The recession has taken a huge toll on the national and regional economy over the past year. Many of the tens of thousands of jobs that have been lost won't be coming back, and when job openings do appear, the competition for them will be more intense than ever.

Unfortunately, the Pittsburgh Region isn't doing well enough in preparing its children to succeed in an increasingly competitive, knowledge-based economy. More than 30 percent of the 11th-graders in the 10-county region can't read adequately, and more than 40 percent can't do math properly. In other words, one out of every three high school graduates in southwestern Pennsylvania isn't proficient in the most basic skills.

We wouldn't expect a business to survive if one-third of its products were defective. How can we accept the fact that a third of our public schools' graduates don't have the skills the schools are supposed to teach them?

If the percentages don't frighten you, the numbers should: Our region's schools are graduating more than 11,000 students every year who don't have the minimum skills needed to compete in the economy. Over the past four years, more than 40,000 southwestern Pennsylvania teenagers have entered the work force without an adequate ability to read, do math or both.

What's worse, school performance in the region isn't improving. There was essentially no change in 11th-grade math and reading proficiency rates between 2006 and 2009.

It's not just a problem with our high schools. The problem starts much earlier. Nearly one-third of the fifth-graders in our elementary schools can't read properly either, and nearly one-fourth aren't proficient in math.

You might think that the biggest problems are in the city of Pittsburgh, since media coverage of schools tends to focus almost exclusively on the Pittsburgh Public Schools. But the fact is that 90 percent of the 11th-graders in the region who aren't meeting proficiency standards are in school districts outside of Pittsburgh, and more than half of them are in schools in the nine counties outside of Allegheny County.

In other words, we can blame Pittsburgh for only 1,000 of the region's nonproficient graduates each year; the other 10,000 are coming from the other 124 school districts in the region.

If you think poor performance isn't a problem in your own school district, you're probably wrong. Only four of the 148 high schools in the entire region had 90 percent or more of their 11th-graders proficient in reading, and only one had 90 percent of its 11th-graders proficient in mathematics. Proficiency levels in more than half of the region's high schools were worse this year than last year.

The problem isn't lack of money. For example, the Shenango Junior Senior High School in Lawrence County was one of only six high schools in the region where more than 80 percent of the 11th-graders were proficient in both math and science, yet the school district's instructional expenses per child in 2007-08 were $6,200, 13 percent below the regional average.

The problem also isn't the difficulties of educating low-income children. Although 79 percent of the fifth-graders in the Propel Charter School in McKeesport were economically disadvantaged last year (one of the highest percentages of any school in the region), 100 percent of them became proficient in math and 92 percent achieved proficiency in reading, the second best performance of any elementary school in the region.

The problem is that parents, taxpayers and businesses aren't demanding better performance. What can you do?

1. Ask your local school board to publicize both the proficiency ratings for the district's students and the board's plans for improving proficiency. (Try going to your school district's Web site to find out how it's performing; you probably won't find the information, or at least not easily.)

2. Hold the school board accountable for the district's performance. Your first chance comes Tuesday, when more than 500 school board seats across the region are up for election.

If our region is going to grow in the future, it needs a high quality work force that can attract and retain businesses. Creating that work force starts with high-performance schools in every district in the region.

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