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This volume contains reports and a discussion that took place as part of a roundtable convened by the U.S. departments of Education and Labour and the National School-to-Work Office in order to discuss issues surrounding an evaluation of school-to-work. Individual papers presented at the roundtable are as follows: 'Evaluating early program experiences in the School-to-Work Opportunities Act: policy and design issues' / Gary Burtless; 'Net impact of School-to-Work: exploring alternatives' / Charles Dayton; 'Net impact evaluation of School-to-Work: desirable but feasible?' / Robert Glover and Christopher T. King; 'Evaluation of School-to-Work transition programs / James J. Heckman; 'Evaluating the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994' / Robert A. Moffitt; 'Net impact evaluation of School-to-Work: contending expectations' by Hillard Pouncy and Robinson Hollister. The volume contains a summary of the roundtable discussion that includes key issues and areas of concern. Show less

‘Evaluation forum’ is a review journal for employment and training professionals focusing on policy analysis and evaluation research in occupational training, education, work and welfare, and economic development. This issue, entitled ‘American poverty: the role of education, training and employment strategies in the new anti-poverty struggle’, covers the following topics: Poverty in America: a context; The underclass poor; The welfare system poor; The homeless poor; Evaluation issues and activities - International level (the evolution of European welfare states); National, state and local level. The journal also contains the following sections: Resources - Selected federal research in education, training, employment and economic development; New concern about poverty: a renaissance in poverty research?; Commentary; Interviews. Show less

Personal reemployment accounts (PRAs) are a new strategy intended to help specific recipients of Unemployment Insurance (UI) build job skills and find work. PRAs are lump sum accounts of up to $3,000 that are fully managed by the unemployed worker and valid for one year. They are targeted to UI recipients who are likely to exhaust their benefits, and recipients can choose how and when to spend funds from their account to purchase reemployment services. PRA recipients may also elect to receive the funds as a bonus for reentering the workforce and keeping a job. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) launched the PRA demonstration project as the first step in examining this new strategy. ETA selected seven states - Florida, Idaho, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Texas, and West Virginia - to serve as PRA demonstration states. These states received a combined total of nearly $8 million to offer PRAs to a minimum of 2,270 unemployed workers. The evaluation of this project will cover the first two years of implementation and will involve both a qualitative and a quantitative study. This interim report presents information about the first year of PRA implementation, based on telephone interviews and site visits to each state and an analysis of state quarterly data reports. Early findings include: PRAs have not significantly altered staffing or service delivery structures within the participating One-Stop Centers, and most sites do not have a staff position dedicated solely to PRAs. Overall, the states have maintained a high degree of flexibility and customer choice in the use of PRAs by placing limited, if any, restrictions on PRA recipients’ selection of training providers. States have also allowed PRA recipients to purchase a broad range of supportive services that help sustain a job search; contact between One-Stop staff and PRA recipients is limited to the purpose of withdrawing account funds and occurs predominantly via telephone, email, or mail. There is no free access to career counseling and limited face-to-face contact overall. The early analysis suggests that PRA recipients will restrict spending on services in order to maximize the amount of a reemployment bonus. But, when funds are used to purchase services, the majority of spending is directed to supportive services in five of the seven states.

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The President’s High Growth Job Training Initiative (HGTJI) is a major national effort to encourage the development of market-driven strategies to address critical workforce challenges as defined by business and industry. As part of the Urban Institute’s initial implementation study and evaluability assessment of this program, this report documents the lessons, experiences and sustainability of 20 of the earliest HGJTI grantees as told by the project administrators. The purpose of the report is to summarize the major implementation lessons emerging from the early grantees and document the extent to which projects continue after the end of the grant.

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This annual report by the Secretary of Labor reviews the activities of the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) from July 1993 to September 1995. An overview is given of the Department of Labor’s workforce investment agenda for the 1990s, which is followed by a description of programs administered by the ETA, including activity summaries. These programs include ones designed to help people with low incomes, including welfare recipients, find jobs leading to economic self-sufficiency and programs that provide basic adjustment services and training to help American workers who were made redundant find new jobs as quickly as possible. Show less

In 2003 and 2004, sites in 11 cities initiated the Ready4Work demonstration. Ready4Work, funded by the US Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Ford Foundation and carried out by Public/Private Ventures (P/PV), conjectured that a strong re-entry program should include employment-readiness and job-placement services, facilitated by case managers who would also refer participants to other needed programs such as drug treatment and housing. In addition, it hypothesized that mentors could help ease the re-entry of adult ex-offenders by providing both practical and emotional support and in the process cut the rate at which they return to prison. This final research report on Ready4Work offers an overall assessment of the Ready4Work demonstration. It provides a detailed portrait of the Ready4Work participants, documents the extent of services provided to participants, examines program retention, and presents key outcomes related to employment and recidivism.

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This report, commissioned of the Urban Institute, systematically examines public and private investments in occupational training to present a general picture of the total spending on occupational training (i.e., job training) from both public and private sources in the United States. The authors focus specifically on occupational training, using a definition that allowed comparability across programs, and defined literally as vocational and/or occupational skills training provided in a classroom, on-line, at the workplace, or through internships or apprenticeships. The results, therefore, should be viewed as approximations and as conservative lower bound estimates of total federal spending on training. The estimates are based on the authors’ computation methods and assumptions that are explicitly presented in the chapters, developed to provide a general overview of the scale of spending on occupational training in the United States. Further analysis and data collection would be needed to provide more precise and detailed estimates. Retraining and upgrading the skills of incumbent workers and providing training to new labor force entrants, dislocated workers, and unemployed persons can help close the skills gap and expand employment and advancement opportunities for individuals. Occupational training also helps build America’s future by ensuring that the United States has the skills and talents necessary to meet the needs of employers. This report was developed to provide a general overview of the scale of funding for occupational training that come from many sources - the federal government, state and local government, private employers, philanthropic foundations, and individual workers themselves.

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On February 17, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. Passed in response to the 2008 recession, the Act's purpose was to create jobs, pump money into the economy, and encourage spending. Through the Act, states received $1.2 billion in funding for the workforce investment system to provide employment and training activities targeted to disadvantaged youth. Congress and the US Department of Labor (DOL) encouraged states and local workforce investment areas charged with implementing these youth activities to use the funds to create employment opportunities for these youth in the summer of 2009. To gain insights into these summer initiatives, DOL’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) contracted with Mathematica Policy Research to conduct an implementation evaluation of the summer youth employment activities funded by the Recovery Act. As part of the evaluation, Mathematica analyzed (1) monthly performance data submitted to ETA by the states, and (2) qualitative data collected through in-depth site visits to 20 local areas. This report describes the national context for implementation, provides an in-depth description of the experience of selected local areas, and presents lessons on implementation practices that may inform future summer youth employment efforts.

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This publication is part of a two-part summary of the final report into the evaluation of the School-to-Work /Out-of-School Youth (OSY) Demonstration and Job Corps Model Centers, focusing specifically on the Job Corps Model Center component. It includes information on the school-to-work vision, school-to-work system building, school- and work-based learning, strategies to connect work site and school-based learning, and methods of sustaining future school-to-work projects. Profiles for all of the individual projects in the report are also given. The companion report, which addresses similar issues with respect to the OSY Demonstration, is indexed at TD/TNC 76.156. Show less

This report describes the results and lessons learned from Policy Academies in six states. The States of Idaho, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio and Virginia sought to help policy makers cope with problems of global competition. The states learned to promote effective economic development strategies and link economic development policies with workforce development policies. The report by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices includes federal policy recommendations and an overview of cluster-based economic development approaches.

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