FALLING DOWN ON THE JOB

The class is not called American history but “Intergroup Relations/Cultural Awareness Training.” There are seven students in this particular section – five blacks, two Latinos — whose average reading level is roughly eighth- grade. Today’s subject is the black experience in America.

“Our black ancestors helped to make America rich,” the teacher explains. ” We had a hand in the greatness of this country.” One black student shouts, ” Backbone!” A Latino student wonders, “Then why haven’t there been any black presidents?”

The teacher is ready. She’s probably faced this query before. “We’ve had a black president. His name is Abraham Lincoln. His name is Warren Harding. And there are others. Abraham Lincoln’s mother was a black slave who sat in the kitchen while Mr. Lincoln took his oath of office. I have a little book that lists them all, all the black presidents.”

She pauses, peering out at her class of high-school dropouts. Every one of them seems to be new to this story of Lincoln’s mother. The teacher continues, “There is no reason for your mouths to be open. They wouldn’t be if you understood the history behind the slavemaster’s relationship with the African- American female. No one wants you to know this, but it’s there. Just go to any African-American-university library. You just need to read. That’s where you get this information.”

The reaction is immediate. Intense. “I have been lied to my whole life by people I’ve trusted,” exclaims one enlightened student. “By your teachers!” another commiserates. “That’s right,” says a third: “His mom was in the kitchen.”

One could dismiss this incident as isolated, rare — unrepresentative of a curriculum that focuses on skills development. Or one could take a few minutes to flip through the course packet, which includes the Chinese zodiacal calendar, “Hispanic-American Word Search,” and the names and addresses of government anti-discrimination agencies. All this for the bargain-basement price of more than $ 1 billion, the federal appropriation for Job Corps in 1995.

One might have expected Job Corps to be a prime target of Republican budget hawks. Not so. Last February, the Associated Press asked Bob Dole to name one social program that works. His reply: “Job Corps.” According to House speaker Newt Gingrich, “As the American workforce adapts to an economy moving into the information age, Job Corps will continue to help prepare our young people for the challenges ahead.” “A model program,” says William Goodling, chairman of the House Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. “The only program that works . . . for hard-core unemployed youth,” says Sen. Orrin Hatch.

But a fair assessment demonstrates Job Corps’s utter failure. Last year, the General Accounting Office audited six different Job Corps sites with an average Labor Department ranking of 50 out of a possible 109. The findings are depressing: A third of Job Corps enrollees drop out within the first three months; only 36 percent complete vocational training; in 1993, only 14 percent of all “terminees” received jobs related to their training; and roughly 40 percent of funds at the six centers was spent on students who did not finish vocational training.

To top it all off, about 15 percent of job placements reported by the six centers were potentially invalid: Many employers stated that they had not hired students allegedly placed at their businesses; other employers could not even be found.

A substantial part of Job Corps’s training is provided by national contractors through sole-source Labor Department agreements with unions and buildingindustry associations. Most of these contracts are at least a decade old; several are over 25 years old. The department’s justification for sole- sourcing, rather than full and open competition, is that the contractors are able to place students nationwide. The problem? About 84 percent of union- provided training is in construction-related occupations, which account for only about 4 percent of the national job market.

“Government training programs are almost inevitably bureaucratic, arbitrary, and inflexible,” says Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute. “Almost all of them are oddly detached from the realities of the job market.”

But Job Corps is just one example, a single appropriation (though by far the largest) in the maze of voced and job-training programs sponsored by the federal government. All together, there are roughly 150 such programs, administered by 15 different departments and agencies. “Almost every department, from the Department of Agriculture to the Appalachian Regional Commission, seems to offer at least one training program,” Tanner explains. And they constitute one of the most expensive myths in the American economy. The cost to taxpayers? Twenty-five billion dollars and rising.

But like any good myth, the job-training story is inviting to believe. First, there is the literature. Very impressive. There are biographies of job- training success stories. There are graduation pictures. There are pictures of President Bush embracing Job Training Partnership Act Presidential Award winners. There is even a quotation from Goethe: “Treat people as though they were what they ought to be and you can help them become what they are capable of being.”

And there are the statistics. During a visit to the Advanced Career Training Center in Baltimore, I was told numerous times by director Ella Cain that her program places 85 percent of its students in trainingrelated jobs. She was manifestly proud. But if one includes early dropouts and official waivers (say, for pregnancy) and excludes students placed in makework government jobs, the placement rate is 16 percent.

Then, there is the visit. Just a few weeks ago, Sen. Rick Santorum, a staunch conservative, toured the Keystone Job Corps Center in Drums, Pennsylvania. “I am extremely impressed with the operations of the [center], ” he said. Which is no surprise. Job-training personnel are expert hosts. ” Much of our time here is spent with visitors, people who are investigating the program,” offers Don Doggendorf, vocations manager at the Potomac center.

There, I was given a tour by three senior administrators, including the director, Curtis Price. “Our mission is to motivate these students, to get them to understand what it means to be a productive member of society,” he said. “We’re giving these at-risk youths a second chance,” Doggendorf added as we walked. Everyone was upbeat. Everyone believed he was helping to secure a brighter future for down-and-out kids with no skills and troublesome attitudes.

The sincerity and professional dedication of these Job Corps officials should not be doubted. But virtually everyone who has analyzed job-training programs — that is, everyone outside the bureaucracy that administers them — has concluded that they fail dismally.

“Job-training programs, although well-intentioned, have not proven effective in raising the longterm hourly earnings of participants,” says Mark Wilson of the Heritage Foundation. “They do not achieve this primary goal — better-paying jobs — because there is little, if anything, the government can do to alter the effect of neglecting the first 12 years of school.” According to labor economist James Heckman of the University of Chicago, “The return is just very, very low.”

And some would say, altogether a myth.

Eric Cohen is a student at Williams College and the publisher of the Williams Free Press.