Brewed Fresh Daily

Tri-C has an important announcement about its new Green Academy.

A week or so ago, the Toledo Blade carried a story about the potential of green jobs in Ohio. The story tracked a new report on green jobs issued by the University of Massachusetts. You can download a copy of this report from this page.

The new Philadelphia Biotechnology and Life Sciences Institute is launching an initiative this summer to strengthen the talent pipeline in life sciences. More than 50 students from at least two Philadelphia high schools will be taught the basics of the life sciences, both through classroom instruction and through placement as interns in life-science jobs. Read more.

For a number of years, Boston University has run City Lab.

These issues touch on an important dimension of talent development: integrating career and technical education into high schools more effectively.

In this region, we have a successful model in engineering education with the Fenn Academy. Hopefully, these models can play a prominent role in the emerging talent strategies that the FFEF/Advance NEO is putting together for the region.

Last week during our I-Open workshop at the Lowe Foundation, I had a valuable discussion with a retired school superintendent who is moving to integrate regional education and workforce development resources in SE Missouri.

He pointed to the importance of exposing middle school students to different career pathways. many students, he told me, are unaware of the preparation they must complete in high school for these careers. Exposing high school students to career options is too late.

No state has tackled this issue of career pathways more aggressively than South Carolina. In 2005 they passed legislation to promote career pathways, beginning in middle school.

On the local level, I like what’s going on in Ft. Wayne. They are aggressively implementing career academies. Indiana is focused developing a stronger focus on this issue. There’s no one pathway. The point is to create more flexibility and choices. Among the options being explored in Indiana:

• Project Lead the Way (pre-engineering program; piloting biomedical in 2007)
• First Robotics (students work with industry sponsors to build robot to compete)
• Work Ethic Certificates
• Developing career awareness programs, like the National Association of Manufacturing’s “Dream-it, Do-it” initiative. The Lilly Foundation has just made a major commitment to SE Indiana.

You can learn more on the role of career technical education and high school reform here.

Some interesting stuff happening in the past few weeks on civic journalism.

The Kennedy School is running the Carnegie-Knight Conference on the Future of Journalism. You can read about what’s happening on the Citizen Media Law Project.

Earlier this month, the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota held the first national gathering of “place bloggers” (citizen journalists and entrepreneurs). Here’s a wrap.

And the AP just released a report on “a new model for news”. You can download it here.

I got into this stream through a good blog I follow, The Buzz Machine.

Akron, Ohio is the only place in the United States where every public school building is being constructed as a “Community Learning Center.”

That strategy led to the National Civic League’s recognition of Akron. Read more.

Akron is experimenting with other programs, like recruiting civic-minded teens to understand how the city government works. Read more.

As we move more toward networks as generators of wealth and prosperity, transparency and civility become strategic assets. Cities and regions with trusted networks will learn faster, operate more effectively, and respond more flexibly to the opportunities and crises ahead.

Part of the challenge will be engaging citizens in new ways. As this articlepoints out, citizens are expecting more engagement in their public services.

Does anyone care to comment on this report? I find the Milken Institute Report interesting since it seems to tell a different story that what we’ve been told about our rankings, etc. Maybe I’m missing something.

Ohio also fared badly as the state plummeted from 24th to 36th place. The erosion largely reflected the state’s struggles to reduce its reliance on manufacturing, the report said.

Massachusetts shines in tech study, California loses luster – San Jose Mercury News

From a new series in the Washington Post:

For David E. Zimmer, the story of the bubble began in 1986 in a high-rise office overlooking Lake Erie.

An aggressive, clean-cut 25-year-old, armed with an MBA from the University of Notre Dame, Zimmer spent his hours attached to a phone at his small desk, one of a handful of young salesmen in the Cleveland office of the First Boston investment bank.

No one took lunch — lunch was for the weak, and the weak didn’t survive. Zimmer gabbed all day with his clients, mostly mid-size banks in the Midwest, persuading them to buy a new kind of financial product. Every once in a while, he’d hop a small plane or drive his Oldsmobile Omega out for a visit, armed with charts and reports. The products, investments based on bundles of residential mortgages, were so new he had to explain them carefully to the bankers.

The Bubble

A friend from Milwaukee sends along this e-mail on the Great Lakes Urban Exchange (G.L.U.E.) meeting last night in Milwaukee.

More on G.L.U.E. here.

The G.L.U.E. meeting last night was interesting. It was held at MSOE due to flooding at Bucketworks. There was a scheduled program which was broadcast to other G.L.U.E. cities and archived for cities that meet at other times. Dave Reid discussed the efforts to convince UWM to expand in the downtown area as opposed to Wauwatosa where they are currently planning the expansion of their engineering graduate program.

G.L.U.E. discussions to date have generally been around issues that can be categorized as “new urbanism” . I think it’s an important discussion because it is easy for Milwaukee and its inherent problems to get lost in all the discussions about regional cooperation. (e.g. Maybe you read the article about SEWRPC in the Crossroads section of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on Sunday).

While I don’t think G.L.U.E. is going to focus on issues directly related to education and workforce development, I think their issues (the vitality of the city, transportation, neighborhoods, affordable housing, entertainment, locally owned businesses, and keeping the urban area alive as the beating heart of the region) are all peripherally important to WIRED work and to maintaining and attracting a pool of talent vital to the local economy.

Here are some of the websites that were referenced in last night’s meeting. They are all interesting.

http://urbanmilwaukee.com

http://www.uwmdowntown.org

http://www.1kfriends.org

http://www.ourmilwaukee.net/default.htm

An interesting commentary from New York, in light of the emerging collaborations in Northeast Ohio: How consolidation and regional planning saved a Rust Belt city

Good report on the Regional Economic Revenue Study in today’s Canton paper.

The current way of pursuing economic development in Northeast Ohio is counterproductive, contend members of the study group, because it pits communities against one another. Governments are inefficient, waste funding and natural resources and unnecessarily expand water and sewer services when they already exist in other parts of the region..

Read more.

Think it’s hokey, doomed or otherwise flawed? Warren Buffet and Nike invested $100 million in it. I’d watch if I were you. And if you want to talk about joining and bandwagons? This would be a good one for doing both.

The Girl Effect

Major hattip to Human Folly. Visit The Girl Effect.