I recently attended, in my role as the Chapter's Public Resource Information Manager, a conference put on by the Partnership for Learning (P4L) entitled "Real Learning for Real Life".
P4L is the educational foundation of the Washington Roundtable, an association representing our state's major employers. These days employers are very concerned about ensuring the jobs pipeline is filled with young people who are well-trained in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) subjects.
To explain how to better fill the pipeline, the conference featured two tracks. The first promoted the new Common Core State Educational Standards. The Core is designed to replace the current welter of 50 different state K-12 standards with a common set to promote consistent national excellence in education.
While the K-12 educational system is generally not the realm of the WLP profession, we do have to deal with the "products" -- the system's graduates and their newly acquired skill sets, adequate or not -- that emerge from it. So as professionals and concerned citizens, I believe we can collectively get behind a common sense reform like the Common Core.
The second track featured a summary of P4L's recent study on the skills gap in Washington state, presented by Dean Allen, president of the Seattle-based construction firm McKinstry, I reported on the study, entitled "Great Jobs Within Our Reach" in this space four months ago. Allen reiterated information from the report, the headline being that there are an estimated 25,000 unfilled jobs in Washington state, a number that is likely to grow unless substantial effort and resources are plowed into changing the picture.
The "Great Jobs" study was the reason I connected with P4L, because the skills gap is a critically important public policy issue for WLP practitioners, and for the American economy and society. National ASTD has been among the first and most effective voices in identifying the skills gap problem and providing the research and advocacy leadership in our country to address it. It is heartening to see research on this issue brought down to the state level. ASTDps and its members should be very much aligned with the Washington Roundtable on this as well.
And yet ...
People spotted some "elephants" in the room, or more apropos, the pipeline. First, in the conference's Q&A session a woman, whom I took to be a school board official, raised an important issue. She pushed back against several mentions of how poorly the United States does in international comparisons of educational achievement. The woman made reference to detailed studies, which dive beneath the widely-reported summary measures. These more granular analyses show U.S. students in fact do very well -- when the data are controlled for the levels of poverty by nation. (For example, see the Economic Policy Institute's January 28, 2013 report, "What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance?")
In short, America's educational shortcomings may be less a matter of "failing" schools or outdated standards than a problem of at-risk children who come to school from poor homes on empty stomachs.
It is always laudable and necessary to improve the educational system through initiatives like the Common Core. But WLP professionals, of all people, should know the importance of ensuring the real problem is being solved if we truly want to improve any outcome.
There is a second elephant that needs noticing. The conference focus was exclusively on students currently in the public K-12/16 educational systems. This may be explained largely, or even entirely, by P4L's purpose, which is concentrated entirely on representing the business community's views of how to improve the K-12/16 system.
But if our state's major employers are really serious about closing the skills gap, then they need to look at a comprehensive solution, not a partial solution predicated solely on educating young workers. It is hard to see, from even the most optimistic reading of the "Good Jobs" report, how sufficient numbers of workers can be trained to fill all of those 25,000 openings anytime soon relying solely on the state's school age population. Even if we converted every English major into an engineer (something that isn't likely to happen) or scored a significant improvement in the state's abysmal high school graduation rate (sad to say, I'm not sanguine about the chances for this either unless something is done about poverty), there would still likely be a yawning gap.
Yet there was no mention of retraining adults. No mention of any of the thousands of currently employed adults stuck in part-time or dead-end jobs. No mention of the legions of unemployed workers or those who have become so discouraged they have dropped out the labor force altogether and are no longer even counted as unemployed.
(Most of the observed decline in the unemployment rate is really due to more and more people giving up searching for work as a futile effort. Only a small amount of this drop in the labor force participation rate is accounted for by baby boomers retiring voluntarily. See ‘The Great Shift’: Americans Not Working" by David Leonhardt in the August 13, 2013 New York Times Economix blog.)
There is a huge opportunity here for the state's businesses -- and for the WLP profession. Many STEM jobs require, not a bachelor's degree, but rather the equivalent of an associate's degree or less (such as specialized vocational training, part or all of which can oftentimes be done on-the-job).But it will require imaginative plans to provide funding and support to make this happen.
By all means, let us support the adoption of new educational standards and find ways to place our young people on career ladders with the promise of a bright future. But let's work with P4L, the Washington Roundtable, our legislators, and others to build a economy that includes and serves everybody. In short, as the ASTDps mission states it, let's create a world that works better.
