EMPLOYMENT : Summer Jobs Program for Teen-Agers Holds Promise, Peril : Critics of plan for low-income youths say it’s make-work. The White House says it works.

If Bill Clinton needs an ally in his effort to expand the government’s summer jobs program for disadvantaged youths, Barraka Baber is ready to step forward. A 12th-grader in Saginaw, Mich., he has spent the last three summers in federally funded jobs, working as a student aide and a park helper, and the experience has made a real difference in his life.

“The summer jobs helped me stay out of trouble, kept me on a straight line and helped me with my financial problems, too,” Baber said. “Sometimes I sit back and wonder where I would be without it. Would I be in jail? Would I have a child? Or would I be on my way to college like I am now?”

But Marvin Turner, a job training advocate who has run Saginaw’s summer jobs program for the last 25 years, is not so sure that all of the money Clinton is seeking will produce similar results. Kids like Baber, he said, tend to represent the exception rather than the rule. For some, Turner said, the programs undermine rather than reinforce good work habits.

“There’s going to be a lot of money wasted this summer,” Turner predicted. “God help the folks administering programs in large cities. I have a hard enough time in Saginaw.”

The observations of Baber and Turner reflect the promise and the peril facing the Administration as it attempts to significantly expand the summer jobs program. Clinton has asked Congress to spend $1 billion to put an additional 700,000 young Americans to work in cities across the country, increasing total participation to 1.3 million.

The funding is part of a $16.3-billion economic stimulus and job creation bill that has provoked a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Most of the GOP criticism is aimed at other provisions in the bill, and it appears likely Clinton will receive the summer job funds he is seeking.

The Administration cites two main benefits of the expansion: It will provide meaningful work and increase the odds of future success for the youths who participate. It also will provide a temporary economic boost to the affected communities because poor teen-agers generally spend most of what they earn.

Mindful that many Americans view such programs as little more than taxpayer-financed make-work, the Administration has specified that each participant must receive about 90 hours of academic enrichment over the summer in the classroom or on the job.

“We have designed this new program to learn from the mistakes of the past, and to build on its successes,” said Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich. “For the first time, the Department of Labor will work closely with the Department of Education on this project and invest substantial resources to provide educational enrichment. We plan on targeting nearly one-third of the additionally requested funding for this purpose.”

Critics of the Administration proposal remain unconvinced. Even Saginaw’s Turner acknowledges that for many participants, a federally funded summer job is not a positive experience: Some are just in it for the money and refuse to work. Some are assigned to projects where they are not needed or given jobs that are not justified. Some experience such lax supervision that they spend more time on break than on the job.

While a number of cities operate innovative programs like the one Baber has attended, others clearly fall short of the mark. And the dramatic expansion envisioned by Clinton could easily swamp even the best programs with thousands of new participants.

Across the country, summer job administrators say they fear that the short lead time will make it impossible to find enough good placement opportunities and to plan the quality educational components mandated by the Administration.

Colorado officials, for instance, expect their allocation to balloon from $7.4 million to $22.6 million if the stimulus package is passed in its current form.

“It remains to be seen if we can get as many job sites or as many kids as we need” to use the extra money, said Kathy Workman, programs manager at the governor’s job training office in Denver.

Opponents of the Clinton proposal recall the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a federal jobs program that was expanded significantly during the Jimmy Carter Administration. The CETA program was widely criticized for tolerating waste, fraud and nepotism.

Demetra Nightingale of the Urban Institute said that CETA was cleaned up by the late 1970s, and that most of the criticism did not involve summer jobs for youths. Nightingale noted that political opposition to government jobs programs is a hardy perennial. Newspaper articles in the 1930s described New Deal workers leaning on their rakes instead of working, and misusing government money.

Reich contends that in recent years, as a result of new legislation and stiffer regulation by the Labor Department, the number of make-work jobs funded by the federal government has been reduced to about 15%--”probably better than the rest of the economy.”

And if government-financed summer jobs fail to transform the lives of every participant, maybe expectations are a little too high, Reich said.

“Giving a poor kid a job and some tutoring over the summer doesn’t work miracles,” Reich said. “Calling the eight to 10 weeks a failure because it fails to alone improve a young person’s chance to lead a productive life is like condemning the school lunch program because it doesn’t end malnutrition. An effort like this must be judged by its modest goal--in this case, to help poor kids retain over the summer what they learned before, and to give them a modicum of structure, discipline and work experience.”

Good summer programs can do even more than that, said Laurie Levin, who designed an innovative summer program combining half-time work with half-time instruction in reading, math and responsible sexual behavior. Her government-financed Summer Training and Education Program is now used in 100 localities for 8,000 young people, and the Labor Department has asked Levin to expand to 75 more areas this summer.

“We need to invest and help these kids do better because ultimately it’s better for society,” Levin said.

Typically, disadvantaged young people lose ground academically during summer break, but experimental jobs programs that devote time to academics have produced measurable improvements in reading and math scores. Studies by Levin’s group, Public/Private Ventures, has found that on average, STEP participants improve their performance by half a grade level during the summer.

Turner, who is administering a STEP program in Saginaw, said the results are even more encouraging than such studies can show. He said he has seen a number of at-risk students start down paths toward college and careers as a result of their participation.

James Donald, 18, whose father works part time as a custodian, is one of those kids. Donald, who is planning to go to a local college next year and study to be a physical therapist, said the summer work-study program has given him the courage to avoid winding up like his cousin, who has been in and out of juvenile detention over the last few years because of drug dealing.

“I’ve learned how to make my own money and my own decisions,” he said.

Some young people say that more traditional summer jobs can also have a big impact on their lives.

Vanessa Cisneros, a Denver ninth-grader who has worked for three summers as a clerk in the county courthouse, said the experience has made her believe she can fulfill her dream of becoming a lawyer. “It has let me see things I never knew I had in me.”