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CHAPTER SIX THE IMPLEMENTATION OF WIA: DOES THE RHETORIC MATCH THE REALITY? Public policies are driven by political ideas, goals, and rhetoric, and the Workforce Investment Act is no exception. As explained in the last chapter, WIA contains two major philosophies: a work-first approach, which is designed to foster immediate attachment to the labor market without much concern about investment in education and skills; and a market-based approach to the delivery of training that utilizes accountability and customer satisfaction as means to improve both choice and quality of training. These two philosophies are in many ways contradictory: work-first is based on the premise that rapid workforce attachment is a “one-size-fits-all” solution, whereas the market aspects of WIA are designed to increase the ability of clients to develop individualized solutions to their employment problems. In spite of this contradiction, we argue, the market-oriented aspects of WIA actually reinforce the goals of work-first by contributing to the reduction in access to education and training, especially for disadvantaged adults. As a result, the goals of the work-first philosophy dominate WIA. Quantitative evidence strongly indicates that access to education and training has been greatly reduced under WIA, particularly for disadvantaged groups such as TANF recipients and nonwhite WIA clients. How did this happen? How were the dominant philosophies in this policy put into practice ? How were they enacted at the ground level? In this chapter we trace the effects of WIA from formal policy to implementation, using qualitative data from multiple state case studies. First we examine how a central aspect of WIA—its three tiers of services—functions to reduce access to training for WIA clients. Next, we examine how WIA accountability measures provide strong incentives for one-stop career centers to direct their limited training dollars toward assisting relatively advantaged WIA clients, while diverting those with more extensive training needs. We further trace the implementation of WIA to the community colleges, illustrating how stringent reporting requirements combine with the overall reduction in the number of WIA clients to discourage community colleges from participating in the training of WIA clients. Their reluctance to participate is exacerbated by what the colleges perceive to be a clash between their traditional academic mission and an increasingly aggressive push toward workforce development. These factors combine to marginalize the role of community colleges in the delivery of training to WIA clients. Finally, we explore the complexity and effects of WIA implementation in detail by examining the case of Florida. SEQUENTIAL ELIGIBILITY: CLOSING THE PIPELINE TO TRAINING Chapter 5 describes how WIA’s model of sequential eligibility creates a hierarchy of services that restricts access to training. Effects of this restriction in the pipeline from local WIA offices to contracted training providers were felt acutely at the community colleges that we studied. Most reported a significant decrease in the number of WIA clients enrolled at their colleges than under JTPA. For example, in Illinois the ideology of rapid labor-force attachment was so clearly embraced by caseworkers at one-stop career centers that very few individuals received the vouchers—Individual Training Accounts, or ITAs— needed to access training during the initial years of implementation. According to a director of a program for truck-driver training (a short-term training program appropriate for many WIA clients) at an Illinois community college, the college experienced a large decline in the number of clients served when the transition from JTPA to WIA occurred. He said, “We had a very small number of folks that came through WIA. We had a great pool of people that should have been coming through WIA; I was interviewing people every day that were quali fied. But they would not send them; they would not fund them.” A one-stop career center employee in the college’s local area confirmed his impression, saying: You have to go through core and intensive services before you ever get to training services. I’ve been in meetings where it has actually been stated that nobody is ever going to get to training because everybody is going to get a job in core or intensive. Our clients that are going to be left as we get to the bottom of the caseload are people who have a lot of barriers they have to overcome before they can even get training. So at this point, the ITAs really aren’t an option for that group of people. THE IMPLEMENTATION OF...

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