Where will the workers come from?

The State puts its finger on the shortcomings of the Knowledge Sector Council the legislature wants to set up:

Long gone are the days when cheap land and cheaper labor could lure manufacturers to our state; China easily out-cheaps us today. Besides, our problem isn’t so much that we can’t attract jobs — even though too many people are jobless, we’re growing jobs at record levels. It’s that we can’t attract high-paying jobs.
Our best hope for finding those jobs is where our universities’ cutting-edge research meets the entrepreneurial spirit. Unfortunately, we start this quest at a severe disadvantage. Worse, the plan by House and Senate leaders doesn’t even acknowledge that, much less put forward any idea of how to address it. Worse still, they and the governor have a dismal track record.
USC, Clemson and MUSC might make amazing research breakthroughs and collaborations, but the products and jobs they spin off will do little to lift up our economy as long as we lack the foundation to support the knowledge sector — an educated workforce, capable of far more complex tasks than flipping burgers.
Why don’t we have that workforce? Our schools are one reason; despite impressive gains, they aren’t doing enough. They can and must make some improvements on their own. But the Legislature must give them more tools as well, from funding to additional authority.
Poverty begets poverty, ignorance begets ignorance, and until we break the second cycle, we’ll never escape the first. There’s a limit to how much a teacher can do for a child who starts out years behind her peers and never gets the support she needs to catch up. The key to breaking that cycle is getting kids to start school ready to learn — able to count and recognize colors, to hold a book and understand they can’t hit other kids. That means getting them into earlier pre-kindergarten programs, or teaching their parents how to teach them these skills, or both.
Providing that leg up for poor kids isn’t a foreign concept; it’s just one our Legislature has treated as foreign. Two and a half years after Circuit Judge Thomas Cooper ruled that the state was failing to give children an opportunity to receive a decent education because it wasn’t providing enough early intervention, the Legislature has offered 4K to a few thousand more kids. That’s a small fraction of the kids who need it. And 4K is a small fraction of what we need to offer, either to kids or to their parents, to get them ready to learn.
Legislators are right to work at the highest rungs of the educational ladder to build the infrastructure for the knowledge sector. If we wait for a generation of better-prepared workers, it’ll be decades before we see results. But if we don’t get to work on that foundation — on raising up a generation of well-prepared kids — then we’ll never see the results we want.