Charting a Path to Increased Federal Accountability Through WIOA Reauthorization

By Dr. Gabrielle Smith Finnie and Dr. Kayla C. Elliott 

Our nation’s federal accountability laws for workforce training providers and higher education institutions fail to create accountability for Black workers’ and learners’ access to good jobs and economic mobility. Accountability laws enhance transparency, measure how well training providers and higher education institutions provide access and produce outcomes, and provide support or enact sanctions when programmatic outcomes are not a good investment of public funding¹. Current congressional momentum towards reauthorizing the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) offers a path to collect the high-quality data necessary to improve accountability. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the A Stronger Workforce for America Act (H.R. 6655 in the 118th Congress) in April 2024² and the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP Committee) recently circulated a discussion draft of proposed amendments to seal the reauthorization. With adequate funding and implementation, WIOA could make great strides toward ensuring training providers and higher education institutions are held accountable for preparing Black workers and learners for jobs that are high-skill, high-wage, and in-demand.

Accountability in WIOA 

Enacted into law in 2014, WIOA³ is a prominent source of workforce development funding that aims to help individuals with barriers to employment gain skills that lead to good jobs and economic mobility.⁴ Economic mobility⁵ is an individual’s ability to improve their economic status over time and is commonly measured by income and wealth generation.⁶ While Black workers are disproportionately represented among WIOA participants, they also have the lowest earnings of all racial groups participating in federal workforce training services.⁷

Unfortunately, WIOA provides little accountability for ensuring equitable outcomes across race. Currently, WIOA’s performance accountability system relies on six primary indicators of performance including employment rates, earnings, credential completion, and measurable skills gains. Each state⁸ creates state-adjusted goals for their respective levels of performance on each primary indicator. Training providers and states report program outcomes for each primary indicator and program outcomes in comparison to the state-adjusted goals. However, outcomes are not disaggregated by race at the program level, so stakeholders cannot assess how individual programs are supporting Black workers and learners.

The U.S. Senate HELP Committee proposed changes outlined below are a step toward the high-quality data and systems necessary to measure and address inequities for Black workers and learners in WIOA programs and higher education institutions.

Senate’s Proposed Amendments⁹

As the workforce development landscape changes, demand to improve accountability and data infrastructure has also increased. A Stronger Workforce for America Act and the U.S. Senate HELP Committee’s discussion draft take incremental steps in the right direction, but WIOA needs more adjustments to achieve system-wide, race-forward accountability that leads to quality training and good jobs for Black workers and learners.

Reimagining the Eligible Training Provider List

WIOA requires states to publish an Eligible Training Provider List (ETPL) of training providers approved to offer programs and receive federal funding. The ETPL is widely disseminated and used to increase awareness about training programs offered in each state, helping workers and learners make data-driven decisions about their future.¹⁰

Senate Discussion Draft: 

The discussion draft proposed dividing the Eligible Provider List into two separate lists: the Standard Provider List (SPL) and the Workforce Innovation Leaders List (WIL). Percentage thresholds for eligibility requirements, like credential attainment rates, job placement rates, and median earnings after program completion, would determine if programs will be listed on the SPL or the WIL. The discussion draft also proposed new sanctions for programs that fail to meet SPL requirements. These sanctions include revoking standard eligibility for programs that fail to meet levels of performance for a given year and determining the program ineligible for at least three years for a repeated failure. To support programs that fail to meet 80 percent of the state-level adjusted performance for any program year, the Senate proposed the U.S. Secretaries of Labor and Education provide technical assistance to identify and develop strategies to improve performance. The Senate also proposed a website that would allow prospective participants to compare programs based on the types of credentials offered, credential portability, and participants’ credential completion rates.

Recommendations: 

WIOA should require all training providers on the SPL and WIL to meet minimum levels of performance for each racial group and subpopulation. Including these accountability measures could help hold WIOA training providers and higher education institutions responsible for disproportionate economic outcomes for Black workers and learners. All WIOA training providers and higher education institutions on the SPL and WIL should be held accountable for preparing Black workers and learners for jobs that are high-skill, high-wage, and in-demand. Additionally, the WIL should only include training providers and higher education institutions who prepare Black workers and learners for roles that offer components of job quality such as fair scheduling policies, access to benefits, and paid leave.

Disaggregated Data 

Currently, WIOA requires training providers and higher education institutions to report the race of learners who are enrolled in each program. However, WIOA does not require programs to report participants’ outcomes by race.

Senate Discussion Draft:

The U.S. House of Representatives’ A Stronger Workforce for America Act included an amendment requiring performance data in eligible training provider performance reports be disaggregated by subpopulation, race, ethnicity, sex, and age, but the Senate discussion draft did not include disaggregated outcomes at the program level. Without disaggregated program outcome data, programs cannot adequately examine how they are serving Black workers and learners.

Recommendations:

WIOA must direct higher education institutions and training providers to disaggregate all collected data by race, ethnicity, and subpopulation. Disaggregated data would help stakeholders build a race-forward data system and a more equitable workforce system that effectively serves Black workers and learners. The Senate should adopt this change in their bill and work with the House to ensure it becomes law during conference after both bills have passed. A comprehensive, race-forward data system can enable states and the U.S. Department of Labor to determine which WIOA programs are fostering a more equitable workforce, and which need to improve their outcomes for Black workers and learners. A race-forward data system could empower the U.S. Department of Labor and state and local boards to monitor and reduce racial and ethnic disparities across occupations, the types of credentials received, and earnings.

Improving Accountability Metrics

WIOA’s performance accountability system currently measures each state’s performance on six primary indicators including participants’ employment rates during the second and fourth quarters after their exit, median earnings in the second quarter after their exit, credential completion, measurable skills gains, and effectiveness in serving employers.

Senate Discussion Draft:

Senate discussion draft proposals to improve the performance accountability system include: Adding median earnings for program completers in comparison to high school graduate median earnings; providing technical assistance to programs that fail to meet performance metrics; providing new guidelines to develop, evaluate, and submit levels of performance; and examining performance templates and reporting processes. Measuring WIOA participants’ median earnings against high school graduates’ median earnings data will help policymakers, workers, learners, and researchers understand the relationship between credential completion and economic mobility for Black workers and learners. The discussion draft also proposed standardizing report templates, which would help improve data availability and transferability across all states. Uniform state data could be the first step to nationwide analyses of Black WIOA participants’ access and outcomes.

Recommendations:

WIOA should holistically evaluate program effectiveness and economic mobility by adopting metrics which are aligned with current and future workforce needs. The current metrics such as median earnings, completion, retention, and matriculation rates, and employment oversimplify the relationship between program effectiveness, employment, income, and economic mobility for Black workers and learners. WIOA’s performance accountability system must include worker-centered metrics such as access to programs, participant satisfaction, job readiness, job quality, and longitudinal employment sustainability for any marginalized groups of WIOA participants.

While WIOA aims to target individuals with barriers to employment, neither the current law nor the discussion draft requires training providers and higher education institutions to measure how well they prepare workers and learners to navigate and overcome these barriers. Congress must instruct the Department of Labor to identify metrics to evaluate job quality, occupational segregation, and racial discrimination in hiring. WIOA should provide funding and guidance to build programs’ capacity to understand and combat the role of racism in labor markets to better support Black workers and learners who experience discrimination. Finally, each state’s WIOA plan should include equity goals which center workers’ perspectives.

Investing in Data Systems

Senate Discussion Draft: 

To address the need for integrated and connected data systems, the Senate proposed codifying the Workforce Data Quality Initiative grant program which would provide new funding to create, strengthen, or implement statewide longitudinal data systems that integrate education and workforce development data with labor market outcomes. The grant program could build states’ capacity to produce evidence for decision-making, meet performance reporting requirements, and encourage collaboration among states to advance data systems. The proposed amendments also require the nationwide system of American Job Centers to use real-time data to identify trends in skills and occupations. This information could help stakeholders determine and develop relevant and high-wage job training programs.

Recommendations: 

WIOA must increase funding for evaluation and improving data systems. Currently, WIOA does not allocate enough funding to improve data collection or develop data systems.¹¹ Congress should adequately fund the Workforce Data Quality Initiative to cover all states. In addition to investing in data system improvement, Congress should allocate more funding to help training providers learn to examine program outcomes and develop strategies to improve reporting, analysis, and assessment of performance accountability metrics. Improving data systems contributes to conducting the evaluations needed to advocate for equitable outcomes.

Conclusion  

Data plays a pivotal role in higher education accountability. WIOA reauthorization presents an opportunity to strengthen the performance accountability system and produce high-quality data. High quality data is vital to hold training providers and higher education institutions accountable to improve our nation’s workforce system and the economic outcomes of Black workers and learners. Adopting these recommendations would help ensure stakeholders have the information necessary to craft workforce development programs that support Black workers and learners and lead to good jobs and economic mobility.

The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

¹ Kayla C. Elliott and Tiffany Jones, Creating Accountability for College Access and Success: Recommendations for the Higher Education Act and Beyond (The Education Trust, 2019).

² House Passes Transformative Bill to Update Federal Workforce Development Programs, (Committee on Education and The Workforce, 2024).

³ Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, Pub. L. No. 113-128 (2014).

⁴ https://workforce.urban.org/node/66.html

⁵ https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/topics/economic-mobility

⁶ Economic Mobility Memo 1: Definitions and Trends (Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2020).

⁷ Alex Camardelle, Principles to Support Black Workers in the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2021).

⁸ “State” refers to all 50 states and U.S. territories.

⁹ Unpublished Senate bill draft.

¹⁰ Benjamin Collins, The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act and the One-Stop Delivery System (Congressional Research Service, 2022).

¹¹ Veronica Goodman, Recommendations for Reauthorizing the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (Center for American Progress, 2024).