Every year in many inner-city high schools half of the students who started out four years earlier as freshmen graduate. Although high school dropout rates declined in the 1990s, there are now more than 3.1 million 14- to 24-year-olds who have not graduated but are no longer attending school (Halperin, 1998). These young people are in more economic jeopardy than they would have been in the past. More broadly, there are 4.5 million working poor families with more than 10 million children who have insufficient skills and incomes (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2002).

What has changed for these young people...

Workforce initiatives for bringing about long-term job retention, wage progression, and career advancement for low-income, low-skilled job seekers are significant local policy issues.¹ This chapter draws on the concepts of governance and performance regimes to describe and analyze the trends and conditions shaping the politics of workforce development in Denver, Colorado (Stone, 1998). This casts the analysis of the prospects for less fragmented, more coherent, effective, and equitable local workforce development systems in terms of the political, ideational, and institutional factors characterizing the local policy context. This review of Denver’s workforce regime also suggests that the political framework in which...

Over the past several years, the design and administration of modern workforce development policy in the United States has suffered intense and consistent criticisms concerning its fragmentation, mission creep, and ineffectiveness. The prime recommendations for addressing these problems are to rationalize, consolidate, and simplify both the public policies of training and employment and the institutional arrangements for implementing them. In this chapter, we offer an alternative approach for understanding local training and employment “systems” and how they might be reformed. Rather than attempting to develop a synthetic analysis and solution that takes a God’s eye view (Lindblom, 1959; Scott, 1998),...

How does a city transform its political culture? How does a political machine with limited local public resources, a fragmented and contentious political process, and a recent history of failed efforts to shape a public–private governing regime engage the issue of workforce development? How does a socially and politically divided city grapple with workforce development issues in a regional economy that is virtually an “ideal type” representation of spatial mismatches and a dual economy? And, how does a governing coalition that is based largely on jobs and contracts begin to address the increasing expectations of outcome-based or performance-based accountability...

Since the 1960s, a succession of job training and workforce development initiatives for the disadvantaged has been put in place: Manpower, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), the Job Training and Partnership Act (JTPA), and the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). At the same time, the overall structure of public services for the poor and disadvantaged has been fundamentally restructured. Community-based service agencies have grown dramatically in number and diversity of service orientation over the past thirty years (Smith and Lipsky, 1993). Public agencies at the state and local level were split and reorganized so that by the early 1990s,...

Federal workforce development initiatives have drawn considerable critical commentary from national policy analysts. According to Fung and Zdrazil (2003) and others (Grubb et al., 1999), workforce development policies at the federal level, including the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), have operated within separate spheres of activity with little overall vision or managerial coordination. As a result, the programs created have tended to be financially inefficient, because multiple objectives were often pursued with little or no assessment of impact at the local level. Several policy analysts report that although the federal government has spent...

Investing in the human capital and career development of low-income, low-skilled workers has been a staple of U.S. social policy for many years. Since the 1960s, billions of public dollars have been invested in “workforce development”: The latest manifestation is the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998. At its best, this approach—frequently called employment and training—has promised benefits for workers and businesses as well as contributed to the health and well-being of families, neighborhoods, and cities.

These aspirations and investments, however, have not delivered the desired results. Evaluation studies question the effectiveness of most employment and training efforts....

By all accounts big-city schools fail half or more of their students from lower-income backgrounds. Dropout rates are high, and even many students who graduate possess only a modest level of academic skills. Some of the students who dropout manage to acquire GEDs on their own and find their way into the job market. Even students with high school diplomas, however, have difficulty entering the mainstream economy of steady work at good pay. Additional training or, more broadly, workforce development offers a possible chance for individuals who had a bad start to recover and attain a decent-paying job.

Some companies...