Top of Mind: Josh Hawley

Hawley has directed dozens of studies with state agencies including the Departments of Education and Workforce, Higher Education, and Job and Family Services.

“I’m especially pleased with some of the dashboards we’ve built for Ohio, so there’s some tangible benefit for things that have continued over more than a decade as technology resources for the state,” Hawley said.

OERC has developed interactive dashboards including the Ohio Broadband & 5G Workforce Asset Map and Ohio’s Evidence-Based Clearinghouse of successful education strategies. Current projects include Ohio’s Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services; the Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes Initiative with the Ohio Department of Higher Education; and the Principal Pipeline Study with the Department of Higher Education, Wallace Foundation and Columbus City Schools. 

Hawley has been particularly interested in analyzing and developing data science for public service. For example, the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive, now managed by CHRR (formerly the Center for Human Resource Research) at Ohio State in collaboration with Ohio’s state workforce and education agencies, offers researchers a unique opportunity to analyze the public administrative records for millions of Ohio residents’ education, work and training experiences over time.

Producing high quality technical processes to standardize and provide state data to researchers and the state, the archive supports governors and executive agencies in decision-making and provides opportunities for a network of staff and students working in Ohio and the nation on data science for government.

Daniel Rizo-Patron, the workforce analytics project manager at the Ohio Office of Workforce Development, has worked with Hawley for nearly 10 years, managing the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive and leading numerous research projects for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

“Throughout this time, Josh has been a trusted partner in guiding research, evaluation efforts and ad hoc analyses,” Rizo-Patron said. 

“Working with Josh has been extremely rewarding. He approaches every challenge with commitment and a collaborative nature. He has a wealth of knowledge and seemingly endless ideas. His contributions demonstrate the power of a great partner, and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is better because of his partnership,” Rizo-Patron said.

The author of the 2020 book “Data Science in the Public Interest: Improving Government Performance in the Workforce,” Hawley is now conducting research for a planned book on the future of workforce development policy. 

“This is emerging as a more formative text examining the big changes the nation needs to make to ensure we have the workforce to succeed in the AI age,” Hawley said. “I have a second stream of work on school-to-work transitions in Thailand and continue to work with the Thailand Development Research Institute on this activity.”

“The U.S. is a collection of sometimes more or less dysfunctional state systems, and while regional government in Russia is under resourced as an example, the national government is funding, staffing and managing systems,” he said. “A second difference in terms of workforce development is that most other nations in Europe or developed Asia have strong vocational systems and work with young people to separate into academic and vocational tracks. We have avoided that since the 1990 Revision to the Perkins Act, which elevated college for all as a goal at the high school level.”

When he joined Ohio State, he was teaching workforce and education policy in the College of Education and Human Ecology. It became clear that the Glenn College made more sense for his expertise. 

“I liked the energy in the Glenn College,” Hawley said. “At the time we had maybe seven faculty members, and there was a ‘pick yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality. It fits my personality: Break things and move fast.”

What are the biggest challenges facing workforce development policy?

Currently, the biggest question is, “What is the mission of workforce development?” Or maybe framed as, “Would we be better off blowing up the current policy structure and starting over?” I’m in the middle of doing interviews for a new book on workforce policy, and most respondents have mentioned the need for radical change. There are as many as 160+ separate workforce policies at the federal level, and without replacing the entire system, the nation risks sliding into mediocrity and irrelevance because adults can’t learn the new skills needed for firms to compete in the AI age. 

A second challenge is that students graduate from high school with poor skills, meaning they cannot enter training and receive vocational credentials because they lack the reading and math skills to be successful. Schools are failing kids, and the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report warning is as relevant today as it was at that time. 

What’s causing schools to fail kids in developing reading and math skills to be successful? 

One problem is that for more than 25 years, states for the most part focused on getting kids to like reading as opposed to learning how to read. In Ohio only two-thirds of kids are proficient in reading at the end of third grade. As a kid with dyslexia, I’ll tell you there is a big difference. You can love books, as I always did, and still struggle with the mechanics of reading. Numeracy is a bigger challenge. There are curriculum problems: How, for example, is the emphasis on calculus helping high school kids in college and work? It isn’t. We should be switching to applied math and statistics as opposed to following the same math sequence our grandparents were forced to follow. 

A second problem is social promotion. I was held back in second grade, and it was the right thing to do for my skill development. As a society we don’t like telling some kids they are not successful and holding kids to account. 

A third problem is that government is uncomfortable with public goods. Schools are a public good. What we face more generally in the K-12 sector is the fact that many families no longer think of schools as a public good; they think of it as a private benefit from government. 

We do not have confidence that the public services are looking out for the public good. One of the problems in the K-12 sector is we’re so far behind on teaching kids how to read and do math. So many kids are lacking those basic skills that it erodes the confidence of the parents no matter how well their kids are doing. We struggle with the notion that the state should support schooling and are frequently pushing toward vouchers because we as a nation are not comfortable with public institutions. 

Why is workforce development key to solving these problems?

Workforce development is classically either about fixing people’s problems like remediating for illiteracy, or, if you think about the history behind workforce development, it’s more about what’s in the interest of either the business or a union. They each have different parties they’re responsible to, but businesses and unions share the need to have people with the best skills to fill needs. Workforce development came out of that after WWI. If you do the reading, the whole initial social policy focus for training and development had to do with improving skills so businesses and employment groups like unions could meet the needs of their members or their shareholders. That’s a very different framing from, “Let’s make sure we remediate everybody’s skills.”

That’s one of the reasons why AI in the workforce is interesting. When you think about AI as productivity-enhancing, it might help us get back to that origin story for workforce development instead of thinking about how we make up for schooling kids are missing.

Read the latest edition of Public Address, the Glenn College magazine.