Once again we are told legislation is about protecting the people and all signs are that it does none of that----dismantling labor and subsidizing corporate profits are all that public job training does. As the articles below show, even the agencies being built to oversee the new requirements are as corrupt as the businesses involved. Neo-liberals are working with republicans to kill labor and justice and that starts with union-busting public private partnerships and replacing union apprenticeships with a cheap public version that kills our higher education institutions as well. THIS IS YET ANOTHER CORPORATE SUBSIDY ----THIS TIME TO HUMAN RESOURCES JOB TRAINING DEPARTMENTS! VOTE YOUR NEO-LIBERAL INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!! WE NEED STRONG EDUCATION AND STRONG LABOR TO REBUILD OUR FIRST WORLD DEMOCRACY!!! Regarding the NPR report on Washington States vocational/career tech for public schools: FIRST, THE LIVING WAGE IN WASHINGTON IS AT LEAST $15/17 AN HOUR AND NOT $13. SO, THESE MECHANICS ARE GRADUATING TO POVERTY WAGES IN A FIELD THAT HISTORICALLY PAID FAR MORE TO START. SECOND....UNIONS ARE BEING BUSTED BY THIS ATTACK ON UNION APPRENTICESHIPS! This reports talks of the Bill Gates privatization scheme for public education that has public schools as human resources departments for corporations. What a way to maximize corporate profits they say! They say students are graduating without the skills needed to do a job so they are trying to create an entire system of publicly funded job training programs that focus a student on one skill set all paid for by taxpayers and student tuition. So, if you go to these career colleges and get a degree for dental hygienist or auto mechanic you will find yourself having to go back to a career college to get yet another degree if you need to change directions. Each time the goal is to make you ready to work from day one with no job training at the point of hire. SWEET DEAL FOR CORPORATIONS!!!! PROFITS ARE SOARING WITH THIS POLICY BROUGHT TO US BY NEO-LIBERALS! Here is what has been in existence for decades------when we had a thriving economy and strong labor wages and benefits and corporations had profits enough. A student graduates from high school with a broad course of strong liberal arts and humanities tied with either a professional track or a vocational track. The students received strong class content in all subjects so regardless of what they decided when they graduated.....they were ready for most career directions. You either go to university where you again had strong liberal arts and humanities with your career major and when you graduated you were ready for any number of career directions in your major.....for example science.....not only dental hygiene. That science degree allowed you to move to research, laboratory, public service, all with just a little on the job training. How about that student graduating with a vocational track? Well, they could go to a two year community college for an associates degree or they could go right from high school into a union apprenticeship found in most trades. Those apprenticeship programs over several decades were known all over the world for quality training and were open for all to apply. A company hired someone to a job and then paid for their training with the union sharing cost.....no taxpayer money involved. The worker got the job first and then was trained for the job and paid while they worked. This system allowed all students a direction after school and allowed for a broad-based democratic education that gave that student choices in career changes. What we know from a decade of this corporate education reform that has for-profit career colleges doing the job of the union apprenticeships and requiring all this training be done before someone is hired is this----most people go through these corporate trainings and then do not get jobs. So the student and taxpayers hand profits to these training programs and then there are no jobs to be had. WHEN YOU ARE TRAINED ON THE JOB YOU HAVE A JOB ALREADY FOR GOODNESS SAKE! It is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money and funding meant for meaningful degree financial aid. Half of all public education financial aid went to these career colleges and most students did not get jobs. So, what this report from Seattle tells us is how this dysfunctional system of job training is now going to move to high schools and in fact Baltimore is already doing this. We had a report on the Medical Arts high school and the dental hygienist program. I went to the news paper to see the job listings for dental hygienist in the Baltimore area and there were about a dozen listings. Now, this is a high school program rotating several groups of youth through a program that also has for-profit and other training groups doing the same thing. THEY ARE CHURNING OUT TONS OF STUDENTS PREPARING FOR DENTAL HYGIENE JOBS THAT WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE IN THE BALTIMORE AREA. It is a mess. They are doing this with Emergency care programs for ambulances. When all is said and done these students generally end up in home health care earning poverty wages with no way to change direction. Well, we are told.....go to where the jobs are for dental hygienist. The point here is that when K-12 concentrates on strong broad educational achievement people have more of an ability to navigate to different career paths as needed. Will students from vocational schools test as well on SAT if they decide to try that course? If we look at Baltimore where students are doing Teach to the Test with Reading and Math as the primary subject at the loss of all other subjects, you see we are making little progress. When the focus is vocational there is even less. Brown vs the Board of Education and equal opportunity and access was about all public schools giving children the opportunity to choose a direction in their lives. What these school privatizers are trying to adopt has pre-school testing deciding what skills these children may have and tracking them accordingly with parents and students having little say. That is happening now in Baltimore as parents are finding the school choice being more directed to these charters/vocational tech schools. Baltimore schools were sadly neglected in funding and oversight for decades so resources and staffing failed to meet the needs of our students. We want strong public schools that allow all students a chance at career paths they choose! **************************************** Apprenticeship From Wikipedia, Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a structured competency a basic set of skills. Apprenticeships ranged from craft occupations or trades to those seeking a professional license to practice in a regulated profession. Apprentices (or in early modern usage prentices) or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships. Most of their training is done while working for an employer who helps the apprentices learn their trade or profession, in exchange for their continuing labor for an agreed period after they have achieved measurable competencies. For more advanced apprenticeships, theoretical education was also involved, with jobs and farming over a period of 4–6 years. To be successful, the individual must have perseverance, ambition, and initiative. Like a college education, the successful completion of an apprenticeship term does not come easily, but is the result of hard work on the part of the apprentice. In practically every skilled occupation, more than fundamental knowledge of arithmetic is essential. The ability to read, write and speak well is beneficial in any walk of life, but in some apprenticeship occupations it is more important than in others.[1] _______________________________________________ We are being told that job placement standards are going to be tied with student loans and grants yet we know that while universities do not track those stats and may not be as successful as these new laws intend-----all of the for-profit data has been skewed from the start and as with all oversight agencies in the US right now, these agencies lie, cheat, and steal more than the business. So, we have a college system that has centuries in business which has been beset with an economy that is systemically fraudulent working on bubbles that crash and kill employment over and over-----impossible conditions to live and work----and neo-liberals think we need to change our esteemed college system to meet the crippled, criminal, and corrupt business system we have today. OH, REALLY?????? ************************************** High job placement ratings are becoming a matter of U.S. law while accrediting agencies are losing trust. It’s not surprising there is deception in the online school system or we wouldn’t have created the scam blog. What is shocking to us is the accrediting agencies turning a blind eye to the abuses even while the Obama administration is passing stringent new laws about graduate employment numbers. We knew we should be leery of some schools, now we know to be suspicious of accrediting agencies and their lack of action. Every potential student should read this and more. High job placement ratings are becoming a matter of U.S. law while accrediting agencies are losing trust. The Obama Administration just released final regulations requiring career college programs to better prepare students for “gainful employment” or risk losing access to Federal student aid. While many career college programs are helping to prepare America’s workforce for the jobs of the future, far too many students at these schools are taking on unsustainable debt in exchange for degrees and certificates that fail to help them get the jobs they need or were promised. These regulations are designed to ramp up over the next four years, giving colleges time to reform while protecting students and their families from exploitative programs. “These new regulations will help ensure that students at these schools are getting what they pay for: solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. “We’re giving career colleges every opportunity to reform themselves but we’re not letting them off the hook, because too many vulnerable students are being hurt,” Duncan continued. Read the rest ed.gov/news/press-releases/gainful-employment-regulations Recently Philip G. Altbach wrote, “Hardly a day goes by in the United States without another report of malfeasance and exploitation by the for-profit education industry. ABC’s national television news featured a story about how the University of Phoenix, owned by the Apollo Group, one of the largest for-profit education corporations, misrepresents job possibilities to prospective students.” Read the rest The Career College Association (CCA), the lobbying organization of the for-profits has been busy explaining how the stories are the result of unfair reporting, or examples of just a few “rotten apples” in the barrel. Some who have been involved in the investigation, such as Senator Tom Harkin (D) of Iowa, has said that the entire barrel is rotten. Several of the American accrediting agencies should be embarrassed by this situation. They have accredited many of the for-profits, and now must deal with the implications of what seem to be poor judgment. So far, the accreditors have been silent. As far as we know, they are still silent. ______________________________________________ This article is written from the view of business so it does not mention the fact that union apprenticeships have always had the best system of skill development throughout US history. If you look below you see these public job training programs started to grow with Reagan and skyrocketed with Clinton and Obama. This is the same time neo-liberals worked with republicans to union-bust. NAFTA sent the jobs away and these public job training programs worked to replace union apprenticeships. IT IS DELIBERATE!!!! When I graduated from college with a degree in science I took that degree and pursued careers in any number of directions in any number of fields. When a union apprentice finished he had a paid job while he apprenticed and signed up for several years after that. His finishing that apprenticeship gave great assurance he could get a job anywhere in the country. These career college formats have regional recognition of most degrees and hold very little status of completion. States like Maryland are trying to make these second and third rate education platforms legitimate while the entire academic and business community say NO! *********************************************** August 11, 2010 The Job-Training Charade By Steven Malanga Even as the ranks of the unemployed and of those no longer looking for a job grow, the media are suddenly discovering more and more businesses which say they want to hire workers but cant find enough qualified people. The Wall Street Journal earlier this week featured the stories of manufacturing companies having a tough time getting applicants with the right expertise to fill skilled jobs. A few weeks ago a technology headhunter from Silicon Valley created a stir when he said he couldnt fill some job searches despite the still growing ranks of the unemployed. Economists, meanwhile, point out that the number of unfilled job openings in the economy has been rising for most of the last 13 months, but even so unemployment stays high. While labor market research suggests at least some of this disparity is attributable to successive extensions of unemployment benefits, which keep at least some workers from taking new jobs, the bigger problem may be the mismatch between the skills of those seeking jobs and the jobs themselves. And that mismatch, which only appears to be growing wider, is a reminder of the continuing failure of government-sponsored job training and retraining programs, which are a signature part of labor policy in Washington these days. Its not as if the disparity between jobs and skills suddenly arose out of nowhere and surprised us. Its been building for decades, and federal and state government have rolled out an alphabet-soup of training and retraining programs under legislation ranging from the Manpower Development and Training Act, to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, to the Job Training Partnership Act, to the current Workforce Initiative Act. Congress passed a number of these programs specifically because what preceded them was ineffective, and the new programs were supposed to replace them with something better. No such luck. Although worker training is as fashionable as mom and apple pie among politicians, these programs consistently fail because they bear all the weaknesses typical of government social programs. They are frequently handed to politically connected groups to run without regard to expertise. The programs often focus on retraining for jobs in industries that politicians and bureaucrats favor now, not necessarily for industries that are most in need of workers. Meanwhile, journalists and policy makers often make the mistake of touting small programs (often run with private money) that do seem to succeed, assuming the model can work nationally, even though upsizing small, successful programs often fails. In the 1980s, research on programs run under the Job Training Partnership Act, the key training vehicle for government programs at the time, found that they had virtually no impact on employment or wage levels among those who completed them. This was not surprising considering that the programs placed people in training for jobs with companies that were rapidly expanding at the time, like McDonalds, which freely admitted they would have hired the workers even without the federally sponsored training. Money also went to train workers who were being hired by companies that had shut down plants in one location and reopened them somewhere else, providing a neat relocation subsidy to firms but no job gains. One commission looking at agencies running job training under the partnership legislation in New York City noted that they do not consistently teach the right skills and overall are not of sufficient quality. Still, convinced it could do the job, Congress moved on in 1998 to a new program, the WIA, which was supposed to focus on training for higher skill jobs and to deliver better services to training applicants. But old patterns are hard to break in Washington. The feds designated some $900 million to design the new system and then, according to a Government Accountability Office study, let out contracts to reshape the system largely through a no-bid, no-competition system of handing out grants. Seven years after Washington set up the system, the GAO reported, the feds had little idea of whether it had achieved what they hoped for, namely to shift the focus of the public workforce system toward the training and employment needs of high-growth, in-demand industries. As a candidate, President Obama made renewing WIA a centerpiece of his labor agenda, though the GAO reported that some 60 percent of funding for a key WIA program to retrain workers never made it to the workers themselves but was eaten up in program administrative costs. Such utter lack of apparent concern for results perhaps explains why, as a GAO official testified before Congress, We have little information at a national level about what the workforce investment system under WIA achieves. Later he declared that the government doesnt know what works for whom in the program. Naturally, these failures didnt prevent the government from including job training and retraining money in the 2009 federal stimulus package (an effort to include the money in the previous 2008 stimulus failed). A big chunk of the money went to retrain workers to work in ‘green industries. In other words the government spent tax dollars to prepare workers for jobs in industries that are only growing because they are subsidized by tax dollars. Somewhere in all of that is something called the private sector, but its hard to find. An ineffective job training program is worse than nothing. Beyond the tax dollars it wastes, such a program misleads the unemployed and ultimately demoralizes them. Today, for instance, many of those without a college degree who go to government retraining programs are routinely told by counselors that they need to upgrade their skills via government-financed classes that teach skills such as how to use basic word-processing or spreadsheet programs. But the unemployed soon find out these new skills make little difference in landing a job in todays market. About the most that these job training programs are accomplishing is to give jobs to politically connected insiders who otherwise might be out on the street with the rest of the unemployed. _______________________________________________ We are being told that job placement standards are going to be tied with student loans and grants yet we know that while universities do not track those stats and may not be as successful as these new laws intend-----all of the for-profit data has been skewed from the start and as with all oversight agencies in the US right now, these agencies lie, cheat, and steal more than the business. So, we have a college system that has centuries in business which has been beset with an economy that is systemically fraudulent working on bubbles that crash and kill employment over and over-----impossible conditions to live and work----and neo-liberals think we need to change our esteemed college system to meet the crippled, criminal, and corrupt business system we have today. OH, REALLY?????? *************************************** Community Colleges Call Job Training An Underfunded Mandate Posted: 08/30/2012 3:25 pm Updated: 08/30/2012 3:28 pm Huffington Post President Obama talks to students at Lorain County Community College in Ohio. Community colleges are more than ever being tasked with the critical role of putting unemployed Americans back to work -- but they are being asked to do it with scarce funding and unrealistic expectations, according to a new report released Wednesday by the University of Alabamas Education Policy Center. The study, called Workforce Training in a Recovering Economy, included numbers that leaders of community colleges and job training have observed for years. Of the 49 state community college leaders who responded, 45 said that business leaders are now relying on them for workforce training -- up from 34 last year. But the problem, the survey found, was that those same schools need more state and federal support. About 35 percent of community college leaders said that training dollars had increasingly been exhausted in their state, as opposed to 12 percent who disagreed with that statement. The community colleges that were emerging from recession, we still see a lot of states have exhausted their Workforce Investment Act funds, said Stephen Katsinas, a professor at the University of Alabama who co-authored the report. Those funds, provided by the federal government, are supposed to be used in conjunction with local unemployment centers to get people back on their feet. Currently, 12.8 million people in the United States are looking for work. Even though the money isnt there -- and the additional billions once provided by the stimulus and a change the Obama administration made to the Pell Grant system are gone, too -- community colleges are still being called upon to fill an expanded role in their communities. Politicians love to name-check community colleges (theyve been mentioned in every State of the Union, save one, since 1996), but they also have some high hopes for them. Thirty of the 49 community colleges polled said that they were being pushed to offer or expand quick job training programs in noncredit areas in their states. Theres a great focus on the short term and not enough focus on investing in long term, in terms of more expensive technical training, that in turn will lead to the much higher wage jobs, said Katsinas. The issue then is they dont have the funding to do the high-tech training that would produce the wage level we want for our workforce. There is an emerging consensus among community colleges that they should focus their efforts on sectoral training in quick-growing, high-wage industries. But to teach students mechatronics, nursing or information, technology requires well-payed instructors and expensive equipment. One way to help, said Katsinas, would be to make sure that the federal Pell Grants supporting community colleges are maintained at their current levels. House Republicans have taken aim at Pell in their budget, but Katsinas said that would harm efforts to fill the so-called skills gap some employers have complained about, between the skills and education levels they need in workers and what the labor force has to offer. Or, as he put it, you can do more with more, or you can do less with less, but you cant do more with less.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 13:01:34 +0000
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