The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE) released a report last week that sounds a familiar theme: Massachusetts schools are not preparing students for the high-skilled jobs of today’s economy. It contained a survey of 334 employers, more than two-thirds of whom cited difficulty hiring employees with adequate job skills. Eighty-four percent of survey respondents said school systems needed to change to address skill-building issues.

This topic always seems to surface during boom times when the need for labor suddenly surges – like the lunch hour lines at your favorite coffee shop, except that business cycles play out over years, not minutes. The two phenomena should be predictable, especially when some hot new technology latte comes along that spikes demand.

During President Ronald Reagan’s go-go first-term years, a 1983 report titled “A Nation at Risk” expressed concern that our education system wasn’t fulfilling the labor needs of the then-nascent PC and biotech industries, both of which were running full bore in Massachusetts and California. In 1993, the MBAE spearheaded a report, “Every Child a Winner,” advocating for standardized testing, which served as a framework for the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993.

Okay, that latte fell out of favor. Today, business is calling for analytical skills and condemns what it sees as an over-reliance on teaching to perform well on standardized tests. Defenders of the educational system say that the purview of pre-K-16 should not be on standardized tests but instead should give students the highly rounded education that would promote analytical thinking.

Both sides are clearly talking past each other, though both apparently hate standardized tests this time around. You’d think they could come to consensus. But no. Blogosphere critics, always the Greek Chorus, accuse educators of trying to duck out on responsibility, or slam employers for failing to offer training and apprenticeships as they used to. That was before the cost savings of offshoring could undercut business training cost investment – and the bottom line – in record time. Remember, corporate shareholders watch this stuff.

Let’s sort out a couple of things. As stated above, fully fledged citizen-students take longer to develop than it takes a boom-bust business cycle to run its course. For many decades, college grads – including newly minted engineers – have lamented that the job market that was hot when they were college freshmen had often cooled by graduation day. The global economy has accelerated that trend, but rest assured, skilled people in other countries will get their turn at job displacement, too.

Admittedly, today’s students may not display the verbal or mathematical proficiencies that many of their forbears would recognize as standard. But their proficiencies were likely acquired through different avenues. That’s why so many young people are joining the hot startups or starting their own rather than sallying forth into the corporate world. They want to go where others speak their language, and they know that if that particular venture goes south, they have plenty of time to make it up. Big employers, take note.

So before we go blaming the education sector or the business sector, we should carefully check the challenges that both of them face.