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Unemployment has risen in Washington in recent years, despite a booming city economy. A Washington Post reporter spent a year trying to determine what is being done to fix the city's jobless problem and why those efforts aren't working.
He interviewed more than 100 people, including unemployed residents of the city; businesspeople who try to hire them; leaders at job training programs; economists and experts; and officials in the federal, District, and various state and municipal governments. He also reviewed thousands of pages of documents, many of them obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Under the Workforce Investment Act, which is the federal government's primary job training program for adults, states must report how many people complete training and get a job. The Post divided the amount of money spent on helping adults find work by the number of people who completed training and got a job to come up with a measure of the cost effectiveness of the programs in each state and the District. The District ranked behind all 50 states.
The Post performed similar calculations for 15 major cities. But comparisons among cities are less accurate than those among states, because cities report less detailed information to the federal government. The analysis included the five largest U.S. cities and the 10 closest in U.S. population rank to the District.
The seven cities that ranked better than the District were Philadelphia, Nashville, Milwaukee, Seattle, Denver, Memphis and Charlotte. Those with worse results were Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Baltimore, New York, El Paso, Houston and Austin.
ยทยทยท
Yesterday: Michael Sims had drifted for more than two decades through cycles of drug abuse, homelessness and jail. In January 2005, he signed up for a job training program at D.C. Central Kitchen, hoping to get a job and put his life on track. A look at how difficult job training can be and how successful ones operate.
Today: The District has an elaborate and confusing system for job training. D.C. residents face an immense bureaucracy if they want help finding a better job, and the city gets less for its job training dollars than many jurisdictions.
On washingtonpost.com
Staff writer Neil Irwin discusses the series in a Live Online session at noon on Monday.
