19 previously unannounced federal grant awards, Congress' bad Ed-DOL takes, and $6 billion in grants listings.
Plus, what's up with apprenticeship cash, where exactly are Ed staff moving, and a $222 million grant with a 13-day application period.
JOBS THAT WORK: THE MONEY is a weekly rundown of the news and grant listings important for people who use money to get people to work, with exclusive intel and insights for paid subscribers. It’s brought to you by
Streamline’s AI-powered Discover platform helps organizations find grants that fit their work more easily and helps them reduce the time it takes to apply. I used Streamline to help put together listings for my paid subscribers—it’s a great tool that makes the hard work of finding grants much easier. Streamline helps organizations save 50 percent to 80 percent of their time to draft grant applications.
You can learn more about Discover here and request a demo here.
Greetings, and holiday programming alert.
Hello from Washington, where I’m feeling particularly betrayed by the trailer for the live-action version of the on-the-job training parable Moana. I always believed we had a social contract that if this movie was made live action, The Rock’s wig would be truly ridiculous, not just mildly ridiculous. It’s hard to believe in anything right now, frankly.
This is a reminder that THE MONEY will be folded into Tuesday’s newsletter next week. It’ll also move to Thursdays on December 11 and 18.
Oh, and behind today’s paywall, I end up announcing federal grants before the federal government does. For the third time.
Toplines.
News you should know about money and things getting people to work.
Congress responds to the Ed-DOL merger by missing the point.
The Trump Administration has tended not to do its congressional allies too many favors with timing. That trend continued this week with the Administration announcing its pouring much of the Education Department into the Department of Labor on the eve of a hearing on career and technical education by members of the House Education and Workforce Committee.
Yet, neither party did a great job interrogating the big question of if Ed and DOL’s workforce components should be merged.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, the California Republican chairing the subcommittee on K-12 education, didn’t even mention the merger in his opening statement. In light of the news the day before, that’s more than a little ridiculous. Kiley is in a rough political spot given California’s redistricting plans, but c’mon. When Kiley did mention the merger, his justification seemed to be that the Administration was connecting education to “industry” by moving programs to DOL, where the industry apparently lives. (Near the old snack bar, I guess.)
Separately, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., the subcommittee’s ranking member, had an opening statement that sorely misunderstood DOL’s jobs training work. She portrayed DOL’s work as “short term”—something an apprentice would disagree with—and seemed to indicate that the staff who build job training programs don’t work with school systems or understand teaching techniques because they don’t have “education” in their title.
“That kind of lifelong learning pipeline can’t be built or maintained without staff who have spent their careers crafting education pathways, not just administering workforce training grants, which is very important but a very different task,” Bonamici said. “These programs are objectively worse off now that they’re at the Department of Labor.”
Constructively, of all the many valid criticisms of the Ed-DOL merger, this is an interesting hill to climb. I would never say that “career and technical education'“ and “workforce training” are distinctions without a difference, but I also wouldn’t draw this thick of a line as a former DOL official who liaised with all of DOL’s training programs and Ed leaders on joint projects in the last administration.
For one, some of DOL’s staff have a rich background in career and technical education and do integrate it into their work. For another, a mistaken distinction made by Democrats on Wednesday was that DOL programs don’t teach things like critical thinking and problem solving. YouthBuild has taught critical thinking skills in its leadership training. And Lordy, trades apprenticeships definitely teach problem solving.
I liked Bonamici’s separate point about having an educational foundation to prepare for jobs evolving due to technology, and I have liked her work on the committee this year—she has asked good questions of her fellow Oregonian, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Still, it’s disappointing to see Democrats like her make their version of an argument that echoes some of the worst parts of Trump II’s workforce thinking, which ironically dwell on artificial lines between education and training.
The Trump view renders every college degree “worthless” unless the major corresponds to job skills, to reference a specific quote from Education Secretary Linda McMahon. On Wednesday, Bonamici seemed to argue the extreme opposite.
“The focus needs to be on career and technical education,” she said. “It’s not career and technical jobs training.”
As I wrote in October, we need better education to do workforce well. Career exposure is also a great onramp to improving young people’s interest and outcomes in education. I understand that a lot of Dems’ response comes from frustration with the Ed-DOL workforce marriage, of which I have heard much of from my Edworld contacts. Considering that the Administration has, you know, belittled education as a field and actively taken apart some smart professionals’ lives’ work, I really, really sympathize.
Yet, I think there is more reason to be skeptical of the Ed-DOL combo because of staffing and logistics, not because DOL somehow doesn’t understand the mystical ways of The Educator.
DOL was understaffed and overclocked prior to absorbing much of Ed. The new DOL also isn’t moving the money, a persistent issue in Trump II. These problems were identified off the bat by one of Wednesday’s witnesses, Braden Goetz, a former Education career and technical education official who now serves as a senior policy advisor at New America.
If you’re going to argue Ed-DOL marriage is a bad idea, this piece of Goetz’s testimony is the type of thing I would zoom in on:
“Yesterday, I was surprised to hear that [the departments] put out a fact sheet that said that 35 grantees have accessed their [Perkins Act] money since the transfer,” Goetz said. “Well, there are more than 35 Perkins grantees and it’s been two months. There are 57 grantees… but only 35 have access?”
This week’s grants listings number: $6 billion.
Big update this week with a decent amount of new federal money, including a $222 million Health and Human Services opportunity that opened on Tuesday and closes the Monday after Thanksgiving. Neat.
Behind the paywall.
More unannounced noncompetitive DOL grant awards… announced.
How the Ed-DOL combination physically will work, and why that matters.
What the heck is going on with $285 million in apprenticeship funding?