Federal Policy

Links of note 9/14/2016

/ The Old Crank

U.S. Household Income Grew 5.2 Percent in 2015, Breaking Pattern of Stagnation [New York Times]
White House trumpeting these three takeaways: (1) median household income in 2015 up 5.2 percent from the previous year — the largest single-year increase since record-keeping began in 1967; (2) about three and a half million people moved out of poverty since last year—the largest one-year drop in poverty since 1968; and (3) the uninsured rate is the lowest since they began keeping records. The Times article emphasizes those points, but notes that median household income is still 1.6 percent lower than in 2007, adjusting for inflation, and 2.4 percent lower than the peak reached during the late 1990s. The Times also notes that the income gains “came mostly from job growth rather than wage growth. More people are working, but many of them are still struggling to maintain their standard of living.”

Related articles:

Goldman Sachs Isn’t That Worried About Technology Destroying Your Job [Bloomberg]
“[W]orkers are already responding to the new employment landscape by taking on “adaptive occupations” that are better insulated from the rise of the machines. Such occupations include nurses and web developers but can also extend to more traditional vocations such as carpenters, plumbers, and tailors.”

New Guidance on WIOA Performance Reporting Released by DOL and OCTAE

/ The Old Crank

The U.S. departments of Labor and Education have just issued joint guidance on meeting the performance reporting and evaluation requirements (sections 116 and 122) of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA).  The Joint Guidance on Data Matching to Facilitate WIOA Performance Reporting and Evaluation, according to these agencies, “provides states with information about applicable requirements for, and procedures and options for, matching confidential unemployment compensation information from wage records with personal information from vocational rehabilitation records, and personally identifiable information from education records, and for protecting the confidentiality of information contained in such records.”

I haven’t done anything more than skim the document, but in doing so I spotted some interesting clarification concerning situations in which FERPA may not apply for some adult education programming funded through WIOA, and I’m not really sure what to make of it. I’ve never seen exceptions carved out before, but I may just not have been aware of them. If anyone has any insights on this, I’d love to hear from you.

Final WIOA Rules Published in the Federal Register

/ The Old Crank

Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) provides the legislative authority for all federally funded adult education programs. Unless you are deeply involved in implementing WIOA at the state level, or are responsible for WIOA-funded programming or technical assistance, the pile of regulations that have been developed for WIOA are likely of limited interest, but I thought it was worth noting that the U.S. departments of Education and Labor have announced today the publication in the Federal Register of the final version of those rules:

All of the final rules, along with several guidance documents, are available at the www.ed.gov/AEFLA.

Links of Note 8/18/16

/ The Old Crank

Launching a new semi-regular feature today: occasional posts that simply compile links to announcements, new research and other news about adult education or tangentially related topics (probably more of the latter), with little to no commentary from me to get in your way. Just click and go. There are those who will describe these kinds of posts as “curated links.” I’m not one of them, but if you are, then you have the basic idea.

I welcome your suggestions.

In Many Courtrooms, Bad Interpreters Can Mean Justice Denied [Pew/Stateline]
“Because there are so many U.S. residents — roughly 25.6 million — who have limited proficiency in English, the credibility of the nation’s justice system relies on competent interpreters.” I witnessed this problem firsthand in Boston courts 25 20 years ago; it seemed to me that non-English speakers were often targeted for minor traffic violations. Many were frankly terrified and the lack of translation services certainly didn’t help.

DACA at Four: Participation in the Deferred Action Program and Impacts on Recipients [MPI]

  • “Examining DACA application rates against the MPI population estimates suggests that 63 percent of the immediately eligible population had applied as of March 2016; the rate fell to 48 percent when including the share that did not appear to meet the educational criteria but may have enrolled in a qualifying adult education population.”
  • “[T]he vast majority eligible to renew the two-year DACA grant have done so—93 percent MPI estimates.”

Lessons From a Year Teaching Digital Literacy [Pacific Standard]

Veteran Hillary Clinton Education Adviser Named to Candidate’s Transition Team [Politics K-12 – Education Week]

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton Say They’ll Ease the Burden of Child-Care Costs [Real Time Economics – WSJ]
Summary of the two major party candidates’ proposals.

Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform [VERA]
“Women in jail are the fastest growing correctional population in the country—increasing 14-fold between 1970 and 2014. Yet there is surprisingly little research on why so many more women wind up in jail today. This report examines what research does exist on women in jail in order to begin to reframe the conversation to include them.”

Two Lingering Suspicions About Economic Statistics [Bloomberg View]
Helpful primer (for me, anyway) on data smoothing (such as the seasonal adjustments made by the BLS to unemployment data) and “Pollyanna creep,” defined here as the likelihood that changes in economic indicator measures/calculations that make the economy look better are more likely to be implemented than changes that do not, resulting in a cumulative effect that is increasingly removed from reality. “[C]hanges made in the calculation of inflation over the past quarter-century… have come under the most fire.”