Got Something to Say about Performance Partnership Pilots?

26% youth employment rate in 2011

The Federal Register has announced that we have until August 7th to send in our comments to Arnie Duncan, Secretary of Education, regarding the  Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth.

Now you should know I'm not a total fan of the PPP.  What's not to like about creating more flexibility to blend funds and get waivers for whatever regulations are tying the hands of service providers?  Absolutely nothing -- the idea is  great. However, it requires partnerships and we know how expensive collaboration can be. I don't know why they didn't just start with one organization and once they learned from that (they are pilots) then expand to a few organizations working together. In addition it's a long-term strategy when we need an immediate one.

According to Andy Sum's recent report The Plummeting Labor Market Fortunes of Teens and Young Adults published by Brookings Institute youth had the biggest drop in employment from 45% in 2000 to 26% in 2011.  So there is something wrong when we spend so much time and effort exploring blending funding and identifying regulatory waivers when what we know we need is higher levels of funding for each young people, more funding to serve more young people, and as much innovation and creativity as we can muster to address the youth unemployment crisis. 

Honestly, I'm also concerned this is a just an effort on the part of the feds to hand out a few scraps to our field to keep us busy. I know that sounds awful, but from what I can tell starting with the White House Council on Community Solutions the message has been from the top -- do the right thing but do it so there's no price tag in the federal budget. The message is that this is a local problem....even though it is a massive national problem undermining the strength of our economy, communities and security.

So when you send in your constructive comments to PPP also remind them that though this is a good long-term strategy to create more flexibility in the system we need an immediate intervention to address the youth unemployment crisis bubbling up in our communities.