Washington— America’s employers need what America’s schools are failing to produce; literate, diciplined, responsibly competent workers. Even at the entry level, there is a serious—and growing—gap between what our young people are learning and what business needs them to know.

That is the message delivered last week by the secretaries of education, labor and commerce. And there was this warning; If America doesn’t learn to do a better job educating its youth, more and more jobs will be lost to overseas competitors and more and more young people will find themselves on the economic scrap heap.

The report—and the roundtable conference called to announce it—was unusual in two ways. First, it marked a rare collaboration among Cabinet agencies. Labor Secretary Anne McLaughlin, in her post only since last November, persuaded Education Secretary William Bennete and Commerce Secretary C. William Verity to join her in the undertaking, “Building a Quality Workforce.” Second, not one of the 50 or so participants in the forum—educators, government officials and business leaders among them—offered a serious challenge to its gloomy thesis.

No doubt that was partly because the evidence is incontrollable, partly because no one was singled out for blame.

The problem, the report contends, is not that the schools are less competent than they once were but that work is more complex than it ever was.

The day of the simple job, requiring only rudimentary skills and a willingness to work hard is gone. Sue Berryman, director of the National Center on Education and Employment, illustrated the point by describing what has happened in the insurance industry.

Computerization, she said, has caused five jobs to be melded into one. What used to be a succession of simple tasks calling for “specific and splintered knowledge” now requires people with good communications skills and the ability to analyze customer needs, to understand several types of information and the relationship among them and to deal with nonstandard requests.

Work that use to be done by high-school graduates, or even dropouts, now requires workers with at least two years of college.

But if the work is more sophisticated than ever, the applicants aren’t. A survey of business executives, which was commissioned as the heart of the report, found that two-thirds of them see their current application pools as lacking in such baseline skills as reading, math, communications skills, ordinary problem-solving ability and basic attitudes and work habits.

The survey findings reported: “Writing skills continue to decline…We notice a problem of follow-through—the inability to think through or take ownership of the problems they unearth…there’s a widespread attitude of ‘That’s not my job’…they are too dependent upon specific, explicit instructions.”

Most of the conferees agreed that industry must take a more active role in public education—both to provide direct assistance and to communicate to educators what they require entry-level workers to know.

But as Albert Shanker, head of the American Federation of Teachers, pointed out, the problem is not that schools are ignorant of the requirements but that they haven’t figured out how to impart these basic skills to non-college-bound students who constitute the bulk of the problem.

Leaving aside the Japanese, who are a “special case,” most of the countries with which American schools are unfavorably compared have heavily tracked school systems, Shanker said. “When I came along in the 1940s, we had the kind of schools we’ve been describing. But we also had an 80 percent dropout rate.” Now that we’re trying to keep virtually every child in school at least through high school, we have to learn new ways of teaching them, he said.

What is needed, in short, is “a complete restructuring of American schools.”