Universal Single Provider Workcare, The Educational Counterpart Of Obamacare
By CAMILLE GIGLIO
August 27, 2009 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Every year in California over 1,000 bills are submitted to the state legislature on a wide variety of subjects. It can be likened to a 1,000 piece puzzle, no one piece of which makes sense alone. In this report we will show you the components of what I call the Workcare Legislative Puzzle and how they fit together to form a government centered, worker controlled picture very similar in organizing principle to the president's healthcare proposal.
To begin sorting out the puzzle pieces one must start with Congress.
During the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton presidencies one heard much about AmeriCorps, a national program of encouraging young and old citizens to volunteer to serve their communities. President Clinton promised $4,725.00 toward college fees if a student upon graduation would spend one year in volunteer service to the country.
This program was based on a 1,300 page piece of legislation entitled The National Community Service Act of 1990 which established a Corporation for National Service developed as a private entity by Bill Clinton.
In April while we were all busy figuring out Obama's agenda and what his health care plan meant, President Obama signed a 1,463 page re-authorization of the AmeriCorps bill, HR 1388 sponsored by Carolyn McCarthy [D-NY] which was entitled the Edward M. Kennedy SERVE America Act of 2009 which also revitalized a 1973 Domestic Volunteer Service Act, reauthorizing appropriations to the year 2014.
One of the bill's subtitles is Youthbuild. Youthbuild started out as a good idea for a group of Harlem youths who were encouraged to spend their summer repairing rundown neighborhood housing. Soon the idea spread to other communities, federal legislation and funding [$40 million] were developed and now it is a nationwide multi-million dollar program housed in the Department of Labor with about 221 cities and counties participating, including most of the more populated areas of California.
This program started out under the direction of the Department of Housing and Urban Development - HUD, and was intended to provide jobs for teenagers refurbishing affordable housing units. With the infusion of millions of dollars and federal promotion it has grown and expanded to other areas of community work including health care, career counseling, mental health counseling and community organizing skills for the student building trades union's apprentices. It also calls for formal partnering between schools, unions and non-profit community agencies.
Along with this SERVE America Act we have the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. It functions "To consolidate, coordinate, and improve employment, training, literacy, and vocational rehabilitation programs in the United States, and for other purposes."
It's those "other purposes" that you have to watch out for.
The website for the Work For America program has this as its mission statement:
"The Workforce Investment Act [WIA] provides increased flexibility for state and local officials to establish broad-based labor market systems using federal job training funds for adults, dislocated workers and youth. With this increased flexibility comes challenges and opportunities for organized labor. While the act did not "block grant" all training programs [as some state advocates had hoped], the law mandates coordination among a range of federal job training programs, including the Employment Service, adult education and literacy programs, welfare-to-work, vocational education and vocational rehabilitation. WIA's goal is to provide workforce development services to employers and workers through a universally accessible, information-driven, one-stop career center system." http://www.workingforamerica.org/documents/workforce.htm
None of these federal level programs can succeed without the cooperation of the states.
States have the option of authorizing federal programs to come into the state. Once in the state a program may either advance quickly with cities and counties deciding to join in or not. California has embraced the twin programs of volunteer community service and pre-planned and controlled workforce development as one would a wealthy member of the family.
Workforce Development Boards, and Youthbuild groups filled with non-elected stakeholders, i.e. unions, corporations, educators, community agencies and non-profit community organizer groups have been operating in California for two years funded by $7 million federal dollars. Newspapers have been filled with glowing reports of the wonderful things teens are accomplishing working or volunteering side-by-side with these groups both during the summertime and during the school year.
As noted previously on these pages [see, http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=giglio8.12.09%2Ehtm] Governor Schwarzenegger has recently signed AB 271 Youthbuild authored by Assemblyman Jose Solorio. This bill gives recognition after the fact to the existence of the Youthbuild program.
Of the 50 plus companion bills to this program, most are sitting in the Appropriations Committee suspense file due to a lack of endorsers or funding or both - one good thing coming out of the state's financial downturn. Some of these bills are sitting on the Governor's desk waiting for his signature. All of these latter bills have passed both houses of the state legislature, endorsed unanimously regardless of party affiliation.
Aides to Republican legislators and bill analysts in the Republican Caucus tell us that the Republican legislators have enthusiastically accepted the idea of Youthbuild and Workforce planning being directed by specially designated public/private partnering groups.
A spokesperson in Concord office of Assemblyman Tom Torlakson told us that his bill, AB 346, Joint-use School Facilities, is just one small piece of a whole package. His bill authorizes separate buildings for joint-use projects to be established on campuses. When asked what these joint-use projects might be, she said that the legislation was simply concerned with setting up the buildings, what the school does inside the buildings is someone else's concern.
Not surprisingly, Torlakson's goal is to become state school superintendent.
When further asked if these might be used to establish one stop community health centers the answer was maybe. When asked if these maybe health centers would be staffed with medical doctors and nurses we were told "if the school wants that."
So, it could be health centers, it could be one-stop career counseling centers for anyone, including middle and high school students plus any unemployed person in the community such as ex-cons returned to the community by early prison release programs - the mandate is apparently open-ended. AB 857, Workforce Development: One-Stop Career Center by Merced Assemblywoman, Cathleen Galgiani is devoted to such use.
There are any number of bills linking schools, graduation credits and job placements. Berkeley Senator Loni Hancock's SB 515, Career Technical Education which passed both houses and is sitting in a concurrence committee, authorizes implementation of the Carl D Perkins Vocational and Applies Technology Education Act of 1996 requiring that a percentage of course sequences offered for students be linked to high priority workforce needs in the career sectors identified by the Labor and Workforce Development Agency or the Labor Market information Division.
Senator Mark Wyland, [R-Carlsbad] has authored SB 253, Career Technical Education: Recognition Certificate. This bill rewards students with an education certificate [not a diploma] if they sign up for certain workforce programs. Wyland's Aide, Eric Bone spoke in glowing terms about the opportunities now available to potential high school drop-outs, who will instead become "well educated future employees who might otherwise become burdens to the state." Eric, a young man himself, protested that so many kids aren't getting a good education these days, you don't really think that every student should go on to college do you?
This seemed to be the pat answer coming out of every legislator's office that we spoke with as soon as we suggested that it wasn't proper to use the schools as recruiting grounds for unions.
Yet, the promotional material for Youthbuild and middle and high school workforce preparation declares that with these programs in place upwards of 95% of students will be able to go on to college. One must now ask just what is college becoming?
The answer could be found in Pasadena Assemblyman Anthony Portantino's bill, AB 555, Community Colleges: Secondary School Pupils. This bill authorizes community college districts to "enter into partnerships with school districts [public and private] to provide secondary school pupils who have exhausted all opportunities to enroll in an equivalent course at the high school of attendance, adult education program, continuation school, regional occupational center or program, or any other program offered...to benefit from advanced scholastic career-technical, or vocational coursework."
Legislators author bills that contain only a small piece of the picture. Analysts look at the bills as individual entities not as small parts in a complex array of social engineering legislation. Such myopia led one analyst to state, "I don't see your point, I don't see what you see in these bills."
It's our responsibility as citizens and taxpayers to be the ones to make these bureaucrats see the whole picture.
Recently the Governor vetoed Felipe Fuente's AB 332, Work-Based Learning, not according to his veto message, because he doesn't agree with the concept, but because he doesn't think this particular bill is the appropriate one to set up work-based learning in the schools.
The bill authorizes "school districts that maintain high schools to establish work-based learning programs, and to purchase liability insurance for pupils enrolled in programs of study involving work-based learning off school grounds. Authorizes partnership academies, regional occupational programs and other educational programs to deliver work-based learning opportunities for pupils that may include work experience education, community classrooms, cooperative career technical education programs." See also AB 35 and AB 36 by Warren Furutani of Long Beach on Education: Workforce Preparation.
There are many more such bills, some of which mandate specific courses of career learning such as the aerospace industry, non-violence peace building [AB 1 by Bill Monning] and health care technicians - remember Torlakson's aide saying that maybe health clinics would have doctors and nurses? Well, maybe not.
There's AB 156 by Kevin Jeffries of Murietta, High School Curriculum: Volunteer Service. This authorizes one credit toward graduation from high school for training and certification in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. This, too, is pulled from the Serve America federal legislation which talks about national disaster preparedness as a worthy nationwide activity complete with advisory boards, councils, etc.
Properly understood this blizzard of legislation is designed to produce a generation of centrally controlled, pre-planned and selected workers filling jobs that the unelected Stakeholder Workforce investment board deems vital to produce its ideal - "self-sustainable communities."
When combined with rigidly controlled health practices and outcomes, school nutrition programs, school parent partnership planning for student outcomes, vaccinations required for a wide variety of illnesses [the word is vaccine preventable illnesses, not airborne communicable diseases] then you will glimpse an emerging picture of individual human beings valued more for their ability to serve the state than their worth as individuals with God given talents. and inalienable rights.
You can stop this mad rush towards collectivism by contacting the Governor and your legislators and demanding a "NO" vote on the continuation of Youthbuild and school workforce preparation programs.
©2009 Camille Giglio. All rights reserved
