Quayle’s Legislative Pride and Joy Nothing to Brag About

Dan Quayle has been trying to strengthen his vice presidential campaign by boasting often about the Job Training Partnership Act that he calls the major achievement of his nearly 12 years in Congress.

But he might want to rethink that claim in the face of yet another major negative evaluation of JTPA that was issued last week.

While suggesting that the program is better than none, the new study said JTPA is badly flawed in many ways and is often “manipulated” to make it look good.

The manipulating is done by what is called “creaming”--selecting only the most competent applicants who have the best chance of being placed in a job. That increases JTPA’s job placement rate and allows Quayle and others to claim that the program has a great success record.

The trouble is that “creaming” does little to help the real target of the program: the millions of unskilled, undereducated, disadvantaged workers that few employers will hire.

Equally depressing is that most of the really disadvantaged high school dropouts who do need and get help from the program are retained for only a few months on jobs when they are hired because they are not adequately trained in the first place.

The latest report, 279 pages long, was prepared for California’s JTPA by Arthur Young & Co., an international accounting firm, and the nonpartisan, nonprofit Training Research Corp., headquartered in Santa Monica.

Ironically, California’s JTPA, which paid for the negative report, is managed by the Administration of Republican Gov. George Deukmejian.

And the report singles out Massachusetts as one of the few states where JTPA is working reasonably well because it is tightly administered by that state’s Administration, headed by Democratic presidential candidate Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Other studies, including one issued last January by the Reagan Administration’s Labor Department Office of Inspector General, all support the new report’s conclusion that the hard-core unemployed are far less likely to get help from JTPA than easier-to-place high school graduates.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) reluctantly agreed to join as a sponsor of the JTPA bill, saying that it was “the only (politically) realistic alternative to the Reagan-Bush Administration efforts to wipe out virtually all federal training efforts.”

In fact, the Quayle version of JTPA program was opposed by the Administration. It passed only after Kennedy and others agreed to drastically reduce its size.

The much-maligned, now defunct Comprehensive Employment and Training Act was spending $19 billion a year at its peak, in 1988 dollars, to help the disadvantaged get out of poverty and into jobs. The budget of the JTPA, which is designed to do the same thing, is just $3.8 billion.

The CETA program was far from perfect and plagued by several scandals that even turned many of its supporters against it. But it needed major reforms, not trashing.

The relatively small size of JTPA means that only one out of every 20 of those eligible for its help are getting any education, training or job placement help it offers.

While JTPA was created to help the seriously disadvantaged dropouts, nearly 60% of those in JTPA programs are high school graduates, the new Arthur Young study showed.

Similar results were revealed in the Labor Department report, which also said that at least 60% of those workers who got JTPA training would have been hired without it. In other words, the “cream” of the JTPA crop didn’t need much enriching to find jobs.

The old CETA program, which flourished in the Jimmy Carter Administration, relied heavily on local and state governments to run it, and to open jobs for CETA-trained and subsidized workers.

In contrast, JTPA requires that business, not government, dominate the program, and many sharp business executives signed on because it reimburses up to 50% of the wages of workers hired through JTPA for up to six months. After that, the companies get up to a fourth of the workers’ wages for another 13 weeks.

Since many of the less-educated and most needy JTPA people don’t last long on their jobs, the program helps some employers get government-subsidized workers but does little to help the workers themselves.

A well-run, adequately financed JTPA could probably cut welfare costs even more than the welfare reform measure signed last week by President Reagan and provide meaningful help to those now virtually unemployable.

It needs more money. But it also needs other improvements, such as an end to the “creaming” tactic, extension of urgently needed remedial education, and close cooperation with other vocational training schools and with the regular public education system.

A revised program must also bring back the idea of subsidizing workers themselves while they are in training, as CETA did. Those who need help the most have to scrounge a few bucks at odd jobs just to eat, if they don’t turn to crime instead.

These people are not likely to opt for non-paying JTPA training spots that leave them little time to scratch out a bare living.

And the program has to be combined with others such as child-care and medical insurance that are rarely offered by employers who hire the JTPA workers.