Is Something Rotten at the Entitlement Corps?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 14, 1998 | by Sean Paige

The Brahmins of Calcutta and Washington both have their sacred cows, the poking of which is considered bad spiritual and political karma. In the latter capital's case, federal programs for the young or old are considered especially untouchable, leaving their detractors open to charges of plotting to toss society's most vulnerable out in the snow.

Yet thankfully not everyone in Washington is too cowed by this line of bull to offer a little constructive criticism. And because it's already well-known here that the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accounting Office and the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste all are staffed by hard-hearted haters of children, these groups have little to lose by making patty melts of three Washington pets: Head Start, the Job Corps and President Clinton's baby bovine, AmeriCorps.

In a recent study, the General Accounting Office, or GAO, found that the Labor Department is overestimating the success of its Job Corps program, which spends about $1 billion annually providing skills training for 68,000 disadvantaged teens. Although Labor in 1996 reported that 62 percent of Job Corps participants were putting their newly acquired skills to work in the private sector, a closer look at the statistics casts doubt on 41 percent of those purported job placements. Oftentimes, kids trained in masonry or health care were instead found flipping burgers or waiting tables --jobs acquired easily enough without a $15,000 taxpayer investment. Moreover, although Job Corps reported that 48 percent of its 1996 participants completed the program, GAO found that a scant 14 percent actually met all the program's vocational-mining requirements.

And if you think that's callous, wait until you hear what the skinflints at Citizens Against Government Waste, or CAGW, say about the federal early-education program Head Start, and about the newest sacred cow in the federal pasture, AmeriCorps. In spite of the $35 billion invested in Head Start since 1965 (and a near tripling of its budget in the 1990s), little evidence exists that it has any lasting impacts on the more than 16 million children who have participated, says CAGW, relying on the findings of GAO and the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO. In fact, most credible studies have shown that Head Start's benefits to preschoolers generally are short-lived and dissipate soon after the child enters the learning-free zone of elementary school. These conclusions recently were bolstered by Ohio's Legislative Office of Education Oversight, whose own study confirmed Head Start's ephemeral impact, but ignited even more indignation by suggesting that some program participants actually posted lower scores than graduates of other preschool programs.

In a new report, "AmeriCorps The Pitiful," CAGW treats this sacred-cow-in-the-making to a similar grilling, citing its 40 percent drop-out rate (many participants have been fired for chronic truancy or even criminal activities), "dismal" record of imbuing its paid participants with the spirit of volunteerism and its co-option (like so much else in the Clinton administration) for the advancement of a political agenda. In 1994, for instance, AmeriCorps "volunteers" were used to protest mandatory life sentences for persons convicted of three violent crimes. And until the practice was halted, as a result of protests, nearly 3,000 AmeriCorps kids had been tasked to work at the Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency, Legal Services Corp. and National Endowment for the Arts.