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This post reruns a 2017 post by our former colleague Pat Cooney entitled the Problem with 3rd grade reading mandates. In it Pat lays out the evidence that 3rd grade reading mandates don't work and offers an alternative that does achieve the goal of all students gaining strong literacy skills and a love of reading, as well as a whole…

In 1979 General Motors employed 468,000 American hourly workers. 76 percent of their U.S. workforce. In 2021 General Motors employed 45,000 American hourly workers. 46 percent of their U.S. workforce. Today 24,000 work at the General Motors Global Technical Center in Warren. Their average annual salary is $120,000. Around double what their highest paid hourly workers made. GM describes the…

For decades many business, political and media elites have told us that Florida is the model for improving student achievement. They constantly urge Michigan to replicate former Governor Jeb Bush's 1999 A+ Plan. Today, once again, Florida is being trumpeted by many business, political and media elites for its policies of in-person schooling during the pandemic. The theory being that…

In our last post we detailed that states with employment most concentrated in production––front-line factory––jobs are all structurally low-prosperity states, with per capita income substantially below the nation's. Those states include Michigan and Tennessee, both with per capita income twelve percent below the nation's Tennessee matters particularly because when it was chosen by Ford for its Blue Oval City electric…

In 2004 Don Grimes and I wrote A New Path to Prosperity?. The report detailed that prosperous states were no longer manufacturing-based states, but were now those over concentrated in knowledge-based industries. In an accompanying Detroit News op ed, subtitled State should quit protecting factory employment and attract high-pay, high-education industries, we summarized our findings this way: The evidence strongly…