Posted on 02/20/2007 5:24:05 PM PST by A. Pole
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 identified are: 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 individual trends have been identified before, but this study makes an effort to examine their combined effects, and to project a disturbing future, including a sharply declining middle class in addition to the lost ground in literacy.
[...]
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Bump
Pretty hard to imagine. ;)
What conspiracy? How could we improve in almost every area of endeavor and go downhill in education. I do not lay any of it at the feet of immigrants. Our schools are dumbing down. There is no satisfactory explanation I have heard as of yet.
It isn't just the "newcomers" who are dragging things down -- it's also the native-born products of our $10-$12K/yr/pupil public school systems that aren't doing their jobs.
I pity the little children of today.
I pity the little children of today.
If this were true, then America should have perished during the great immigration; but the opposite happened.
IMHO, the Teachers Unions bear 75% of the blame, with poor parents picking up 25%. My Grandparents came from Norway, the other set from Switzerland; neither set spoke English. They taught themselves to speak English, they spoke English at their homes, they forced themselves to integrate with the American culture. These people didn't demand that teachers learn their native language, that the American culture change to meet their needs. They worked hard, and they prospered; and America prospered.
Today, we have a culture of victimhood. Our teachers are required to speak multiple languages, we have illegals who demand free medical care, federal papers prepared in their native tongue, and special privileges.
The Teacher's Union has managed to use this problem as an excuse to empower themselves, while providing a lower form of education. Add grade inflation into the mix, and America as we know it is simply doomed. We will not be the top nation in 50 years. India and China are going to overtake us technologically; it's inevitable.
Where we can't do enough for the losers in life, India and China spend their energies on the winners. Where we waste time on 'self-esteem' India and China tell their young that you either work and learn, or you starve and die.
Now on our local newspaper forum, these aren't foreigners, and I want to tell you so many of them cannot spell worth a darn and express themselves very poorly, I try not to nitpick at them and cut them some slack for dashing off a response; yet I suspect they tend to be from the younger generation, but are definitely homegrown types. They simply have very poor English skills.
I don't make any pretense of having perfected some of the finer points of the English language and have found myself having to check more which I attribute, transliterate letters, in part, to aging.
Frequently, I have exchanges with persons where English is not their first language, and their language skills, while not perfect, are amazing compared to some of our own where English is the only language they ever learned.
Perhaps they ought to have factored that into the lead article.
Notice at the bottom of the poster:"Get ready for the second coming". They don't even know what the second coming really means. This country is LOST.
Yep. It's as if demanding excellence from our children is somehow cruel.
Unlike previous waves of immigrants (and contrary to conventional wisdom), this is probably the first generation of immigrants that has not been permitted into the country for the labor they provide. These immigrants are moving here because this country sees them as ideal consumers, not producers.
An immigrant who can't speak English, believes anything he/she sees on television, and may well end up in prison -- but who is willing to spend 100% of what they earn -- is an attractive prospective "customer" in our post-industrial economy.
Bah-humbug!
The reason is the general dumbing down of the American educational system.
Been going on since the late 60s as far as I can tell.
I work with (mentor) kids from 4th grade through 12th grade. I am constantly amazed at the poor level of education they have.
They have trouble making the simplest of decisions and generally lack much common sense.
Most of them, the older kids, don't have much of a clue when it comes to stuff like picking the best price at the grocery store, how to change a flat tire or how a checkbook works.
I really feel sorry for them. They are in for a very scary wakeup call one of these days.
That about sums it up here in fealy-mealy America where psychiatry, psychosis, and teachers unions rule.
Well... we need ditch diggers too.
Actually, I don't believe much of this. Seems like every generation has assumed that it is the best educated in history, and every generation after them will be a bunch of slackers. There's a certain arrogance to this premise.
We haven't even begun to understand how the Internet is going to shape the flow and use of knowledge. If anything, the grand interconnectedness of intelligent people is going to accelerate the growth of knowledge and language.
One effect of the Internet that's yet to happen, but I will go ahead and predict: Homogenization of language globally, due to more connectedness. Perhaps not a complete uni-language for quite a while... but more and more cognates between languages and increased homogenization.
Which, in the long run, is probably a good thing.
But here's the rub: globally languages will slowly unify between english/russian/chinese/french/german... etc.
But not Arabic.
Many of our schools stink and gov't, IMHO should get out of education, but I still have to lay a lot of this at the feet of the parents (or lack thereof).
What's the problem? We will have more cleaning people.
"Homogenization of language globally"
Among other issues, the approaching conflict between America and China will ultimately resolve which nation's language will be the primary global language of trade and commerce.
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