As baby boomers retire, the American workforce will become dumber and dumber…
…according to a new report from the Educational Testing Service.
Specifically, three factors are converging in a “perfect storm” that is turning the American labor force into a highly illiterate one, profoundly impacting our ability to compete: 1) the educational and skills gap between the races, 2) a global economy that rewards the educated and highly skilled; and 3) the influx of non-English speaking hispanic illegal aliens into the workforce.
Download the PDF version of “America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future.” The report also includes a brief history of the U.S. economy and the role education has played. I suggest you read it and draw your own conclusions because this post provides only a snapshot of its findings, interspersed with my highly biased commentary. This post by no means includes all arguments and points mentioned in the report or arguments relevant to education, jobs skills, poverty, the economy, or whatever else you can think of.
This Christian Science Monitor story summarizes the report.
Educational and Skills Gap
According to the report, blacks and hispanics “lag considerably” behind whites and Asians in educational achievement. The high school graduation rate for blacks is 50 percent, hispanics 53 percent, whites 75 percent, and Asians 77 percent. Although the U.S. ranks near the top in per-pupil spending, it ranks in the middle among international achievement.
(In the case of Washington D.C., among the nation’s highest in per-pupil spending, consistently ranks near the bottom nationally.)
Exacerbating the educational and skills gap is the fact that “minorities” continue to have disproportionately high out-of-wedlock birth rates. These parents tend to lack high school diploma’s and come from fatherless poor households themselves. They repeat the cycle, giving birth to children likely to be poor and have children out-of-wedlock. The scenario will play out generation after generation. From the report:
[C]hildren raised in low-income, single parent families often suffer from a number of critical cognitive, health, and nutritional deficits that are likely to limit their future academic achievement and educational attainment.
White Americans may care about the deficits, but whites everywhere else don’t. Black Americans won’t be able to appeal to white guilt in the global economy. Now that illegal aliens are replacing native-born blacks in low skilled industries, the employment outlook for lower educated blacks is becoming worse. Consequently, getting an education and acquiring higher level job skills are more important than ever for black Americans.
Trivia: Did you know that foreign-born blacks performed better on the prose literacy portion of national literacy surveys than native-born blacks?
Global Economy
In an increasingly outsourced labor market, owed in part to innovative technology (especially information technology, i.e., computers, broadband), international trade agreements and the like, the demand for highly skilled workers is growing. From the report:
There also has been a dramatic shift in the composition of the job distribution in America toward professional, management and management support, technical, and high-level sales positions. Many of the faster-growing private-sector services and financial industries employ a greater proportion of individuals in these college-labor-market occupations. At the same time, changes in technology and the mix of industries in manufacturing have also increased the demand for workers with these skills.
In other words, the global economy favors innovation and highly literate workers with college degrees. If Americans mired in a cycle of poverty, which contributes to low educational attainment, don’t reverse the trend, they will be virtually left out of the global economy, contributing nothing and living on government crumbs.
Trivia: In 1979, the expected lifetime earnings of men with a college degree were 51 percent higher than for men with only a high school diploma. By 2004, expected lifetime earnings were 96 percent higher.
Illiterate Illegal Aliens
Back in the day, immigrants flocked to the United States, ready, willing, and able to become assimilated, English-speaking Americans. They prized not only America’s opportunities but what America symbolized. These immigrants didn’t just want a good job or higher standard of living. They wanted to be productive and proud Americans.
Today’s “immigrants,” mostly from Central America, have no such ambitions. They come to the U.S. for the employment opportunities and to take advantage of America’s social services. They know what suckers we are for the “disadvantaged,” and they use our own generosity and laws against us.
Not only are illegal aliens pouring across the border, they’re reproducing at higher rates than the native population. Since the federal government is uninterested in carrying out immigration law, illegal aliens are here to stay. This new wave of “immigrants” is uneducated, poor, lacks good English-speaking skills, has disproportionately higher rates of out-of-wedlock births and crime. While black Americans have the convenient white boogeyman to point to as the cause of all their troubles, illegal aliens aren’t really complaining or blaming anyone for anything. At least not yet.
Lower skilled Americans are the ones most negatively affected by illegal aliens. From the report:
Over this same period, nearly half of the projected job growth will be concentrated in occupations associated with higher education and skill levels. This means that tens of millions more of our students and adults will be less able to qualify for higher paying jobs. Instead, they will be competing not only with each other and millions of newly arrived immigrants but also with equally (or better) skilled workers in lower-wage economies around the world.
Wrap-Up
Just focusing on blacks for the time being, I’m convinced that living in a stable family is necessary for the success of a black child today. There are certainly exceptions — the poor black child with an uncaring parent rising to the top academically and professionally — but generally speaking, that’s not the way it works.
Back in the day when blacks as a group valued education more than they do now, even poor blacks did what they had to do – work two or three jobs – to pay their way through schools or send family members to school.
Somewhere along the line, the black “self-help” mantra shifted to a “government action” mantra. Subsequent generations lost the self-help motivation. That, in my opinion, has been devastating. In a global economy, it’s more important than ever that people start taking advantage of opportunities sitting right in front of them. Those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder can no longer afford to sit back, mired in ignorance and victimhood. They are being left behind, and there will be fewer white people around who care.
Get this through your thick heads: No government program will ever close the educational achievement gap (Correction: Only if the program dumbs down the standards) or wipe out poverty. Individuals must take responsibility for their own situations and find the motivation and determination to alter their own life course. Parents must push their kids to stay in school and succeed (even in a lousy school), but that is assuming the parents care about their kids staying in school and succeeding in the first place. The kind of people who make babies without the foresight and intelligence to form families first are less likely to motivate their kids.
Children of these parents have a tough road ahead of them. They learn warped values in a subculture that claims to care about education but doesn’t practice it. In their world, everything comes down to one thing: victimhood and government handouts. No one taught them that they are indeed masters of their own destinies. No one taught them that education is valuable in itself, let alone where it can take them in this life. I have no sympathy for the adults in this scenario, only for the children of these dolts.
My disgruntled critics love bringing up the fact that “white people do it too” when I write about illegitimacy and crime. It’s a stupid response, really, because we’re talking about proportionality, a concept liberals understand when it comes to race preferences and entitlements but suddenly become ignorant about when the discussion drifts toward crime, poverty, and out-of-wedlock birth statistics. 
Yes, social pathologies are found in all races and in all socioeconomic classes, but they’re found not only in greater proportions in the black community, the damage they cause is much worse. For example, during the “free love” era of the 1960s, sexual standards were relaxed, as was the stigma against getting knocked up. Whites were better equipped to absorb the negative impact of sexual permissiveness (increased rates of sexually transmitted diseases, fatherless children, etc.) than blacks. In a group with higher poverty and illegitimacy rates to begin with, the loosening of moral standards was akin to letting loose an aggressive virus.
People are always whining to me about solutions. Solutions. “What don’t you offer solutions instead of criticizing black folks, La Shawn,” they drone. The thing is, I always offer solutions and suggestions, but those solutions and suggestions aren’t what they want to hear. Absent from my list are any references to white people or slavery or government action.
Blacks have within themselves the power to stop committing crimes, stop having sex outside marriage, and to hold a job, any job, learn new skills and network with people who can steer them toward higher paying jobs. These things are not lofty or unrealistic. They are highly do-able and necessary if blacks, especially blacks with lower job skills and educational attainment, want to improve their lot, compete in the global arena, and live decent and productive lives.
Addendum: Some people just can’t help themselves when it comes to the “white people do it, too” refrain. It’s some sort of reflexive yet misguided and pointless defense tactic. Nothing in this post implies that whites don’t “do it, too.” But…oh, never mind. Whatever I say will be ignored anyway.
Related:
- Review of Enough, by Juan Williams
- Review of Raising Boys Without Men
- Hispanics vs. Blacks: The Battle For ‘Preferred Minority’ Status
