Rep. Foxx demands accountability in Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act
Nearly 10 years after the WIOA went into effect, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx seeks to improve existing programs for job seekers.
Foxx also stressed "transparency" as a priority of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Representative Dr. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, Chairwoman of the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce, recently shared her thoughts on accountability nearly a decade after the passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA).
On Sep. 20, the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development held a hearing titled “Strengthening WIOA: Improving Outcomes for Jobseekers, Employers, and Taxpayers.”
Signed into law in July 2014, WIOA “requires states to strategically align their core workforce development programs to coordinate the needs of both job seekers and employers through combined four-year state plans,” the Department of Labor summarizes.
Representative Burgess Owens (R-UT), the chairman of the hearing, began with opening remarks about the struggles that Americans face nearly 10 years after the passage of WIOA. He stated that “the lingering problems of unemployment and skilled worker shortages persist.”
“To distract from this harsh reality, some will tell you to focus on the unemployment rate,” Owens continued. “The real story is that too many young, discouraged men and women have been pushed out and are now sitting on the sidelines of our economy.”
Dr. Foxx shared Owens’ sentiment regarding the imperfections of the act, as well as adding her own insight. “Holding programs accountable for their performance is a top priority of mine, and it’s frustrating that almost a decade after WIOA is enacted the Departments of Labor and Education still have not fully implemented the accountability provisions,” she said.
Foxx then took to questioning the witnesses of the panel.
Scott B. Sanders, President and CEO of the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA), told Foxx that he agreed “wholeheartedly” that already-collected data should be used to update means of measuring successes of programs.
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“I feel as if it is a black box when it comes to the way that the calculations are made. The states don’t have any insight or transparency as to how the numbers are calculated,” he continued.
“Transparency is the other thing we’re looking for in everything that we do in this committee,” Foxx continued. She then turned to question Rya Conrad-Bradshaw, Vice President of Corporate Markets at the Cengage Group, about the effectiveness of states working together to “streamline the application process for high quality programs.”
“The most important outcomes are those that matter to the learner,” Conrad-Bradshaw answered. “Congress should encourage states to work together to streamline the process to get these quality providers as many WIOA participants as possible.”
“I really appreciate the specific recommendations that we’ve gotten from members of the panel today, and we are definitely going to learn and improve: learn from what has not worked, and improve in every way that we possibly can,” Foxx concluded.
Campus Reform reached out to Foxx, Owens, and the witnesses of the panel for comment and will update this story accordingly.
