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The Center for the Study of Human Resources (CSHR) is the only institute of its kind in the southwestern United States. Funded entirely by research contracts, CSHR has built a national and international reputation by working on issues that are at the forefront of current public debate--education, workforce development, welfare reform, health policy, and program accountability. |
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LBJ School Associate Dean Leigh Boske, who directed the Center from 1991 to 1996, said CSHR's research and evaluation efforts have been providing decisionmakers with concrete recommendations on which to base policy changes since it was established in 1970. "Over the years, the Center's work has had a direct and profound impact on Texas and the country," he said. In the early to mid-1970s, when Ray Marshall was the director of CSHR (see related story), the Center helped model the minority women's employment project, which placed many of these women in nontraditional jobs. Alexis Herman, the current U.S. Secretary of Labor, directed this project with Robert Glover, now an internationally known CSHR research scientist who specializes in apprenticeship, school-to-work transition, and skill standards. Later, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, CSHR helped model the Apprenticeship Outreach Program with the support of private foundations and the federal government. Subsequently, this program became a major U.S. Department of Labor effort and played an important role in placing minorities and women in apprenticeship programs from which they had been systematically excluded. During the late 1980s, CSHR conducted research for the National Commission for Employment Policy that eventually led to provisions that were included in the 1992 reform of the Job Training Partnership Act. "This legislation, passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President George Bush, encouraged states to create overarching human resource investment councils for all of the state's workforce programs," said Chris King, who conducted the research and now heads the Center. More recently, the Center's work has helped shape important Texas policy--providing the framework for legislation, evaluating existing programs, and briefing top-ranking legislators and administrators--n such areas as welfare reform, youth policy, school-to-work policy, and workforce development. |
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