Grubb, W. N., Kalman, J., Castellano, M., Brown, C., & Bradby, D. (1991). Readin', writin' and 'rithmetic one more time: The role of remediation in vocational education and job training (MDS-309). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.

THE AMBIGUITY OF THE PROBLEM: THE NATURE OF BASIC SKILLS ^[3]

In one sense, the nature of the problem confronting educational institutions and job training programs seems obvious. Widely cited reports from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate that only fifty-eight percent of thirteen-year olds and eighty-six percent of seventeen-year olds perform at the "intermediate" level of reading, while only eleven percent of thirteen-year olds and forty-two percent of seventeen-year olds perform at the "adept" level (Kirsch & Jungeblut, 1986). Typical complaints describe the problem as a lack of very simple skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic operations:

The Department of Education estimates that there are about 27,000,000 adult Americans who can't really read. Almost all of them can sign their names and maybe spell out a headline. Most are totally illiterate in the way we used to define illiteracy. But they can't read the label on a medicine bottle. Or fill out a job application. Or write a report. Or read the instructions on the operation of a piece of equipment. Or the safety directions in a factory. Or a memo from the boss. Maybe they even have trouble reading addresses in order to work as a messenger or deliveryman. Certainly they can't work in an office. (Lacey, 1985, p. 10)

The consequences for business are often greater than for the individual's access to jobs. A joint report of the Departments of Education and Labor, pointedly entitled The Bottom Line: Basic Skills in the Workplace (1988), described one instance of the problem:

In a major manufacturing company, one employee who didn't know how to read a ruler mismeasured yards of sheet steel, wasting almost $700 worth of material in one morning. This same company had just invested heavily in equipment to regulate inventories and production schedules. Unfortunately, the workers were unable to enter numbers accurately, which literally destroyed inventory records and resulted in production orders for the wrong products. Correcting the errors cost the company millions of dollars and wiped out any savings projected as a result of the new automation. (p. 12)

In an article in the December 19, 1988 issue of Time magazine, Christine Gorman reported that "the skill deficit has cost businesses and tax payers $20 billion in lost wages, profits, and productivity. For the first time in American history, employers face a proficiency gap in the work force so great that it threatens the well-being of hundreds of U.S. companies" (p. 56). These kinds of complaints suggest the need for the kinds of remedial programs that we see most often in adult education, community colleges, JTPA programs, and welfare-to-work programs: efforts focused on teaching reading comprehension of simple paragraphs, writing coherent paragraphs, and applying arithmetic skills such as fractions, decimals, and long division--all staples of the elementary school, and "basic" by almost any definition.

Not surprisingly, though, the conception of what is "basic" varies substantially. The report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk--the report which in many ways ignited the reform efforts of the 1980s--identified the "New Basics" as four years of high school English, three years of math, three years of science, three years of social studies, and one-half year of computer science. The report then went on to specify the content of each area, outlining the need for capacities such as knowledge of "our literary heritage and how it enhances imagination and ethical understanding" (p. 25), geometry, algebra, elementary probability, and statistics--capacities well beyond simple arithmetic and reading for comprehension.

Other manifestoes define the problem somewhat differently, and identify still other capacities as "basic skills." A report of the American Society for Training and Development (Carnevale, Gainer & Meltzer, 1990), a group which sponsors training within firms, moves well beyond academic competencies in defining necessary skills:

Reading, writing, and math deficiencies have been the first to surface in the workplace; but, increasingly, skills such as problem-solving, listening, negotiation, and knowing how to learn are being seen as essential. . . . [Employees] are less supervised, but they are frequently called upon to identify problems and make crucial decisions. (p. 2)

The report, Workplace Basics: The Skills Employers Want, identifies as "basic skills" such capacities as adaptability, the ability to innovate, strong interpersonal skills, the ability to work in teams, listening skills, the ability to set goals, creativity, and problem-solving skills (Carnevale, Gainer, & Meltzer, 1990, chap. 2). Others have echoed the claim that simple academic abilities are insufficient:

Reading, writing, and arithmetic, however, are just the beginning. Today's jobs also require greater judgement on the part of workers. Clerks at Hartford's Travelers Insurance Company no longer just type endless claim forms and pass them along for approval by someone else. Instead they are expected to settle a growing number of minor claims on the spot with a few deft punches of the computer keyboard. Now, says Bob Feen, director of training at Travelers: "Entry-level clerks have to be capable of using information and making decisions." (Gorman, 1988, p. 57)

Still others have denied that any of these skills matter much, at least for the moment. The Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce surveyed a sample of firms, and only five percent reported that education and skill requirements are increasing. The Commission concluded that, with some exceptions, "the education and skill levels of American workers roughly match the demands of their jobs." Instead of deficiency in conventional skills, their sample identified a different area of deficiency (National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), 1990):

While businesses everywhere complain about the quality of their applicants, few refer to the kinds of skills acquired in school. The primary concern of more than 80 percent of employers is finding workers with a good work ethic and appropriate social behavior--"reliable," "a good attitude," "a pleasant appearance," "a good personality." (p. 24)

The report went on, however, to forecast a "third industrial revolution," one which will "usher in new high performance work organizations that have higher skill requirements than exist today" (p. 56), and then it outlined the necessary capacities, including "foundation skills." These skills include the following:

the demonstrated ability to read, write, compute, and perform at world-class levels in general school subjects (mathematics, physical and natural sciences, technology, history, geography, politics, economics and English). Students should also have exhibited a capacity to learn, think, work effectively alone and in groups and solve problems. (p. 69)

Like the "New Basics" of A Nation at Risk, this conception of "foundation skills" suggests the inadequacy of basic skills as conventionally defined for a world-class labor force, a point echoed by many others forecasting a continued increase in the skills necessary for the future workforce (e.g., see Johnston & Packer, 1987).

From these commission reports and manifestoes, then, comes an ambiguous definition of the problem. Whether basic skills should be defined as reading comprehension, simple writing abilities, and arithmetic computation, or as academic competencies usually associated with a college preparatory curriculum and restated in the "New Basics" and the "foundation skills" of more recent reports, is unclear. Whether the serious deficiencies in the labor force are those of simple academic competencies, "higher order skills" such as problem solving, interpersonal skills such as the ability to work in teams, or behaviors lumped under the term "work ethic" is another subject of contention. Whether workers need more sophisticated academic skills, or whether employers really need judgement--a highly complex capacity that requires the ability to understand the multiple goals of an organization and balance competing demands--is similarly unclear. Whether the deficiencies in the labor force are present now, or whether the current labor force is adequate to the tasks demanded of it but not to those of a future and still imaginary organization of work, has also been the subject of some dispute. Something seems amiss in the labor force; however, what is wrong and how to fix it are ambiguous.

A second major ambiguity involves the focus of concern--the question of who is suffering because of deficient skills. From one perspective, skill deficiencies are a problem because they make it impossible for individuals to qualify for jobs necessary to make them self-sufficient; they may be able to work at unskilled jobs--if they can manage to complete application forms and get hired--but they can't aspire to much more. Even so, most reports that focus on skill deficiencies have shown little concern for the well-being of individuals. Instead, what is at stake is the competitive condition of the country; and the major beneficiaries of remedial efforts appear to be employers and then the American economic system.

Both of these concerns are highly vocational and utilitarian; that is, they emphasize the purpose of enhancing basic skills, or eradicating illiteracy, in terms of employment and productivity on the job. In contrast, another parallel discussion about literacy and illiteracy has stressed that the capacities associated with literacy--including the reading and writing abilities usually included among basic skills--are valuable beyond their vocational goals; their purposes include political uses for informed citizens, familial uses for parents educating their own children, the ability to participate actively in community and non-work organizations, aesthetic goals for those who read fiction and poetry, avocational pursuits, and various forms of self-improvement too numerous to catalogue and even to describe as purposeful.[4] From this perspective, narrowing the definition of literacy to those forms which are job-related--as many of the commission reports do when they concentrate on the skills necessary to build a world-class workforce, or as functional context literacy does when it reduces literacy to those skills required in a specific work context (Kazemek, 1985)--is inappropriate, since individuals may seek to become literate for many different reasons (Fingeret, 1990).

In the context of institutions struggling to provide remedial education, these concerns may seem academic. Most community colleges are straining simply to keep up with the demands for remedial education and ESL, and most job training programs and welfare-to-work programs have found themselves without sufficient resources to provide very much basic skills instruction. In this situation, arguments about whether remediation and literacy programs ought to include more elements are simply pointless without additional resources. However, keeping the different conceptions of basic skills and literacy in mind helps interpret what programs are doing. For example, a program that relies heavily on individual computer-based instruction in reading and computation is quite different from one that uses a variety of reading, writing, and interactive activities to provide practice in interpersonal communication; what we will label the "skills and drills" approach to remediation has very different ambitions from the eclectic approaches sometimes developed in community colleges; and programs which link remediation to the requirements of particular jobs have advantages and disadvantages, compared to other programs, that are inseparable from their goals.

Most importantly, the current debates about basic skills and literacy, and the clarion calls to do something about the sorry state of the American labor force, cannot change federal and state policies without some decisions about the purpose of remedial efforts. To expand the nation's efforts in remediation, as many recent reports call for, it is necessary to specify what the scope of such efforts should be. Even if this is done by omission--by failing to specify the goals of remedial efforts, leaving that decision to local institutions--this still constitutes a decision about scope and purpose. When we return in the last section of this monograph to the questions of what ought to be done with the remedial programs that are part of vocational education and job training, the question of purpose will prove crucial.

[3] The logic of this section is drawn in part from Hull and Cook-Gumperz (1990).

[4] For some of the recent efforts to define literacy, or to specify what the purposes of literacy are, see Venezky, Wagner, and Ciliberti (1990); "Literacy in America" (1990); deCastell, Luke, and Egan (1986); Kintgen, Kroll, and Rose (1988); Graff (1986); and Gee (1989).

Grubb, W. N., Kalman, J., Castellano, M., Brown, C., & Bradby, D. (1991). Readin', writin' and 'rithmetic one more time: The role of remediation in vocational education and job training (MDS-309). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.