A better school ranking system
The Michigan Department of Education (MDOE) recently released their 2011 rankings of all of Michigan’s k-12 schools. They released two rankings. One clearly is a better measure than the other of relative school quality. One ranking is mandated by the federal government. The other was developed by MDOE. The reason there are two rankings is […]
Michigan talent attracting companies
Mlive recently ran an article on HP opening a new IT services office in Pontiac. According to the article “the center expects to hire more than 200 technically skilled employees as well as an undetermined number of support personnel.” Why is HP coming to metro Detroit? According to HP Vice President Rick Sullivan: HP selected […]
What’s new at the accelerator
I haven’t written for quite awhile about our high school accelerator – Michigan Future Schools. But we have been busy! Just as a reminder the accelerator is designed to help start at scale new quality high schools serving students from the city of Detroit without regard to governance. We select schools to work with through […]
What we learned: the national economy
Our work is focused on how Michigan’s economy is performing compared with the nation’s and why. To do that we need to understand what is driving the national economy. At the core of our work is the basic belief, since we were founded twenty years ago, that globalization and technology are mega forces that are […]
Previewing our new annual progress report
Don Grimes and I are wrapping work on our annual progress report on Michigan’s transition to a knowledge-based economy. Look for it in mid September. It is later this year largely because we have have added a major new section to the analysis. In past reports our focus has been on per capita income. As […]
The failed low tax experiment
Former Governor Granholm commented on my blog on a decade of state spending restraint. (You can find the blog and comment here.) The Governor wrote: … Of course much of that was due to the changes in the economy, but I also cut taxes 99 times (small and large) in the first 4.5 years of […]
Triumph of the city: the data
As we explored in my last post, Edward Glaeser in his terrific new book, Triumph of the City, compellingly makes the case that vibrant central cities that anchor big metros are the geographic engines of economic growth across the planet, not just here in the US. They are the most productive places and the places […]
Triumph of the City
In my post on ineffective green subsidies I featured a column by Harvard’s Edward Glaeser. To me the key take away of that column is his claim that: In the long run, America will be richer than China only by having smarter citizens, and that requires the skills that come from schools and cities, not […]
Effective, efficient and expensive
The Detroit Regional Chamber featured Geoffrey Canada at the recent Mackinac Policy Conference. A well deserved recognition for the CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone. The organization provides cradle to college services for all, predominantly low-income, children who live in a 97 block zone of Harlem. Canada has earned his recognition by getting results. Children […]
American workers as the priority III
More evidence that American companies are doing well and American workers are not. This time from an insightful study by Andrew Sum and colleagues at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Its title says it all: The “Jobless and Wageless” Recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Highly recommended! What the researchers found is […]