PROVIDENCE -- Nearly one in five Rhode Islanders over 25 have no high school diploma, and some 50,000 have less than a ninth-grade education. The state is home to some 150,000 immigrants, and 3,000 more arrive each year. About 60,000 speak little or no English.
In the old economy, these people could get jobs. Most mill work required virtually no literacy, no math skills, no English.
But the mills are almost all gone now. And the companies building the new economy need workers who speak English, and can read complex instructions and handle sophisticated technology.
Rhode Island has a problem. It has plenty of workers and plenty of potential jobs, but the workers can't handle the jobs. Many can't even handle the training for the jobs.
As Gary M. Sasse, executive director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, told a state Senate committee yesterday, big parts of our work force are stuck in a "bottleneck."
What the state urgently needs, Sasse and more than a dozen leaders in economic development, public policy and education told senators yesterday, is to invest in educating those people so they can fill industries' needs.
For the last six years, Rhode Island has spent an average of $450,000 annually on adult education -- including adult basic education, GED preparation, and English as a Second Language.
Now a group of legislators led by Sen. Mary Parella, R-Bristol, want to boost that support to $3 million for fiscal 2002-03. Sasse and the others came to speak in support of the bill at a joint hearing of the Joint Finance Subcommittees on Education and Human Resources.
Asked by Sen. Aram Garabedian, D-Cranston, who chaired the hearing, why the state should make such a big investment, Nazneen Rahman, education director of the International Institute, replied:
"It's going to help this large group of people at the bottom, with low skills, to get up the economic ladder."
Christopher Bergstrom, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council, argued that it's not just the poor who will benefit -- but the entire state economy.
Rhode Island's growth in promising areas such as biotechnology and information technology is hampered by a lack of skilled workers, Bergstrom said. One of the state's deficits is on the technology-training end, but that's just part of it. Like Sasse, Bergstrom spoke about a "literacy bottleneck" -- companies need people with the knowledge and skills to understand and use texts, forms, tables and graphs, and do arithmetic operations.
Paul Harden, of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, cited a specific example of how this plays out in the job-training world. The Community College of Rhode Island has recently started a program to train welders at Quonset Point, to fill dozens of vacancies at companies such as Electric Boat.
To learn welding -- which requires, among other skills, being able to read directions and blueprints, and apply measurements -- the prospective students had to pass some basic competency tests. But 10 to 15 percent of the applicants didn't even have seventh-grade reading and math skills, Harden said. Some had second- and third-grade skills.
"If we're going to grow the Rhode Island economy, we need to address the adult-literacy problem," Harden said.
But as Education Commissioner Peter McWalters put it, adult-literacy programs in Rhode Island are haphazard -- "a patched-together system, catch them as you can."
And they barely scrape the surface of the problem.
In 2000, Bergstrom said, Rhode Island's adult-education programs served about 12,100 people, about a third in ESL. That's less than 5 percent of all adults who are functioning at less than high-school literacy, he said, and on the ESL front, less than 7 percent of Rhode Island adults with limited English proficiency.
Right now, with a major budget crunch, it's unclear what chances Parella's proposal has of being approved. But Garabedian, for one, was supportive.
At the end of the hearing, Garabedian noted that legislators have an obligation to pass laws that are "good for the whole," not just for select groups, and this seems to fit the bill.
"The literacy issue is right up on top -- without it, a lot of people suffer," he said. "It's probably the most critical area I can see."
