America's economic position on Labor Day 1989 is not reassuring. The news from Wall Street was good this week, but our continuing competitiveness in world markets is going to depend on something that Wall Street cannot supply -- skilled workers. We don't have enough of them to meet current needs, and the situation is likely to get much worse. This is not news. But I don't think the reality of the "skills gap" has come home to most people. Partly because we're given to optimism -- it's almost un-American to admit we're in a tough spot. And partly because no one likes to think abut a problem that doesn't seem to have an easy answer.
A new report from the Department of Labor, Investing in People: A Strategy to Address America's Workforce Crisis, to be released tomorrow, goes beyond merely laying out the problem to propose some possible solutions. The writers of the report, a bipartisan commission of which I was a member, made up of leaders from business and labor, educators, economists and public policy analysts, see four areas where basic changes need to be made: (1) preparing young people who have not yet started work; (2) training and retraining experienced workers whose jobs have changed or been phased out; (3) making efficient use of people who already have necessary skills; and ( 4) providing data on which to base future policy decisions about the U.S. workforce.
Some of the solutions the report offers will sound familiar, but the composition of the commission gives the report weight and a feeling of urgency. When people who don't usually sit at the same table -- academics, presidents of unions and business leaders - get together to talk about a problem, it seems almost like a council of war.
Our schools, the report points out, are not meeting the needs of our economy; they are not preparing young people to be productive workers. When compared with students in other industrialized nations, "U.S. students lag behind in science and mathematics at every grade level. ... The top 5 percent of college-bound high-school seniors in the U.S. have scores in advanced mathematics comparable to the average score of all Japanese seniors." And if we need confirmation of what the test scores tell us, we can find it, the report reminds us, in the complaints of companies that discover that many of their young employees are so poor at reading and calculating they can hardly be trained.
Investing in People's strategies for change, some of which I've discussed in past columns, include getting students engaged with the work they do in school and linking school work with the world of work. The report sees incentives as an important tool for improving the schools. But it does not see change simply as something that's up to the schools; most of the strategies depend on cooperation -- on joint efforts between the schools and the business community or various levels of government.
Some of these changes would be relatively easy to make - a matter of logistics. Others would mean altering the curriculum in basic ways and, really, changing the way our schools run. It would not be difficult, for example, for businesses to link up school performances with hiring and promotion -- one of the report's suggestions -- or for an industry council to set up in-school employment bureaus where local businesses could advertise jobs to students. Nor would it be hard for schools to develop easily understood transcripts and provide them in a timely fashion to prospective employers. But carrying out these three suggestions would show that school counts and would provide students with incentives to work in school instead of just doing the minimum.
Some of the report's other suggestions include:
• Asking the business community to suggest course content and techniques of instruction "to meet the current and emerging needs of the workplace." The resulting courses might place less stress on competition and more on cooperative effort and practice in problem solving.
• Setting up a student-credentialing program based on voluntary tests. This would recognize student achievement in a wide variety of academic and vocational areas and would be a further incentive to excellence.
• Creating other incentive programs to recognize outstanding teachers and outstanding schools.
• Encouraging school restructuring. Investing in People sees this as a three-way effort involving schools, departments of education and the business community.
Investing in People takes this same cooperative approach in making suggestions about the other three problem areas it deals with. That's a real strength. It's easy enough to say that our current workforce is a crippling handicap to increasing our competitiveness, but fixing the problem is complicated. Schools can't go it alone. Neither can business or labor or government. We can close the skills gap only if various sectors of our society work together. If we achieve solidarity -- and that, after all, is the lesson of Labor Day.