Legislature(2017 - 2018)ADAMS ROOM 519
04/02/2018 01:30 PM House FINANCE
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| Audio | Topic |
|---|---|
| Start | |
| HB268 | |
| HB221 | |
| HB400 | |
| Adjourn |
* first hearing in first committee of referral
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
| + | HB 268 | TELECONFERENCED | |
| + | HB 221 | TELECONFERENCED | |
| + | HB 400 | TELECONFERENCED | |
| + | TELECONFERENCED |
HOUSE BILL NO. 221
"An Act relating to the duties of the Alaska
Commission on Postsecondary Education; relating to a
statewide workforce and education-related statistics
program; relating to information obtained by the
Department of Labor and Workforce Development; and
providing for an effective date."
3:41:38 PM
REPRESENTATIVE HARRIET DRUMMOND, SPONSOR, introduced
herself. She read from a prepared statement:
Thank you, Finance Committee Co-Chairs, members of the
House Finance Committee
For the record, my name is Harriet Drummond, Chair of
the House Education Committee, and with me are my
aide, George Ascott, and Stephanie Butler, Executive
Director of the Alaska Commission on Postsecondary
Education.
I am honored to sponsor HB 221 as part of ongoing
efforts in the legislature to take a detailed look at
ways to improve how we as a state spend money on
education and job training in Alaska.
HB 221 will help the Legislature to best allocate and
utilize increasingly scarce resources available for
education and workforce training by clarifying the
authority of the Alaska Commission on Postsecondary
Education (ACPE) to receive and analyze existing data
from state entities through a statewide workforce and
education related statistics program.
HB 221 also changes the law to permit the Department
of Labor and Workforce Development to share
Unemployment Insurance data for the purposes of the
statistics program, as permitted in federal
regulation, and contingent upon a written agreement
with ACPE.
HB 221 is not at all about tracking or collecting data
on individuals. It is about statistical outcomes. It
is about taking a bird's eye view of spending results
based on analyzing and aggregating data we already
have to create outcomes statistics.
HB 221 will help policy makers in the following ways:
It provides a more secure method to transport
data between agencies
It lowers costs to access and analyze information
It combines multiple processes into a highly
secure, automated, and cost-effective process
It provides greater access to longitudinal
information
It reduces the time and cost required to perform
program outcomes reporting
Alaska spends more than $2 billion annually on
education and workforce training, but we do not know
which programs produce trained Alaskans who are more
like to remain in Alaska and contribute to our
economy.
What is the return we receive on these huge
investments?
HB 221 will allow for more meaningful assessment of
program outcomes across K-12, postsecondary programs,
and into the workforce.
And it has no additional cost to the state.
I would note that we will have invited testimony from
Stephanie Butler, Executive Director of the Alaska
Commission on Postsecondary Education, who will
provide more detailed technical information about HB
221.
At this time, if it pleases the committee, my aide,
George Ascott will provide a brief sectional analysis
of the bill.
3:44:46 PM
GEORGE ASCOTT, STAFF, REPRESENTATIVE HARRIET DRUMMOND,
introduced himself and read the sectional Analysis:
Hello and good afternoon Chairs Seaton and Foster,
members of the House Finance Committee.
For the record, my name is George Ascott, staff to
Representative Harriet Drummond. I am here to provide
a brief sectional analysis to describe what actual
changes will occur to state law under HB 221.
If you take a look at the bill you will notice it has
five sections.
Section 1:
The first section of the bill is mostly existing
statute and goes to the beginning of the third page.
Under existing law, the Alaska Commission on
Postsecondary Education is allowed to adopt
regulations to administer financial aid programs,
institutional authorization functions, and
interstate compacts - which includes the
collection and confidentiality of data.
HB 221 creates additional authority for the
Commission to adopt regulations. These are:
Regulations relating to the collection and
analysis of K-12 data, as approved by the
Department of Education and Early Development,
under its current authority to collect that
information (Page 2, Line 2)
AND regulations for a new purpose: Administering
a statewide workforce and education related
statistics program (Page 3, Line 4)
Section 2: (All new statutory language)
Beginning Page 3, line 6 - is all new statutory
language. Currently the law allows the Commission to
collect data and share it with the governor, the
legislature and other state and federal agencies, but
they don't have clear authority to maintain and
analyze the data.
Section 2 of HB 221 changes the law by adding three
new subsections so that:
(b) The commission can maintain a database for
the purposes of administering a statewide
workforce and education related statistics
program and enter into cooperative agreements
regarding education and employment, with other
agencies
(c) The Commission is required to remove
personally identifiable information before it is
entered into the database, and it may not provide
personally identifiable information to the
Federal Government
(d) A "unit record" is defined as information
pertaining to an individual
Section 3: (All new statutory language)
Currently the Department of Labor & Workforce
Development is not allowed to share data regarding
unemployment insurance with other agencies.
Beginning on page 3 line 22, Section 3 changes the law
to permit the Department of Labor and Workforce
Development to share such data for the purposes of the
statewide workforce and education related statistics
program, as permitted in federal regulation, and
contingent upon a written agreement with ACPE
Section 4:
Beginning on page four, line five. This makes it clear
that the department of Labor and workforce development
can share data obtained before the effective date of
HB 221.
Section 5:
The section is just an immediate effective date.
With that, I will turn the microphone over to
Stephanie Butler, Executive Director of ACPE. Thank
you, Representatives Seaton and Foster, members of the
committee.
3:48:12 PM
STEPHANIE BUTLER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ALASKA COMMISSION ON
POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND EARLY
DEVELOPMENT, read a prepared statement:
Thank you, Mr. Chair, Mr. Ascott.
For the record, this is Stephanie Butler, Executive
Director at ACPE. With me in the audience is Kerry
Thomas, Operations Director at ACPE.
Some very brief background information: ACPE is
charged with providing Alaska's citizens with tools
and resources to access and experience success in
college and career training. Some of the ways we
accomplish that are by managing the Alaska Performance
Scholarship and Alaska Education Grant programs (APS
and AEG), offering low-cost student loans, among other
activities.
But are these the most effective ways to increase
access and success? In this time of severely
constrained resources, are we using the state's
increasingly limited resources in ways that produce
the best return for our students and for the Alaska
public to whom we are responsible?
What is the return on investment in programs like the
APS and the AEG?
The things that we can currently easily measure, like
the number of program participants or even the numbers
of program completers, cannot answer that return on
the public investment question. To answer that ROI
question, we need to know the long-term outcomes
across different public sectors, such as:
Alaska spends approximately $5 million annually on the
Alaska Education Grant program. Do recipients graduate
at higher rates than non-recipients? Does it help
recipients enter the workforce sooner than similarly
situated non-recipients? Do they earn more?
Or earlier in this session we had questions about
whether loan forgiveness was successful, given the
costs of that forgiveness. If we had a cross-sector
outcomes database back then, we could know: Did
students who took forgivable loans complete their
degrees and return to Alaska at rates higher than
other students? And did they work in Alaska? Did they
stay in Alaska at higher rates than others?
In other words, are we spending public money in smart
ways that make the most difference for students, and
for the Alaska economy? The University and DEED
indicate they want to answer similar questions about
their programs.
The challenge to answering questions like this is not
that we don't have the data: we do have it. The
challenge is that the data is currently housed in
separate transactional databases. Each time we have a
question like this, about long-term outcomes, agencies
have to put together a data-sharing MOU, extract the
relevant data from our various systems, match it and
link it up, and then get the answers to the questions.
And in accordance with federal law, once we have those
answers to our questions, we have to destroy the
linked data to protect individual privacy, which means
if we have a follow-up question, the process has to
start again. This process can be inefficient and
expensive, and it can result in the need to duplicate
identifiable citizen data.
HB 221 streamlines this process by allowing the
Department of Labor to share unit-level employment and
wage records with the Outcomes database, which is
maintained by ACPE. This database securely houses de-
identified linked statistics from ACPE, from UA, from
DEED, and from Labor, but right now only training and
GED data form Labor. With HB 221, it would also house
the employment and wage record statistics. Once data
is linked, personally identifiable information (PII)
is stripped off, and that PII is never stored with the
resulting statistics.
What this Outcomes database offers us is a faster,
more cost-efficient way to do longitudinal outcomes
assessments, and a key part of doing this is
minimizing the proliferation of personally
identifiable data. Also, it allows us to retain the
de-identified linked statistics, so we can respond to
follow-up questions or efficiently perform future
analyses.
As previously noted, Alaska currently spends more than
$2 billion dollars annually on our K-12,
postsecondary, and technical/workforce training, but
we don't currently have a database that can fully
provide efficient, cost-effective and secure
statistics to the Legislature and the Administration
on the value received from these public investments.
HB 221 enhances Alaska's ability to provide that
feedback in several ways:
It allows the Department of Labor to provide
unit-level employment and wage data to the
Outcomes database for longitudinal analysis,
something 28 other states already do,
It prohibits sharing of any unit-level data from
the Outcomes database with the federal
government,
It codifies in law that data in the database must
be de-identified and sets out what that means,
and
It clarifies ACPE's authority to maintain
longitudinal statistics of this nature.
HB 221 does not commit any funding for these purposes;
it just allows for the inclusion of these additional
statistics in the Outcomes longitudinal database,
which was created a few years ago under a federal
grant.
Specific to funding, you will note that this bill has
a zero fiscal note. The Outcomes database was created
to accept the workforce data, so there is no new cost
there.
Longer term, it is our intent to seek resources,
potentially through another federal grant, to provide
outcomes reports once these additional statistics are
available in the Outcomes database. In this time of
such severely constrained resources, we believe there
is significant opportunity to attract grant dollars to
this project, recognizing that tough budget times make
it even more important than ever that policy-makers be
able to access the cross-sector statistics needed to
be able to evaluate program outcomes.
I would also like to be clear for the record that we
do not anticipate that we would be able to produce
these reports and outcomes analyses immediately upon
passage of HB 221 since we would need funding to use
the data and do those analyses; however, HB 221 does
get us a step closer a very important step closer,
and a step without additional cost to being able to
provide you with those kinds of outcomes analyses, as
we seek grant or other funds.
In summary, the long-term goal is to have the ability
to quickly and easily and inexpensively produce
reports like the APS outcomes report to look at the
outcomes of other programs, K-12 programs as well as
collegiate and career training programs and provide
you with the information to know not just how much the
program costs, but what the return is on that cost
investment.
Thank you for this opportunity to present this
information. I hope it has been useful to you, and I
would be happy to respond to any questions.
3:55:13 PM
Co-Chair Foster asked about additional testifiers.
Ms. Butler responded that she would engage additional
testifiers if there were technical questions from the
members.
Vice-Chair Gara liked the bill. He had a couple of
concerns. He wanted to make sure the data was not misused.
He relayed that folks from broken homes tended to get
financial aid or needs-based loans and suggested that
first-generation college students were not as successful as
those students whose parents had gone to college. He was
concerned that the statistics would be used in a way where
it was determined that students with less resources
wouldn't get help after not doing as well as those from
traditionally college-bound homes.
Ms. Butler responded stated that the statistical process
compared "apples to apples," and compared high needs
students with other high-needs students in the program.
Vice-Chair Gara appreciated Ms. Butler's answer. He
provided a hypothetical scenario, and considered the lower
wages for those pursuing careers in writing or art. He
wondered about the intrinsic value in education that was
not related to money and wages. He reiterated that he
wanted to make sure the data was not misused.
Ms. Butler anticipated the comparison of groups at fairly
high levels, looking at college graduates compared to other
college graduates. She pondered that the more granular the
data was at the college major level; the better the data
would show greater earning power of certain majors. She
stated it would be difficult to not consider the question
of one's college major being a personal choice.
Representative Thompson had talked with several people in
labor and carpentry jobs from his district over the
previous weekend. He was curious about the numbers of
people in the state that graduated from colleges versus
technical schools and apprenticeship programs. He noted the
wage differences for various pathways. He wondered how to
encourage more kids to go to vocational programs. He stated
that the carpenters union was looking for young people to
join its apprenticeship program.
Ms. Butler thought the proposed database could aid in
answering Representative Thompson's question. She
referenced a counselor that wanted wage statistics from
different occupations, but there was no such information
specific for Alaskans. She spoke of using the database to
provide to counselors and teachers with additional tools.
4:00:31 PM
Representative Wilson stated she had been on the ACPE board
and asked about the Answers Program that had been funded
with $4 million in 2012.
Ms. Butler responded that there was a 2012 grant used to
create the Answers Program, but there had not been
additional funding, so the program did not take off. She
relayed that the proposed database had been created under
the program.
Representative Wilson asked how the proposed database would
be different than the Answers Program.
Ms. Butler stated that the Answers Program had bee a much
broader scoped proposal that would have included research
and analysis, as well as online databases with dashboards
and informational products for parents. The bill proposed a
much smaller scope database.
Representative Wilson thought the proposal was talking
about adults that might be receiving unemployment. She
wondered about permission to use the data, and if there was
an opt-out provision.
Ms. Butler answered there was not currently an opt-out box
on any paperwork. She elaborated that a provision to opt-
out would require identification of individuals, and the
primary premise of the database was that the information
was de-identified.
Representative Wilson suggested that if there was an opt-
out box, the data would not be present in the first place.
Ms. Butler replied in the affirmative. She added that
individuals would need to be identified in order to be
opted out of the database.
Representative Wilson noted that there was a zero fiscal
note. She asked about potential funding for utilization of
the proposed database.
Ms. Butler did not have exact figures but relayed that the
department had been encouraged to apply for federal grants.
Representative Wilson asked for approximate numbers. She
noted the state had spent $4 million on a program that had
been discontinued due to a lack of funding. She asked if
there was a target amount for funding the program.
Ms. Butler would follow up with the information.
Representative Kawasaki asked about what information would
be received from the Unemployment Insurance Division in the
Department of Labor and Workforce Development (DLWD).
4:04:00 PM
Ms. Butler responded that information on wage records
(through the unemployment database) would be gathered in
order to identify the amount being earned in various
categories.
Representative Kawasaki asked for verification the only
additional information from DLWD would be wage and hour
information.
Ms. Butler responded in the affirmative.
Representative Kawasaki asked for the reason the department
needed the information up front. He wanted to reduce the
number of places the personal information was seen.
Ms. Butler answered that the proposed database would reduce
the number of times the information needed to be passed
around. For research related to workforce outcomes,
currently the information had to be extracted from various
systems and matched. One goal would be a long-term database
free from personally identifiable information. She noted
that there were a number of reports that could be produced
in future years if the bill passed - at a lower cost and
without having to link personally identifiable information.
Representative Guttenberg shared that he was a retired
laborer. He was always amazed that people who could not do
math problems were able to do complex practical field work.
He spoke about merging databases. He asked how much data
was mergeable. He thought merging databases was problematic
if everyone was not aligned and could create a huge cost.
He asked for greater detail.
Ms. Butler answered that the commission would only link
select elements that would be relevant to measuring
outcomes from each data systems. She stated that all the
work to make the databases communicate had been done by the
grant mentioned by Representative Wilson. A grant used in
the future would be to do the research and analysis to use
the data to develop the statistics to provide outcomes
information.
4:08:08 PM
Representative Guttenberg wondered why the state had not
been doing the analysis before.
Co-Chair Foster OPENED public testimony.
DOUG WALRATH, DIRECTOR, NORTHWESTERN ALASKA CAREER AND
TECHNICAL CENTER, NOME (via teleconference), testified in
support of the legislation. He discussed data reporting
that neglected to account for the impact of teaching
students engaged and in school. He detailed that 75 percent
to 80 percent of his organization's high school training
population were students enrolled in grades 9, 10, and 11.
Employment measures that were taken months after the
training could present a skewed view of success as the data
was missing one-third of the subjects. He reported that
rural Alaska graduation rates tended to track lower. He
considered that the bill was a tool for measurement
purposes tracking employment. He thought the database could
provide tracking from exploration-level training leading to
certificated courses leading directly to employment. The
bill protected identifiable student information and would
be valuable.
Representative Wilson asked if the program kept statistics
of students in the Northwestern Alaska Career and Technical
Center.
Mr. Walrath answered that the center kept records for
purposes of programming. The program had a small staff and
it was difficult to follow up on all former trainees. The
bill would provide a tool to extend beyond the capability
of the center.
Representative Wilson thanked Mr. Walrath for his work.
4:12:54 PM
Co-Chair Foster CLOSED public testimony.
Representative Wilson asked what information unions used to
follow students.
Ms. Butler answered that generally unions engaged in
tracking but did not know what specific elements were
considered.
Representative Wilson would appreciate the information. She
referenced statistics from DLWD. She wondered about the
data unions gathered to show success of apprenticeships.
She asked about other issues unions might have finding
students to do apprenticeships.
Co-Chair Seaton appreciated the bill and the Alaska
Performance Scholarship report in the packets (copy on
file). He thought the information could be helpful in
identifying effective programs. He referenced page 3 of the
bill and asked about the removal of personal information
from the database. He wanted to know if the bill was
proposing to look at key elements. He asked about the
meaning of "unit data."
Ms. Butler responded that "unit data" simply meant data
that referred to a specific individual.
Co-Chair Seaton tried to understand how unit data would be
organized.
4:16:31 PM
Ms. Butler explained that as the unit data was received,
the personally identifiable information would be stripped
off, and the remaining statistics that would be used would
be assigned a random number and moved into a separate
database. She confirmed that an individual's personally
identifiable information would never be stored in the same
database as the statistics being used for outcomes
reporting.
Representative Guttenberg reiterated what he thought Ms.
Butler was saying. He wondered about the assignment of an
identifiable number. He wondered how new data would be
identified to merge with existing data.
Ms. Butler indicated that Representative Guttenberg had the
right idea. She indicated that there was staff available to
provide additional detail.
Representative Guttenberg was fine.
Vice-Chair Gara MOVED to report HB 221 out of Committee
with individual recommendations and the accompanying fiscal
note.
Representative Wilson OBJECTED. She would be offering an
amendment.
Co-Chair Foster indicated that amendments were due
Wednesday, April 2nd by 5:00 PM.
Vice-Chair Gara WITHDREW his motion.
Co-Chair Foster thanked the bill sponsor.
HB 221 was HEARD and HELD in committee for further
consideration.