Previous Next Title Page Contents 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.


SECTION  2

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 exception--particularly 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 old-fashioned 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 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:

      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:

      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, or--most commonly--are 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.

      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 education--into 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.[18] 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 colleges--the major providers of adult occupational education in virtually every state--have 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 active in regional WQCs; and in Oklahoma's voluntary Workforce Quality Compacts. Sometimes--Texas is a good example--community 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 states--particularly some states that we did not visit--community 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.[20] 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.

      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.[21] 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 classes--flexible 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 educationand training.In general, our evidence--and the implicit views of states that have intended to include them in reform efforts--suggests 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.


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:

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."

      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 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 changes--despite 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 committees--so advisors as well as staff become aware of coordination issues--in 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 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 developers--a 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 rare--it 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 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 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 requirements--governing eligibility, advisory committees, reporting periods and requirements, allowable expenditures, contract years, the boundaries of regional entities, planning procedures, and a myriad of other administrative details--are 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.

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 barrier--to 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 that--as an alternative to consolidation--the 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, however--even 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.

[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).

[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.

[17] This 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.

[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.

[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, 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).

[21] 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.

[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 sense--though the choice between the two has rarely been posed in this way.

Previous Next Title Page Contents 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.
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