Our Views for July 13

• Published: Jul 13, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Gov. Bobby Jindal and his administration, as well as the Legislature and the business community, deserve credit for tackling the tough and long-term issues of work-force development in Louisiana. Yet there is growing evidence not only in Louisiana but in the nation that the struggle will be longer and more difficult than heretofore predicted.

The Jindal administration should take a look at the report of the National Commission on Adult Literacy, convened by business groups concerned about the issue.

The commission’s study director was Cheryl King, former commissioner of adult education and work-force development in Kentucky, and now president of Kentucky Wesleyan College. David Perdue, who retired during the course of the study as chief executive of the Dollar General Corp., served as commission chairman.

The commission’s warnings are relevant to Jindal’s goals in this arena: While Jindal is correct in stating that Louisiana has a lower percentage of adults in the work force than the national average, it is probably a function of education — difficult to catch up with since two-thirds of the working-age population is probably beyond the reach of traditional schools — as well as training opportunities.

“Among the 30 (major) free-market countries, the U.S. is the only nation where young adults are less educated than the previous generation,” the literacy commission reported. “And we are losing ground to other countries in educational attainment.”

As Jindal forcefully has noted, the economy now requires at least some post-high-school occupational training to be ready for jobs in a global marketplace. “We must encourage more of our people to get an education, finish high school and continue their education after that,” the governor told the Press Club of Baton Rouge.

Yet the literacy commission noted that as many as 88 million adults in the United States have “at least one major educational barrier” to advancement.

Those include lack of basics such as a high-school diploma or community college certificate, but may include basics such as lack of reading competency or a poor grasp of English by immigrants.

“Every year, one in three young adults — more than 1.2 million people — drop out of high school,” the commission said. “Even more alarming, many high school graduates who do complete high school lack basic skills and readiness for job training and college.”

The issues are vast. The report of the literacy commission is damning, but there is no question that many states — including Louisiana — are aware of the importance of change toward economic competitiveness in the workplace.

From “redesign” of the high school experience to tough standards for LEAP tests in grade schools to experiments with specialized charter schools, much good work has been done in Louisiana. But educational attainment will lag until more reforms take hold.

We remain, in addition, behind in establishing a premier research university at LSU. Many Southern states have jump-started economic development through investments in higher education. It’s tough, after all, to upgrade the educational attainment of a state when its college-graduate population has found better opportunities in Austin and Atlanta or elsewhere during the past decade.

As Jindal noted at the Press Club — and he should have included kudos here to former Gov. Mike Foster — Louisiana is expanding its community college system to help meet the need for post-high-school education. And the new Louisiana Workforce Commission established by Jindal’s administration might be able to better align training opportunities with the job skills workplaces need.