Public Policy Commons^™

What Predicts Success In Jtpa?: Test Of A Three-Component Model, Carolyn Ball

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), an education and training program to assist the economically disadvantaged, is one of sixty or more programs Congress is considering consolidating. This program had great success in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but its value and support have been declining. This author examines whether JTPA should continue through a test of three employment theories: discrimination, signaling, and human investment using data from Maine's JTPA program. Findings indicate that while the program can reduce discriminatory barriers and negative signals such as welfare status, it does not consistently succeed as a training investment. Enrollment in …

Industrial Policy: Federal, State, And Local Response, Zenia Kotval

New England Journal of Public Policy

During the past twenty years, many economists and policymakers have strongly advocated that the United States formulate a national industrial policy to improve the competitiveness of American firms in the global marketplace. These proposals call for both direct and indirect assistance to specific industrial sectors. Some would contend that U.S. industrial policies are being challenged by newer growth theories that shift the focus from the nation as the basic unit of industrial geography to regions and municipalities. There is little argument about the need for industrial policies that tie national, state, and local initiatives together. However, confusion and disagreement exist …

The Professional Decline Of Physicians In The Era Of Managed Care, Aimee E. Marlow

New England Journal of Public Policy

Physicians have long enjoyed prestige, power, and autonomy, but the rise of managed care organizations has drastically changed their status. Many doctors are in thrall to the financial well-being of the corporations that employ them, their knowledge and expertise controlled and manipulated in the interest of profit maximization. This article investigates the professional decline of physicians, citing the use of gag clauses, incentives to withhold care, and the breakdown of their authority. In an effort to regain some measure of control, physicians have taken their concerns to the public, supporting state and federal legislation that attempts to curb questionable managed …

Institutional Design And Regulatory Performance: Rethinking State Certificate Of Need Programs, Robert Hackey, Peter Fuller

New England Journal of Public Policy

The success of state efforts to control rising health care costs depends on the incentives contained in the legislative design of regulatory policies and in the administrative capacity and autonomy of state agencies. States have regulated the construction and expansion of health care facilities and services for more than two decades through "certificate of need" (CON) programs designed to limit the diffusion of expensive new medical technologies and to avoid the duplication of health care facilities. Although the cost-control record of state certificate of need programs has been widely criticized, Rhode Island's experience with a reformed CON process from 1985 …

Citizen Participation And Strategic Planning For An Urban Enterprise Community, Michael Leo Owens

New England Journal of Public Policy

Public policies rarely have single objectives. For the federal Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities initiative, bettering the socioeconomic opportunity structure among a collection of the nation's low-income areas is only one of its goals. Another initiative objective is to foster the representation of common citizens, especially residents, in the planning and implementation of strategies and programs designed to redevelop these low-income areas. Strategic community planning was the method chosen by the initiative's designers to achieve both objectives. This article, which makes use of the case study approach, addresses strategic community planning as an instrument of advancing citizen representation in urban …

Is Boston Becoming A Branch-Plant Town?, Lawrence Franko

New England Journal of Public Policy

A decade ago, Boston appeared to be emerging as a headquarters city for a large number of world-class enterprises. Notwithstanding the recovery from the early-1990s recession, and a thriving entrepreneurial economy of business acorns, Boston today seems on its way to becoming largely a branch-plant town. None of the 1980s Massachusetts Miracle saplings or the more recent acorns have grown into mighty corporate oaks headquartered here. This article discusses the risks of having our current prosperity increasingly based on branch plants acquired or established by firms centered elsewhere. Its concern is based on the proposition that having big-business corporate headquarters …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

Readers of this journal will have noticed an increasing emphasis on the impacts of globalization in recent issues. Not only has it become the mantra of the last years of the dying millennium, it is being presented as an elixir of unbounded possibilities, a process that will, with the help of some undefined alchemy, make the twenty-first century fulfill the promises and potential that somehow got lost or marginalized in the tumultuous upheavals of the twentieth. Yet its implications are largely unknown, the pace and speed of change are laboratory equations, and the unintended consequences of our hubris in our …

Governing Massachusetts Public Schools: Assessing The 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act, John Portz

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 created a number of important changes in public education. In the area of local governance, the act was guided by a corporate model in which authority and responsibilities were reallocated among school committees, superintendents, principals, and newly created school councils. School committees in particular assumed a policymaking role, and superintendents became the chief executive officers of their school districts. This article, based on responses to a mail survey, is an early assessment of the act's governance changes. Superintendents are most satisfied with their role, especially their authority over principals and teachers. School committee …

From Welfare To What?: The Limitations Of Low-Income Work, Lande Ajose

New England Journal of Public Policy

The premise of the welfare law enacted by Congress is that people living in poverty could vastly improve their economic status if only they were employed. The author argues that economic security for welfare recipients will not be realized simply by increasing the labor-force attachment. Home health aides comprise an occupation that could absorb many of the large pool of workers expected to join the labor market because demand for their services is high and barriers to entry are low. However, as this survey shows, the home health field offers limited promise to welfare recipients because, significantly for women rolling …

Nursing: A New Day, A New Way, Lin Zhan, Jane Cloutterback

New England Journal of Public Policy

The U.S. health care environment is changing rapidly. Its structure, financing, and delivery are being reconfigured toward an integrated system based on managed care. Increasingly, national interest in health promotion and disease prevention is moving care away from a disease-oriented, institutionally based model to a population-focused, wellness-oriented, and community-based system. Health care consumers are diversifying in age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The approach emerging from these changes and others requires nursing to rethink, redesign, and retool its workforce to meet new challenges. This article analyzes nursing education, practice, and operations. The authors discuss the dilemmas and complexity of developing an …

Foreword, Andrés Torres, James Green

New England Journal of Public Policy

Many important debates about public policy at the national level and in states like Massachusetts have centered on health care and human services, including welfare and the care of children, the abused, the disabled, the elderly, and those suffering from mental and physical illness. In this issue scholars and advocates examine a range of problems in the health care and human service fields from a perspective often lacking in the public policy discussion — that of the workforce and of the labor organizations that represent the workforce.

Improving Workforce Conditions In Private Human Service Agencies: A Partnership Between A Union And Human Service Providers, James Green

New England Journal of Public Policy

In 1995 the Service Employees International Union Local 509 and four Massachusetts human service providers signed an unusual agreement to forge a partnership in which employers would remain neutral while the union approached its workers with an offer to advocate in the state legislature for greater funding for private human service employees and to promote cooperative relations with their employers. This study examines the context of the agreement and the pressures on public employee unions and small human service providers whose workforce copes with low wages, high turnover, meager benefits, and poor public image as well as the give-and-take between …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

This special issue of the journal, "Workforce Development: Health Care and Human Services," focuses on a range of problems in the health care and human service fields from a perspective that is, to say the least, frequently neglected in public policy discussion — the perspective of their workforces and the labor organizations that represent them. In many respects, the questions the articles address are a microcosm of the problems that will daunt us in the future, daunt us even more because, in a world of limited choices, denial has a special utility: by allowing us to evoke the unpalatable, it …

The Potential Impact Of Workforce Development Legislation On Cbos, Edwin Meléndez

New England Journal of Public Policy

The proposed congressional legislation revamping the employment and training system will result in budget cuts, program consolidation, and block grants for the states. These changes are potentially harmful to community-based organizations (CBOs) because (J ) they eliminate categorical funding that traditionally has required contracting with organizations which specialize in servicing the disadvantaged, and (2) they introduce stricter performance standards that may be unattainable for many small-scale operations. However, the adoption of best practices in serving non-English-speaking and poor populations, increasing connections to emerging government intermediaries in labor markets, and establishing greater linkages to postsecondary educational institutions may offer CBOs the …

The Trouble With Connecticut, Kenneth J. Long

New England Journal of Public Policy

The problems of Connecticut, this author believes, parallel those of Nigeria, which are described by Chinua Achebe in The Trouble with Nigeria. Both places may be considered dirty, callous, ostentatious, and dishonest. The causes of these and other defects are also similar: unusually large disparities in living standards, high cost of living, localism, and lack of leadership. In Connecticut, gross inequities in taxation seem to intermingle with and reinforce all these roots of unpleasantness.

The Repeal Of Rent Control In Cambridge, Robert P. Moncreiff

New England Journal of Public Policy

In the November 8, 1994, state election, Massachusetts voters approved a question placed on the ballot by initiative petition passing a law that effectively outlawed rent control throughout the commonwealth. This law had its most dramatic effect in Cambridge, where a stringent rent control system had been in effect since 1970. The success of the petition was realized primarily through the grassroots efforts of a coalition of small-property owners in Cambridge who felt aggrieved by the city's rent control system. The use of a statewide vote on an initiative petition to enact a law with predominantly local effect created for …

Umass Chooses A Political Executive: The Politics Of A Presidential Search, Richard A. Hogarty

New England Journal of Public Policy

Horace Mann, the father of American public education, had served as president of the Massachusetts Senate prior to becoming the state's first secretary of education. Since then, as reformers succeeded in removing politics from the sacred groves of academe, appointing a politician to head the state's educational system fell into disfavor. Relatively recently, however, there have been two abortive attempts by politicians to reach the executive pinnacle of public higher education. Both James Collins, in 1986, and David Bartley, in 1991, were defeated in the quest to achieve this goal. Historical understanding of these battles is necessary to comprehend what …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

In a paraphrase of Yogi Berra's immortal words, we came to a fork in the road and we took it. Which is all in the way of introducing this issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy. The articles featured here, while spanning a very broad spectrum of public policy, have several unifying themes. They are all case studies in one way or another of the incompetence that is an essential feature of the public policy process in a democratic culture, of the constraints in the way of making change, no matter how obviously desirable or in the …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

This issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy is devoted to further consideration of the public policy implications of specific topics that are of concern to the Latino community and in need of urgent redress. This must be a priority if the United States is not to find itself hopelessly mired in the ramifications, blithely ignored at the end of the twentieth century, of the complexities the changing ethnic composition of the country will create in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

Understanding Latino Ethnic Identity Development: A Review Of Relevant Issues, Azara Rivera-Santiago

New England Journal of Public Policy

One of the most promising areas in cross-cultural psychology is the development of identity among various ethnic groups in the United States. This article has a twofold purpose. First, it offers the concept of ethnic identity as defined and studied within the social sciences — sociology, anthropology, and psychology — including a review of some of the recent work on ethnic identity development proposed by leading investigators in the field of psychology. The author discusses their generalizability across ethnic groups. Second, it presents a number of dimensions considered important in conceptualizing and studying Hispanic ethnic identity development. These include acculturation, …

Foreword, Edwin Meléndez

New England Journal of Public Policy

This is the first of two parts of "Latinos in a Changing Society"; Part II is scheduled for Fall/Winter 1995 publication. The following articles provide new insights into several key areas of concern: immigration, employment and income, and political participation. Part II articles will address education, health, and identity and ethnicity.

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

These two issues of the Journal focus exclusively on the Latino community in the United States, which is the fastest-growing minority in the country. It is a development that poses profound questions regarding the course this country will take into the twenty-first century and the way in which it will define itself. It will sever the almost metaphysical distinctions between the melting pot and multiculturalism, opposites on a philosophical curve that are as much self-created as self-evident.

Three areas of Latino experience are examined in this volume — the impact of immigration policies, employment and income opportunities, and the degree …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

With a great deal of pride, the New England Journal of Public Policy is pleased to announce a new partnership. Beginning with this issue, the journal becomes a joint publication of the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, University of Massachusetts Boston, and the Center for Policy Analysis, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Both bring to the joint venture special skills that complement each other; both are committed to holding the quality of the publication to the same rigorous standards that intellectual integrity demands, and both are committed to maintaining the degree of accessibility that has been a hallmark of …

Access To Capital And Technical Assistance, Richard J. Ward

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article summarizes and analyzes the views of select leaders in business, labor, banking, the government, and academia with regard to the constraints, obstacles, and recommendations to achieve economic growth in Massachusetts. The role of the state government in addressing these issues receives special attention. Access to capital and technical assistance had been regarded by many as the key constraint, particularly during the recession of the early 1990s. The author analyzes inconvenient government systems, bottlenecks, and bureaucracy as throttling the flow of capital to small-business entrepreneurs. The analysis concludes, however, that unless the state cum federal government finds ways to …

The Impact Of School Spending On Student Achievement: Results Of Meap Statewide Tests, Robert D. Gaudet

New England Journal of Public Policy

Examining school spending and student achievement as measured by the Massachusetts Educational Assessment Program tests on a community-by-community basis indicates that high spending in and of itself does not ensure achievement. While every community must have adequate funding to deliver an acceptable level of education services, there is a wide variation in achievement in similar communities with similar spending. The data suggest that other factors influence outcomes at least as much as spending.

Parent Involvement In Urban Schools: The View From The Front Of The Classroom, Frances Gamer, Kathleen Mccarthy Mastaby

New England Journal of Public Policy

American educational reform movements focus on efforts to restructure our schools to include all interested parties, especially parents, in the decision-making process. Nowhere is involvement more crucial than in America's inner-city urban neighborhoods. As parents are given a greater voice in their child's school, educators must join them as collaborators. This article identifies elements that impeded parental involvement and recognizes positive and encouraging techniques leading toward successful family-school-community partnerships. An alliance between groups too long seen as opponents rather than proponents must be established.

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

In this special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy, we explore some of the more perennial but nonetheless substantive issues involved in the ongoing debate about the shape educational reform should take from different points of view, and seek that most sought-after and elusive alchemist, common ground.

Better High Schools: What Would Create Them?, Theodore R. Sizer

New England Journal of Public Policy

The American desire to improve education has set off a flurry of activity to reform schools. In such a climate of restructuring, Sizer explores what better secondary schools might "look like" if indeed they existed. His consideration of the improved high school is based on five particular conditions — all of which support teachers and students in their engagement with the serious stuff of learning and all of which must exist in one form or another for schools to be effective. The conditions are cast as questions. Sizer locates the responsibility for school reform broadly, from the heart of a …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

On April 23, 1993, the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs celebrated its tenth anniversary. To mark the occasion, the Institute established the John Joseph Moakley Award for Distinguished Public Service, which will be awarded annually to a man or woman whose contribution to the public good merits our most grateful acknowledgment. The first recipient of the award was Congressman John Joseph Moakley, Chairman of the House Rules Committee, one of the most powerful and influential positions in Congress.

Among those who paid tribute to Congressman Moakley were Michael E. Haynes, Minister, Twelfth Baptist Church, Boston; Raymond G. Torto, …

State Strategy For Developing Base Industries: A Massachusetts Case Study, Chris Tilly

New England Journal of Public Policy

In developing strategies for economic development, state governments must target base industries that bring income into the state and drive the rest of the economy. This article presents a case study of industry analysis and development strategy for Massachusetts, focusing on the state's base industries. Particular attention is paid to the role of industry clusters — groups of industries linked through customer, supplier, or other relationships, and typically concentrated geographically as well. After assessing strengths and weaknesses of the state's economy, the author concludes that despite the current severe recession, the state possesses the basis for renewed growth. Policy implications …