| Grubb, W. N., Badway, N., Bell, D., Chi, B., King, C., Herr, J., Prince, H., Kazis, R., Hicks, L., & Taylor, J. C. (1999). Toward order from chaos: State efforts to reform workforce development systems (MDS-1249). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |
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 institutions--almost 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 structure--local 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 time--little more than three decades--a 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 system--which programs are considered part of it, and which are not--are 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 employers looking for well-trained workers, and for policymakers trying to understand--and perhaps even improve--the system.
In this monograph, we examine one moment in time, within the longer evolution of workforce development, by analyzing ten states--ten relatively active states--that 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 programs[1] 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 community-based organizations (CBOs). 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 short-term programs considered trainingand administered by the Department of Labor, various educationprograms supported by the Department of Education overlap in their purposes.[2] Adult education providing remedial 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 with job training. Other federal agencies have jumped into the act, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development which supports YouthBuild, 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 1960s--especially 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 state-initiated 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 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 issues--what'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 beforeindividuals enter employment, the workforce development system includes at least four types of preparation[3]:
| 1. | Pre-employment education and trainingprepares individuals for initial entry into employment, and is often aimed at younger individuals. |
| 2. | Upgrade trainingprovides additional training for individuals who are already employed, as their jobs change or as they advance. |
| 3. | Re-trainingprovides 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 trainingprovides 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 one or two. Finally, most of these programs emphasize postcompulsoryeducation 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 adults--again, 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,[4] 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 self-correcting 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 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 efforts--the WIA of 1998, and legislation for vocational education being considered in fall 1998--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.[5] Currently, however, a number of states--including the ten we examine as well as many others with new advisory committees, state HRICs, and super-agencies overseeing both education and training programs--are 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 statereforms, 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 education--including postsecondary vocational education in community colleges, as well as adult education--to be largely the responsibility of the states, so that creating a 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 developments[6], 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. |
| 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 high-unemployment 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 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.[7] As it 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 requirements--enrollment targets, or performance measures in JTPA, for example--they 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. Some--particularly 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 agency--the Department of Labor and Workforce Development--with 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.
[1] There has been some fruitless discussion about the differences between programsand 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.
[2] The distinction between educationand trainingis 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 firm--rather than being available to all. Training takes place in a variety of organizations, including CBOs, unions, 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.
[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.
[4] 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).
[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).
[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.
[7] 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.
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| Grubb, W. N., Badway, N., Bell, D., Chi, B., King, C., Herr, J., Prince, H., Kazis, R., Hicks, L., & Taylor, J. C. (1999). Toward order from chaos: State efforts to reform workforce development systems (MDS-1249). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |