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  7

UNRESOLVED ISSUES:
THE CONTRADICTIONS IN STATE POLICIES

      There is no question that some states--some 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 reasons--because 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 programs--specifically postsecondary vocational education in community colleges and technical institutes or centers, and adult education--are (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 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 training[42] 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 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 it--such as Pell grants and aid to local vocational schools--can't be accessed. There isn't that kind of money in the entire system--and what there is, is completely categorical--to 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 issues--for 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 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 promise--that 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.[44] 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 locally--for 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 combinations--for 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 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 providers--creating 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, can--if they are appropriately organized[47]--coordinate 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 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 short-term 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 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 force--for 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 Shinesdeclared the need to build "a superior workforce . . . equal to any in the world by 2010," the foundation of "well-paying, 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 subsidies--particularly over the unlimited years that nonwelfare recipients are entitled to be in public education and training programs--while 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 them--they are being constrained to pick up whatever skills they can find in low-level work. And the preoccupation with welfare "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 source of advancement.

      Second, the focus in most workforce development reforms on low-intensity job training is also inconsistent with the rhetoric about higher-order 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-rate-distance 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]

      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 goals--creating 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 programs--are 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.

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 exceptions--like Oregon with its rejection of overt competition, and perhaps Florida at the other extreme--states 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 shows--whether there is evidence to back up the claims and counterclaims of each side--partly 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 market-like 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 one-stop 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 notserved by one-stops have access to information they need for rational decisions. The question of whether information is sufficient for individuals to make decisions--or whether the relatively inexperienced and uneducated individuals who seek access to training and welfare-to-work opportunities need more than information, like additional counseling--is 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, or whether they engage in behavior--creaming, preparing for short-term over long-run effects, creating displacement, or simply cooking the numbers--that 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 states--which have adopted both market-like mechanisms as well as certain approaches to institutional improvement--suggests that the question of institutional improvement ormarket-like approaches may be the wrong way to pose the question. Instead of this either-or approach, a better question might be what combinationof institutional and market-oriented approaches is likely to be most effective. One possibility--certainly one that avoids an either-or approach--is 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 well--for 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.

[42] 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.

[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).

[44] 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.

[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, Iowa--in 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).

[48] The problems associated with DACUM and other competency-based approaches to vocational curricula are clarified in Achtenhagen and Grubb (1999, forthcoming).

[49] 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 four-year colleges but is underused in community colleges and leads to large amounts of default and fraud in proprietary schools.

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.