Coming US Challenge: A Less-Literate Workforce

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

US workers may be significantly less literate in 2030 than they are today.

The reason: Most baby boomers will be retiring and a large wave of less-educated immigrants will be moving into the workforce. This downward shift in reading and math skills suggests a huge challenge for educators and policymakers in the future, according to a new report from the Educational Testing Service (ETS).

If they can’t reverse the trend, then it could spell trouble for a large swath of the labor force, widen an already large skill gap, and shrink the middle class.

“There is no time that I can tell you in the last hundred years” where literacy and numeracy have declined, says Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston and one of the report’s authors. “But if you don’t change outcomes for a wide variety of groups, this is the future we face.”

The decline in literacy is one of the more startling projections in a report that examines what it calls a “perfect storm” of converging factors and how those trends are likely to play out if left unchecked.

The three factors: “a shifting labor market increasingly rewarding education and skills, a changing demographic that include a rapid-growing Hispanic population, and a yawning achievement gap, particularly along racial and socioeconomic lines, when it comes to reading and math.”

The researchers, however, also point out that it might not be as bad as they predict. That being said, that the future is grim seems to be quite clear. What they want to do is to “call attention to urgent issues that affect not just many Americans’ lifestyle, but the sort of democracy based on an informed middle class that the country was founded on.”

So, what to do? Firstly, of course, ‘getting the message out’. Americans have to know about this. Secondly, according to the researchers, increase “attention and resources to early childhood education, to the social factors that affect young children, to continuing adult education, and to programs that keep kids from dropping out of school and address the achievement gap.”

Go over to the CSM to read the entire article, it seems to me that Americans have to be aware of this and have to do everything necessary to counter this development.

In the Netherlands we are focusing on becoming a ‘knowledge economy’. We have made mistakes and we will continue to make them, but we learn from them and continue on our path towards K.E.

Focusing on being a knowledge economy is a requirement for every Western country as to be able to compete with certain other countries in the future (like India, China, etc.), or so it seems to me.