The Workforce Investment Act: Implementation Experiences and Evaluation Findings

2 - An Overview of WIA

49 2 An Overview of WIA Dianne Blank Laura Heald Cynthia Fagnoni U.S. Government Accountability Office Over time the U.S. workforce development system has seen incremental changes in its structure, its services, and the role that federal, state, and local officials play in decision making. Beginning with MDTA of 1962 and continuing with CETA of 1973 and JTPA of 1982, services were largely focused on training for low-income individuals or those on public assistance. The array of job training programs operated in an uncoordinated patchwork of programs and agencies that served this population, often resulting in inefficiency, duplication of effort, and confusion for the job seeker. But, with the passage of WIA in 1998, the workforce development system has undergone a fundamental shift in the way employment and training services are provided. Comparing the structure of WIA to its predecessor programs, we see several key themes emerge in the progression of employment and training policy in the United States. These include • a decreasing focus on income eligibility as the only basis for accessing services; • a decreasing focus on job training as the primary means for getting a job—assessing and marketing existing skills becomes the service of choice; • an increasing focus on personal responsibility through selfservice and consumer awareness, for example, in choosing training options; • a greater focus on reducing duplication of effort—but through consolidating services, not programs; • an increasing role for the private sector in guiding policy and a focus on the employer as customer; and • a greater focus on both state and local decision making. 50 Blank, Fagnoni, and Heald Since 2000, the GAO has issued more than 25 separate reports on WIA alone, many of which included recommendations regarding various aspects of WIA. This chapter draws on GAO work conducted between 2000 and 2009 in which the GAO examined the nature of the challenges confronting officials at all levels—federal, state, and local— in implementing the Workforce Investment System, what has been done to address them, and the challenges that remain. The first two sections of this chapter cover the consolidation of services in One-Stop systems and the structure of the three programs authorized under WIA. The third section focuses more explicitly on the performance accountability provisions for the three WIA-funded programs. KEY ELEMENtS OF WIA’S APPROACh AND hOW thEY WORK WIA made several important changes to the existing employment and training system, but two are key: 1) it consolidated services for most federally funded employment and training programs for adults and youth; and 2) it redesigned services under the largest employment and training program, JTPA, when it created three new funding streams— WIA Adult, Dislocated Workers, and Youth. States were required to implement these changes by July 1, 2000. Consolidating Services in the One-Stop System To create a more comprehensive workforce investment system, WIA required states and localities to bring together the services of most federally funded employment and training programs into a single system, called the One-Stop system. Prior to WIA, services to job seekers were often provided through a patchwork of agencies and offices. While many of the programs shared similar goals, their services were rarely coordinated, creating an environment of confusion and frustration and hampering efforts to help job seekers get and keep a job. For about a decade before WIA was passed, states and localities had been experimenting with integrating some of their employment and training An Overview of WIA 51 services, but none had gone so far as to include the full range required under WIA. The USDOL has overall responsibility for administering the provisions of WIA. Sixteen federally funded workforce development programs administered by four separate federal agencies, including the USDOL, are required to provide their services through the One-Stop system. In fiscal year 2009, Congress appropriated over $15.9 billion for the 16 mandatory programs, including about $3.3 billion for WIA. In addition, several of these programs, including all of the WIA-funded programs, received additional funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The three WIA-funded programs in particular received a total of $3.2 billion in additional funding. Even without the additional funding, these three WIA-funded programs combined currently constitute the largest federally funded employment and training program in the United States. (See Table 2.1.) Each state must have one or more designated local workforce investment areas, and each...