from Chaos
83
welfare-to-work efforts into the broader push for workforce reform. Skills
development, career advancement, and increased earnings are to be found
almost exclusively on the job, not through public programs offered by
community organizations or community and/or technical colleges.
In addition, as Bloom (1997) and others have pointed out, the various
welfare-to-work strategies yield widely differing results. "Work first"
generally has been found to offer some temporary benefits for society and
to provide net benefits for taxpayers by reducing welfare caseloads quickly.
Yet, over the longer-term, there appear to be few if any lasting benefits for
individuals; any earning gains from the initial increase in employment tend
to be offset by declines in income from welfare benefits.
A recent Economic Policy Institute study has estimated that the
implementation of federal time limits on welfare may lead to a 10-12%
decline in real wages, due for the most part to large numbers of poorly
prepared, low-skilled women being forced into the labor market. This
finding is echoed in a number of state research reports as well. Lawson
and King (1997) found that implementation of Texas' time limits could lead
to considerable downward pressure on wages, especially along the border
and, without significant efforts to build the skills of the women affected,
would consign them to lowly paid work, mostly part-time/part-year jobs,
in sales and service occupations, many of which provided few employee
benefits. To the extent that state "work first" programs are focused on
immediate employment in "any job" and those jobs fail to offer such workers
access to further education and training (Carnevale & Goldstein, 1990), we
will have done little to foster a HS/FIW agenda.
Replacing Universal with Fragmented Approaches
A characteristic of the most recent wave of many workforce reforms is
that they develop more universal systems serving the entire range of
populations, from dislocated aerospace, banking, and defense industry
employees to youth, ex-offenders, and welfare recipients. But welfare reform
strategies of the mid-1990s conflict sharply with these universalist
approaches, instead creating fragmented programs. By developing "work
first" approaches for welfare recipients only, they create conflicting goals
and send contradictory messages to major actors in the system. They also
create what is in effect a caste system for participants. Incumbent workers,
the system's "Brahmins," have access to high-quality training provided
on-site or at community colleges or universities; this training may be funded
by their employers or one of the customized training funds financed by UI
payroll taxes or general revenue. Dislocated workers may be offered similar
services. Economically disadvantaged participants who are not on welfare
are typically assessed to determine skill needs, aptitudes, and interests;
they are typically offered access to short-term training in the usual "secondchance" system. Welfare recipients, the "untouchables" who have some of
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the lowest academic and occupational skills and the least work experience,
are offered the least intensive services and sent off into the low-skilled,
low-wage labor market. In addition, this approach attaches an even greater
stigma to recipients of public assistance. Serving welfare recipients in such
a noticeably different manner may also have the effect of harming those
individuals the systems are attempting to help (Burt less, 1985).
Hijacking Workforce Refonn
In several of the states we studied, most notably Texas, Michigan, and
Wisconsin, welfare reforms have gained such momentum that they affected
broader workforce reforms. This phenomenon is reflected in several ways.
First, state policymakers have devoted an inordinate amount of their time
and resources to the workforce implications of welfare reformdespite
the fact that public assistance represents a strikingly small share of state
revenues (often less than 1%27), that caseloads have been falling in virtually
all states since 1994, and that welfare recipients comprise only a small share
of those needing education and training. As a state official in North Carolina
mentioned,
Welfare reform is competing with education for time and energy
and a place at the table and on the agenda. Everybody is just
running around like Chicken Little about the sky falling in with
this new welfare reform initiative that just got passed.
In addition, states have often acted as if welfare reforms should drive
other programs. For example, Texas developed planning guidelines for local
workforce boards that began with the following sentences (TWC, 1996):
The thrust of state welfare reform is a "work first" approach to
assisting people in moving from dependence on welfare programs
to economic independence through employment. . . . The Texas
Workforce Commission was created to implement legislative
changes in the way welfare and employment programs are
delivered in support of the "work first" approach.
These guidelines encompassed nearly all workforce services ranging from
JTPA programs for disadvantaged adults and dislocated workers to Food
Stamp Employment and Training, as well as JOBS for welfare recipients. In
addition, the first goal for the workforce system as a whole was the
following: "Increase the percentage of Texans who become and remain
independent of public financial assistance" (TWC, 1996, p. 6).
" Texas has gone so far as to put a 1% limit on welfare spending in its constitution.
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85
Similarly, Wisconsin has made its highly touted Jobs Centers the heart
of its W2 (Wisconsin Works!) program. Where once they served as the
gateway to a broad array of services for many diverse population groups,
they are fast becoming welfare/workforce service centers. Other groups
are going to be more likely to turn to their community or technical college
for assistance rather than a local Jobs Center. Only the Regional Training
Centers and employer-supported incumbent worker training appear to have
relative immunity from W2 in Wisconsin.
The implementation of the new federal Welfare-to-Work (WtW) Grant
program, providing additional federal funds for welfare-related training,
will only exacerbate this phenomenon. In many states, funds for WtW,
TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), and FSE&T (Food Stamp
Employment and Training) will account for the largest single share of their
workforce development funding; in Massachusetts, for example, fully 40%
of Regional Employment Board (REB) funds derive from the state's welfare
agency. As Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) and others have noted,
policymakers' attention tends to be drawn to those areas with the greatest
growth in funding or which are perceived in some way to be "hot" policy
areas.
Alienating Employers
One goal of states' workforce development reforms has been to better
serve employers as one of the system's primary customers. Historically,
state workforce programs, most especially the much-maligned Employment
Service (ES), have been criticized for doing a poor job of matching workers
and employers. One result has been that ES has lacked credibility with
employers and has tended to serve disproportionately the lower reaches
of the labor market. While government contractors and other employer
groups may have been required to list their openings with them, ES has
generally not penetrated the ranks of managerial, administrative,
professional, and other high-paying jobs very well.
As the emerging workforce development systems attempt to address
this issue and more fully engage employers at all levels in the labor market
(see Section IV), they have worked hard to build their credibility by assessing
participants, providing them with improved services, seeking to train only
for occupations in demand, and even "guaranteeing" their trainees. But
with the onset of welfare reform, workforce systems are finding themselves
in the uncomfortable position of referring large numbers of inadequately
assessed, poorly trained, and inexperienced workers to employers for any
job that they might have open. This has the effect of alienating the very
employers whose support they need. The following statement, from a
manager of a Dallas Career Center, indicates the problems of alienating
employers through "work first":
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98
I don't think that [it] is doing a service to the employer or the
individual. . I would lose the employers who are the customers
of the center, and I can't afford to lose them. The board will fire
Lockheed Martin if we're just throwing bodies at employers.
. .
This approach thus undermines state efforts to serve employers more
effectively than in the past. It also jeopardizes employers' faith in the other
trainees in the system.
Local/State Tensions
To the extent that states' welfare reform strategies reflect coercive, topdown policies, they are also in direct conflict with the broader workforce
reforms which encourage greater local discretion in nearly all aspects of
workforce development policy. Local workforce boards and PICs are
increasingly resisting state efforts to circumscribe their discretion. Examples
of such resistance can be seen in Dallas, where the local WDB has delayed
shouldering full responsibilities for welfare recipients because of the
divergence between their preferred practices and the treatment prescribed
for this population. The potential liability incurred for failure to meet work
participation requirements under federal welfare reform is also a deterrent.
Similarly in Massachusetts, local REB center staff expressed concerns that
devoting such large shares of their time and effort to welfare reform and
"work first" contradicted their customer-driven mandate, causing them to
neglect their customers who wanted services in favor of welfare recipients
who did not want to be there. "Work first" has also alienated numerous
CBOs, which had been their partners.
Local boards in Michigan also expressed similar sentiments, complaining
that they "lacked autonomy" to design appropriate service strategies for
welfare recipients. Boards found themselves operating market-driven,
economic development type programs for most populations they served,
while responding largely to top-down political pressures for welfare
initiatives. A local official noted about the state's "work first" program,
"Obviously this is an instance where the local WDBs are not having much
autonomy."
In summary, the effects of welfare reform and "work first" on state efforts
to reform workforce development systems have been largely negative. To
be sure, some have welcomed the switch from welfare agencies as places
checking eligibility for entitlements to programs that encourage or pressure
welfare recipients to become self-sufficient. In addition, some states have
experimented with new efforts to train welfare recipients in relatively short
periods of time. On the whole, however, state reforms have been distracted
and underminedhijacked"by "work first." Welfare reforms create
conflicts in goals and objectives, adverse effects on state efforts to create a
customer-driven focus, greater stigma for welfare clients, increased
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employer alienation, and enhanced local/state tensions. The tendency to
treat welfare recipients as the "undeserving poor" creates an increasingly
fragmented, rather than more holistic, workforce system.
Furthermore, these enormous costs to workforce development will come
without creating any substantial benefits to welfare recipients themselves.
The latest research shows that participation in "work first" programs
benefits taxpayers more than participants, for whom it generally yields
significant impacts on employment only in the short run (Bloom, 1997;
Friedlander, Greenberg, & Robins, 1997). Over the longer run, "work first"
offers little hope of improving participants' employability and earnings or
of contributing to states' economic progress.
Finally, the prospects for the future are discouraging. The current period
in which "work first" has been implemented has been a time of economic
growth and low unemployment, but no one believes that business cycles
have come to an end. If as a nation we fail to improve the academic and
occupational competencies of welfare recipients nowduring a period
when the economy is robust, state and federal treasuries are relatively full,
and time limits have yet to expire for most welfare recipientsthe problems
of doing so will be even more difficult later on when the economy takes a
serious downturn. In every dimension, welfare "reform" is short-sighted.
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SECTION 6
What Is the Meaning of SystemBuilding? Linkages and Quality
As we pointed out in the introduction, states mean different things when
they talk about reforming their workforce development systems. In some
states, the consolidation of programs in a single agency, or the creation of a
super-agency with some authority over a variety of programs, constitutes
reform, despite the fact that consolidation by itself may not lead to different
decisions about services delivered. Some states are concentrating on
building the institutional infrastructure for a system, particularly through
one-stop centers. In other states, reform means incorporating more marketlike mechanisms, particularly competition among potential providers. Other
states are trying to develop data and accountability mechanisms to drive
improvement in a top-down way. And in still other casesOregon and
Oklahoma are the obvious examplesreform means cultural changes in
the ways that local and state administrators view their work. Rather than
focusing on individual programmatic requirements, administrators are
encouraged to work with other programs to achieve the larger goals of
workforce and economic development.
Because of this variety, it is worth clarifying what it might mean to create
a coherent system of workforce development programs, drawing on our
experiences with ten states and twenty localities. We first examine what
the linkages among programs might be, developing a rough hierarchy
ranging from minimal interaction among programs to fully integrated
service delivery. We then examine conceptions about the quality of
individual programs, for the simple reason that a coherent system of low-
quality programsin which, for example, the linkages among programs
are clear to all participants, information about the options is readily
available, and joint planning has eliminated all duplication, but in which
each program provides low-quality servicesis not necessarily an
improvement. Thus, system-building may be necessary but not sufficient
for effective workforce development.
The Variety of Linkages: A Hierarchy of Coordination
In examining what states are currently doing, we can discern a hierarchy
of efforts to link programs. The least substantial of these, particularly the
information-sharing mechanisms, have been required by federal legislation
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Toward Order from Chaos
89
at least since 1984.28 The more substantial of these coordination efforts,
including integrated service delivery, occur only under rare circumstances,
particularly when a community college dominates all services in an area.
However, states are starting to think of a greater variety of coordination
mechanisms, and some of these are slowly working their way up this
hierarchy. The coordination activities that follow can be ranked roughly
from less substantial to more substantial (summarized in Box VI.1).
Box VI.1 A Hierarchy of Coordination
Information Sharing
Sign-off provisions
2. Cross-membership on boards and councils
3. Other information-sharing mechanisms, from informal to more formalized
4. Information-sharing about specific clients
1.
Referrals Among Agencies
5. General referrals to other programs
6. Subcontracts with other agencies
7.
Creating feeder systems and articulation agreements
Joint Service Delivery
8. A division of labor
9. Co-delivery or integrated service delivery
10. Consolidated service delivery
Information Sharing
1.
Sign-off provisions require one program to assure that they have seen the
plans of another program. These constitute perhaps the simplest and
most bureaucratic form of information-sharing. Such plans are often
compliance-oriented documents assuring federal agencies that the letter
of the law has been met, and providing little information about which
specific services are being delivered or what substantive decisions have
been made.
2. Cross-membership on boards and councils means that board members for
one program also sit on the boards of others: This is a mechanism of
information sharing, of course, with the added benefit that individuals
have some power to make decisions about other programs. For example,
to create linkages among programs, Oregon requires that Regional
Workforce Quality Councils (RWQCs) include representatives of
welfare, JTPA, the Employment Department, Economic Development
Department, community colleges, K-12 districts, and the Community
28 The Perkins Act of 1984 provided federal funding for vocational education and
required notification to JTPA programs.
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1
9
Action Agency. In some cases, the overlapping membership has led to
the consolidation of certain boards. In the mid-Willamette region, leaders
began to see that the responsibilities of the PIC and the RWQC were
substantially similar; both were dissolved, therefore, and replaced by
the Enterprise for Employment and Education, which now carries out
the responsibilities of both.
3. Other information-sharing mechanisms range from informal to more
formalized. For example, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the directors
of the Employment Security Commission and the Department of Social
Services regularly get together for coffee. While this is informal and
non-institutionalized, they credit this mechanism with keeping them
abreast of pending legislation and policy changes, and allowing them
to discuss the options available to each agency. Many local agencies
cite informal mechanisms, and specifically the good personal
relationships among program staff, with facilitating coordination. A
more formalized procedure in North Carolina is one in which the state
Department of Social Services designates an individual to learn about
community college programs; this individual, then, not only becomes
expert about complementary programs but also becomes the "point
person" for initiatives, complaints, and other contact from community
colleges. One community college began formally designating
individuals responsible for liaisons with other programs, with one
working with the local STW initiative, another connected to local job
training efforts, and a third responsible for knowing every program in
the college and serving as a one-stop information center for other
programs.
4.
Information-sharing about specific clients occurs rarely, though in
Greensboro, North Carolina, JTPA and the Department of Social Services
have joint caseworkers, one from each agency, for every client. In theory,
this practice allows them to identify the appropriate array of services
from the two programs. This approach moves beyond simple
information-sharing toward joint service provision (see #8 on next page).
Referrals Among Agencies
5. General referrals to other programs occur when a program refers all
individuals of a particular kind to another agency. For example, some
JTPA programs refer individuals who fail a basic skills test to adult
education; in the past, some community colleges have sent their lowestperforming students to volunteer literacy programs or adult education.
Usually, such general referrals do not consider the characteristics of the
receiving programs and may, therefore, refer individuals to low-quality
programs.
6. Subcontracts with other agencies arise when one agency subcontracts with
another to provide some or all of its services. In the past, welfare-to-work
. Toward Order from Chaos
91
programs have often subcontracted with adult education providers and
community colleges for assessment, remedial education, and vocational
skills training (though these arrangements are dwindling under "work
first"). Similarly, JTPA programs have often subcontracted with
community colleges for vocational education. Whether such
subcontracts help create a more coherent system facilitating transfer
among programs, or merely serve as sources of lower-cost services,29 is
not always clear.
7. Creating feeder systems and articulation agreements within the education
and training "system" is intended to provide smooth sequences or
"ladders" of programs. For example, in some areas of North Carolina,
every client who completes a pre-employment workshop with TANF is
then referred to JTPA for job assessment and possible referral to an
appropriate training program. In Iowa, the location of JTPA agencies
within community colleges facilitates such feeder systems, though there
is little evidence about how common this practice is.3° The articulation
agreements that community colleges have with four-year colleges, and
that high schools have with community colleges in Tech Prep, are more
familiar versions of such feeder systems.
Joint Service Delivery
8. A division of labor arises when programs agree, through a joint planning
process, to divide up services according to the expertise of different
programs. For example, in Greensboro, North Carolina, providers
agreed that JTPA would do assessment; Social Services would provide
supplemental services, like child care and transportation; the community
colleges would provide both remedial and vocational skills training;
and the local employment service office would provide placement
services. This division of labor draws on the varied strengths of different
programs. It also helps ensure that individuals can find the full array of
services they needrather than, for example, JTPA clients having no
access to vocational skills training (or to restricted options), or
community college students having neither supportive services nor
placement efforts.
9. Co-delivery or integrated service delivery occurs when intake workers from
any program see any individual who walks in, and can provide each
29 In earlier work, NCRVE determined that many such contracts were fiscally
motivated, particularly because community colleges could often collect state ADA
payments for JTPA clients and thus charge JTPA less than CBOs could. See Grubb
et al. (1990a); Grubb and McDonnell (1996); Gula and King (1990).
3° It proves virtually impossible to get information about the rate of movement
from one program to anotherfor example, from a JTPA program within a
community college into an Associate degree program.
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the full array of services. In a one-stop center in Tempe, Arizona,
individuals entering the center (called "guests," not clients) can choose
among self-service, using the computer lab for information; group
services, in which classes in job searching are offered; and case
management, for which an individual must meet eligibility criteria.
However, most individuals talk with a Personal Services Representative
to determine eligibility and get answers to questions about benefits. In
contrast to many other one-stop centers, this mechanism relies not only
on information to prospective clients and referral to the appropriate
agency, but instead eliminates this potential hurdle by providing
personal consultation and enrolling an individual in appropriate
programs and services on the spot. Similarly, Iowa is far along in the
development of an Integrated Customer Service System (ICS) and is
piloting this system in its Cedar Rapids Workforce Development Center.
Of course, integrated service delivery is the most complex form of
coordination since it requires that all intake workers be crosstrained
about all other programs, and it requires a management information
system that can track individuals through multiple programs.
10. Consolidated service delivery takes integrated service delivery one step
further by merging one program into another. Most examples of
consolidated service delivery we have seen occur when community
colleges take over the provision of virtually all services, and particular
forms of education are available to a variety of individuals with different
needs.3' For example, remedial classes are open to welfare recipients
and employees as well as a college's entering students, and a variety of
short-term and longer-term vocational programs serve the needs of those
seeking upgrade training and retraining as well as pre-employment
preparation. We note that in some cases where consolidation seems to
have taken place within community colleges, separate programs are
provided by different divisions of the college with little connection
among them and, therefore, co-location rather than real consolidation
best describes these practices. In addition, consolidation at the state level,
where separate programs are administered within one agency rather
than scattered among many independent agencies, is not the same as
consolidated service delivery, which must take place at the local level.
The former could lead to the latter, though it does not generally do so.
Several mechanisms can move programs to these different stages of
coordination. Joint planning can lead to any of them, though it is not
necessarily sufficient to do so. The co-location of programs in one-stop
31 A partial exception occurs in Coos Bay, Oregon, where Newmark College houses
various services, though a consortium of programs administers them.
I LI 5
Toward Order from Chaos
93
centers can also lead to many of them, though so far officials report that colocation has been used primarily to provide more extensive information to
clients rather than to promote coordination among programs. Consolidation
of programs within single agencies might be intended to lead to different
forms of coordination, butas the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC)
illustrates with its internal divisions and incomplete collection of
programsin practice it has not. Joint planning, co-location, sign-off
requirements, cross-membership, and state agency consolidation are,
therefore, means to other ends, not necessarily ends in themselves.
If integrated service delivery is the most complex kind of coordination,
and information sharing the least substantial, then most states are still at
the first stage. Many one-stops have confined themselves to information
sharing (though a number of them have plans to move beyond this stage).
The voluntary efforts in Oklahoma, the activities of the TWC, and the focus
on establishing computer-based information systems in Maryland have not
yet moved to encourage referrals on a broad scale among programs at the
local level, or to joint service delivery. To be sure, several of the states we
examined are trying to create a culture and political climate in which future
efforts can be more substantial, including Oklahoma with its initial
voluntary effort and Oregon with its emphasis on peer leadership and
example rather than coercion. Similarly, Iowa seems to have made only
slow progress toward coordination, though it has been steady throughout
the terms of Governor Terry Branstad, who has been dedicated to a
comprehensive workforce development system. At this stage of states'
development, therefore, it is not necessarily discouraging to find how far
up this hierarchy of coordination states have to go, since the process has
barely begun for most states. It is discouraging only when states seem to
backslide, as they do when state leadership takes a different tack (as
happened in Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Wisconsin) or when
they appear to be reforming without any clear vision of the next steps.
One vision of system-buildingone that we can discern in bits and pieces
across the countryis movement up this hierarchy of coordination. But it
should be no surprise that, in this large and contrary land, there are many
state (and local) officials who deny that such a vision is the right way to go.
A number of individuals expressed discomfort with the whole notion of
coordination and system-building, sometimes because its benefits have not
been proven. In still other casesand Oklahoma with its voluntary efforts
and Oregon with its noncoercive policies are good examplesstate agencies
may recognize the benefits but assert that coordination is not always worth
the political struggle it may require. Consolidation and the inherent
problems of overcoming turf also have the tendency (evident particularly
in Michigan and Texas) to drive away talented administrators from agencies
that are subject to consolidation. This is particularly costly when such
individuals are replaced by uninformed and inexperienced staff. In Texas,
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106
for example, a great deal of institutional memory has been lost through
this process. And certainly in the forty states that we did not examine, this
sentiment is prevalent, since by design these are states that have done much
less to begin reforming their workforce development "systems."
It is difficult to respond directly to these criticisms of coordination. The
efforts at coordination and system-building are too new and incomplete to
have been evaluated in any sense, and it is hard to know how to evaluate a
complete system change.32 Of course, system-building requires some
political battles, with losers as well as winners. Some reform efforts have
taken a great deal of time to pass through political opposition, only to do
very little at the local level. Because of this, the results often do not seem to
be worth the battle. Even so, many states are starting the process of reform,
and have at least implicitly accepted the a priori argument in favor of system-
building.
The Components of the System: The Quality of Individual
Programs
If system-building concentrates on creating linkages among programs
linkages of planning, of information, of referrals, or of service delivery
then a different kind of activity emphasizes the quality of individual
programs. In states where particular institutions are highly regarded, there
is a much greater tendency for other programs to use them. For example,
community colleges in Oregon and North Carolina have strong reputations
in those states, and, as a result, they have been central to both economic
development and welfare reform. Similarly, adult education in Oregon
appears to provide innovative programs, and has been integrated into other
workforce development efforts, where elsewhere the poor quality and low
profile of adult education has caused it to be nearly invisible to other
programs. If individual programs are of low quality, then there is little point
in linking them. For example, a welfare administrator in San Francisco stated
that welfare recipients "fall into the black hole of ABE" because the
instruction was so poor, progress so slow, and dropout rates so high that
welfare clients rarely returned with sufficient preparation to move on to
vocational skills training." Linking programs is, then, one purpose of
system-building, but improving the quality of individual programs is also
necessary.34
32 On the difficulties of evaluating the effectiveness of systems, see Grubb and
McDonnell (1996).
33 This example comes from earlier NCRVE research (see Grubb &z McDonnell, 1996).
34 Again, earlier NCRVE research confirmed that one of the common barriers to
coordination at the local level was distrust of the services provided in other
programs.
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Of the ten states we examined, most have decided to improve quality
through a system of performance measures, drawing to some extent on the
experience of JTPA. Florida is the best example, with its array of outcome
measures (see Box 1.3). Oregon's Benchmarks represent another example,
and Table 1 displays the data systems other states are developing. All these
cases require programs to collect new data, on outcomes rather than inputs.
Common measures include completion rates, short-term placement rates,
and earnings levels. While the shift to performance-based funding has taken
place only in Florida (and is just starting even there), there are many ways
to use such information to cajole, coerce, or humiliate local programs into
improving their performance.
The JTPA system, which has included performance measures and
standards since the early 1980s, provides many warnings about the use of
performance measures to enhance quality, including the following: (1)
conventional measures of performancefor example, placement rates of
individuals completing a programare not necessarily good measures of
effectiveness, which is better measured by the improvement in employment
for an individual compared to what he or she would have done in the
absence of a program. The random-assignment evaluation of JTPAone
of the most sophisticated evaluations of any training programmeasured
the effects of participating in the program compared to a precisely
equivalent group that had not gone through training. However, these
measures of effectiveness proved to be completely uncorrelated with
conventional performance measures (Barnow, 1997; Doolittle et al., 1993,
p. 10); (2) performance measures often create incentives to "cream"to
select the most able individualsrather than to improve the quality of
programs. Such efforts are difficult to detect except in sophisticated
evaluations"; (3) conventional performance measures are unable to measure
displacement, or the extent to which finding jobs for program completers
simply displaces other nontrainees who would have otherwise gotten these
jobs. Displacement is particularly likely in markets for less skilled labor
with substantial unemployment (Johnson, 1979; So low, 1990); and in British
studies, the extent of displacement has been measured at up to 80% (Begg,
Blake, & Deakin, 1991; Deakin & Pratten, 1987; also cited in Grubb & Ryan,
1999, forthcoming); (4) many programs have found ways to manipulate
the data necessary for performance measures, though these are not widely
35 The performance measures in JTPA have affected local agencies in several different
ways. In Dickinson et al. (1988), about one third of SDAs appeared to be quite
client-focused, and did not let performance measures cause any distortions in their
operations; but about one third were standards-driven and let performance
measures drive them toward low-cost programs and creaming. The remaining third
of SDAs were basically clueless and were, therefore, unaffected by performance
measures.
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Table 1
The Structure of State Efforts
State agency
Local or
regional
Florida
Enterprise Florida
(advisory); Jobs and
Education Partnership
Iowa
Iowa Council on Human
Investment (planning); Iowa
Workforce Development
(HRIC)
(HRIC)
Regional Workforce
Development Boards
Regional Advisory Boards
School-to-work (STW);
Welfare-to-work (WtW);
One-stop centers; HighSkills/High-Wages
(HS/HW)
Proprietary schools; Adult
education; Technical centers;
Private colleges
STW; WtW (WAGES) (in 16
of 25 areas); HS/HW
(occupational forecasting)
Promise Jobs; Elder Services;
JTPA; Voc rehab; Dept. of
Labor (DOL) Shared
Information System
agencies
Programs
included
state level
Programs
excluded
state level
Loca 1
responsibilities
Firm-based
training
Performance
Measures and
Data Systems
Distinctive
features
Quick Response Training
(high-dividend occupations
only)
PBIF measures; FETPIP (see
Box 1.3)
Vocational education;
Departmeht of Human
Services
STW; WtW; Regional
Workforce Centers: JTPA,
Voc rehab, ES, Veterans'
Services
New Jobs Training Program
(through CCs); Iowa Jobs
Training Program; Business
Network Program; Training
and Retraining for Target
Industries; Innovative Skills
Development Program
Integrated information
system, combining data from
all programs
Market-oriented mechanisms
109
Toward Order from Chaos
97
Table 1 (cont.)
State agency
Maryland
Massachusetts
Governor's Workforce;
Investment Board
DOL and Workforce
Development;
Massachusetts Jobs
Council (advisory)
Local or
regional
agencies
Programs
included
state level
Programs
excluded
state level
Local
responsibilities
Firm-based
training
Performance
Measures and
Data Systems
Distinctive
features
98
12 SDAs; local Dept. of Social
Services (DSS) agencies; local
Job Service agencies
JTPA; Perkins funds for voc ed;
adult ed; ES; JOBS, Nat'l
Community Service; Food Stamp
Employment and Training
(FSE&T) (as of 1995)
One-stop centers; STW; WtW;
economic development;
community colleges; UI; ES
12 SDAs provide organization
for JTPA, STW other job
training; DSS agencies implement
WtW; community colleges
autonomous; local planning
encouraged but not mandated
Dept. of Business/Economic
Development; WtW pilot
projects; some local community
college and SDA programs
Regional Employment
Boards (REBs)
One-stop centers; UI; ES;
JTPA; WtW
STW; vocational
education; community
colleges; adult education
Regional career centers;
WtW; policy setting and
coordination
Corporation for Business,
Work, and Learning
(formerly Baty State Skills
Corp.); Enhanced
Enterprise Communities
Dept. of Human Resources
(DHR) using pay-forperformance contracts with
private vendors; State Dept. of
Ed. (SDE) emphasizing
performance standards in K-16
education
New administration reversed
course; split of economic
development from workforce
development, and of welfare
from job training; Advanced
Technology Centers in
community colleges
NCRVE MDS-1249
10
Competitive funding of
regional career centers;
ideal of market-based
workforce development
system
Table 1 (cont.)
State agency
Michigan
North Carolina
Michigan Jobs Commission
Governor's Commission on
Workforce Preparedness
(GCWP) (HRIC); Interagency
Coordinating Council
(advisory)
Local WDBs
(administrative); Governor's
Workforce Commission
(advisory)
Programs
Local Workforce
Development Boards (WDBs)
in 26 Michigan Work Areas
JTPA; ES; TANF/JOBS,
state level
Work First!; FSE&T; STW;
Economic Development Job
JOBS; ES; FSE&T; community
colleges; secondary voc ed;
Training; Renaissance Zones
New and Expanded
Industries Training
Vocational rehabilitation
Local or
regional
agencies
included
Programs
excluded
state level
Local
responsibilities
Adult education; community
colleges
Direct Administration (Tier
GCWPadult ed; JTPA;
STW; one-stops; JTPA
One): JTPA; TANF, Work
First!; FSE&T; STW; No
Wrong Door Centers;
Corrections & Displaced
Homemaker Training
Programs
Collaborative Planning (Tier
Two): adult education;
vocational education; ES
Firm-based
training
Performance
Measures and
Data Systems
Distinctive
features
Economic Development Job
Training (EDJT)
Employment at program
completion and at 52 weeks
postprogram; developing
customer satisfaction
measures (as of August 1997)
Strong employer & economic
development orientation;
competitive subcontracting by
local WDBs; economic
development through tax and
regulatory relief; EDJT
New and Expanded
Industries Training; Focused
Industrial Training;
Occupational Extension
Common follow-up system,
reporting to Employment
Security Commission (in
progress)
Priority of CCs as deliverers;
consistency of efforts over
time; use of one-stop centers
for collaboration; staff
development (Box 1.2);
funding to CCs for firm-based
training
I,
1
Toward Order from Chaos
99
Table 1 (cont.)
Oklahoma
State agency
Local or
regional
agencies
Programs
included
state level
Workforce Quality Council
(WQC) (now the Workforce
Policy Cabinet)
21 local Compacts (with more 15 Regional WQCs (now
expected)
Regional Workforce
Committees)
Education (K-12, higher
education, Depts. of
Vocational and Technical
Education); Employment
Security Commission; Human
Services, Commerce,
Rehabilitation Services,
Human Resources; Cabinet
Secretaries: Commerce, Health
and Human Services, Human
Resources, Education; private
sector heads of 21 local
Compacts
Programs
excluded
state level
Local
responsibilities
Firm-based
training
Performance
Oregon
Workforce Quality Compact
DOL; proprietary trade
schools; Department of
Corrections
Voluntary
Area Vocational-Technical
Schools; community and twoyear colleges
Exist for separate systems
Measures and
Data Systems
Five business members; Five
labor or community-based
organizations; State
legislator; Local elected
official; Local education
representative Education (K12, Community College
Services, State System of
Higher Education); Economic
Development Department,
Department of Human
Resources, Bureau of Labor
and Industries
Proprietary trade schools
Advisory primarily; STW;
one-stop center planning
Targeted Training Program;
Small Business Development
Center (in CCs)
Oregon Benchmarks (K-12:
Certificates of Initial and
Advanced Mastery); shortterm performance measures;
Shared Information System
.
(SIS)
Distinctive
features
100
Voluntary participation;
inclusion of all education
sectors
NCRVE MDS-1249
112
Long-term, stable commitment;
state-level cross-functional
teams; Oregon Benchmarks
and SIS; Key Industries
Table 1 (cont.)
State agency
Local or
regional
agencies
Programs
included
state level
Texas
Texas Council on Workforce
Wisconsin
Council on Workforce
and Economic
Competitiveness (advisory);
Texas Workforce Commission
(TWC) (administrative)
28 WDBs, of which 16 were
Excellence (state HRIC);
Department of Workforce
Development (administrative)
fully operational as of
7 /1 / 98
Job Centers; Wisconsin
Works (WtW); TANF; JTPA;
ES; STW; vocational
rehabilitation; UI;
Workman's Comp
JTPA; ES; UI; FSE&T;
TANF/JOBS/WtW; STW
(shared); Trade Adjustment
Assistance; Skills
Development Fund; Senior
Texans; Child Care
Management System
Programs
excluded
state level
Local Collaborative Planning
Teams (advisory); Job Centers
Vocational education; adult
education; vocational
rehabilitation; Smart Jobs
Technical colleges; adult
education
Fund
Local
responsibilities
Under local WDBs: one-stop
career centers; JTPA; FSE&T;
JOBS; CCMS; STW; [ES & UI
Firm-based
training
Performance
Measures and
Data Systems
still under TWC]
Skills Development Fund;
Smart jobs Fund Programs;
Self-Sufficiency Fund; Texans
Work Program
Statewide goals and eight (8)
core performance measures
approved by Governor, with
UI wage-based employment
and earnings as two "key"
measures (not fully
Job Centers: Wisconsin
Works; JTPA; ES; vocational
rehabilitation; Perkins Funds;
Adult Education Funds
Wisconsin Regional Training
Partnerships
Outcomes vary with area
population and
unemployment and include
placement and duration of
employment in unsubsidized
jobs and increased earnings
implemented)
Distinctive
features
TANF is largely "work first" Threats from "work first";
early and active Job Centers
113
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101
discussed36; and, most important of all, (5) performance measures as they
are usually measured provide information only on short-term benefits, but
the long-run effects may be quite differentand, in most job training
programs, tend to vanish four to five years after the program:37 Thus, shortterm performance measures are poor indicators of long-run benefits. As a
North Carolina official mentioned about the state's Common Follow-up
System, the system is trying to ask,
Have the clients gotten the basic underpinnings of an education
that will allow them to transfer their knowledge, or every time
they change jobs are they going to have to be re-educated because
they didn't get the basic foundation to begin with? That's an issue
that's not necessarily going to be answered by our follow-up
system. Nobody seems to be paying attention to that question since
we have had a political shift to the right in our legislaturethat
has not been a particularly hot question on their minds.
Short-run performance measures may also skew the kinds of services
programs offer in favor of getting individuals quickly into jobs that may be
of low quality and provide few opportunities for advancement.
Therefore, performance measures may be one way to force local programs
to shift their attention to outcomes, but they are seriously flawed. A different
approach to program quality concentrates not on either inputs or outcomes,
but, rather, on the process by which programs prepare individuals for the
labor force. This approach would, for example, develop a conception of
what high-quality programs do, and then provide information about "good
practice" to other programs through a process of technical assistance. Such
information is complementary to that obtained by performance measures.
36 In other research, JTPA programs admitted that they would enroll clients formally
only after they had been in the program a week or two, eliminating the early
dropouts. In addition, efforts to follow up clients to calculate placement rates often
do not try very hard to locate mobile clients, who may be the least likely to be
employed. Officials sometimes alluded to being able to calculate any placement
rates they needed to, seeming to imply that there were still other methods of
manipulating data. Despite the potential consequences of these practices on
performance measures, we have never seen this subject carefully addressed.
37 See Friedlander and Burt less (1995), especially Table 4.2, reprinted in Grubb
(1996a), pp. 76-77. See also the meta-analysis by Fisher and Cordray (1996), which
found that effect sizes for earnings increase gradually until the 9th quarter, at the
beginning of the third year, but then decay rapidly, effect sizes for the proportion
employed increase gradually until quarter 10, and then decay rapidly over the
next three quarters. In a nonexperimental study in the U.S., Geraci (1984) compared
short-term indicators and longer-term earnings. The correlations were generally
quite low, indicating the inaccuracy of short-term measures of success.
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114
If, for example, a program's performance is found wanting, then there's no
reason why this information will improve its outcomes unless it has access
to the resources (both informational and financial) necessary for
improvement. However, this kind of information about good practice is
comparatively rare. We have already noted that technical assistance is
relatively infrequent; with the possible exception of North Carolina (see
Box 1.2), few of the states we examined provide much of it.
Perhaps more damaging, few of the local or state officials we interviewed
could articulate criteria describing the quality of education and training
programs, aside from the definitions embedded in performance indicators.
We routinely asked administrators and policymakers to identify exemplary
programs, allowing them to define what "exemplary" might meanthough
we provided some examples if they requested them (see question 9 of both
the local- and the state-level protocols in Appendix A). We wanted to
identify exemplary local programs to visit; in addition, we wanted to see
how local and state officials define qualityand to test their conceptions
against the five-part conception of quality that we have developed in various
studies over the past few years (see Box VI.2).
Unfortunately, few administrators could identify any specific programs
as exemplary. Some mentioned examples of programs currently being put
in placefor example, individuals in Iowa mentioned Workforce
Development Centers that were moving toward the state's goals, and
officials in Texas and Michigan also emphasized the one-stop centers that
were furthest along in implementation. In the cases of Oregon and
Oklahoma, with their focus in coordinated regional planning and
implementation, state officials named specific regions within the state that
they perceived to be well on their way to coordination. Some mentioned
high-profile programsfor example, programs operated with large
employers like Disney World or Universal Studios in the Orlando, Florida,
areawithout indicating what made them exemplary and without knowing
anything about them except the program name. Several individuals,
particularly in community colleges, proudly described computer-based
learning programseven though computer-aided instruction is often of
poor quality, particularly for remediation.38
In Maryland, most state officials asserted that it was a local role to address
qualityeven though the state was attempting to improve quality through
some technical assistance, developing performance standards, and tracking
performance measures. The few mentions of "exemplary" programs were
those that had been around long enough to generate outcome data, or that
had a good local reputation, but they were unable to describe key
components of implementation strategies that were distinctive in these
38 On the generally poor use of computers in community colleges, see Grubb and
Associates (1999), Chapter 7; see also the Panel on Educational Technology (1997).
115
Toward Order from Chaos
103
programs. Officials in Wisconsin identified one particular job center, one
that appeared to make more referrals to education than others; however,
the domination of "work first" in the state made it difficult to cite any
exemplary education and training efforts. In North Carolina, administrators
have become enamored of the "model" of the Center for Employment
Training (CET) in San Jose, Californiaa step in the right direction, since
CET shares many of the attributes of quality that we have identified in Box
VI.2 and its outcomes have been shown to be better than those of other job
training programsbut they have been unable to replicate all the
components of CET.
To be sure, there are some specific programs and institutions that have a
clearer sense of what quality requires. The North Carolina community
colleges are particularly insistent on close relationships with employers,
which they achieve partly through economic development activities (see
Box VI.2, point 1). The Index Program in Tulsa and the Industry Consortia
elsewhere in Oklahoma also emphasize close partnerships with employers.
The community colleges in Maricopa County cited the importance of
workforce development activities in creating close linkages with employers.
In addition, they have articulated a philosophy that they call
"incrementalism," recognizing that many individuals obtain their education
in small, incremental steps. As one administrator described it,
Our college deals mostly with adult students, so they have shortterm goals: "I want a job." That's the first goal. "I want a better
job." That's another goal. So then they come back each time they
need to meet a goalthey come back for the next segment.
This is identical to the idea of creating "ladders" of opportunities, from
short-term job training to longer-term vocational programs with certificate
and Associate degrees (Box VI.2, point 4), that could help structure other
education and training programs. But few programs have articulated such
ideas, and fewer still have put them into practice.
Overall, then, most local and state officials in these ten states could only
rarely articulate any definitions of what good and bad programs might
look like. They made few references to any of the five criteria for highquality programs presented in Box V1.2; and they did not have their own
conceptions of quality either. There are many reasons for this. Many state
administrators do not visit local programs very often, and local
administrators rarely get out of their own areas. Many officials interpret
what programs do entirely in terms of the numbers they must collect
enrollment rates; sometimes completions; and, in a few states, placement
rates and other performance measuresand they interpret their jobs as
monitoring performance on these narrowly defined indicators; they simply
have no reason to develop a broader conception of quality. Some state
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NCRVE MDS-1249
1 1.
administrators feel that it
is not their responsibility
to impose conceptions of
quality on local programs.
Conversely, some local
administrators feel that they
should mimic what the
state has declared desirable,
rather than coming up with
their own ideas. Clearly,
many local and state officials had never been asked
about exemplary programs.
In the absence of state
technical assistance, or
efforts to identify and
replicate "best practice," or
snoopy researchers trying to
find local programs to visit,
this simply is not a useful
question. Who would want
to know the answers?
But the lack of any clear
conceptions of quality is
unsettling. If local and state
officials cannot articulate
any diMensions of quality,
then they cannot recognize
when their policies are
driving programs in the
Box V0.2 Dimensions of Quality in Workforce
Preparation Programs39
While there are many ways to conceptualize
quality, five characteristics of programs are
important in generalthough for particular
programs several of these may not matter:
1. Assessment of the Labor Market:Training
individuals for positions where there is little
or no demand cannot possibly lead to
effective programs. Therefore, some of the
most effective training programs have
included procedures to assess the state of
the local labor market, to distinguish jobs
with relatively substantial (or increasing)
demand from those with stable or declining
demand, or to identify relatively high-wage
jobs or jobs with prospects for wage growth.
For example, one examination of particularly
effective job training programs in Texas
effective as measured by steady employment
at minimum wage or betterdetermined that
the most effective programs targeted jobs
with high and growing demand, and
counseled participants about the
occupational fields in which they were most
likely to be successful, thus, improving the
chances that anything learned in the program
would be translated into higher earnings
(King et al., 1995). In the ten states we
examined. Florida tries to target low-growth,
high-wage jobs: and Oregon's Key Industries
are an attempt to identify high-growth
sectors.
direction of higher quality
cont.
or, conversely, when policies
might erode qualityfor
example, when performance measures might actually diminish quality.
These conceptions of quality have emerged from this study, from examining a
series of supposedly exemplary programs, from the research in King et al. (1995),
39
and from various other research over the past decade. We regard these five
dimensions of quality as rough working hypotheses about high-quality programs.
See also Grubb and Ryan (1999, forthcoming), Section 11.4, which presents four
stages of human capital development: (1) implementation, (2) the learning process,
(3) changes in behavior on the job, and (4) employment and non-employment
outcomes. These four stages are closely linked to the conceptions of quality
presented in this section.
un
; Toward Order from Chaos
105
MI!
They cannot identify other
Box VII.2 cont.
state policies that might
2. Teaching the Appropriate Competencies:
Once a program has targeted a particular job,
then the competencies appropriate to the job
must be taught. Somewhat artificially, this
task can be divided into content,
incorporating the competencies that are
required on the particular job: and pedagogy,
or the methods of teaching various
competencies. The content of workforce
development programs is complex, since
most jobs require a broad array of
noncognitive abilities in addition to familiar
linguistic and mathematical abilities. In many
workforce programs, remediation is
necessary and, therefore, a set of "academic"
abilities complementary to vocational
competencies need to be achieved. In many
of the best programs, academic and
vocational competencies are integrated
rather than taught independently or seriatim.
The pedagogy of vocational education is
equally complex but almost completely
neglected within the United States.° If
programs ignore the content and pedagogy
appropriate to the demands of the workforce,
completers will not be adequately prepared
the common complaint of employers.
3. Providing an Appropriate Range of Services:
High-quality programs provide a range of
services appropriate to the needs of trainees
because an individual's employment may be
constrained not by the lack of vocational or
academic competencies, but by family
responsibilities, particularly the care of young
cont.
'
improve quality, and they
certainly cannot support
technical assistancean
approach that presumes a
state has access to informa-
tion about high-quality
programs. Worst of all,
a world in which there
are few discussions about
qualitybut where public
discussion focuses on expanding or declining revenues, enrollments, performance measures as oblique
measures of quality, and
political alliances over and
over and over againis one
in which fledgling efforts to
improve quality can find
little support. The currency
of the realm is still enroll-
ment and, in turn, the
revenues generated by
enrollment.
Ironically, then, the con-
ception of a workforce
development system is
skewed in many states.
These efforts have empha-
sized linkages among
programsparticularly, at
this stage, information
The issue of pedagogy is badly neglected in all of vocational education and
training. This section relies on Achtenhagen and Grubb (1999, forthcoming), which
reviews the existing literature on vocational pedagogy. Even in the much-emulated
German dual system, issues of pedagogy have not been systematically addressed,
even though teacher training there is quite comprehensive. In the English-speaking
countries with their less institutionalized systems, teacher training is often badly
neglected, and the same is true in most transitional and developing countries. In
the absence of explicit preparation in pedagogical issues, most instructors revert
to didactic and skills-oriented approaches.
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118
about other programsbut
have done much less about
the quality of programs
themselves, except to begin
the process of defining
performance standards. But
the problem with this
strategy is that many
programs in the current
education and training
system are not very
effective. Short-term job
training programs and
welfare-to-work programs
Box VL2 cont.
children; abusive family relationships: health
problems, including physical handicaps; and
mental health problems, especially depression
or bipolar conditions, or alcohol and drug
abuse.4' If a training program fails to screen
its clients for this range of issues, and fails to
respond with the appropriate services (like
remedial education, child care, health care, or
mental health programs), then, by default, a
number of individuals will fail to complete
the program and it will be ineffective.
4. Creating Linkages Among Programs: Many
stops maybe useful to some
public training programs, particularly for
remedial purposes and retraining, are quite
shortperhaps ten to fifteen weeks, and
sometimes (in job search assistance) as little
as two weeks. Unfortunately, their effects on
subsequent employment and earnings are
small and often transitory. One common
reason for such small effects is, of course,
that such programs are simply not long or
intensive enough to substantially improve the
competencies of the individuals involved.
Unless it is possible to develop more
comprehensive programs, an alternative is to
link shorter programs in "ladders" of
successive opportunities so that individuals
can enter one short-term program, perhaps
work for a while, and then enter a subsequent
program to further develop their skills. Such
linkages also allow services to be provided by
different programs to the same individual.
allowing him or her to receive an appropriate
array of services. However, if a short-term
program fails to establish such linkages, then
individuals are again on their own in
identifying further education and training
opportunities.
students, but not to those
cont.
show small effects, vanishing after several years,
and even these are being
eclipsed by "work first"
initiatives. Most adult education programs keep their
students for only short periods of time, teach them in
dreadful ways, and provide
them with little advancement (Grubb & Kalman,
1994; Young, Fitzgerald, &
Morgan, 1994). Many com-
munity colleges and area
schools have high dropout
rates; mediocre connections
with local employers; and
weak services, including
placement efforts. The infor-
mation provided by onewho failed to find their way
41 As a particularly vivid example, Quint, Musick, and Ladner (1994) found
indications of depressive conditions in one fourth to one half of the individuals in
an experimental program for mothers on welfare. Depressive conditions may
manifest themselves as drug or alcohol abuse or as what appears to be laziness, so
an accurate diagnosis is necessary to understand the appropriate response.
119
Toward Order from Chaos
107
Box VI.2 cont.
5. Monitoring Effectiveness Continually: A final
characteristic of high-quality VET programs is
that they monitor their own effectiveness by
collecting the appropriate data and using it
to identify and remedy weaknesses. This is a
desirable characteristic because it shifts the
burden of assuring quality from a regional or
national boardwhich may not be in a good
position to learn about dimensions of
qualityto the training provider itself, which
is in a better position to be aware of the
variety of employment and client
characteristics that affect effectiveness. The
ability to monitor effectiveness requires a
process to collect and act upon information.
While performance measures could be part
of this process, it could also include regular
interviews with employers, exit interviews
with students leaving the program, and other
information that could determine why
outcomes may be mediocre. The process in
Oregon, of establishing Benchmarks and
then urging local programs to develop the
ability to improve, probably provides the best
example among these ten states.
10
108
NCRVE MDS-1249
there or are unable to make
good use of computer-based
information. Each compo-
nent of the current system
bears examination and
improvementbut without
any clear conception of
what high-quality programs
look like, there is little
guidance to help states face
this challenge.
SECTION 7
Unresolved Issues:
The Contradictions in State Policies
There is no question that some statessome of the most active states
have made substantial strides in creating coherent workforce development
policies, certainly compared to their activities a decade ago. Others lag
substantially behind, often for obvious reasonsbecause their efforts have
not been consistent over time, or because they have started only recently to
think about significant reform of their workforce development programs.
Over longer periods of time, they might make more progress.
However, across the ten states we have examined, there are a number of
issues that present substantial barriers to future development. These are
structural issues, deeply rooted in current policies and politics, that cannot
be resolved simply with additional time and attention, unless they are
confronted directly. They have emerged even in states that have made
substantial progress, and that have consistent political support for reform
of workforce development. In our estimation, these present the real
challenges for future efforts: the continued separation of education from
training; the conflict between the rhetoric around a skilled workforce and
the reality of low-level programs; and the debate over institutional versus
market mechanisms.
The Continued Separation of Education and Training
One of the notable patterns across these ten states is that education
programsspecifically postsecondary vocational education in community
colleges and technical institutes or centers, and adult educationare (with
some important exceptions like North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Oregon)
frequently left out of state coordination efforts. Thus, the Texas Workforce
Commission (TWC) failed to include any education programs. Adult
education fought hard to stay out of the TWC, and the community colleges
have also managed to stay independent of this effort. Similarly, in Michigan,
adult education and community colleges were not included in the programs
administered by the Michigan Jobs Commission (MJC), and state officials
complain frequently about the unresponsiveness to employer needs of adult
education in particular. In Maryland, community colleges are widely viewed
as weak partners in workforce development, with a mixed record of
working with employers and an inability to move fast enough. One observer
noted that colleges "always come to the table as vendors, never as partners,"
wanting more resources without being willing to share the risk of new
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Toward Order from Chaos
109
efforts. Others noted that colleges shifted the "profits" from continuing
education to their "core" offerings. (There are, to be sure, initiatives to draw
community colleges into the workforce development system, especially
through Advanced Technology Centers.) Adult education has a low profile
in Maryland, and was not mentioned by other programs as an important
part of the system.
In Massachusetts, both two- and four-year colleges send representatives
to the Massachusetts Jobs Council, but they have not been able to exert
much influence because public education is outside the state's workforce
development funding and governance structure. More generally, as we
pointed out in Section II, adult education in a number of states fought
vigorously to be kept out of consolidation efforts, and education programs
were never considered for inclusion in the first place. Sometimes the
separation originates in political practices. In Arizona and several other
states, an elected Superintendent of Instruction is independent of the
Governor. The Governor's Policy Board did not include any education
agencies; as a local coordinator complained,
There's a separation between the Governor and the Superintendent.
So just by the way it's structured, you're going to have a separate
system since the Governor administers and oversees the
employment training programs versus the Superintendent who
oversees the educational program.
Where it occurs, the continued separation of education from training42
means that the majority of funding in workforce development efforts
remains outside state reforms. For example, the TWC includes about $750
million in overall spending, though some of this$220 million in child
care, $46 million in the Employment Service (ES), and $76 million in
Unemployment Insurance (UI)is essentially segregated for specific
purposes; but an additional $700 million is spent in vocational education,
adult education, vocational rehabilitation, and the Smart Jobs fund to lure
industry. As a result, the TWC can make decisions about less than half of
the education and training funds in the state, and its influence over
education is scant. Similarly, in Massachusetts, an inventory of education
and training programs led local programs to believe that they might have
huge budgets; however, when the local career centers were funded, it
" This follows a pattern which earlier NCRVE research also noted: Grubb and
McDonnell (1996) found that one common pattern of coordination in local
communities was for education providers to coordinate (especially to ease the
transition from high school to college and from two-year to four-year colleges)
and for job training providers to coordinate, but for the two groups to remain
separate from one another.
110
NCRVE MDS-1249
1
became apparent that much of the funding in the system was locked up in
education or other programs that could not be touched. As a state official
mentioned,
The career centers were promised huge budgets. They really
believed that there was $700 million in the system for them,
ignoring that most of itsuch as Pell grants and aid to local
vocational schoolscan't be accessed. There isn't that kind of
money in the entire systemand what there is, is completely
categoricalto support a purely customer-driven model. In fact,
about $1 million is available for each of the SDAs. The result was a
complete meltdown.
But the more serious problem of the continuing division, in our view, is
that each could learn from the other. Educational institutions have certain
strengths which job training programs typically lack, and conversely,
education has much to learn from job training. In particular, short-term job
training programs usually generate very small benefits for their participants,
in the range of $200 to $500 per year; and even these paltry benefits tend to
vanish after four or five years, so any benefits are temporary.43 The reasons
for these discouraging results include the low intensity of these programs
(since most last only 10 to 15 weeks), the provision of a limited range of
services to individuals with multiple barriers to employment, the poor
quality of training, and the inattention to teaching issuesfor populations
who have often failed to learn basic academic skills in ten to twelve years
of schooling. One way to correct these weakness might be to create more
substantial job training programs, like the one-year residential Job Corps
or the two-year German programs with many ancillary services. But if this
seems politically and fiscally unreasonable, the only other solution would
be to link a series of shorter programs in "ladders" of opportunities, perhaps
including one or two short job-training programs and then transfer options
into certificate and Associate programs in community colleges or technical
institutes. This solution, relying on existing institutions rather than creating
new ones, requires that job training and education providers be better
integrated, and the continued separation of the two in many states thwarts
this possibility (Grubb, 1996a).
Similarly, many job training and welfare-to-work programs are forced
to provide remedial education, either before or as part of vocational skill
training. But remedial education within the world of job training
is incredibly haphazard: many programs use the worst kinds of
43 The benefits of training have been summarized in Grubb (1996a), Lalonde (1995),
and U.S. DOL (1995). The long-term effects are examined in Friedlander and Burtless
(1995).
1
,,
--Toward Order from Chaos
Ill
computer-based programs, very few pay any attention to the pedagogy of
basic skills instruction or to the training of instructors, and even the most
careful of these efforts show no results. The effects are not any better in
adult education programs, on the average, which also tend to be too short,
to have extremely high dropout rates, and to pay little attention to
appropriate teaching methods (Grubb & Kalman, 1994; Young et al., 1994).
However, some community colleges have developed remedial (or
"developmental") efforts that have more promisethat use a variety of
different teaching methods, that generate programs of considerable
intensity, and that link remedial education with vocational education so
that students stay motivated." But adult education and job training
providers cannot learn from these efforts if they are segregated in their
own little worlds. Only a state effort that began coordinating all programs
and allowing different providers of remediation to learn from one another
would have some chance of improving practices in the worst programs.
Conversely, education providers also have much to learn from job
training. As we mentioned above, community colleges often have weak
connections with employers, and often assert that placement is not part of
their charge as educators; however, partly because the markets for
individuals without baccalaureate degrees are quite local, the benefits of
postsecondary vocational education often do not materialize unless students
find employment related to their course of study (Grubb, 1998). Usually
this requires finding employment locallyfor which strong connections
to employers and placement efforts are crucial, as they are for some
institutions (like the vocational-technical centers in Oklahoma, or the
community colleges in North Carolina) but not for others (like academically
oriented community colleges). In addition, colleges are frequently charged
with having rigid schedules, operating only on a standard academic
calendar; they could benefit from learning about the flexibility more often
seen in job training and adult education. Community colleges, adult
education programs, and job training providers could, therefore, learn from
the strengths of other programs. Indeed, we have sometimes seen such
combinationsfor example, when the JTPA program in Miami joined
community-based organizations to provide recruitment, assessment,
counseling, and job placement, while the local community college provided
classroom instruction in both remedial and vocational skills, with each
" On the lack of effects of adult education and job training programs, see Grubb
and Kalman (1994); for a random-assignment evaluation of a basic skills program
showing no significant effects, see Martinson and Friedlander (1994). On learning
communities in community colleges that combine remedial and vocational
education, see Grubb (1996b), Chapter 5; and Tinto, Goodsell-Love, and Russo
(1994). On the integration of remediation and vocational education in a job training
program, see Burghardt and Gordon (1990) on CET.
112
NCRVE MDS-1249
12 4
providing its own specialty.45 But for this to happen, the division between
education and training must be bridged.
Occasionally, better connections between education and training exist
when a community college dominates the local provision of services, and
can thereby coordinate different programs.46 For example, in Iowa, the East
Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium and the East Central
Iowa Private Industry Council (PIC) transferred administrative
responsibilities for JTPA from the city to Kirkwood Community College,
which provides leadership for establishing a coherent regional service
delivery system and, as the coordinating service provider, the Regional
Workforce Development Customer Service Plan. Within each of Iowa's
workforce regions, several entities will be involved in providing products
and services, including the Regional Advisory Board (RAB), the PIC, local
elected officials, coordinating service providers, and the fiscal agent. Partner
organizations will manage the regional workforce development system and
remain responsible for coordinating service providerscreating ongoing
working relationships among a variety of education and training providers,
including the community college. More generally, community colleges
administer JTPA programs in about half the counties in Iowa and, therefore,
canif they are appropriately organized47coordinate education and
training. In addition, because community colleges provide customized
training to firms through Iowa's unique bond program, they can also
coordinate economic development activities with job training.
Another similar example exists in Orlando, Florida, where Valencia
Community College provided leadership in the development of central
Florida's Partnership for Workforce Development. The one-stop centers
are located on the five campuses of the college, which shares staff with the
centers. The college provides a wide range of assessment, basic skills, and
other kinds of adult education; both short- and long-term vocational
education; and placement services. Still another example is Maricopa
County Community College District in the Phoenix area. The colleges
provide a great deal of training through the state's Workforce Recruitment
Program; they are active partners in the local one-stop centers, providing
staff two days a week who can enroll students on the spot. The STW office
is located on the college campuses. The colleges provide a variety of
45 This example can be found in Grubb et al. (1990b).
46 See also the model of coordination where the community college is dominant
found in Jacksonville, Florida, and in Sioux City, Iowain Grubb and McDonnell
(1996).
47 In earlier research, we found some community colleges in Iowa with responsibility
for JTPA organized job training in an independent division, limiting the connections
between short-term job training and longer-term vocational certificate and Associate
programs. See Grubb et al. (1990a).
15
1
;Toward Order from Chaos
113
short-term training and operate the Maricopa Skill Center specifically for
short-term training, as well as offering certificate and Associate programs.
Their philosophy of "incrementalism" recognizes that students in shortterm training may later need or want to return for longer-term programs.
In addition, some states have managed to incorporate educational
institutions into their workforce development reforms. For example, the
Workforce Quality Compact in Oklahoma includes the regents for higher
education (responsible for community colleges), the Superintendent of
Public Instruction (for K-12 education), and the direction of the Department
of Vocational and Technical Education (with responsibility for area
vocational centers). The Compact can, therefore, continue to promote the
cooperative agreements and articulation that have been developing between
community colleges and area vocational schools. In the spirit of building
partnerships and using existing resources, the Department of Human
Services has allocated substantial grants to the community college and area
vocational schools to serve TANF clients. In addition, adult education is
integrated with workforce development to a greater extent than in most
states. It provides some basic skills and functional literacy training in
workplaces for specific employers; it supports Job Link, a program available
to all unemployed and underemployed individuals that provides basic skills
required for entry-level jobs, where employers give preference to
individuals who have completed the program; and it has provided several
special grants for basic skills to community-based workforce development
programs.
North Carolina provides another example of bridging education and
job training, partly because of its long history of vocationally oriented
community colleges. Community colleges and adult education are overseen
by the Governor's Commission on Workforce Preparedness, which
consolidated the state's advisory boards for vocational education, job
training, and adult education. Community colleges are the preferred
providers for all workforce development, including upgrade training for
specific employers and new-hire training for firms moving in. They also
provide adult education and literacy programs, and often provide these
services for job training and welfare-to-work programs, usually through
noncredit courses in continuing education divisions. In Massachusetts, the
director of adult education has been a member of the Massachusetts Jobs
Council, and for several years has tried to rationalize programming through
multiyear grants and the issuance of joint RFPs with other state agencies.
Many other training administrators identified this office as the only
educational program that understands workforce development. Oregon
also has made community colleges an important partner in workforce
development and welfare reform. The Office of Community College
Services staff and local colleges have been key players at the local and state
levels. The colleges' chancellor took a leave of absence to_.serve as the
114
NCRVE MDS-1249
1"
Education and Workforce Policy advisor to the Governor, and the interim
chancellor was also active in supporting the WQC. On the workforce side,
local community colleges house one-stop centers, serve as primary
providers or subcontractors for education and training of welfare recipients,
and also administer adult basic education.
There are, then, some bright spots in the efforts to coordinate education
and training, particularly where community colleges (and, in Oklahoma,
the area vocational centers) are oriented toward workforce development.
But most states have failed to bridge this divide. Until they do, we suspect
that job training programs by themselves will remain small and ineffective,
and that education programs will be less effective than they could be if
they made common cause with other participants in the workforce
development arena.
A Skilled Workforce: Rhetoric and Reality
A second contradiction in the plans of many states is a deep conflict
between the rhetoric behind state reforms and the reality of what states
often do. The justification for reforms is often some version of the national
SCANS report published in 1991, which argued that international
competitive pressures and the demands of high-performance workplaces
required new skills in the labor forcefor example, five of the competencies
that the SCANS report identified were the ability to work with resources,
information, systems, technology, and other people of different kinds from
diverse backgrounds. Similarly, states have usually prefaced their reforms
with the same rhetorical flourish. In Oregon, for example, the 20-year
strategic plan called Oregon Shines declared the need to build "a superior
workforce . . equal to any in the world by 2010," the foundation of "wellpaying, productive jobs for Oregonians, providing an economic base that
enriches all aspects of Oregon life."
But the reality of what states are doing is far from the resolve to provide
"higher-order skills" for 21st century jobs in at least three respects. Most
obviously, "work first" programs for welfare recipients are limiting their
access to education and training, and are instead pushing them into jobs
.
that are unlikely to have much educative potential. States seem to be willing
to live with a two-tiered system, in which some citizens gain access to public
colleges and universities, with substantial public subsidiesparticularly
over the unlimited years that nonwelfare recipients are entitled to be in
public education and training programswhile others are given two-week
job search assistance workshops and told to make their way into the current
labor market, in which the earnings of low-skilled workers are steadily
eroding. Evidently, the skills required for the "workforce of the 21st century"
are not for themthey are being constrained to pick up whatever skills
they can find in low-level work. And the preoccupation with welfare
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"reform" has drawn attention away from education and training in many
states, undermining the commitment to higher-order skills for the
population as a whole. It is hard to reconcile these activities with the rhetoric
of human capital development as the §ource of advancement.
Second, the focus in most workforce development reforms on lowintensity job training is also inconsistent with the rhetoric about higherorder skills and a flexible workforce. Most job training programs provide
15 weeks or less of relatively job-specific preparation, barely adequate for
entry-level work, and the dismal long-run effects of these programs clarify
that they do not provide the educational base to allow individuals to
continue learning on the job. The remedial programs in the workforce
development system, particularly the brief efforts that are part of job training
programs and adult education, are usually ineffective and provide the
lowest levels of basic skills, with high rates of dropping out and few options
for those who do complete these programs. In some states, there appears
to be a trend toward shorter programs. In Michigan, for example, employers
continue to stress the importance of "soft" or personal skills and workers
who can reinvent themselves, but they are also demanding shorter
programs. Fewer students are completing Associate degrees, fewer are
taking courses of study with math and language components, and the
programs of the Michigan Economic Development Job Training Program
(often provided by community colleges) tend to be short and highly
employer-specific. The states pursuing "work first" strategies have
generally avoided connections to postsecondary education, since these
programs are generally too long for their purposes. These policies are not
routes to a highly skilled labor force.
Third, as SCANS and many others have pointed out (e.g., Berryman &
Bailey, 1992; Berryman, 1995; SCANS, 1991), higher-order skills require new
approaches to teaching and learning. It is impossible to learn sophisticated
communications skills in English courses that continue to drill on grammar
and punctuation, or to learn problem-solving in conventional math courses
emphasizing computational algorithms and simple-minded time-ratedistance problems. The typical computer-based programs used in many
job training activities and remedial labs are particularly poor ways of
teaching higher-order skills of any kind. Some institutions are using the
DACUM process of curriculum development in an effort to orient their
vocational preparation around the skills that are presumably required in
work, but DACUM and other competency-based approaches usually result
in long lists of low-level skills to master, ignoring the conceptual
understanding that is crucial to working in high-performance workplaces."
48 The problems associated with DACUM and other competency-based approaches
to vocational curricula are clarified in Achtenhagen and Grubb (1999, forthcoming).
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Instead, new approaches to teaching are necessary in which individuals
face more realistic problems and more lifelike approaches to
communications skills, teamwork, computer use, and the other commonly
mentioned higher-order skills. These approaches have been promoted in
some efforts to integrate academic and vocational education supported by
federal funds for vocational education, in some Tech Prep programs, in
learning communities adopted by a few two- and four-year colleges across
the country, and in some efforts to bring academies and career pathways
into high schools. However, such changes in approaches to teaching have
been missing from reforms in workforce development programs, where
issues of teaching and learning are almost non-existent.
More generally, as we showed in the previous section, most local and
state officials find it difficult to conceptualize quality in education and
training programs. They certainly do not mention "skills for the 21st
century," despite the prevalence of such rhetoric in state policies, and they
do not think about the approaches to teaching that could lead to such skills.
The emphasis on welfare "reform" has distracted the attention of state
officials, and it has tended to alienate the employers whose support for
public education and training is critical over the long run. The future of
workforce development does not lie in "work first," but, rather, in improving
the quality of education and training programs and the linkages among
them.
Now, perhaps, we should understand the rhetoric of preparing a
"workforce for the 21st century" as overblown, and, therefore, accept more
modest goals for workforce development. Certainly, modest goalscreating
more coherence in the "system," encouraging a little more coordination,
creating more information for potential clients, generating a little more data
about results, and providing a new forum for comparison among
programsare all worthy in their own right. But these goals, without
attention to dimensions of quality or ideas about what skills are most
appropriate, set their sights too low. By supporting training and related
services that are appropriate, at best, for the unskilled labor force, they doom
the individuals in them to jobs where they cannot readily advance and
where their wages will deteriorate in real terms. They virtually guarantee
that the mediocre outcomes typical of existing job training programs will
be replicated. And they guarantee a divide between the substantial efforts
in the conventional education system, including two- and four-year colleges,
and the modest efforts in workforce development, reinforcing a two-tiered
system.
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The Debate Between Institutional Versus Market
Mechanisms
In the efforts to reform workforce development, we can see an implicit
debate that has taken place in other education and social programs
between the wisdom of policies designed to strengthen public programs,
and those efforts to provide competition and other market-like mechanisms
to enhance quality. The range of state policies, depicted in Figure 1,
illustrates this issue, in which most states have adopted policies that draw
from both institution-building strategies and market-like mechanisms. But
this "debate" is rarely made explicit because, with few exceptionslike
Oregon with its rejection of overt competition, and perhaps Florida at the
other extremestates have adopted their policies without explicit
consideration of the alternatives available to them.
The debate in the U.S. about markets and market-like mechanisms has
settled into a predictable pattern: advocates for markets declaim about
choice, effectiveness, and efficiency, while detractors complain about
inequities and fraud and wonder if they can deliver on the promises made
for them. There have been fewer attempts to determine what the empirical
record showswhether there is evidence to back up the claims and
counterclaims of each sidepartly because there is still not much evidence.49
Indeed, state efforts to reform their workforce development programs can
be viewed as opportunities to test the efficacy of institutional versus marketlike mechanisms of reform.
But for such tests to be adequate, it is necessary for states to collect the
right information about effectiveness. For example, the question about onestop centers is not simply how many people use them; the critical questions
are whether decisions about training programs are improved or changed
by having access to more information, and whether individuals who are
not served by one-stops have access to information they need for rational
decisions. The question of whether information is sufficient for individuals
to make decisionsor whether the relatively inexperienced and uneducated
individuals who seek access to training and welfare-to-work opportunities
need more than information, like additional counselingis one that has
rarely been posed. An issue about performance measures is not simply
whether they force programs to pay more attention to outcomes; it is also
whether programs attain those outcomes in ways related to enduring effects,
" See, for example, Levin's (1998) review of the evidence in the U.S., and Finkelstein
and Grubb's (1998) review of the British evidence. What evidence there is seems
distinctly mixed: the principal U.S. voucher system, federal grants and loans for
postsecondary education, generally seems to work well for those attending fouryear colleges but is underused in community colleges and leads to large amounts
of default and fraud in proprietary schools.
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or whether they engage in behaviorcreaming, preparing for short-term
over long-run effects, creating displacement, or simply cooking the
numbersthat make programs seem effective without changing the
prospects of clients.
Similarly, for states like North Carolina and Oregon that have engaged
in more extensive technical assistance and institution-building, the question
is whether local institutions respond to these policies, or whether they accept
state resources and merely relabel what they are already doing. And, for
the larger number of states that have done relatively little technical
assistance, the obvious question is whether state resources overall might
be more effectively spent if small amounts of additional resources were
allocated to institution-building. Our general point, then, is that, until states
ask the right questions about their current approaches, they will be unable
to address the question of which policies are most effective.
The behavior of most stateswhich have adopted both market-like
mechanisms as well as certain approaches to institutional improvement
suggests that the question of institutional improvement or market-like
approaches may be the wrong way to pose the question. Instead of this
either-or approach, a better question might be what combination of
institutional and market-oriented approaches is likely to be most effective.
One possibilitycertainly one that avoids an either-or approachis that
markets can work well only in the presence of strong, self-conscious
education and training programs that recognize the dimensions of quality
like those in Box VI.2. In such cases, then, competition can work wellfor
example, community colleges that have taken on a variety of different
responsibilities, including short-term training and contract education for
employers; that have well-established connections with the local labor
market; and that have worked to improve the quality of teaching in all
their programs. But where programs have no sense of how to become more
effective, or simply respond to the incentives (including reporting
requirements) in state policies, then the danger increases that ill-informed
consumers will confront an array of programs oriented toward profit rather
than quality. (This happens, for example, when poorly informed
"consumers" like welfare recipients face unscrupulous proprietary school
or weak community-based organizations with few ties to employers and
no conceptions of teaching.) The implication of this argument is that states
should consider combining institutional support to create strong providers
of education and training and well-informed consumers, with limited
market-like mechanisms to create greater flexibility, variety, and consumer
choice.
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SECTION 8
The Implications for State and
Federal Policy
By now we can see that, even as states are moving in the direction of
more coherent workforce development systems (albeit slowly and fitfully),
their policies and practices vary enormously. We expect that this pattern
will continueand rightfully so, given the differences among states in the
economic issues they face, the institutions they have developed, and the
structure and culture of local and state governments. If states continue to
become more active in shaping their own systems, then the uniformity
imposed in federal programs like JTPA and JOBS will give way to greater
variety in how state and federal funds are planned, combined, and used.
In this situation, it is inappropriate to make fixed recommendations, or to
decide that the approach of a particular state is the right one for others to
follow. Instead, we outline a series of issues that, based on the experiences
of these ten states, should probably be considered by all states as they
attempt to reshape their workforce development systems. We then examine
federal policy briefly, to make three points about policies that are helpful
to state efforts in varying degrees.
Finally, we return to the questions we raised at the beginning of this
report. It is impossible to forecast whether workforce development systems
will continue in the direction of greater coordination and rationalization,
as the education system has over the past two centuries; however, the
analogy is a useful one, since it can alert us to both the benefits and some of
the pitfalls of system-building.
Considerations for State Policy
The local-state structure that most states have developedthat is,
establishing a state agency by combining or consolidating a variety of
programs, together with local or regional counterparts closer to local labor
marketsis both logical and flexible. However, states must explicitly
consider the following dilemmas or their efforts will simply add another
layer of bureaucracy without affecting programs:
The powers of local and state agencies must be carefully considered.
Administrative agencies are much more powerful than planning
agencies, and voluntary efforts (as in Oklahoma) seem to reach only the
most committed local areas. The extent of state authority in consolidated
agencies involves a simple kind of tradeoff: More powerful state agencies
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are better able to ensure uniformity from region to region; but certain
kinds of uniformity are counterproductive and create such resistance
from local programs that very little is changed. In contrast, the policy of
"state guidance, local direction," particularly in the more gentle forms
that Oklahoma and Oregon have taken, create less resistance but also
allow much more variation in the response of regional boards. Whether
such efforts can, over time, change the culture of how local programs
operateas states like Oklahoma and Oregon hoperemains to be seen,
but the consensus elsewhere is that there has to be some energy put into
the state system in the form of either administrative power, funding, or
political influence before coordination takes place: "unless you apply
an input of energy, the system is not naturally integrated."
In many states, the state's vision is more powerful than its implementation. In
many cases, implementation has failed because of familiar problems:
poor choices in leadership, slow developments at the state level,
inconsistent state practices, resistance from various providers or from
local officials, and/or the continued restrictions of federal programs (all
reviewed in Section II). But we are particularly impressed with the
importance of having stable and continuous state policies, support from
a series of governors, and bipartisan support so that policies can continue
to develop over timeas has been most true in Florida, North Carolina,
and Oregon. Where new governors have taken a different position, or
workforce programs have become pawns in partisan politics, or an
activist governor has been succeeded by one who does not care about
education and training, progress has been unsteady and often reversed.
The inclusiveness of state boards or planning councils, and then of their local
counterparts, is a crucial decision. Most often, these decisions have left in
place a divide between education programs, on the one hand, and other
job training programs and related services (like information and
counseling or one-stop centers) on the othera split created in the early
1960s which continues to reflect differences in purpose, in institutional
norms and practices, and in political resistance. However, we have
argued (particularly in Section VII) that such a division is
counterproductive to creating more effective systemssystems in which
different programs can learn from one another and create appropriate
linkagesand, therefore, states need to consider the alternatives they
have to reintegrate education and training.
Many states are moving toward systems that are more holistic, in the sense
that they include a variety of potential clients or students, and more
flexible and responsive services determined by individual assessments
and labor market information. This approach replaces, on both
dimensions, the approach of fragmented categorical programs providing
fixed services (or a lock-step progression of services, as in "work first")
to a specific clientele without much sense of local employment conditions.
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While there is not yet "evidence" of the conventional statistical sort about
the effectiveness of such holistic and flexible approaches, they are
superior for many a priori reasons: They move away from tiered and
stigmatizing approaches, they adhere to many of the principles of
program quality outlined in Box VI.2, and they provide a clear goal for a
state's reforms. Therefore, the purpose of coordination and consolidation
is not simply to move programs around an organization chart in the
hopes that good things will result. The purpose is to create more effective
local programs and a system that is holistic, flexible, and responsive in
these particular ways.
As states begin to develop more coherent workforce development systems, the
quality agenda"the enhancement of the effectiveness of individual
programsbecomes more prominent. Other programs do not want to
coordinate with low-quality programs, particularly (in most states) adult
education and the ES; conversely, high-quality programs (like community
colleges in North Carolina or adult education in Massachusetts) are more
likely to play active roles in creating state systems. But states need to
consider carefully how to enhance quality: Performance measures and
accountability systems may be valuable in creating more information
about effectiveness, but in the absence of the ability and will to change
they may not be sufficient. The slogan we presented in Section I"no
funding without accountability; no accountability without technical
assistance"may be overly simple, but it does at least highlight the fact
that states have several different approaches to quality, and may need to
consider approaches that they are not now using.
As part of the quality agenda, states need to recognize the potential disjunction
between their goals for a high-quality workforce and the reality of low-level
training (see Section VI). In some kinds of trainingfor example, upgrade
training for specific employersthis may not be a problem, since
employers can specify the requirements of production. But for remedial
training and some re-training, it may be a serious issue, and it is unlikely
that conventional programs can bring individuals lacking basic education
to the levels appropriate for a high-skilled workforce all at once.
Therefore, states need to consider how to create a series of programs, or
a ladder of opportunities, so that individuals can over time develop the
competencies necessary for skilled work.
Many localities and states have come to recognize the importance of engaging
employers in creating workforce development programs, at the very least by
paying greater attention to the structure of demand and job growth.
However, there are several more ways to engage employers, particularly
in providing work-based placements complementary to school-based
learning, in a variety of education and training efforts; and in helping
design the curriculum of programs, certainly in cases of customized
training but in other forms as well. As experience with STW programs
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has clarified, creating these linkages also requires stable efforts, over
long periods of time, with attention to the mutual interests of employers,
students or clients, and education and training providers.
The practices associated with "work first," particularly in their more extreme
form, violate many of the developments states have been trying. They
undermine the provision of education and training and, therefore,
undermine the quality agenda; they replace holistic and responsive
programs with categorical and rigid approaches; they distract state
policymakers from the stable development of their own workforce
development visions; and they have alienated employers. States need
to consider carefully the costs of welfare "reform" and "work first" for
the rest of their workforce systems, and may need to develop more
moderate versions (as Iowa and Oregon have).
It is encouraging to see the emergence of economic development policies, since
these have the potential of matching supply-side policies in education
and training with demand-side policies to enhance employment.
However, the effectiveness of state economic development efforts has
not been widely assessed, and many policiesespecially "smokestack
chasing"need to be more carefully considered. And while a few states
have developed mechanisms of coordinating economic development
with workforce development, as outlined in Section I, this is by no means
universal. Over the long run, states might consider how to combine
effective policies, enhancing state employment with high-quality
education and training.
Considerations for Federal Policy
In many ways, federal policies have created the problems that state efforts
at coordination seek to redress. The accumulation of categorical problems
with numerous and conflicting regulations have contributed to the sense
of chaos, duplication, and ineffectiveness that, in turn, have generated both
state and federal efforts at reform. The question for the federal government,
then, is how it can be most helpful as states begin their own reforms. The
experiences in these ten states suggest at least three considerations:
1. Federal efforts that bring various education and training providers together
have been generally helpful. Ten years ago, for example, local and state
officials generally praised the requirements for information sharing and
joint membership on governing boards; and although the 7% funds for
coordination between JTPA and vocational education were often poorly
spent, they were also central to many local innovations. Currently, the
efforts to create one-stop centers have been helpful in bringing many
participants to the table. While many efforts so far have not gone beyond
information-sharing, many centers have grander plans for the future,
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and some centers have served as a forum to create more substantial
coordination and even consolidation. Similarly, STW programs have been
generally praised as mechanisms for getting various education and
training providers together, even though in some areas they have not
yet changed how high schools work (Hershey, Hudis, Silverberg, &
Haimson, 1997). Thus, federal policy should in the future seek out
opportunities to provide certain programs and services through joint
delivery mechanisms, and current requirements for information-sharing
and joint memberships should be continued.
2. Federal regulations continue to be a thorn in the side of state reforms and local
programs. There are, however, a variety of approaches the federal
government might take:
Expanded use of waivers, especially in the efforts extended to several
states like Workflex, is one way for the federal government to
encourage greater effectiveness and coordination.
The federal government could embark on a project to review its
regulations, with an eye to eliminating unnecessary restrictions,
coordinating requirements among federal departments (e.g., among
the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human
Services), and creating definitive interpretations of regulations in place
of the current inconsistency and uncertainty among regional and
national offices. While we do not think this is likely,50 it does at least
clarify that there are alternatives.
Consolidation of vocational education, job training, and adult
education programs would presumably eliminate most federal
programs. The local and state officials we interviewed are ambivalent
in their view of consolidation, however. Some expect it would clear
away a thicket of unnecessary regulations, while others fear it would
dilute the commitment to certain populationswelfare recipients, the
underemployed, the disabled, or dislocated workers, for example50 The implementation of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, which is jointly
administered by the Departments of Education and Labor, has been a bureaucratic
nightmare (see Hershey et al., 1997). If cooperation between two departments on
new and relatively simple legislation is difficult, cooperation among several
departments on legislation that has been in place for several decades, and that is
much more complex, seems unreachable. In addition, the political power that would
be necessary to force such cooperation would be unlikely to come from either the
Congress or the executive branch since the benefits are intangible and prospective
while the costs are evident and present, and would be instantly expressed by
multiple interest groups. This is a good example of Lowi's (1969) contention that
democracies based on interest group liberalism cannot be planned rationally.
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who are now protected in some measure by these regulations.
Furthermore, in some states, officials fear that governors hell-bent on
work first" would use all federal funds for welfare recipients, leaving
nothing for a greater variety of participants and employers.
Consolidation seems to be a bold stroke, then, but in cutting the
Gordian knot of federal regulations, it might also cause the workforce
development systems in some states to unravel.
3. Welfare "reform" and "work first" have been overwhelmingly detrimental to
workforce development systems, and, by extension, any subsequent federal
legislation that imposed categorical and inflexible approaches to
education and training would be similarly detrimental to workforce
development systems. For the moment, the obvious recommendation is
that federal legislation should undo the most damaging aspects of welfare
reform; although we do not anticipate that this will be politically possible,
given the ideological positions on welfare and the near impossibility of
political consensus on any changes." For the future, however, the
Congress and the executive branch could at least take the Hippocratic
oath of "do no harm," and avoid new programs and regulations that
make state reforms more difficult.
The Potential Role of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998
The latest revision of federal legislation came in August 1998, when the
Workforce Investment Act (WIA) was signed into law. This legislation is
not the massive consolidation contemplated in 1996, which would have
combined federal funding for job training, vocational education, and adult
education. The WIA maintains separate titles for job training, adult
education, Wagner-Peyser (the ES), and vocational rehabilitation, and funds
for vocational education will come in separate legislation. In addition, the
legislation maintains separate funding for adults, for dislocated workers,
and for youth, preventing states from making their own judgments about
priorities. However, in many other ways, the WIA contains the following
provisions that should enhance coordination and the development of
coherent systems:
It continues the local-state structure that many states have already
adopted, with a state Workforce Investment Board required to develop
a five-year plan, and local Workforce Investment Boards responsible for
planning and overseeing local programs. The WIA allows states that
have already moved decisively to reform their systems to "grandfather"
51 Welfare policy illustrates Lowi's (1969) other contention about democracies based
on interest group liberalismthat they cannot achieve equity.
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1 .3
these changes in over several years. Conversely, other states (like
Oklahoma) that have taken a more gradual and voluntary approach will
find it more difficult to implement WIA.
It encourages states to submit unified plans for up to 14 federal programs
in order to ensure their coordination and avoid duplication of workforce
development activities.
It strengthens the role of one-stop centers, principally by establishing
them as the access point for employment-related training and other
services. Since one-stop centers have been helpful in convening different
programs and getting them to work more closely togetherdespite the
resurgence of turf battles in some localitiesthis should further the
coordination of programs at the local level.
It provides further incentives to improve the quality of programs,
particularly by requiring indicators of performance and establishing
incentive grants starting in the year 2000 to states with above-average
performance. Since the low quality and unresponsiveness of programs
is one factor preventing their coordination with othersfor example, in
the reluctance of many providers to work with adult education in some
statesthe improvement of quality should enhance the willingness of
programs to coordinate with one another.
The WIA requires four core indicators each for adults, dislocated workers,
and youth, and specifies that these must be negotiated between governors
and the DOL, and then between governors and the local workforce
boards. On the one hand, the process of negotiation may mean that
governors must take this effort at accountability more seriously. On the
other hand, the negotiation mechanisms may lead to a proliferation of
compliance-oriented mechanisms (rather than those intended to enhance
effectiveness) and the development of too many measures across the 50
states to be practical. It will take some time to determine the effects of
these required indicators.
It appears to place less emphasis on federal rules and regulations,
authorizing them only to the extent necessary and extending the
eligibility for Work-Flex waiver provisions to all states (rather than just
six). In addition, certain state plans are automatically approved within
90 days unless the DOL determines they are inconsistent with legislation,
placing the burden on the DOL to prove noncompliance rather than on
states to prove their compliance. Since federal regulations and
uncertainty about their interpretation have been barriers to local and
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state coordination, this should also facilitate the development of more
coherent workforce development systems.
On the one hand, the WIA places new emphasis on Individual Training
Accounts (ITAs), in which participants choose among providers, and de-
emphasizes the provision of training through contracts with specific
providers. This means that states like Florida, which has already moved in
the direction of choice and other market-like mechanisms, should find it
easier to continue their developments. On the other hand, states like Oregon,
which have preferred an institutional approach to its workforce
development, may find it more difficult to switch to ITAs. More generally,
when individuals are the principal decisionmakers, rather than program
administrators, they may or may not decide to enroll in programs that are
well-coordinated with others. It is difficult to compel providers to coordinate
if they can attract enough students without such reforms, and consumer
"choice" may be influenced by many factors (like proximity and
convenience) other than the quality of programs, the comprehensiveness
of services, and the links to other providers.
There are several possible developments for ITAs. If these are
implemented like pure vouchers, thenlike the youth training vouchers
adopted in Great Britain (Grubb & Finkelstein, 1998)they may result in
no expansion of consumer choice and low-quality training. If, instead, they
are implemented like the "individual referral" model used in Texaswith
full assessment and counseling about training options and implications
then the outcomes could be much different, with consumers much better
informed and low-quality programs being eliminated from the system.52
The WIA is, therefore, somewhat ambiguous in its influences, and it will
no doubt take some time for its effects to become evident. On the whole,
however, it appears to facilitate the kind of coordination and cooperation
that the most active states have pursued in developing more coherent
workforce development systems.
The Future of Workforce Development Systems?
We began this report with an analogy between the education system,
developed over the past two centuries, and the considerably shorter
trajectory of workforce development programs. The developments in
education have resulted in a relatively clear progression among its
componentsthat is, from the lower grades to high school, from high school
to college. Where these transitions are uncertain, we see considerable effort
to make them smootherfor example, in Tech Prep programs to help high
school students move into community colleges, or mechanisms intended
52 See again Barnow and King (1996) and their review of the literature on vouchers.
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431 9.
..1-
to smooth transfers among public colleges (both two- and four-year). The
education system also includes relatively well-known institutions with
predictable characteristicslike the high school, the community college,
the liberal arts college, and the research universitydespite variation
among localities and states in the specifics and quality of such institutions.
This uniformity has its costs, of course distinctive institutions are hard to
find, and innovation is often difficultbut it does contribute to the
regularity and transparency of the educational system. Issues of quality
remain, and have been among the most resistant problemsparticularly
in urban areas, and for low-income students. In addition, the articulation
of the education system with employment is sometimes imprecisenot
typically at the baccalaureate level, where education is usually a prerequisite
to employment, but at the sub-baccalaureate level where, unlike bettercodified systems like those of Germany," there are many equivalent ways
into employment.
If the analogy between the better-developed education system and the
fledgling workforce development system is appropriate, then we might
anticipate certain developmentsand, indeed, we can see that these are
underway in the ten relatively active states we observed. One is the
continued effort to eliminate redundant, ineffective, or overly specialized
programsto eliminate "waste and duplication." The pressures for
consolidation, the imposition of performance measures that can detect lowperforming institutions, the beginnings of performance-based funding in
Florida, and the incorporation of several programs into comprehensive
community colleges in some areas are all part of this trend. In education,
this has tended to eliminate secondary schools and specialized colleges; in
workforce development, this suggests that holistic programs are likely to
replace more specialized categorical programs.
A second characteristic of the education system is the growth of relatively
clear ways of moving among levels of the systemreplacing, for example,
the many different ways of getting into college typical of the 19th century
with a well-established, if still controversial, process of application and
admissions with standardized tests and grades. This feature of systembuilding suggests that free-standing programs unconnected to any others15-week job training, for example, or independent adult schools of short
durationare likely to develop linkages to other programs (or simply to
be subsumed in other programs, as when community colleges take over
adult education). In workforce development systems, this appears to be
happening slowly, but it is emerging in a few areas where one-stop centers
have encouraged greater coordination, and where local consolidation and
53 In international comparisons, the American educational system is usually viewed
as not being particularly transparent, at least compared to German-type dual
systems, because of the loose articulation of education with employment.
1 4.0
Toward Order from Chaos
129
integrated service delivery are starting to take place. Indeed, the .process
we described in Section VI as moving up the hierarchy of coordination
efforts, moves toward creating such linkages. And we can anticipate that,
if and when local boards are established and become more inclusiveof
education providers as well as training, for examplemore of this will
take place.
A third obvious parallel between the education system and the emerging
workforce development system is the problem with quality. It has been
quite difficult for localities and states to define for themselves what highquality programs are. Performance measures have provided some
dimensions of outcomes that programs can aim at, but their effects have
been uneven, sometimes even counterproductive. Consistently, the same
patterns of differences in quality evident in education also emerge in
workforce development: The "Brahmins" get access to high-quality training
in firm-based efforts and high subsidies in public universities, while the
"untouchables" receive low-quality "work first" programs and low-cost
community colleges.
Another parallel involves the roles of institutional versus market-like
mechanisms. In the education system, dimensions of choice have always
been important in postsecondary programs, where the major funding
mechanismgrants and loansis essentially a voucher system. In K-12
education, choice mechanisms stressing aspects of marketslike charter
schools and vouchershave become increasingly popular, though their
effects on equity and quality are highly contested. So, too, in the workforce
development system, market-like mechanisms are becoming increasingly
popular in a number of states. While Florida is the best example of a marketdriven approach, many states have combined institutional and market-like
methods (as we illustrated in Figure 1).
Other features of the education system are more difficult to detect in
workforce development. One feature of the education system from the mid-
19th century was the development of bureaucratic mechanisms; teacher
credentialing; rigid hierarchies of control at the school, district, and state
levels; and governing mechanisms at district and state levelsall with their
own justification, but which are generally viewed as stifling innovation,
creativity, and flexibility. There are, of course, many complaints about
inflexibility in workforce development programs, but the bureaucratic
controls in this system are nowhere near the complexity of the regulations
in education. The goals of flexibility and responsiveness to changing labor
market conditions have been more important for workforce development
than for education, and we presume that difference will persist.
We do not mean to suggest that there is anything inevitable about
workforce development going the way of education. As we have stressed
throughout this report, states have run into considerable problems trying
to implement their visions. Many have taken giant steps backward,
130
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141
particularly with changes of governors and changes of direction; and there
is a great deal of skepticism that greater coordination is worth its costs.
Instead, we have outlined the analogy between the workforce development
system and the education system in order to pose the most fundamental
question: What do we as citizens, employees, policymakers, and employers want
of our public systems? It is then possible to outline numerous possibilities:
If we want transparency to potential clients and employers, then
simplification and better information are necessary.
If we believe in the ideals of "lifelong learning," with individuals able to
access education and training at various stages in their lives, and, thus,
able to continue developing their abilities, then linkages among programs
are necessary in addition to transparency.
If we are serious about creating "a workforce for the 21st century," then
the difficult issues of quality must be addressed more consistently than
they have been.
If we value flexibility and responsiveness, then certain mechanisms of
accountability are too ponderous; if we want accountability above all
else, we may impose mechanisms that limit both flexibility and quality
unless they are carefully developed.
If we prize equity, then we must revise the priorities in a system that
provides the least to the most needy among usfor example, welfare
recipients who are relegated to "work first."
As states move to develop more coherent systems, these questions and
the potential answers to them become clearer. The question in the years
ahead is whether localities and statesand the federal government, in many
ways responsible for the creation of workforce development programs
address these questions forthrightly, or whether they answer them
indirectly, through the policies they enact without thought or principle.
142
Toward Order from Chaos
131
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130
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APPENDIX A
Local and State Protocols
Local-Level Protocol
Individuals To Interview
Director of special programs or contract education for the community
college
Director of adult education
Staff director of the Service Delivery Area
Coordinator for welfare-to-work of the local welfare board
Local director for one-stops??
Local Employment Service??
Local or regional coordination board
Basic Questions about Local Developments
Introduction: purpose of the study; confidentiality
1. What has this state done during the past five years to coordinate,
consolidate, or otherwise improve its "system" of education and job
training?
Probe: Why was this approach chosen over others?
What political issues determined these changes?
What programmatic concerns determined these changes?
What are the overall goals and intended effects?
Had there been previous such efforts at the state level?
2. Were these changes desirable from your local perspective?
Probe: What were the intended changes? Was there a real problem at
the local level?
3. What power does the innovation (e.g., a SHRIC or an advisory
committee) have?
Advisory only? To whom?
Decisionmaking authority? With what limits?
Operating authority?
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141
Does the state effort have enough power or influence over local
programs to cause changes? If not, what does drive local efforts?
4. What has happened during the first few years (first few months)?
Distinguish errors and bureaucratic problems from programmatic
problems and policy disagreements.
Probe: What differences in perspective are there within the state?
What differences among local communities in reactions to state
policy have there been?
Have any evaluation mechanisms been established? Collect if
possible.
5. What effects on your local programs have there been so far? What
changes are anticipated in the near future? If there are changes, do
these improve the way you operate?
6. What students/clients from other programs do you serve? In regular
offerings? In special offerings? Do you send your students to other
programs? If so, which ones? How are they selected?
7. What changes are being contemplated in the states' welfare program
and in welfare-to-work? How will this influence your local program?
Do the changes in the state education and training "system" facilitate
or impede changes in welfare-to-work? (Too early to tell?)
8. What other changes does this state anticipate over the coming decade?
Do the changes in the state education and training "system" facilitate
or impede responding to these changes? (Too early to tell?) How will
they affect your local program?
9. Are there some exemplary local programs that are widely known in
your comnumity? Throughout the state? (Get specifics: why considered
exemplary; whom to contact) What role has state policy played in these
exemplary efforts? (Or are they locally developed?)
10. If you could change one thing in the state's administration of education
and job training programs, what would it be? What would you change
in your local program?
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52
State-Level Protocol
Individuals To Interview
State agency responsible for community colleges
State coordinating board for higher education (if different)
State director of adult education
State Human Resource Investment Council (if it exists) or State Job
Training Coordinating Council
State director for one-stops
Employment Service
Head of welfare-to-work programs
State coordinating council (if it exists)
Staff members responsible for education and training in legislative
research officesfor example, a house or senate (or legislative) office of
research
Other knowledgeable individuals
Basic Questions about State Changes
Introduction: purpose of the study; confidentiality
1. What has this state done during the past five years to coordinate,
consolidate, or otherwise improve its "system" of education and job
training?
Probe: Why was this approach chosen over others?
What political issues determined these changes?
What programmatic concerns determined these changes?
What are the overall goals and intended effects?
Collect any available reports.
Had there been previous such efforts at the state level?
2. What programs have been included in any changes? Which have been
left out?
Probe: Why were some programs included and excluded?
Political and programmatic issues?
3. What power does the innovation (e.g., a SHRIC or an advisory
committee) have?
Advisory only? To whom?
Decisionmaking authority? With what limits?
Operating authority?
j .3 Toward Order from Chaos
143
4. What has happened during the first few years (first few. months)?
Distinguish errors and bureaucratic problems from programmatic
problems and policy disagreements.
Probe: What differences in perspective are there within the state?
Have any evaluation mechanisms been established? Collect if
possible.
5. What effects on local programs have there been so far? What changes
are anticipated in the near future?
6. What changes are being contemplated in the state welfare program
and in welfare-to-work? How will this influence education and job
training? Do the changes in the state education and training "system"
facilitate or impede changes in welfare-to-work? (Too early to tell?)
7. What other changes does this state anticipate over the coming decade?
Do the changes in the state education and training "system" facilitate
or impede responding to these changes? (Too early to tell?)
8. Are there some local communities that are more advanced than others
in implementing changes? Probe for which two local communities
would be most useful to visit.
9. Are there some exemplary local programs that are widely known
throughout the state? (Get specifics: why considered exemplary; whom
to contact) What role has state policy played in these exemplary efforts?
(Or are they locally developed?)
10. If you could change one thing in the state's administration of education
and job training programs, what would it be?
154
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APPENDIX B
Localities and States Examined
Arizona
Maricopa County Community College District
(Phoenix)
Florida
Central FloridaOrlando
Volusia and Flag ler County Partnership for
Workforce Development
Iowa
Mason City and the 9-county Regional Advisory
Board
Cedar Rapids
Maryland
Baltimore City
Frederick County
Massachusetts
Boston
Hampton County/Springfield
Michigan
Kalamazoo
Traverse City
North Carolina
Greensboro
Whiteville
Oklahoma
Muskogee
Tulsa
Oregon
Region 3 (Yamhill, Marion, and Polk Counties,
around Salem)
Region 7 (Coos County and Curry County)
Texas
Dallas County Workforce Development Board
West Central Texas Workforce Development Board
(around Abilene)
Wisconsin
Madison
Waukesha County
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145
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