In June 2008 a National Commission on Adult Literacy presented the final report of a two year study of the skills of the American workforce and the demands for skills in the workplace. Entitled "Reach Higher, America: Overcoming Crisis in the U.S. Workforce", the report states "Almost a decade into the 21st Century, America faces a choice: We can invest in the basic education and skills of our workforce and remain competitive in today's global economy, or we can continue to overlook glaring evidence of a national crisis and move further down the path to decline." (p. v)

Continuing its claims of a crisis in the U. S. workforce due to low skills,  the Commissions report goes on to state: "Americans should have been
stunned when the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), released in 2005, revealed that a staggering 30 million American adults scored at

"below basic "-meaning they could perform no more than the most rudimentary literacy tasks. Another 63 million adults could perform only
simple, basic everyday literacy activities.1 The NAAL findings are ominous because most good jobs require at least some education beyond high
school. The NAAL found that of the approximately 222 million adults aged 16 or older living in households or prisons in the United States, some
93 million lack literacy at a level needed to enroll in the postsecondary education or job training that current and future jobs require. This
alarming number should have produced a national outcry. But-at a time when our economy and welfare are more dependent on knowledge and skills than ever before-there was barely a whisper." (p. 2)

Why has there been "barely a whisper" in the face of this workforce skills  crisis? There are no doubt many factors involved, but one of them seems to
be that the claim of such a crisis is challenged by another stream of reports by organizations and individuals. For instance, in a recent article online at
http://www.ednews.org,, Dennis Redovich, a job skills specialist(www.jobseducationwis.org) surveyed a number of the claims of workforce skills deficits and concluded Quote: "Reality is 1. For the majority of the jobs in the world and the U. S., basic reading, writing, arithmetic, and developing a work ethic may be required. 2. Education for education sake is good and is helpful in getting a job and doing well. However there is a surplus of highly educated workers for jobs that require higher levels of education and training. 3. A majority of jobs in the United States workforce require only short-term or moderate length on the job training or experience. About 21% of jobs might require a bachelor's degree or more. About 32% of workers in 2003 in the U. S. workforce 25 years and over had a Bachelor's degree or more. 5. About 5% of jobs in the
United States in the 2000s might require higher math and or science course work."

In a September 2006 article in Phi Delta Kappan, Gerald Bracey has an article in which he notes that for years both he and Redovich "have been
screaming about what we might call the "high-skills hoax" -- the notion that everyone must have high skills." He goes on to say, Quote: "It's not
that we don't recognize a civil rights issue in the debate -- everyone should have the opportunity to develop the skills to land a high-paying  job. However, we understand the law of supply and demand, and we knowabout what jobs are actually being created. In fact, if everyone became
highly skilled, the wages of skilled labor would fall, and the unemploymentrates for skilled workers would rise, a condition conducive to socialunrest." End quote

Both Redovich and Bracey point to research indicating that the workforceof the near future (e.g., up to 2020) will not face a future dominated by jobs with postsecondary or college degree requirements. Bracey states,Quote: "Most new jobs, though, continue to be in the low-paying service sector. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues its 10-year job creation forecasts, the number of new jobs for retail sales clerks alone approaches the number for the 10 fastest-growing jobs combined. At present, the number of people with bachelor's degrees is just about right to fill the proportion of jobs requiring them, and that proportion is not projected toincrease much in the near future. Producing a great many more college grads will . . . well, here we are again, back to supply and demand. Parallel to the claim that we will need more skilled workers is the claim that there is a mismatch between jobs and the skills of workers: workers don't havethe skills that employers demand. We have argued against this, too." End quote.

In 1998 I prepared a paper for the U. S. Department of Education entitled Beyond 2000: Future Directions for Adult Education. In that report I drew
upon work from the Hudson Institute [Judy, R. & D'Amico, C. (1997) Workforce 2020: Work and Workers in the 21st Century. Indianapolis, IN:
Hudson Institute] looking at the education and skills requirements of jobs up to the year 2020. I concluded that Quote "If the new Hudson Institute
report is correct, 65-75 percent of the new jobs in the fastest growing occupations will require language and mathematics skills at or below the 8th grade level in school. . Regarding the so-called "skills gap," then, what can be said for certain is that the last decade and a half has witnessed a plethora of analyses to find out if such a gap exists and to this date there has been no definitive answer (there is not even agreement on what is meant by the word "skills," see papers for the National Academyof Sciences edited by Lesgold, Feuer, & Black, 1997). This debate is likely to persist into the next millennium." End quote.

Now we are nearing the end of the first decade of the new millennium and we find that, indeed, the great debate about workforce skills and job
demands goes on. The recent report of the National Commission on Adult Literacy is the latest in the stream of reports decrying the skills of the workforce and portending a crisis for our global competitiveness. On the other side of the debate are the reports by Bracey, Redovich and the analysts they cite who argue that we are not facing a workforce skills crisis that threatens our national economy nor our international competitiveness.

This debate may contribute to some degree to the conclusion of the Reach Higher America report that, despite the surveys of adult literacy conducted by the U. S. Department of Education suggesting that some 93 millionadults lack literacy at a level needed to enroll in the postsecondary education or job training that current and future jobs require, barely awhisper has been heard. More to the point, little by way of policy and funding for the Adult Education and Literacy System of the United Stateshas changed, and the system continues to work staffed mostly by part-time and volunteer teachers, with an obscene level of funding of barely $800 per enrollment. This does not signal to me that a crisis exists in the skills of the workforce.

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
Email: mailto:tsticht@aznet.net

Published July 11, 2008