Workforce Development

Community Workforce Plan Evaluation

May 14, 2018 Leave a Comment

Principal Investigator:	Greg Cumpton, PhD
Sponsor:	Workforce Solutions Capital Area
Project Duration:	January 2018 – March 2022
Description:	The Ray Marshall Center (RMC) has partnered with Workforce Solutions Capital Area (WFSCA) to evaluate the progress of the Austin Metro Area Master Community Workforce Plan. The objective of the Master Plan is to effectively engage employers, community-based organizations, and educational institutions to more efficiently match employers’ skill needs and successfully prepare economically disadvantaged residents for family-sustaining careers. The RMC will investigate the educational and labor market outcomes of workforce development program participants, as well as variations in such results associated with demographic, personal, educational, and programmatic service regimes of the participants. RMC staff will work with WFSCA staff and area training providers to identify paths to the successful implementation of the Master Plan.
Reports Available:	Austin Metro Area Community Workforce Plan Year Two Evaluation Report Authors: Greg Cumpton, Cynthia Juniper, and Ashweeta Patnaik Date: September 2020 Publication Type: Report, 50pp. Austin Metro Area Master Community Workforce Plan Year One Evaluation Report Authors: Greg Cumpton, Cynthia Juniper, and Ashweeta Patnaik Date: October 2019 Publication Type: Report, 43pp. Austin Metro Area Master Community Workforce Plan Baseline Evaluation Report Authors: Greg Cumpton, Cynthia Juniper, and Ashweeta Patnaik Date: October 2018 Publication Type: Report, 86pp. Family Work Support Benefits: An assessment of food and child care supports in the Austin, Texas metro area (MCWP Supplement: Poverty) Authors: Cynthia Juniper Date: January 2019 Publication Type: Supplement, 13pp.

2Gen article co-authored by Chris King published in Russell Sage Foundation Journal

April 3, 2018 Leave a Comment

RMC Senior Research Scientist Dr. Chris King was part of a group that authored a paper titled “A Two-Generation Human Capital Approach to Anti-poverty Policy” that has now been published in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. The paper was published online in the February 2018 special issue on innovative anti-poverty interventions and was co-authored by Teresa Eckrich Sommer (Northwerstern University), Terri J. Sabol (Northwestern University), Elise Chor (Temple University), William Schneider (Northwestern University), P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale (Northwestern University), Jeanne Brooks-Gunn (Columbia University), Mario L. Small (Harvard University), Hiro Yoshikawa (New York University), and Dr. King.

In the paper, they propose a two-generation strategy to improve the economic fortunes of children in the United States. With CAP Tulsa’s CareerAdvance® program as a prototype, they suggest a competitive grant program to test and evaluate different models using federal dollars. They estimate average benefit-cost ratios across a range of promising career fields of 1.3 within five years and 7.9 within ten years if 10 percent of Head Start parents participate in two-generation programs. You can read the paper here (issue 4(3), pp. 118-143).

The Ray Marshall Center has an ongoing partnership with CAP Tulsa and Northwestern University to create a sectoral, career pathway workforce strategy for the parents of young children in early childhood education in Tulsa that began in 2008. You can view the details of the partnership here.

Chris King gives presentation at the National Head Start Association conference

January 10, 2018 Leave a Comment

RMC Senior Research Scientist Dr. Chris King was invited to give a presentation at the National Head Start Association‘s 2017 Parent and Family Engagement Conference held at the JW Marriott in Austin, Texas, on December 4-6, 2017. The conference is “the only national event that focuses on how communities, parents, families, and Head Strart program staff can best partner to promote both parent and family engagement and children’s learning and development.”

In a December 5th session titled Launching the Workforce: Head Start’s Success in Families’s Careers, Chris was on a panel led by Scott Groginsksy of NHSA along with Dr. Cindy Decker, director of Innovation Labs at CAP Tulsa, and Candee Melin, Director of Child Services at Parents in Community Action, Inc (PICA). You can learn more about the session here, and you can view Chris’s presentation here.

L-R: Cindy Decker, Chris King, and Candee Melin

Einstein Project: Austin Youth STEM-CE Community Alignment Study

December 11, 2017 Leave a Comment

Principal Investigator(s):	Heath J. Prince, PhD
Sponsor(s):	City of Austin
Project Duration:	November 2017 – May 2019
Description:	The Ray Marshall Center entered into an interlocal agreement with the City of Austin for process development, data collection, and analysis of youth-focused programs in science, technology, engineering, math, creative, and entrepreneurship workforce development programs. Ray Marshall Center researchers will work with stakeholders, workforce organizations, local businesses, and local school districts, using a collective impact model framework, to establish regional baseline metrics to classify and assess current youth focused programs in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Creative, and Entrepreneurship (STEM-CE) for study and careers. Through the course of this assessment, the RMC will develop appropriate measurement instruments and techniques, produce a report describing current relevant activities, and propose methods and processes for the future evaluation of youth STEM-CE programming. This assessment of Austin STEM-CE programming will provide insight as to how scarce public resources can be leveraged to secure private participation in the development of a future pipeline of workforce, filled by the city’s current youth in poverty, which will connect to quality jobs in Austin’s future economy. Findings will be used to propose policy recommendations for Mayor and Council to consider that will enable program development or expansion to properly encourage students from backgrounds in poverty to enter into STEM-CE fields of study and careers. Some goals of future STEM-CE interventions may include changing attitudes about STEM-CE fields among students participating in such related programming, as well as improving their academic performance in STEM-CE subjects.
Reports Available:

LBJ School and Federal Reserve convene workforce, economic experts at National Conference

October 19, 2017 Leave a Comment

(Above) Heath Prince, director of the Ray Marshall Center at the LBJ School, moderated a panel on investing in research.

A stronger workforce supports a stronger economy. The Oct. 4-6 conference at UT Austin, “Investing in America’s Workforce: Improving Outcomes for Workers and Employers,” featured all 12 of the Federal Reserve System’s regional banks and the Board of Governors, and generated national conversation about how to leverage community resources, policy and social investments to build connections between businesses and workers.

The capstone conference was hosted by the Federal Reserve System in collaboration with the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Ray Marshall Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Angela Evans, dean of the LBJ School; Heath Prince, director of the Ray Marshall Center at LBJ; Ray Marshall, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and LBJ professor emeritus; Christopher King, senior research scientist at the Ray Marshall Center; and Julián Castro, LBJ visiting professor, led multiple conference sessions and facilitated policy discussions.

(Above) Dean Angela Evans, left, moderates the panel, “Making the Connection to Work,” including panelists Julián Castro (center) of the LBJ School and Carol Naughton (right), president of Purpose Built Communities. Other panelists included Jim Gibbons, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries International, Michael Harreld, special advisor to the chairman at PNC, and Ryan Haygood, president and CEO of the NJ Institute for Social Justice.

Several LBJ students had an opportunity to attend the conference as well. They covered the event extensively through social media. Anna Crockett (MPAff ’18) is interested in economic policy, so she was interested in attending to get a nationwide perspective on job creation. “My best experience was seeing Dean Evans and Julian Castro on a great panel on Friday morning. I felt a lot of LBJ pride at that moment! It was also great to see the focus on policy. I think the policy element really pushed people to speak in terms of benchmarks and tangible outcomes,” Crockett said.

“It was great to see the focus on policy. I think the policy element really pushed people to speak in terms of benchmarks and tangible outcomes.” —Anna Crockett, MPAff ’18

Fellow student Natasha Bylenok (MPAff ’18), whose interest in labor policy aligned closely with the conference mission, said, “Panelist Brendan Martin [Executive Director of Working World] made the point, ‘We’ve organized people to serve the economy instead of organizing the economy to serve people.’ I think he and the other panelists gave a powerful reminder of the human element of economics and labor policy.”

The event opened with a reception hosted by the LBJ School and the Ray Marshall Center on Wednesday evening at UT’s Blanton Museum of Art. Dean Evans was joined by UT Austin President Gregory Fenves and Austin Mayor Steve Adler to welcome over 300 guests to the campus and the city.

(Above) UT Austin President Gregory Fenves speaks at the reception for attendees, held the first evening of the conference.

Rooted in the idea that our country can only reach its economic potential through strong alignment between employer needs and a skilled workforce, the mission of this cross-sector collaboration was to:

Reframe workforce development efforts as investments, not just social services
Attract new resources and leverage existing funding sources
Improve economic mobility and impact for workers

Featured speakers included:

Raphael W. Bostic, president & CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
Esther L. George, president & CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City
Patrick T. Harker, president & CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Robert S. Kaplan, president & CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Juan Garcia, Global Leader for Career Advancement, Amazon
Ras Baraka, Mayor of Newark, NJ
Jim Gibbons, president and CEO, Goodwill Industries International
Jen Crozier, Vice President of IBM Corporate Citizenship, President of the IBM International Foundation
Lisa Schumacher, Director of Education Strategies, McDonalds’s Corp.

Faculty

« Previous Page
1
…
3
4
5
6
7
…
12
Next Page »

Community Workforce Plan Evaluation

2Gen article co-authored by Chris King published in Russell Sage Foundation Journal

Chris King gives presentation at the National Head Start Association conference

Einstein Project: Austin Youth STEM-CE Community Alignment Study

LBJ School and Federal Reserve convene workforce, economic experts at National Conference

Sign up for updates

Connect with us

Principal Investigator:	Greg Cumpton, PhD
Sponsor:	Economic Mobility Corporation, Inc
Project Duration:	January 2018 – December 2023
Description:	Project QUEST provides employment training and services aligned with the skills most in demand by San Antonio, Texas employers. The Ray Marshall Center will be working with the Economic Mobility Corporation, Inc (Mobility) and building around their recent program evaluation of Project QUEST. This innovative partnership links both QUEST participants and similar non-participants to Texas Unemployment Insurance wage records. By combining self-reported and administrative data, the research will seek to verify self-reported outcomes, enhance the longitudinal tracking of employment and earnings both prior to and after completing QUEST, and measure long-term impacts of program participation.
Reports Available: