3. EXERCISE STRUCTURE

The structure of the Policy Planning Exercise on Education and the New Economy followed that of other recent exercises conducted by RAND. It began with a dialogue on issues and continued with a two-move seminar game. In the game, the first move addressed current problems in a near-future context and the second move addressed longer-term challenges encountered after the passage of several years of game time. The exercise concluded with a "back from the future" session on federal policy and a final plenary session for summing up of lessons learned and critique of game design. In this section we discuss the details of this structure as it applied to the current exercise (we omit elaboration on the final critique, which was simply a roundtable discussion). A full set of the game materials provided to the participants is given as Appendix A.

• The Opening Dialogue
• The Seminar Game
• "Back From the Future": Federal Policy Now

THE OPENING DIALOGUE

The exercise began with assignment of participants to one of four groups. Each group consisted of five or six persons chosen to provide diverse perspectives, plus a facilitator and a recorder. The facilitators were associated with NCRVE or RAND and had all participated in a dry run of the game at RAND. Their purpose was to moderate the opening dialogue and serve as resource persons in subsequent sessions. The recorders, associated with NCRVE or OVAE, took notes to support group recall and documentation of the exercise.

Exercise participants represented various stakeholders or actors involved in vocational education, including research organizations, state education agencies, and the private sector (see Table 3.1). While participants spoke from a broad array of viewpoints, some important elements of the U.S. educational community were not represented. Among those were instructors, administrators, or parent-teacher groups associated with the K-12 system; elected officials and their staffs; unions and other associations of teachers; and organizations involved in training. Representatives of some of these omitted groups were invited to attend but declined. Naturally, the discussions and decisions could have gone a different way had they been present.

The purpose of the dialogue, held on a Monday evening after dinner, was to give people a chance to get to know one another and air their various perspectives and agendas. While it was anticipated and even desired that participants bring their particular biases to the table, they were assured that they would not be quoted identifiably, so they need not feel that they had to speak for their organizations.

Game designers offered the facilitators three general questions to help guide the discussion:

• What do you see as the relationships among education, work, and the economy? This was intended to elicit personal experiences with education as a preparation for work, along with views on the changing economy and the responsiveness of education to those changes.

• What are the objectives of education for individuals and for the nation as a whole? A list of possibilities was provided, e.g., national competitiveness and prosperity, poverty reduction, citizenship, and realization of individual potential.

• What are the main challenges facing education today with respect to how the economy is changing? Possibilities suggested included leaving too many people behind, poor integration of academic and job-related education, and inability of high schools to engage young people most in need of education. Participants were also presented with the possibility that the system may be working fine as is.

THE SEMINAR GAME

Tuesday was devoted to the two-move seminar game. During this game, each group played the role of a panel of advisors to a state governor. This role definition was narrower than in some other exercises RAND has conducted, where players have sometimes taken on a wide array of roles across an affected community. In fact, the role of advisor probably did not require much of an imaginative leap on the part of most participants. In this exercise, however, we were aiming not so much to get participants to think like someone else as to give them an opportunity to explore options their real-life roles might not allow them to. The advisor role did provide a focus for the group discussions and had some influence on the way the groups undertook their assigned tasks.

Two mythical states--Montoya and Algonquin--had been invented, patterned closely after two real states--California and Ohio--with differing educational challenges. The game began with a background briefing on each of the states (more detail was provided in handouts). Two panels were assigned to each of the states.

Two hours were allowed for the first move and two and a half for the second. For these sessions, group facilitators turned over their moderation role to a leader chosen by the panelists from among themselves. The leader also presented the panel's recommendations to all the participants in plenary sessions held at each move's conclusion.

Move 1: Allocating Incremental Funds in the Near Future

For the first move, panelists were asked to assume that it was January 1998 and that Congress had passed a law combining federal funds previously dedicated to Pell and Perkins grants,[2] job training, and adult education into a block grant program. Each state would receive an amount equal to what it received the previous year for those programs, plus incremental funds amounting to about half that total. That increment was to come from funds proposed by the president to fund tax deductions or credits for higher-education expenses.[3] The panels were to recommend to their governors how the grand total ($2.4 billion for Montoya and $770 million for Algonquin) was to be allocated among various education and training programs. The options included those combined into the block grant, along with K-12 education, community colleges, other postsecondary education, and welfare-to-work programs. Panelists were also invited to invent programs of their own.

In keeping with the philosophy and purpose of gaming, panelists were encouraged not to feel constrained by political considerations but to act as advisors charged with serving the best interests of their state. Panelists were free to move the federal money around as they wished in pursuit of any or all of the goals of the block grant: providing up to two years of postsecondary education or training, employing and training adults, training disadvantaged youths, and enhancing adult education and literacy. Panelists were told, however, that future federal funding could be affected by the success of program clients on a variety of measures, e.g., number receiving a high-school diploma, number employed and average earnings, number independent from welfare, and number literate.

Move 2: Designing an Education and Training System for the Long Term

For the second move, panels were asked to imagine that they had been reconvened after four years. They were given tables of data on the following:

• Participation in high school, college, adult education, job training, and public assistance programs.

• Annual number of high-school diplomas awarded and postsecondary degrees awarded, annual number of persons completing advanced training and of trainees placed, employment rate, and per capita earnings.

• Earnings and workforce distribution across educational attainment categories.

These data were given for 1998; for 2002, as projected in 1998 assuming no policy changes; and for 2002, as transpired given the reallocation adopted in Move 1.

The 2002 "actual" numbers were calculated by a spreadsheet model. The model, fully described in Appendix B, consisted of a set of hypothesized elasticities[4] relating

• changes in allocation to changes in program participation

• changes in participation to changes in participants' success (e.g., degrees awarded, earnings)

• changes in participants' success to changes in workforce composition.

Baseline data on program participation, success indicators, and workforce composition were drawn from the 1996 Digest of Educational Statistics and the Census Bureau.

Although the model was too simplistic and too little was known about some of the elasticity values to place much confidence in its output, panelists were asked to accept it as a plausible situation for the purpose of game play in 2002. Since the model output did not indicate large changes in any case, panelists were facing much the same set of problems they did four years earlier. In addition, they were reminded that the five-year limit on welfare benefits that was passed in 1996 would be coming into effect for some people.[5]

Panelists were asked to advise the governor as to how the state's education and training system should be redesigned to fulfill several objectives:

• Creating a coherent, high-quality system relevant to the needs of all people.

• Training and sustaining the skilled workforce necessary for a prosperous economy.

• Meeting the special needs of the disabled, those on welfare, and others.

To keep proposed strategies within the ambit of the feasible, panelists were also asked to comply with federal legislation and avoid harmful, revolutionary shocks to the system. Panelists were asked to assign priorities to a menu of system design elements, e.g., standards and certifications, vocational skill training, work-based education, contextualized teaching, integrating academic instruction with occupational education, tracking individuals' progress through the system. Panelists were free to omit any of the elements on the list or include others of their own choice.

"BACK FROM THE FUTURE": FEDERAL POLICY NOW

On Wednesday morning, exercise participants were asked to leave behind their game roles as advisors to governors. They were now to take advantage of their own personal experience, their own perspectives, and whatever they might have learned so far in the exercise to make recommendations for near-term federal policy on workforce education and training. Specifically, teams prepared briefings for the U.S. secretaries of education and labor and delivered the briefings to the final plenary session at midday.

[2]Pell Grants are basic educational-opportunity grants awarded to individuals by the federal government under 20 USC 1070a. They may be used for postsecondary education or job training. The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Act provides grants to states for various purposes specified in the Act.

[3]These deductions and credits were subsequently enacted into law in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997.

[4]An elasticity is a percentage change in one variable, given a one percent change in another to which it is related.

[5]The law was not retroactive; that is, the five-year "clock" began running for everyone in 1996, so the lifetime cutoff would not affect anyone until 2001 (unless the state passed tighter limits).