By John Bebow - January 21, 2009
It seemed to receive less fanfare upon passage than when she proposed it, but Gov. Jennifer Granholm's concept of "Promise Zones" for free and reduced college tuition for youths in struggling communities is now law.
This summary courtesy of Peter Luke… Saying that college tuition in Michigan is "ridiculously expensive," Gov. Jennifer Granholm has signed legislation creating local authorities that would pay the full cost of at least two years of community college tuition for resident students. Modeled after the Kalamazoo Promise college scholarship, the new law would allow up to 10 school districts or communities to apply for a "promise zone" designation by the Michigan Treasury Department. Local school, civic and business leaders could, under the law, craft a financing plan to provide a minimum of two years of community college tuition for every graduating high school senior who resides in the zone. After two years of successful fund raising, the zone would be eligible for state aid captured through local school property tax growth.
Now, will philanthropists in local communities step up to this challenge in the face of so many other competing request for funding in this economy? The answer to that question is far from clear. But, by many accounts the Kalamazoo Promise on which this concept is patterned, is among the best local talent and economic development boosters at work in the United States today.
As the governor signed the Promise Zone bill into law this month, Michigan's unofficial troubadour of talent, Lou Glazer, offered up two tales, one in New York, and one in Ireland, to underscore the need to build Michigan's competitiveness by building a more talented workforce…
From the New York story… "Historically, human capital — the education and skills of the workforce — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not."
From the Ireland story… "More dire, however, is the condition of the permanently unemployed in Limerick's festering ghettoes, where experts say the unemployment rate touches 70 percent… Walking through the garbage-strewn, empty roads on a cold, misty afternoon, (one local expert) points to the shuttered houses and the mothers still dressed in pajamas taing their children home from school. Social workers refer to the 'pajama index': the more men and women one sees who do not take the time and care to dress for the day, the worse the economic situation tends to be."
Glazer's conclusion: "What are the characteristics that really matter in positioning places to do well in a flattening world?… If it's concentrated talent, as we argue in our New Agenda report, NYC has it, I'm not sure Ireland does. (The Irish renaissance may have been more temporary than we thought). Clearly we don't."
One Comment
New York City reinvents itself using masses of immigrants that still flood into the crowded low rent districts in Queens, Brooklyn, and parts of Manhattan. These young people are willing to work hard for low wages in resturants, stores, and on construction sites. You see them everywhere, and you sit beside them on the subway cars going to and from work thinking and speaking in a multitude of languages and so weary at the end of the day. But they and their children produce a real city with real people and everything good and bad and exciting that comes with the human life drama. You soon realize that the whole city is immigrants at different stages – some newly arrived, some many generations after arrival. The live in dynamic neighborhoods, neighborhoods that change but never lose their human scale attractions of social interconnectivity, family, familiarity, and life-long relationships. The city has been populated for decades with these imgrants, many of whom have found happiness and meaning in their neighborhoods.
Michigan needs cities with permanent populations and human scale neighborhoods like New York City. Our cities have no subways or transit, but many super highways that cut up cities into disjointed neighborhood fragmentss, roads that distroy cities with inhuman scale berms and dangerous lanes and eternal noise irritations, roads that lead out of the city and beckon everyone to leave.
Until Michigan can develop stable human scale neghborhoods within cities served by subways and commuter trains instead of super roads, we will always be in a permant unstable flux. A great state must have great cities and great cities will always have bad parking and great transit.
John Guidinger
Jackson
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