Jobs Program Changes Target Youths, Poor

The Bush Administration on Thursday proposed rewriting the nation’s premier job-training program to target most spending on the unskilled poor and teen-agers and to hinge some federal money on improvements in state training and education efforts.

The program was co-authored by Vice President Dan Quayle when he was a member of the Senate.

The suggested amendments to the Job Training Partnership Act answer most criticisms of the program and are substantially in line with changes proposed by several congressional Democrats, prompting Republicans and Democrats alike to predict passage of a revised program this year.

“There is an urgent need for more than job training,” Labor Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole said in outlining the Administration proposal to the Senate subcommittee on employment and productivity. “Many desperately need basic skills training, literacy and remedial education.”

Similar Package

The chairman of the subcommittee, Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), has introduced a package of similar amendments and expressed confidence that minor differences in the approaches would be resolved.

JTPA is the nation’s largest training program, receiving $2.4 billion this year to serve an estimated 1.9 million people. President Bush has requested stable spending for next year.

Labor Department officials have said the proposed amendments would increase per-person training costs and therefore cause some modest reduction in service levels.

Current JTPA spending formulas send two-thirds of the money to areas based on their unemployment rates. The amendments would make the concentration of economically disadvantaged the overriding factor in spending decisions.

Also, youth training programs now scattered throughout sections of JTPA that also deal with adult training would be collected into a separate entity, which Dole said would allow improvements in efforts to curb high youth unemployment, particularly in inner cities.

The amendments also would establish grants for states that set goals for their training programs and submit to the Labor Department plans that demonstrate improved coordination between training and related programs.