Editor's note

Looking back on it, few believed the city's summer jobs program would help young people much in the long run. At best, it put a few dollars in their pockets and kept them out of trouble for a couple months. Even many advocates acknowledged it was a band-aid approach to deeper challenges.

A law that went into effect in 2000 was supposed to change all of that. The Workforce Investment Act pulled federal funding from the summer effort, creating a year-round program to help poor teens get jobs, diplomas, GEDs and other skills.

Unfortunately, things seem to have gotten worse. Budgets have been slashed, providers feel pressured to overlook the hardest-to-serve teens and the number of participants is only a fraction of what it used to be.

Meanwhile, job prospects for young Chicagoans have grown their bleakest in decades--less than a quarter of them had jobs last year. Just 13 percent of African American youth were employed in Chicago in 2003.

But something else is even more troubling. Few who oversee the youth employment program seem to understand how it is--or isn't--working.

As she wrote this month's cover story, Reporter Sarah Karp discovered that providers aren't sure how to count and categorize the teens under the new system. City officials provided her several sets of numbers about how many teens participated and how well they did. None of the figures matched those included in the state reports passed on to the federal government. (For clarity's sake, we used the last set of city-provided figures in our analysis.) The agencies that work directly with the young people had different totals altogether.

And, when Karp asked why, no one seemed to know. The discrepancies and reporting requirements, according to one state official, are "too difficult to explain." Others acknowledged the differences in data collection, but couldn't describe how it occurs. One of the few politicians in a position to comment--U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson, the area's only federal lawmaker who sits on a labor committee--didn't respond to requests for an interview. And city officials can't articulate their strategy for successfully moving teens out of the program; more than 1,000 of them stay on for more than a year at a time.

We won't hear about any of that next spring, however. That's when aldermen and others will begin crowing about the lack of work for young people again. They will complain about the spread of gangs, insisting we have to keep teenagers off the street. And the mayor will lean on his corporate buddies and cobble together another set of short-term jobs, quieting the critics for another season.

But the critics need to recognize the deeper problems Karp's story reveals. Understanding, and working to reform, the broader flaws of this latest federal effort needs to move closer to the top of their agenda. Creating a path from school to work for low-income youth requires it. As many of them told Karp, getting a job takes connections, which are hard to find in many city neighborhoods.

Now that Washington is under Republican control, who knows how much leaders from this largely Democratic city could improve the structure of this program. But showing a willingness to try, instead of issuing a collective shoulder shrug, would be a good start.

The opinions expressed by the editor and publisher are her own.

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