Articles written by Lou Glazer
At Michigan Future, Inc. we believe that investments in higher education are the single best thing the state can do to grow a high prosperity economy. It is the best asset we have to grow a knowledge-based economy.
In the Twentieth Century we built one of the best public higher ed systems on the planet when it didn’t matter so much to economic growth. This century when it does, we have been disinvesting in it with state support declining by thirteen percent since 2000. Real dumb!
Our support for higher ed is unwavering, but it does not mean that we don’t also think there is room for improvement. In particular, except for those with highly selective admissions, our colleges and universities have low graduation rates. Its a national problem, but one we need to address.
The higher ed graduation rate is about half. And maybe more worrisome is, that despite far more enrolling in college, the proportion of adults with either a two year or four year degree nationally has been stagnant for about three decades at around one third. The Boomers, Generation X and the Millennials, so far, have about the same proportion of college grads.
Can we do better? I think so. My optimism in large part is based on the big improvements we are getting in new urban high schools here and around the country. A decade ago hardly anyone believed we could create open enrollment urban high schools that could get graduation rates of 90% and college attendance rates of 90%. Better results than many suburban high schools.
The typical response of urban high school educators is to blame k-8s, parents and the community for high dropout rates. There isn’t anything we can do with kids who are so behind. But, of course, we now know there is something that high school educators can do that get far better results. It starts with educators taking responsibility for student achievement.
All too often this blaming others is what you get from higher ed officials when you raise their low graduation rates. Its the students and/or the high schools fault. Which, of course, raises the question “why are you enrolling so many students you believe you can’t educate?”
Its time for college and university educators to take responsibility as well for student achievement. I think, just like with urban high schools, once they do we can get big achievement gains.
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The question I get most often these days is for my take on the 2010 elections. To be honest I don’t have a clue what is going to happen. But I do have a sense of the nature of the debate. Likely it will be a repeat of the 2006 elections.
As you remember that was a race where Mr. DeVos told us that lower taxes/small government would restore Michigan to prosperity and Gov. Granholm told us that keeping jobs from going to China would restore Michigan to prosperity. Both are nonsense. But both parties seem stuck on the same failed answers of the past.
To a considerable degree I believe we keep having the same meaningless debate because its what the base of each party wants. What unites Republicans is a belief that lower taxes is the answer to everything economic, despite the fact that most low tax states are characterized by low incomes and low education attainment. For the Democrats – particularly their unionized blue collar base – getting rid of NAFTA and free trade is the magic bullet that they believe will restore a high wage factory based economy. This too ignores reality. There is no policy that will take us back to a successful factory-based economy. Those days are gone forever.
But more broadly we keep having the old debate because a majority of Michiganians have not yet accepted the new reality that what made us prosperous in the past, won’t in the future. When most of us demand change what we are asking for is politicians to get others to change, so we don’t have to. This is one of those times when – as hard as it is – we have to change. What policy makers can do for us is help us make the necessary changes. What they can’t do is turn the clock back.
The debate we should be having in 2010 – if we care about restoring Michigan to prosperity – is how can we make the transition to a knowledge-based economy. One where a combination of knowledge, creativity and entrepreneurship enables people to realize the American Dream. Its the new reality. Talent is the only reliable path to prosperity in the future. But we can’t have that debate as long as most of us will only vote for politicians – of both parties – who tell us they have some plan for getting our old jobs back for us. Until we realize they can’t, we are likely to have an ineffective politics about the past, not the future.
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I attended a terrific conference this week – co hosted by CEOs for Cities and United Way for Southeastern Michigan – on reducing poverty. The mission was to identify local actions that can significantly reduce poverty over the next two to four years. In my presentation, unfortunately, I said we don’t know how to do that.
Nationally there are two areas that can make a big difference in reducing poverty in the short term: full employment and an expanded safety net. Both are powerful tools for large scale poverty reduction. Local efforts that can achieve at scale poverty reductions are hard to identify. Yes we should do whatever we can to boost job creation. But as I have written in previous blogs state, regional and local levers to do that are not strong. And yes we should build a regional transit system so that city residents – where poverty is concentrated – can access jobs in the suburbs.
But ultimately the chief state and local responsibility for reducing poverty is education and training. Preparing people for jobs that pay above poverty wages and benefits. Unfortunately, no matter what the time horizon, we are not very good at doing that with most of the chronically unemployed, the working poor or those who are newly unemployed. With each group there are barriers to gaining the needed skills for those better paying jobs. For the chronically unemployed there are a whole set of ready to work barriers that we are not very good at overcoming. And then for all three groups there is the low foundation skill challenge. Lots of adults who sign up for training end up in remedial programs and never make it out.
For adults who get beyond those barriers, our community colleges, by and large, are very good at teaching occupational skills. But for far too many we are unable to help them overcome those barriers. And there is little evidence that we are improving our success rate. Or even have developed models that provide a framework for how we can get substantially better participants outcomes. The adult training system is characterized by too many of the same operators, providing the same services, with the same bad results decade after decade.
Contrast that to urban k-12 education. Where we have made substantial progress in learning how to prepare children growing up in low income households for the better paying jobs of the future. We obviously have a long way to go to get to the scale we need. But there seems to be a known path to get there.
That has led me to consider replicating the drivers that have allowed us to develop new models in urban education. A combination of the money following the student and accountability standards. Choice allows new entrants, which gets you innovation. Some of which will get good results, some of which won’t. That is where meaningful accountability standards come again. They should be used to close down the worse programs/agencies as well as help students shop for high quality programs.
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Today we officially launch Michigan Future Schools (MFS) as an initiative of Michigan Future, Inc. It builds on the work we have been doing for the past decade or so to figure out how to connect urban high schools students to the economy of the future. Its goal is to create new high schools at scale in Detroit and its inner ring suburbs to substantially increase the number of low income and/or minority students attending high quality schools.
MFS starts with grants from four local foundations of more than thirteen million dollars that will allow it to help launch seven new high schools over the next three years. MFI and its funders are committed to raising the funds to reach its goal of thirty five high schools in the next eight years. Schools will be chosen through an annual competition.
The three core principles of this initiative are unique:
1. We don’t care about the form of governance. All the ideological wars between public, charter and private school advocates are irrelevant to us. We will work with any school as long as it has a high likelihood that it will prepare all its students for college. MFI expects that all students enrolled in the high schools it supports will succeed in college. It has committed to its funders that at least 85% of each school’s students will graduate from high school, of those graduates at least 85% will enroll in college and of those who enroll at least 85% will earn a college degree.
2. We don’t care about where the school is located. It must be open to students from the city of Detroit, but the schools we will support do not have to be located in the city.
3. We will only work with new schools. We think new schools have a far better chance of creating the kind of culture and teaching and learning that lead to high student achievement than trying to transform failing schools.
All of us who have been involved in designing MFS are really excited about its possibilities to make a big difference. We are aiming for nothing less than creating an alternative high quality network of high schools that will compete with low quality high schools no matter who operates them!
For more information see the Michigan Future Schools page.
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After reading my previous post on Apple, John Austin, of the State Board of Education and the Brookings Institution, sent me a terrific study. Its from the Personal Computing Industry Center at the UC Irvine. Its topic is job creation generated by the iPod. It is one of the best articles I have seen on how products are made in a flat world.
What the researchers found is that the introduction of the iPod created 41,000 jobs worldwide. (These are direct jobs – no trying to calculate multipliers.) Of those about 27,000 were outside the US, 14,000 here. But when it came to wages the proportions were reversed: $753 million earned by US workers, $318 by workers from outside the US. You know the basic story: production done in Asia by low wage workers, knowledge work predominantly done in the US, retail done across the globe. Of the 14,000 US iPod jobs 6,000 were high paid engineers and other professionals, while about 8,000 were lower paid jobs in retail and other non professional occupations.
As I wrote in my previous posts about Apple and Bissell this is the new face of manufacturing in America (and other advance economies). Some products will continue to made in America. But increasingly by machines. About ten percent of American workers now work in a factory and it almost for sure will not go higher, most probably lower. But what America can be is the pre and post production center of manufactured goods. Everything from research, development, engineering, design, supply chain management, logistics to marketing, sales and service. These are the new high paid jobs. Where the 21st Century middle class will be centered. It will be the predominant way America exports to the rest of the world.
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Good post on quality of place by Rick Haglund at his web site. Its micheconomy.com Worth checking out regularly. Rick always has an interesting take on what’s happening to our state’s economy.
In this blog Rick writes about the wife of Johnny Damon wanting him to play in a more cosmopolitan city – like Chicago – rather than Detroit. Its a story I hear over and over again from those trying to recruit talent to metro Detroit. Its not just young professionals who are looking for quality place along with a good job when they make location decisions.
Ultimately, if we are going to regrow a high prosperity Michigan, we are going to have to improve Michigan as a place that has what mobile talent are looking for. One of the assets that matters that we really need to work on is vibrant central cities. Its a core characteristic of almost all prosperous regions across the country. Forget the idea that Michigan can comeback without Detroit (and to a lesser degree Grand Rapids and Lansing/East Lansing) working. They need to be on priority list!
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In my last post I recommended that we ask 2010 candidates “what state would Michigan look like if your economic development strategies worked?”
The other key question I would ask is “what does Michigan need to look like for your kids (or grand kids) to want to live here?” Nearly all will be or are college graduates. Where they decide to live and work will, in large part, determine the future prosperity of the state.
Its not what most candidates are thinking about or what they are talking about. They are under enormous pressure by voters and interest groups to articulate their ideas about today – not tomorrow. But communities that don’t keep their college educated kids won’t be prosperous now or in the future. Its that important.
My guess is if candidates talked with their kids about where they want to live after college they will find that what they are talking about on the campaign trial is of little relevance to their kids decision on where to live after school . Items like what to do with taxes and how to save or restore factory jobs don’t matter very much to future knowledge workers.
If Michigan is going to be prosperous again we need elected officials who are focused on building a state where their kids want to live and work. We need to use the upcoming election to identify who those candidates are.
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