[Reading-hall-of-fame] Labor Day Weekend 2021

[Thomas Sticht]

Labor Day Weekend September 4,5,6, 2021



September 3, 2021



Labor Day in a Nation Still at Risk in a Dangerous World



Thomas Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education (Ret.)



September 6, Labor Day 2021, finds the United States in a quandary because,
on the one hand we celebrate America’s workers for the richness of life
they have provided through their labor, while on the other hand we are
deeply troubled by the continuous erosion of the knowledge and skills of
our laboring workforce over the last half century and its effects on our
international competitiveness..



National attention was called to this erosion of America’s skills in 1983
when the blockbuster report “A Nation at Risk” was introduced by the U.S.
Government with the opening grabber "Our Nation is at risk. If an
unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as
an act of war." Among the indicators of the risk facing America in 1983
were the findings that about 13 percent of all 17-year-olds in the United
States could be considered functionally illiterate, with functional
illiteracy among minority youth running as high as 40 percent.  As adults,
23 million Americans were declared functionally illiterate.



Over 30 years later, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) reported in
An Education and Workforce Challenge “An assessment of adult skills by the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that
about 18 percent (35 million) of 16- to 65-year-olds in the United States
have low literacy skills and 30 percent (58 million)  have low skills in
working with and using mathematical information (numeracy). Hispanics and
Blacks are three to four times more likely than Whites  to have low
literacy skills and some one-third of low-skilled adults are immigrants.
This represents millions of American adults, including many working adults,
who struggle to use written text and numbers, and some two-thirds of these
low scoring adults possess high school diplomas or higher educational
achievement. Among the 22 OECD member countries included in the assessment,
12 countries ranked above the United States in literacy and 17 countries
ranked above the United States in numeracy” (
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bb74b8e4b0139570ddf020/t/55df6d61e4b0496d7ba2a500/1440705889654/PIAAC+Lit+and+Num-Infographic.png
).





*The Modern Language Association (MLA) reports that the average Scholastic
Aptitude Test       (* SAT) “ verbal score among college-bound seniors
decreased more than 8% between 1968 and 2014. From 1992 to 2013, the
percentage of 12th graders who scored below basic on reading achievement
increased from 20% to 25%, while those at or above proficient decreased
from 40% to 37%. In international reading assessments, the U.S. scored
23rd, behind China, Estonia, and Poland.” (
https://www.mla.org/content/download/52219/1812312/Infographic-Language-and-Literacy-3.pdf
)



A study by the Education Trust of some 350,000 high school graduates aged
17-20 who applied for enlistment in military service between 2004-2009
found that 23 percent of the test-takers failed to achieve a qualifying
score for entrance into the U.S. Army. The report went on to say, “Among
white test-takers, 16 percent scored below the minimum score required by
the Army. For Hispanic candidates, the rate of ineligibility was 29
percent. And for African-American youth, it was 39 percent. These dismally
high ineligible rates for minority youth in our subsample of data are
similar to the ineligible rates of all minority Army applicants as recorded
over the last ten years” (
https://edtrust.org/press-release/shut-out-of-the-military-more-than-one-in-five-recent-high-school-graduates-is-not-academically-qualified-to-enlist-in-the-u-s-army/
).



At the officer level, and consistent with the MLA data for high school
students, in which there was a three percent decline in the more proficient
students, researchers at the Brookings Institute reported that “…the
intelligence of new Marine Corps officers has declined steadily since 1940.
Two-thirds of the new officers commissioned in 2014 would be in the bottom
one-third of the class of 1980, 41 percent of new officers in 2014 would
not have qualified to be officers by the standards held at the time of
World War II…. This trend has not been caused by Marine Corps policies; it
is a reflection of the expansion of higher education in America. In 1980,
18.6 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were in college. Today, that number is
close to 30 percent. The dramatic rise in college attendance has increased
the pool of people eligible to become officers in the military (possession
of a bachelor’s degree being one of the chief requirements to be
commissioned as an officer in all branches), but it also means that
possession of a college degree is a less significant indicator of
intelligence now than it once was. Marine Corps officers have reflected
this trend, declining in average intelligence along with the population of
college graduates” (
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookingsnow/2015/07/24/understanding-the-steady-and-troubling-decline-in-the-average-intelligence-of-marine-corps-officers/
).



This  Labor Day while we celebrate America’s workers for building a great
Nation we must also aim to bring greater numbers of the workforce to higher
levels of achievement of the knowledge and skills needed in an increasingly
technologically complex and interactive world. Our national abundance,
international competitiveness, and national security demand it.



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