Michael J. Handel

Worker Skills and Job Requirements: Is There A Mismatch?, by Michael J. Handel, Economic Policy Institute, December 2005

Welfare Reform: More Information Needed to Assess Promising Strategies to Increase Parents, by Government Accountability Office (GAO) , General Accounting Office, December 2005

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However, Michael J. Handel, author of the new study, "WorkerSkills and Job Requirements: Is There a Mismatch?"
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have shrunk, said Handel.

[Michael Handel, Worker Skills and Job Requirements: Is There a Mismatch, Economic Policy Institute, 2005]

To date, our laments have gone for naught, but now we are joined by two well-known researchers at two well-known organizations: Paul Barton of ETS and Michael Handel of the Economic Policy Institute.
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Barton put together a summary monograph, High School Reform and Work: Facing Labor Market Realities, while Handel penned a small book, Worker Skills and Job Requirements: Is There a Mismatch?
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Handel observes that employers have been complaining about young workers for decades but that the complaints don't follow the kids into adulthood. "As workers age and shoulder more adult responsibilities," Handel says, "they grow out of casual work attitudes and adjust to -- or are socialized into [conditioned into? brainwashed into?] -- the workplace norms of the jobs they consider worth keeping."
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Handel's chapter examining test scores of various kinds concludes that they don't mean much. He finds the correlation between Gross Domestic Product and adult literacy scores to be virtually zero -- even when Sweden, an outlier, is removed from the analysis and even when the GDP is adjusted for hours worked. Handel also makes a salient point about what tests measure:
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The chapter on this issue leads Handel to conclude that there might have been a modest increase in required skills in recent years, but certainly any such increases are not rising faster than in the past.
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Barton and Handel are highly skeptical.