Emphasis mine. There are no measures of the effectiveness of anything else in TSA either.
The fact that TSA does not need to prove it is effective (or cost-effective) at any level or for anything should tell everyone what they need to know about this theatrical power grab.
Originally Posted by
bpshell
Via the Washington
Post Federal Eye Blog. This may partly explain why TSA procedures vary so much from airport to airport.
U.S. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson released a DHS Inspector General's report on TSA's training program for screeners. The chart on page 27 is worth the price of admission: new hires get 80 hours of coursework and 60+ hours of on-the-job training. (Or about half the length of my long-ago Air Force basic training.) The report is here:
http://www.dhs.gov/xoig/assets/mgmtr...1-05_Oct10.pdf
What the IG found was, no surprise, disorganization. Some quick points:
- TSA established a training division in 2006, but it "did not assume leadership until 2009"
- There is no written procedure for updating training courses
- There are no measures of training program effectiveness
- During OJT, a new screener is most likely to have only one person monitoring him or her
- Employees often don't train on the equipment they will be using
- Some training computers are far from checkpoints, while others are located inside checkpoint areas, where trainees are surrounded by distractions
- Employees are not given adequate time to finish computer-based lessons, so they rush through them
No wonder that when encountering a TSO, YMMV.