State officials regard President Clinton’s job-training plan in much the way employers view a young worker hired for a complicated job: There’s potential for a real winner -- but getting the job done will take time and probably involve a few missteps.
Officials generally give the plan high marks for addressing a long-neglected need and encouraging states to stretch and try new approaches to vocational education. But officials in some states worry that the legislation may not go far enough to improve the current practices.
“It’s a good first effort and a great place to start the discussion,” said Quintin Rahberger, director of the Apprenticeship and Training Division in Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries. “If they could get what is in there currently, they will have made a herculean step forward. It’s going to be different.” Oregon passed the country’s first Youth Apprenticeship legislation in 1991.
W. Davis Lackey, Jr., a spokesman for Maine Gov. John R. McKernan, Jr., a Republican, said the legislation was good, but may not push hard enough. For example, Mr. Lackey thinks some post-secondary education should be provided for all students.
“It doesn’t discourage innovation,” he said of the bill. “But it may not go as far as it might to encourage states to look beyond the tried solutions and more at the bold solutions which may make a bigger difference in determining our competitiveness and success in providing excellence in education.”
Maine began an ambitious youth-apprenticeship program in January.
The School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1993 was introduced in Congress last month with the promise to build a national network of programs that would guide high-school students through the academic and vocational training they need to wind up in “high-skill, high-wage jobs.”
The bill doesn’t prescribe a single model, such as the youth-apprenticeship programs that are popular in Europe. Instead, it allows states to build on existing programs, variously named “tech-prep,” “co-op,” and apprenticeships.
Tech-prep usually provides a technical education over two years of high school and two of community college. Co-op typically provides a half day of high school and part-time work or a job-shadowing arrangement, in which someone follows a person around in a job and learns its rudiments. Apprenticeships link schoolwork with intensive, on-site job training, complete with a watchful mentor.
The legislation requires that graduates end up with high-school diplomas or certificates from postsecondary institutions, as well as certificates of mastery in their chosen field that meet industry criteria.
The bill would make grants available for all states to plan programs and for some states to begin putting programs in place if they’re ready. It also would make technical assistance available to help states learn from the research and experience of national groups and other states.
The U.S. Departments of Labor and Education proposed the bill jointly, and both are still working out many details. For example, they won’t know how much grant money they can offer until Congress approves an appropriation. Labor Department officials hope the planning grants will start at $200,000 and increase according to a state’s size, while Education Department officials hope to get at least $30-million to divide among the few states that are ready to put programs in place.
The federal government has long supported a patchwork of state and local job-training efforts, particularly for veterans and people with low incomes. The Clinton plan aims to spur states to improve their offerings, eventually providing a national network that will train high-school students to meet tough standards set by business and education leaders.
“Our proposal is not a top-down, one-size-fits-all federal solution, but an effort to stimulate state and local creativity,” the Secretaries of Labor and Education, Robert B. Reich and Richard W. Riley, said in a letter to Congress about the plan.
The most common concerns about the bill are that it won’t do enough to insure quality in all states.
Some people, including Governor McKernan, who had seen earlier versions of the bill, worried that it wouldn’t require state programs to include higher education -- as in fact it doesn’t. But the final version strongly urges states to include postsecondary training for occupations that generally require it.
Supporters welcome the bill as an important federal effort to strengthen vocational training and consider its success vital to the country’s economic survival. They note that 75 per cent of American students don’t graduate from college, and that their route to a fulfilling, skilled job isn’t clear.
The United States, they add, is the only industrialized country that doesn’t provide youngsters with institutions and a clear itinerary to guide them from school to desirable jobs.
“We largely leave it on the backs of young people,” said Anne L. Heald, executive director of the Center for Learning and Competitiveness at the University of Maryland in College Park.
“The evidence is that most young people from 15 to 24 do fairly rapid turnovers” in jobs before landing in a career, she added. “Their international counterparts by 18 or 19 are doing high-skilled and high-paying work” after completing training.
In Maine young apprentices spend blocks of days in school, then blocks working. Employers pay a stipend and assign mentors to supervise the training and work with teachers to link academics with workplace situations. Students spend two years in high school and one in technical college.
William H. Cassidy, the program’s co-director, said the federal money would come in handy, allowing his office to provide important services, particularly consultation with businesses, more quickly than it could with its current $950,000 annual budget.
The reception from community-college officials in two other states was mixed.
Hal Miller, assistant to the president of the North Carolina Board of Community Colleges, said the federal program might help his state enhance its well-developed tech-prep program.
But Bertha A. Landrum, district director for occupational education for Maricopa Community Colleges, in the Phoenix area, said she did not think the bill would have much effect on her system’s tech-prep programs because it would not require postsecondary education. In the 1990’s, she said, very little of the American dream is available to students who don’t get some education beyond high school, whether it be a program certificate or an associate’s degree.
Several people said an important role for the federal government would be to convince labor organizations and businesses that they will benefit from strong programs, and to encourage them to make some investment by helping to set skill standards, write curricula, provide mentors for student workers, and demand high standards when they hire students.
“If they aren’t dead serious about making it a high-profile, highly funded thing in the Administration, business isn’t going to take notice. And it won’t take root in America unless businesses, the high-profile ones, get on the bandwagon,” said Curt Johnson, deputy chief of staff to Minnesota Gov. Arne H. Carlson, a Republican.
Some officials with state training programs said federal officials also should help change the perception that everyone needs a college diploma to get a satisfying job and become a productive citizen. Some college may be necessary, they said, but the more important goal is to teach students to think analytically and creatively so they can adapt to changes in their jobs.
“We continue to send more of our kids to college, and half of them drop out. We need to set the tone that it’s O.K.” not to get a baccalaureate degree, said Jean Wolfe, director of the Pennsylvania Youth Apprenticeship Program. “There’s more than one way to learn and more than one way to get a good-quality living.”
Responses to the legislation vary as much as the politics and training programs in each state, showing why it’s hard to create legislation that will serve all states well.
Pressure for quality often comes from states, such as Maine and Oregon, that are in their second or third year of building apprenticeship programs based on European models. Those programs typically take pains to have businesses work closely with schools to design curricula and set industry standards. Officials want to guarantee employers that students with credentials from other states have met similarly stringent criteria.
“The thing I think might be a problem is that it will mean a different thing in different states,” said Susan Brown, co-director of the Maine Youth Apprenticeship Program. “There are so many options. As we talk about portability [of credentials] and building standards at the national level, I worry that it’s going to be difficult for us to get consistency with all the options.”
Still, she said, it’s important for states to be able to build on programs that have worked for them. She also praised the bill’s technical-assistance provision, since she had had to scramble around to get advice from other states.
But Piedad Robertson, the Secretary of Education in Massachusetts, which has a hybrid tech-prep and apprenticeship program, said accountability for quality rightly lies with the states.
“We should know our states better than the federal government,” she said. “I think we know who to bring to the table as players. I think there is a fear that it will be business as usual, but it’s up to us to make sure it isn’t.”
William H. Kolberg, president of the National Alliance of Business, which works with a network of apprenticeship programs, agreed that states have the primary responsibility for education. But he said the federal government should assume some oversight, because the United States needs much higher academic and occupational standards if it is to compete internationally.
Hilary Pennington, president of Jobs for the Future, a national non-profit organization that works on policies linking work-force training, economic development, and education reform, called the bill “clever."She said it wisely avoids prescribing certain programs, which might discourage some states from trying anything, but sets high standards for what programs should include.
The proof, she said, lies in whether the first round of competitive grants meets those standards.
The chief argument against a federal template for programs in all states is that the legislation talks about a new breed of program. While some states have promising experiments and some European countries have proven programs, no one is far enough along in working the bugs out of an American program to say this is how it should be done, several people said.
“We can’t just cook it up at the national level and hand it out,” Ms. Heald said. “If we are to have change at the national level, we will have to have a huge number of players.”