February 08, 2007

A Nation of Dummies: workers may be less literate in 2030

From this:

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."

...[Irwin Kirsch, a senior research director at ETS and the lead author of the study] and the other researchers emphasize they're not saying the US is in any danger of collapse, or even that this grim scenario will come true. What they hope to do, they say, is 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.

Obviously, there are very powerful forces that oppose such an "informed middle class", prefering a system more like that in South America.

Posted to Immigration2007a at February 8, 2007 04:35 PM

Comments

its more like a people who have no ideals of freedom, the totally evil system in south America
is the one our so called leaders want for us all.

Posted by: Fred Dawes at February 8, 2007 06:50 PM

Alan Greenspan warned of this in his 11/3/05 "State of the Economy" speech.

Some choice quotes from the speech:

"We face threats to Democracy that not even our Constitution may protect us from"

and

"We've made promises we can't keep"

"Cuts have to be made"

That speech was the most truthful & dire I've ever heard by a public official in my life.

Posted by: Smitty at February 9, 2007 12:01 PM