Putting Poor People to Work: How the Work-First Idea Eroded College Access for the Poor

CHAPTER FIVE. THE WORKFORCE INVESTMENT ACT:INVESTMENT OR DISINVESTMENT?

CHAPTER FIVE THE WORKFORCE INVESTMENT ACT: INVESTMENT OR DISINVESTMENT? The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 and the 1996 welfare-reform legislation (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) are inextricably linked by an endorsement of the “work-first” ideology and a rejection of the human-capital narrative. As such, the full impact of the work-first idea on access to education and training can only be discerned by means of an examination of the implementation and impact of both policies. This and the next chapter focus specifically on WIA. Where welfare reform embodied one primary idea—that ending the entitlement to services and requiring work most benefits the poor—WIA was driven by two. In addition to the work-first philosophy, WIA also embodies a market-based philosophy focusing on outcomes and accountability measures designed to better address the needs of WIA clients, as well as their potential employers. This second notion is an attempt to rectify the flaws of WIA’s predecessor, the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), which was roundly considered to be an incomprehensible assortment of training programs and policies guided by few requirements and producing little in the way of meaningful results (Lafer 2002). In reaction to this assessment, a single piece of legislation, WIA, was crafted to reflect both a market-approach to service provision and a work-first approach to determining who qualifies for services. The presence of these often-competing ideas poses a unique set of challenges for the implementation of WIA. Most important for the purposes of our analysis, these ideas—viewed separately and together—have a distinctly negative effect on whether and how individual WIA clients gain access to education and training.1 In this chapter we provide a basis for understanding both the philosophical underpinnings of WIA and their practical implications in terms of the policy’s effect on access to education and training. WIA’S PREDECESSORS As discussed in chapter 2, federal workforce policy over the last thirty years has followed a clear trajectory away from federal guarantees of outcomes (through job creation and placement in public-service jobs), toward providing an opportunity to find a job. This movement occurred as welfare and workforce policy became increasingly intertwined. Whereas earlier iterations of welfare and workforce development policies had distinctly different goals, over time their goals and practices began to merge. Table 5.1 shows that workforce policy, like welfare policy, has moved from a focus on governmental responsibility to individual responsibility, and moved from explicit efforts to reduce poverty toward efforts at promoting “self-sufficiency.” As a result, workforce programs, like welfare, have moved away from an emphasis on education and training altogether (Lafer 2002). Chapter 2 traced the emergence of the work-first ideology, primarily as reflected in federal welfare policy. Those changes effectively paved the way for parallel changes in workforce policy, resulting in a “work-first” Workforce Investment Act. The Comprehensive Employment Training Act of 1973 (CETA) was an attempt to alleviate poverty directly by creating public-service jobs and providing the training necessary for unemployed workers to succeed in them. At its height, in the early 1980s, the program enjoyed a $6.1 billion budget (Reville and Klerman 1996). CETA was designed to concentrate control of the program at the local or municipal level; states were generally not involved in CETA’s administration, and local entities reported directly to federal officials. In addition, the program was characterized by the heavy involvement of community -based organizations and other local entities for the development and provision of training programs. These organizations were often aligned with the interests of the poor rather than with the needs of the employment sector (Lafer 2002). Local business entities and the private sector in general did not play a significant part in the administration or oversight of CETA. Moreover, the program was subject to a relatively lax accountability structure, which focused only on the number of individuals served rather than on measures of employment or earnings outcomes. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were created under CETA’s auspices (Grubb and Lazerson 2004), and CETA was clearly effective in decreasing unemployment, especially among women. Its training programs also resulted in significant increases in earnings among disadvantaged women, but not for men (Bassi and Ashenfelter 1986). Yet these successes were generally ignored by mainstream policymakers; criticisms of CETA were abundant. A chorus of conservative critics argued that CETA’s jobs-creation component was...