endary. That is obviously something that you can't clone, but you can certainly strive for. I think that the other dimension, taking some of the principles that are involved in the school to work initiative, the notion that training and education need to have both a work place-like and a school place-like nature to them. And that what it does is, it makes education relevant to these youngsters. One of the great things about Job Corps is that it takes education out of the classroom only setting by connecting it to trades, and often to employers, in a way that enables you to get the kind of experience that you need to tell you that your education is worthwhile and is going to make a difference in your life. You're seeing it applied in practical applications, whether it's in a machinery program or a carpentry program or whatever. I've seen kids in many, many of these programs. The change in these youngsters is marvelous when they start seeing the relevance of the education they're getting, and they start to see a little bit of hope for their own futures. We also work very closely with community relations councils. Those community relations councils can help us do a better job both of reaching out and getting these youngsters before they've dropped out or when they're on the verge of dropping out, and connecting them to the Job Corps. We need to do a better job of doing that. Mr. BONILLA. Thank you, Mr. Barnicle. RETIREMENT OF CAROLYN GOLDING Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, before I begin my questions, and I hope this doesn't come out of my time, I'd simply like to take this opportunity, Mr. Barnicle, to note that not only do you have a long previous and very respectable tenure with the Employment Training Administration, but I think the committee ought to also take this opportunity to recognize the distinguished career of Deputy Assistant Secretary Carolyn Golding, who is with you today, and who I understand is going to be retiring at the end of this year. Ms. Golding, this committee is appreciative of your support and the work you've done through the years. You're retiring as one of the agency's top career officials. I understand you began in the agency as a management intern and have worked your way up the hard way. This committee appreciates the help that you've given us over the years. STREAMLINING CLIENT SERVICES Let me simply ask Mr. Barnicle, in the absence of job training reform legislation, has your department been able to do anything to facilitate consolidation at the street levels to try to produce streamlined services for the clients that you're supposed to serve? Mr. BARNICLE. Working with this committee in the funding of the one stop career center I think has probably been the most important single thing that's been done to try to make it easier for our citizens to navigate this often complicated maze of Government bureaucratese in ways that end up getting them better jobs and better training opportunities. I think that I visited a one stop center in your state in Waukesha about six months ago. Mr. OBEY. Waukesha is the deep south. Mr. BARNICLE. I know it is. [Laughter.] It's the deep south and it was a wonderful day. Mr. BONILLA. I thought that was the North Pole. [Laughter.] In any event, I was out in Waukesha, and I've seen employment service offices and job training offices over the years, and all over the country. Waukesha was one of my first experiences of going back and seeing what this one stop business is all about. And I have to tell you, it's very, very impressive. And this is happening all over the country. It's happening both spontaneously and through investments that we're making in the one stop career centers. This was not an idea that was just spawned in Washington or dreamed up by somebody one night. This is a notion that's come from the field, from the people who are actually trying to provide services. It's remarkable how different it is when you walk into a center like that in Waukesha compared to what it used to be. I mean, number one, I think that the people in this business now recognize that consumers are very sophisticated, and if you want to provide a consumer with a reasonable service, you have to present that service in a way that's going to make that person believe there's something here professional and of value to them. Our one stop centers are demonstrating that to people all over the country. This particular one stop center had a little day care organization as part of it. Our one stop centers have lots more technology that help integrate programs. For instance, in that center, they have touch screen technology. So even somebody as computer illiterate as I am can sit down at the touch screen, and said say, okay, I want to have a job up in Mr. Obey's district so I'd like to work in Superior. What jobs are open in Superior, Wisconsin, dealing with management positions? Using the touch screen technology, you can find out what jobs are there, how much they pay and who you contact. There's also integrated assessment and intake, so that whether you're coming in under theoretically the welfare jobs program or one of the titles of JTPA, you go through a common intake process. You're assessed in a similar type of way, and there are efficiencies and competencies that develop in doing it as a result of that. I was very impressed. I think that that's probably the most important single thing in integration. I think the second thing is something that you've all done in the last few days, and that's in the new agreement on the new appropriation, you've allowed a 100 percent fungibility, so to speak, of the summer money in the JTPA Title II-C year-long youth program. I think that's important in terms of allowing local level decision makers led by the private industry council to decide what the ratios ought to be in their particular location based on what their needs are. Similarly, in the adult program, between the disadvantaged adult and the dislocated worker programs, you're moving in the same direction. The Administration in that case is proposing in this budget a 20 percent fungibility. We want to make sure that we don't have a rush to disinvest in some of these workers. JOB TRAINING PROGRAM EFFECTIVENESS Mr. OBEY. Let me just ask three boilerplate questions all rolled into one. I've been in this Congress 27 years. I've seen job training programs come and go. I've seen many "reform efforts" in the job training area. I think it's safe to say that a lot of people in this society, often justifiably so, have the skeptical view that a lot of these programs aren't worth a tinker. I'd like you to respond and to tell us, what we can tell our constituents to demonstrate that these programs are becoming much more useful. Second, with respect to the summer program, you have a lot of criticism about that, that it really does not teach young people to do anything or to learn anything real about work. What solid evidence can you give us that that's not so? And lastly, if you take a look at the GAO report on JTPA, which some would characterize as being negative on the program, would you give us your analysis of how you see that GAO report on the program? Mr. BARNICLE. Sure. For the first question, I think, as with most programs and institutions in the job training business as a whole, there's been a pragmatic operational level set of improvements that have been made in these programs. That, I would think, is the most important reason why I have more confidence now than I had in the past in the likelihood of training really making a difference in somebody's life. I think that in terms of JTPA, specifically, we've seen changes that have been brought about by Congress in the amendments to JTPA in 1992. I think those amendments resulted in a couple of very important things happening. One important thing is that in our regular program for disadvantaged adults, there was a real concern that that program was not dealing with the hardest to train and the hardest to employ. And there was a push on our system to do that and to do it better. As a result of that push, over the last two or three years, since those amendments have been implemented, we've seen a dramatic improvement in the system's responsiveness to people with real problems. So, for instance, the number of people on welfare who are now served in our Title II-A program has increased in the last two years from about 30 percent to over 40 percent. The number of people who have never been connected to the work force has increased dramatically. The number of people who have reading and math skills that are below the high school level have increased dramatically. And when I heard all this, I said, well, that's all great, but what's happened to placements and what's happened to how much people are making who go through the programs. And what I thought was very heartening is that in fact the placement rates have stayed up in the mid sixties, around close to two thirds of all the people who go through this program end up three months later in a job and getting a salary that is the average wage now is over $7.00 an hour. And while wages generally for people in this cat egory have not been increasing, wages for people in these programs have been increasing in the last several years at a rate that's ahead of inflation. So I think on that particular program, we've got a base to build on in the new legislation that seems encouraging. DISLOCATED WORKERS In terms of dislocated workers, which are an extraordinarily important and growing problem in this country, the data is also very, very impressive to me. So maybe I have a standard that's too low. But I know how tough it is to run these programs, how difficult it is to deal with people who have these problems in their lives. You take the dislocated worker program. Now there's a program that now places, if people go through training, over 70 percent of the people who come in the door. And they're placing them at over 90 percent of what their past hourly wage was in the job they lost. Now, the Inspector General did an evaluation of this program on a sample basis in 1995. And what the Inspector General found from his sample was that about two years after a person completes a program like this, 84 percent of them are back to work, and are back to work at approximately 100 percent of the wage that they left. In fact, 58 percent of the people in that analysis said that they were better off in the job that they were in, bouncing back from the job they lost, than if they had stayed where they were. I think that there's a lot of quality improvement that's taking place in these programs, not because some geniuses sat in a corner and said, this is how it all ought to be done, and give you the three magic principles, but because pragmatically, year after year after year, the system has gotten better. And there has been more of a focus on getting that quality better, and we've invested substantially in it. The Enterprise that I mentioned earlier is a very interesting partnership between state, local and Federal Government. We've got the Baldridge award judges working with us and that coalition, to put together the kind of standards we needed to set for ourselves. Our folks who meet those standards against those quantitative measurements get a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval from the Enterprise. I can tell you from being all over the country that out of the 630 SDAs that we have, the 125 that have made the cut in terms of the Enterprise are very, very proud of it. That's building pressure for an improved system. Obviously, the increased investment in labor market information is something that I thought for years we've just totally underinvested in. People need that, because their lives are much less secure employment wise than they've been in the past. They need data to make judgments about what to get trained in, where the jobs and what the occupations of the future are going to be, etc. In terms of efficiency and effectiveness, I think that we've come a long way in the last five or ten years. EFFECTIVENESS OF SUMMER PROGRAM The second issue you raised was on the effectiveness of the summer program. I think the summer program, again, is one that's been evaluated by lots of folks. It's one that I've seen in many, many places. The summer program does not turn 14 and 15 and 16 year old kids into Harvard business school graduates. I think that if that's our standard, then, well, maybe this isn't the program we ought to be investing in. But I think it's really important that these youngsters, mostly from very poor backgrounds, unlikely as heck to get any kind of a job in the private sector, given the communities that they are growing up in, get this first opportunity to earn a buck, to know what discipline is, to learn what working on a team means, to follow a structured work pattern every day and have a boss who's making sure that you are, and to produce a product that's of some value to society. I think that the summer program is extremely important in doing that. I mean, we talk the work ethic and this helps us walk the walk. We can't just tell these kids to get jobs and then not provide the wherewithal when the private sector can't do it in the community. So I think that the summer program is extremely important. I might also say that in the last couple of years, one of the new things that I've seen coming back into this business full time is that there is now an educational enrichment component to about two-thirds of all the summer job programs in the country. What this does is it reduces the amount of grade loss that occurs during the summer for these youngsters, who are prone to dropping out of school. It's very important that they feel comfortable and sustained in terms of the grade that they reach the year before. This helps them to do a little bit of that. GAO REPORT ON JTPA The final question was on the GAO report on JTPA. GAO has done the first intensive five year analysis of the original, what we call the Abt study, the long term JTPA study, and the findings from that, the data that they have looked at are very positive as far as we're concerned. We've looked at the data, our analysts have begun to analyze it in detail. We've had external experts look at it for instance, Dr. Andy Sum from Northeastern University, who's one of the preeminent experts in this field. We're all very impressed. What the data shows is that in every single category, adult male, adult female, male and female out-of-school youth, the four categories that were evaluated, in every single category, a person who went through the JTPA program in the mid and late 1980's, was better off financially five years later than were a control group that did not have this opportunity. We think that's a very positive result. We think it reinforces the results that came out of the analysis that was done 30 months after the students were trained, which demonstrated that for the adult component, the program paid for itself very quickly. What this also showed was that even for youth, where there had been some real questions based on the original JTPA analysis, even those young people who had gone through JTPA were better off than those who did not. That includes young males who in the fifth year after the program were making $800 a year more than young |