Nation Should Focus On Closing Jobs & Earnings Gaps Caused By Poor Literacy.

Substantial differences in the literacy skills of America’s adults are leading to a growing number of employment and earnings gaps between the literacy haves and have-nots. These gaps can be partly addressed through expanded workplace education and improved training, says a new report from the ETS Policy Information Center.

The report, Pathways to Labor Market Success: The Literacy Proficiency of U.S. Adults, is the fourth in a series that draws on the vast amount of data from the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) and the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). The authors review the prose, document and quantitative proficiencies of the employed in the United States and other countries and the links between the occupations, wages, and earnings of workers and their literacy skills. The report was co-written by Andrew Sum of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University and Irwin Kirsch and Kentaro Yamamoto of ETS.

“Workers with the `richest’ literacy proficiencies were far more likely than their less literate peers to enrich their human capital through personal and employer investments both on and off the job,” writes Sum. “As the rich get richer in human capital, these widening human capital disparities will exacerbate the already large wage and earnings differentials over a person’s work life.” The authors report that low proficiency scores result in:

— lower rates of labor force attachment and employment

— large gaps in earnings between the most and least literate

— constraints on occupational mobility and the ability of firms to develop high-performance work organizations

— more limited growth in the size of the resident labor force

— limits on realizing the nation’s potential for economic growth

If unaddressed, the proficiency and related employment and earnings gaps will only get worse, according to the report, which cites U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections showing that, over the 2000-2010 decade, jobs in occupations requiring formal postsecondary degrees or postsecondary vocational credentials are projected to grow by 9.3 million, accounting for 42 percent of all job growth in the country.

The authors also note that, when ranked against the mean proficiency scores of other individual high-income countries, the United States fell only in the middle of the pack with respect to prose skills and in the bottom third on document and quantitative scales. “On none of the three literacy scales were the employed in the United States a world leader,” Sum adds.

“Existing workers and future workers need to be made more aware of both their current proficiencies and those needed to gain entry into higher-skilled and higher-wage occupations,” says co-author Irwin Kirsch of ETS’s Global Assessment area. “Our ability to expand the pool of well-educated and well-trained labor will be critically dependent on substantive improvements in the literacy proficiencies of our population.”

The report notes, “There is a clear need for federal and state governments to work with private sector employers, labor unions, and other education/training providers to expand job-related educational and training investments in the nation’s front-line workers, especially those at the bottom half of the literacy distribution.”

“As a nation, we need to do more than add resources to existing workplace education and training efforts,” Yamamoto adds. “We must also demand reform of these systems to broaden participation of more front-line workers in these programs, integrate occupational/technical training with literacy training, and demand greater accountability for results.”

For more information at http://wwwts.org