Youth Employment and Training Programs The YEDPA Years (1985) / Chapter Skim
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Commissioned Papers
Commissioned Papers
Knowledge Development Under the Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act, 1977-1981
Pages 281-347
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From page 281... ...
. The law substantially increased authorizations for two existing youth employment programs, the Job Corps and the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP)
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From page 282... ...
Youth Employment 14-21; at least and Training 85 percent economically Programs (YETP) disadvantaged Residential centers; education, skill training, work experience, counseling, health care; stipends; centers administered in cooperation with other federal agencies, state and local governments, and non-profit organizations Work in public or private, nonprofit agencies; some educational enrichment Work in community-planneo public projects Two-year demonstration; guarantee of minimum wage, part-time work during school year, fulltime work during summer; contingent on satisfactory performance in school and work Work for up to 1 year on conservation, public projects; by statute, 70 percent administered through interagency agreements with Departments of Interior and Agriculture, 30 percent through formula to states Classroom or on-the-job training, work experience, pre-employment skills; administered through local prime sponsors; 22 percent set-aside for cooperative programs with local educational agencies
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From page 283... ...
This effort was described with the arresting phrase "knowledge development." The youth employment knowledge development effort was remarkable in many respects: It was one of the largest short-term investments in social research and development ever undertaken by the federal government. Its scale and complexity dwarfed any research and development effort undertaken by the Department of Labor before or since.
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From page 284... ...
In the 1930s, the National Youth Administration's employment programs and the Civilian Conservation Corps were assumed to have accomplished their purposes when federal money was transferred through public employment to unemployed young people. In the 1960s, this view began to shift markedly.
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From page 285... ...
· Organizational Complexity. The large-scale accumulation of knowledge about social problems turned out to require orchestrating competing political demands, marshaling money and expertise behind policy questions, and constructing organizations to deliver services and do research.
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From page 286... ...
Practitioners argued that the quantitative findings of rigorous research and evaluation were too abstract to be of any practical use, too insensitive to practical problems, and that experimentation and evaluation were expensive ornaments hung on social programs for the benefit of social scientists. Social scientists argued that, without a scientific basis, practice could not be justified to the public and that resistance to systematic analysis stemmed from the professional's usual hostility to external scrutiny.
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From page 287... ...
Not much of this capacity for research and analysis, however, was focused specifically on youth employment -- a matter that would become important with the passage of YEDPA. in economic analysis and evaluation,
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From page 288... ...
· What are the political and organizational correlates of successful accumulation of knowledge? If the accumulation of knowledge about social problems requires orchestrating competing political demands, marshaling money and expertise behind policy questions, and constructing organizations to deliver services and do research, then how do we distinguish between better and worse ways of doing these things?
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From page 289... ...
According to Nik Edes and Richard Johnson, then staff director of Nelson's Senate Employment Subcommittee, the Senators delivered a simple message to the Carter appointees: A youth employment bill would be introduced in the Senate immediately, with or without administration support. The administration could collaborate or be left behind.
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From page 290... ...
Senate aide Richard Johnson said, "We told them, 'You can't do that on Capitol Hill, legislators want to pass legislation and get some visibility'." So on March 9, the administration followed with a youth employment message, containing a proposal that had been worked out jointly with the Senate. It requested authority for three new youth programs -- YACC, YCCIP, YETP; it provided a set-aside of joint school-prime sponsor projects; and it provided that half the YETP funds would be distributed by formula to prime sponsors and the other half used to fund "innovative and experimental" programs at the discretion of the secretary of labor or his designee.
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From page 291... ...
First, whereas the Senate proposal created new programs focused on youths, the House proposal amended Title III of CETA, a general grant of discretionary authority to the secretary of labor for research and demonstration projects. The Senate saw itself as initiating new, more or less permanent, youth employment programs.
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From page 292... ...
Everyone anticipated that youth employment would be integrated into CETA when the 1978 reauthorization occurred. Rather than putting youth programs on a different authorization schedule than the rest of CETA, there was substantial agreement that the new youth programs should be authorized for 1 year and then taken up again in 1978 with the reauthorization of CETA.
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From page 293... ...
There was consensus that the time was ripe for political action, but little confidence in past solutions to youth unemployment and little specific agreement on what would constitute success. Asked whether a more detailed analysis of the youth employment problem and its solutions might usefully have preceded a multi-billion dollar demonstration effort, one congressional staff member replied, "Are you kidding?
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From page 294... ...
A related issue that did not arise explicitly in the youth employment bill, but lay behind it, was the youth subminimum wage. The idea of offering employers exemptions from the minimum wage for hiring youths had long been a popular conservative proposal for addressing youth unemployment.
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From page 295... ...
Congress expected all these working relations, plus the newly mandated cooperative arrangements with local educational systems, to be carried over into the administration of youth employment programs. These expectations were stated in explicit statutory language.
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From page 296... ...
Under the previous system, youths were singled out for attention by categorical programs, notably the Neighborhood Youth Corps and the Job Corps. After CETA, the Job Corps and the Summer Youth Employment Program remained separately authorized, but the expectation was that state and local governments would make their own decisions about the appropriate mix of youth and adult programs within broad guidelines set by the federal government.
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From page 297... ...
. Executive Branch Perspective Within the executive branch at the federal level, expectations for the new youth employment effort were quite modest.
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From page 298... ...
In the words of Bill Spring, White House Domestic Policy Staff member, "We came within an inch of losing the whole thing." In an effort to refocus attention on the positive side, the Department of Labor began increasingly to emphasize its youth employment efforts. By late 1978, the Carter welfare reform proposal had gotten bogged down in a tangle of interdepartmental, congressional, and interest group fights that eventually led to its demise.
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From page 299... ...
The final terms of the congressional charge involved roughly doubling the size of the Job Corps, as well as enriching the program's education and training components; increasing the Summer Youth Employment Program; launching the Youth Incentive Entitlement Pilot Projects, a $200million-plus, multi-site demonstration; launching three new operating programs -- YCCIP, YACC, and YETP; and, most importantly, deciding how to use the discretionary funding allocated to the secretary under the terms of YEDPA. It was from the last of these -- discretionary funding -- that the "knowledge development agenda" grew.
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From page 300... ...
Another alternative would have been to allocate the bulk of the discretionary money to prime sponsors under a series of large-scale grant competitions, and then to require the recipients of those grants -- state and local agencies -- to develop research and evaluation plans and relations with research and evaluation organizations as part of their projects. A third option might have been for OYP and OPER jointly to develop plans for a limited number of large-scale demonstrations or social experiments, along the lines suggested by YIEPP, to manage those projects jointly, and to contract with external organizations to evaluate the projects.
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From page 301... ...
Humphrey-Hawkins [full employment proposal! than with youth employment; the youth programs were less than highest priority, and because of that Taggart was given much freer rein." Taggart used another device to solidify his position within DOL.
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From page 302... ...
OPER, on the other hand, was staffed mainly by career civil servants whose background was in employment programs and whose main interest was the program monitoring and evaluations aimed at improving operations. These institutional loyalties tended to reinforce mutual stereotypes within the department, not always accurate, that ASPER was populated by "academic economists" and OPER by "program people." Another characterization of the difference, offered by an OPER administrator, was that the "academics believed that conceptualizing an evaluation was the key issue .
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From page 303... ...
"Finding out what works" was useful only insofar as it was instrumental in building a structure of institutions focused on youth employment. Taggart was young -- in his thirties -- relatively inexperienced as an administrator, very ambitious, and possessed of strong ideas about the role of research in policy making and administration.
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From page 304... ...
On this matter, Taggart is unapologetic. "I'm the only one who knows how the pieces of the process fit together because I'm the one who designed it." The practical problems of mounting a large-scale research and development enterprise were another major theme in the knowledge development plans -- problems of management, organization, time, and methodology.
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From page 305... ...
3. Work experience has become the primary emphasis of youth programs.
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From page 306... ...
3. Given the fact that work experience leas become the primary emphasis of youth programs, are the jobs productive, which ones are most "meaningful" and how can they be improved?
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From page 307... ...
This meant that, while many research questions required long-term studies, commitments could only be made for one year. After October 1978, when YEDPA was reauthorized through 1980, there were additional demands to provide timely results, through the summer and fall of 1979, for the policy development effort operating under the Vice President's Task Force for Youth Employment, which culminated with a proposal to the Congress in January of 1980.
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From page 308... ...
Granting the complexity of expectations, though, a common theme among both Taggart's harshest critics and strongest allies was that he did little to control the complexity of the enterprise. Robert Lerman, ASPER staff member, recalls that in late 1978, when Taggart convened a conference at Reston, Virginia to discuss knowledge development efforts, "It struck me that the plan just had too many questions.
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From page 309... ...
Process information may not have been useful to OMB in making government-wide allocation decisions, but it was valuable intelligence to Taggart in his attempt to create and manage a youth employment delivery system. Moreover, by asking for process information, Taggart was communicating that he placed a high priority on creating an infrastructure to mount, administer, and evaluate youth programs.
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From page 310... ...
Finally, the overall design of the knowledge development effort and the design of specific studies changed markedly over time. For example, the YIEPP demonstration started by testing the effect of a fully subsidized work guarantee on school attendance, school completion, and short-term employment.
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From page 311... ...
Design, then, meant two distinctly different things in the knowledge development plans. First, it meant accommodating congressional, executive, and institutional interests involved in the youth employment problem in some sort of overall scheme and using that scheme to develop an institutional base for youth programs.
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From page 312... ...
Administratively, the problem is how to get state and local organizations, mainly in the business of delivering employment and training services, to agree to participate in fixed-term research and development efforts. The research problem is devising and implementing a design that will answer policy questions within the operating constraints imposed by the existing delivery system.
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From page 313... ...
These constraints, coupled with the congressional charge to forge federal interagency connections and to rely on community-based organizations, quickly led Taggart to "management by remote control" or "indirect management" of the knowledge development effort (see Salamon, 1981~. In Taggart's words, "It takes as much time to process a $5 million contract as it does a $100,000 contract." Given a choice between managing thousands of contracts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or dozens of multi-million dollar contracts, there was no contest in Taggart's mind.
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From page 314... ...
Hence, in November 1977, the Corporation for Public/Private Ventures (CPPV) was established to handle demonstrations of private sector youth employment; in January 1978, You thwork was established to handle exemplary in-school employment programs; and in May 1978, the Corporation for Youth Enterprises (CYE)
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From page 318... ...
Interagency Agreements Interagency agreements were an outgrowth of congressional expectations that DOL would "pull together the pieces" of the federal government around the youth employment problem. The portfolio of
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From page 319... ...
But two equally important additional purposes of these projects were, first, to develop a basic research constituency for youth employment among academics, and second, to assure that youth employment issues were adequately addressed in established longitudinal data bases, like the National Longitudinal Survey and the Continuous Longitudinal Manpower Survey. In their own way, the intraagency projects were among the most successful in the knowledge development process.
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From page 320... ...
This battery of instruments would then be administered by prime sponsors as part of the routine requirements that accompany YEDPA-funded demonstration projects. The results would be collected, compiled, and analyzed by ETS, but also made available to others for special studies.
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From page 321... ...
From that point on, we had a constant battle to try and turn it around." Constituency Support Constituency support projects were designed to make good on Congress's expectation that client groups, community-based organizations, and intergovernmental constituencies would be involved and consulted in the implementation of YEDPA programs. The mayors', counties', and governors' associations were important in maintaining any political support for any future youth employment activities, since they were the host governments for CETA prime sponsors.
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From page 322... ...
The knowledge development plan was, in a sense, a protective system; to get funding, institutions had to adapt to the design and structure of demonstration approaches. The overlay of research requirements and outside evaluation agents was a disciplining force, serving a monitoring and management function which would not otherwise have been possible given limited staffing in the Office of Youth Programs.
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From page 323... ...
Erik Butler, a former administrator of youth programs in Boston and later executive director of the Vice President's Task Force on Youth Employment said, "When MDRC came to talk to us about the Entitlement project, they were talking research, while we were talking program. The issue was how to accommodate their interests and ours." Marion Pines, a nationally visible employment and training administrator from Baltimore, took her complaints about the reporting and administrative demands of the entitlement project directly to Congress, making a plea for more local control over design decisions.
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From page 324... ...
As is clear from Tables 2 and 3, SYEP accounted (and still does) for a large proportion of both outlays and participants in federal youth employment programs.
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From page 325... ...
"January 1980 is the scheduled date for submitting administrative recommendations. When the budget goes up a year from this January, if we are going to ask for any money to continue youth programs, the legislation has got to accompany the budget" IDOL, 1980e:25~.
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From page 326... ...
One of the more impassioned versions of this argument was made by Robert Schrank of the Ford Foundation. "Large sums of money have been allocated for massive quantitative evaluation effort," he argued, "but no one is asking what the pitfalls of such research might be, or whether it is even appropriate to what we are trying to study." He continued, "The object of the research is a network of youth programs," not the production of research results.
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From page 327... ...
As noted above, sometime in the fall of 1978, the administration seized on youth employment as its major social policy issue for the 1980 campaign, having run into difficulty with welfare reform. The Task Force was as ambitious a policy development exercise as ever takes place in the federal government.
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From page 328... ...
The early efforts at better coordination between prime sponsors and local educational systems did not produce widespread changes, but the objective is an important one for federal policy. · Institutional Comparative Advantage.
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From page 329... ...
By early 1980, it had become clear that youth employment was the only game in town for those interested in affecting domestic policy. With the election approaching, activity around the administration's proposal became feverish.
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From page 330... ...
They identified about 120 incomplete discretionary projects, of which all but a few required additional DOL action to close them out. They also examined data collection activities under ETS's Standard Assessment System, and found 20 of 48 sites in which data were incomplete.
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From page 331... ...
The Carter administration, when it finally turned its attention to youth employment, expected support for a new domestic initiative. Taggart's research, program, and policy constituencies expected methodological rigor, sensitivity to administrative constraints, and firm answers to policy questions.
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From page 332... ...
Reinforcing this perception from the Hill is the perception of those who worked on the Carter youth initiative. Domestic Policy Staff member Bill Spring argues, "I think there is broad agreement among those of us who worked in the White House that the Youth Initiative was probably the best-run policy-making exercise in the Carter years.
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From page 333... ...
A wide range of people, from Taggart to the Brandeis staff to the Vice President's Task Force staff to congressional staff, claim credit for influencing the content of JTPA. This consensus is an important indication that YEDPA and its attendant policy activities created an occasion for rethinking the legislative and administrative structure surrounding federal youth employment programs.
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From page 334... ...
Andrew Hahn describes the influence this way. "Before YEDPA and knowledge development people who worked in the youth employment field basically had no common professional identity.
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From page 335... ...
Michael Borus, a researcher from Rutgers, has reviewed research on employment programs for high-risk youths, including the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the Job Corps, and a number of discretionary knowledge development projects under YEDPA. He found serious methodological flaws in most impact evaluations of these programs including low response rates, ~ ~ ~ lack of adequate comparison groups, and rudimentary development of treatments -- and little evidence, outside of Job Corps, of positive effects.
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From page 336... ...
But they often do not shed much light on the larger questions of how to make judgments about the investment of the public's money in large-scale research and development enterprises, such as the youth employment knowledge development effort. These larger questions often broach the diffuse and difficult subjects of political, organizational, and management strategy -- subjects in which neither social scientists nor policy advocates believe they have a comparative advantage.
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From page 337... ...
They provided little guidance for what the Congress meant by "finding out what works." Assuming that Congress meant rigorous research when it said "find out what works" probably overstates the sophistication of Congress's concern. Congress was more interested in generating a variety of practical activities addressed to youth employment than in setting the conditions for rigorous social research.
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From page 338... ...
If young people are to be given clear expectations of performance as a condition for participation in employment programs, what constitutes satisfactory performance and what happens to those young people who do not meet expectations? Again, these questions are relatively far removed from the conventional social science questions about Treatment A and Treatment B
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From page 339... ...
As an exercise in the application of social science methods to the problem of youth employment, it was less successful, but by no means a complete failure. whatever its other defects, the knowledge development process did reflect, in its design and execution, the distinction between ordinary knowledge and scientific knowledge.
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From page 340... ...
" would be moot, since there would be no political constituency to support youth programs in the next round of congressional debate. While finding out what works was an important purpose of YEDPA, delivering services to political constituencies, state and local jurisdictions, employment training organizations, and disadvantaged youths was instrumental to that
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From page 341... ...
It did, however, seem to elude many of the social scientists and policy analysts who criticized the knowledge development effort. The confusion between "advocacy" and "research" troubled some, as did the raggle-taggle quality of the research in many of the demonstration projects.
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From page 342... ...
The programs were reauthorized in 1978, but by that time the Carter administration had launched the Vice President's Task Force on Youth Employment, with instructions to produce a new youth employment policy by the following year. The pressure mounted within the administration to produce results that simply were not there.
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From page 343... ...
It is instructive that the entitlement demonstration, the one piece of the knowledge development effort that had a relatively clear mandate, a finite research agenda, and a considerable amount of institutional research capacity behind it, came the closest to meeting congressional and executive expectations. It is also instructive that the Job Corps, the federal youth program with the greatest institutional maturity, the longest history of trial and error (in both the political and experimental sense)
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From page 344... ...
It did not get that analysis in this instance. Payoffs A few conclusions about the expected payoffs of large-scale research and development efforts like YEDPA follow from this analysis.
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From page 345... ...
What incentives are available for mobilizing that capacity? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Charles Betsey, study director for the Committee on Youth Employment Programs, and Robinson Hollister, chair of the committee, in preparing this paper.
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From page 346... ...
U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Education and Labor 1977 Youth Employment Innovative Demonstration Projects Act of 1977.
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From page 347... ...
Office of Youth Programs, Youth Knowledge Development Report 1.3. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
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