Minnesota is a high tax state. Has been for decades. Minnesota is the Great Lakes States best in economic well being and demographic outcomes. Has been for decades.

Michigan is not a high tax state. Its taxes per capita far lower than Minnesota’s. Minnesota is far ahead of Michigan in all well being and demographic outcomes.

Minnesota has been a successful high tax state for decades. The Census Bureau reports in 1980 Minnesota had the 6th highest state taxes per capita in the country. Michigan ranked 13th. Minnesota’s state taxes per capita were 122 percent of Michigan’s. In 2021 Minnesota had the 5th highest state taxes per capita in the country. Michigan ranked 28th. Minnesota’s state taxes per capita were 163 percent of Michigan’s.

There is no question Minnesota is a high tax state––its residents paid $2,145 more in 2021 than Michigan residents in state taxes alone. So for decades Michigan chose lower taxes as its prime lever to compete for economic growth and population. While Minnesota for decades chose to use its higher taxes for public investments in good schools and high quality communities as its prime lever to compete for economic growth and population.

When you combine state and local taxes per capita in 2020 Minnesota was the 7th highest in nation, Michigan was the 10th lowest. State and local taxes per capita in Minnesota are $6,507, 116 percent of the national average. State and local taxes per capita in Michigan were $4,263, 76 percent of the national average.

As reported by the Tax Foundation, on all the major state taxes Minnesota has substantially higher rates than Michigan:

Minnesota has a graduated individual income tax, with rates ranging from 5.35 percent to 9.85 percent. Minnesota also has a 9.80 percent corporate income tax rate. Minnesota has a 6.875 percent state sales tax rate, a max local sales tax rate of 2.00 percent, and an average combined state and local sales tax rate of 7.49 percent.

Michigan has a flat 4.25 percent individual income tax rate. There are also jurisdictions that collect local income taxes. Michigan has a 6.00 percent corporate income tax rate. Michigan has a 6.00 percent state sales tax rate and does not levy any local sales taxes.

We have been told over and over again for decades that high taxes leads to economic decline and depopulation. Think again!

• Minnesota has not lost a congressional seat in six decades while Michigan’s congressional delegation since 1960 has declined from 19 to 13.
• A recent study found that Minnesota is one of only nine “brain-gain” states with 8 percent more recent college graduates residents compared to those who graduated from its college and universities. Michigan is a “brain-drain” state with 14 percent fewer college graduates compared to those who graduated from its college and universities.
• In November 2022 Minnesota was tied for the second lowest unemployment rate in the country, Michigan was tied for 43rd.
• In November 2022 Minnesota was fifth in labor force participation, Michigan was 40th.
• In 2021 per capita income in Minnesota was three percent above the national average, ranking 13th. Michigan was 12 percent below the national average, ranking 35th.
• In 1979 Minnesota per capita income was one percent above the national average, Michigan was three percent above. So as Michigan’s state taxes per capita declined from 13th highest in the nation to 28th the state’s per capita income declined by fifteen percentage points compared to the nation. While Minnesota gained two percentage points while staying a high tax state.

Why is the conventional wisdom that high taxes leads to economic and population decline so wrong? Former New York City Mayor got it right when he wrote in a Financial Times op ed:

Many newly successful cities on the global stage – such as Shenzhen and Dubai – have sought to make themselves attractive to businesses based on price and infrastructure subsidies. Those competitive advantages can work in the short term, but they tend to be transitory. For cities to have sustained success, they must compete for the grand prize: intellectual capital and talent. I have long believed that talent attracts capital far more effectively and consistently than capital attracts talent. … Economists may not say it this way but the truth of the matter is: being cool counts. When people can find inspiration in a community that also offers great parks, safe streets and extensive mass transit, they vote with their feet.

At its core the Minnesota playbook for economic and demographic success has been higher taxes used for public investments to “compete for the grand prize: intellectual capital and talent” by offering good schools from birth through colleges and creating places where people want to live by offering high quality basic services, infrastructure and amenities.

Minnesota has used those higher taxes for services and investments that matter in a knowledge-based economy. An educated work force, efficient transportation systems, vibrant cities and metropolitan areas, and a secure safety net.

The Minnesota good schools and quality communities strategy has paid off in the best in the Great Lakes economic and demographic outcomes. Michigan’s low tax/low public investment strategy has been accompanied by a decades long decline compared to the nation in both economic and demographic outcomes.

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Success in today’s and tomorrow’s economy is largely dependent on having a set of skills that are critical in today’s workplace. At Michigan Future, we’ve been using a framework articulated by learning scientists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff for these skills, which they define as: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence (the “six Cs“). There are other frameworks around non-cognitive skills or social emotional skills that are also helpful, though we haven’t seen others that combine both these human capacities and content so clearly. Kids equipped with the six Cs are prepared to be adaptive, lifelong learners, able to rebound from challenges, and successful in both postsecondary pursuits and in their careers. Building these skills for all kids needs to be the goal of the education system.

To define these vital skills as the purpose of education, across learning environments, for all kids, does not mean erasing all common content standards. But it does mean that content is no longer the focus to the exclusion of growing other skills. Fortunately, the type of learning environments that foster six C skill development also help kids to integrate their content learning more deeply. Instead of cutting drama to fund literacy tutors, for example, schools with a focus on six Cs will recognize the other skills that drama class nourishes in kids, and may build on the ability of a drama course to shore up weaker literacy skills.

Raising the standard

To reorganize schooling around critical skill building is not a minor tweak to education. It’s a major shift, and it is a raising of the bar as to the purpose of our public education system. It’s a shift: from teacher explains, to teacher facilitates; from defining what kids should know, to how kids should learn; from increasing standardization to increasing adaptability and individuality; from a system that requires teachers to control as much as possible, to a system that asks teacher to empower kids. Most critically, it’s a shift from a filtering system to a system that provides all kids with opportunities for growth.

This shift will of course take resources, but not simply putting money into delivering the same system better or distributing today’s funds more equitably.

On the ground, this shift would entail tens of thousands of Michigan teachers adopting new teaching practices. Districts would have to mandate and support their new approaches. The greater community would need to agree on alignment in the system around skill development as the goal, and the state would need to incent innovation and transformation.

A new type of schooling: what it is

The good news is that there are models for this type of learning, even within the current system. I’ve seen many in action, and while I’d say there isn’t definitive proof that one of these approaches is the most effective or most scalable, I do believe that project-based learning (PBL), inquiry-based education, integrated/thematic instruction, and expeditionary learning seem to have the greatest promise to foster simultaneously deep learning around content and critical skill development. What the schools doing this work tend to have in common, regardless of the pedagogical approach they’ve adopted, are:

• a unity of purpose from leadership on down;
• an emphasis on students having some direction over their learning;
• a recognition that the human brain does not learn in discrete content blocks, so learning is often be more cross-disciplinary than in traditional schooling;
• the pursuit of depth over breadth in understanding;
• a move to performance tasks or assessments to evaluate student learning, rather than standardized testing;
• the presence of strategies that increase student engagement—not simply by adding pop culture to the curriculum, but by asking students to wrestle with meaningful questions about the world and their role in it or to take on projects that have potential impact for others; and
• alignment of the school’s infrastructure to support the purpose—which can involve a rethinking of schedules, classroom arrangements, and collaborative teaching; student cohorting; changes to grading policy, credit requirements, and report cards; and student placement in internships, early college, and in educational settings outside the school building; among many other changes.

In these classrooms and schools, teachers have less control over exactly what material students learn, because they don’t just deliver content through readings, lectures, and homework assignments. Instead, they set up the conditions and experiences for learning and guide students along the path.

I was extremely lucky during my time here to interview a number of the people who are doing leading this work in Michigan–like Danielle Jackson in Detroit, Lisa Bergman and Lisa Diaz in Mt. Pleasant, and Kevin Polston and Carol Lautenbach at Godfrey-Lee–and around the country, like Sarah Fine at High Tech High. If you need some inspiration, and want to know how differently they imagine school, check out these and other What Now? interviews.

What it isn’t

Because in too many education environments I have seen tablets and responsive software explained as innovation, I want to note that in my view, none of the models that foster six C learning are dependent—except in a pandemic—on the use of new technology. Technology in schools should be viewed as a tool, like a chalkboard once was, or a pencil, or a book. Used wisely, technology can help students collaborate, or serve as a vehicle for creative projects, or help students think about communicating their findings. But massive technology upgrades are not the core way we will achieve broad six C learning, which depends much more on well-designed learning experiences and an authentic relationship with an engaged adult. Let’s not be lazy in defining adaptive technology deployment as a stand-in for actually personalized instruction.

Equity demands imagination

Finally, a word about innovation and equity. We know that innovation is vital to achieving educational equity, as our current system is failing to achieve equity at any scale. Yet I have seen first-hand what can happen when innovation is deployed first on poor and Black and brown children: before it has been well-tested, without adequate support (funding), or without any local, or nonwhite leadership. I have seen the utter failure of “innovative” models that were deployed first in a low-income, Black and brown neighborhood. The response by the system to the failure has been additional harm to children (blaming the kids or families and lowering the standard, or closing the school and causing immense disruption). Poor and nonwhite children can’t be guinea pigs, though they are the children who most need us to be innovative because they are the most poorly served by our current system.

While I don’t know exactly what policy changes will bring about the system I’m describing, I do know that in too many conversations, we are constrained by our inability to truly understand today’s reality, by a lack of imagination as to what school could be like, and by a shameful tolerance of the status quo, which so poorly invests in so many children. Today’s reality is marked by inequality and system failure, where harm to children is common. We lack urgency if our kids are in “good enough” schools, even though kids one town over are not. When we try to envision the future, too many of us can only go as far as imagining our favorite teacher from 7^th grade. Those excellent teachers may be inspirations, but we have to now ask how to get that kind of learning across the system, in all classrooms, for all of Michigan’s children.

Today is my last day with Michigan Future. I am offering a series of reflections on education in Michigan from my years of work understanding what the future, and the present, will demand of our children. While there have been many others, my most critical learning opportunities have been: our relationships with the school leaders that were a part of Michigan Future Schools; planning, with a series of remarkable educators, the Outsmarting the Robots event, where we tried to model the learning experiences we should be offering to kids; and each of the leaders, educators, and researchers I interviewed during the pandemic for What Now?–our video series on education. You can read my two earlier posts: What I want for Michigan’s children, and How better measures would leave no doubt about the need for school redesign.

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After a number of years, I’m preparing to step away from my work at Michigan Future at the end of this month. I am offering a series of reflections on education in Michigan from my years of work understanding what the future, and the present, will demand of our children. While there have been many others, my most critical learning opportunities have been: our relationships with the school leaders that were a part of Michigan Future Schools; planning, with a series of remarkable educators, the Outsmarting the Robots event, where we tried to model the learning experiences we should be offering to kids; and each of the leaders, educators, and researchers I interviewed during the pandemic for What Now?–our video series on education.

This first reflection entry is my attempt to work upwards from what I want from school for my kids, to what the school has to be to provide that, to how the education system should be shaped to foster those types of schools. What I must say at the outset here is that what I want for my own kids, I want for all of Michigan’s children. I believe our system is providing this type of education in pockets, but is not currently designed to provide what I want for all, and our primary challenge in resolving this is one of system design. While I support more equitable school funding, I don’t think more money is enough.

What do I want from the school I send my children to?

• To prioritize at all times their social-emotional well-being; to observe them fully as humans; to address them and their learning as individuals and to find ways, within reason, to let their particular learning style come to work in the classroom.
• To have a vision for the type of skills that my kids need, and how to build those skills over time, knowing that skill-building is not something that happens in one year.
• To actively welcome and affirm my children’s identities. (This is somewhat automatic in our current system for my white, middle class, non-disabled girls. But needs to be true for students of color, indigenous students, immigrant students, poor, neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, and/or trans kids.)
• To make my kids feel that they have the ability to ask interesting questions and pursue the answers.
• To allow my kids to explore some of their own interests in the classroom and as the vehicle for learning. Not all the time, necessarily, but sometimes. (Frankly I also want them to learn that once in a while, they also have to just put their head down and do something not fun because it’s a part of making the day work for everyone else.)
• To help my kids develop a feeling of responsibility to their community, and a sense of their own power to be a positive contributor to their community.
• To provide a sense that my kids have the power to learn anything they put their minds to, and that they belong and are valued, and their particular contributions appreciated in their school community.
• To help my children see their peers as valued co-learners and develop a sense that kids can learn from each other as well. Authority figures are not the only teachers, and in fact, sometimes authority figures are wrong. They need practice understanding their own perspective and how others might have different, also valuable perspectives.
• To spend the majority of time on things that are engaging and educational, a little bit of time on things that are just about relationships and fun, possibly a little time on things that aren’t engaging but we just have to do, and just enough assessment to make sure the teacher understands where they are.
• To expose my children to a wide range of disciplines and modes of thinking, including creative expression through visual arts, music, etc. and meaningful scientific and sociological exploration, to a sufficient degree that they can figure out where their own interests lie.
• To encourage them to think critically about why the world is the way it is.

What are the priorities of and attributes of the school that will build what I care about?

• Because students do as teachers model, this is critical: teachers are learners. They are respected as creative, resourceful, and adaptive professionals. They model adaptive learning for their students. Their day and the structure of the school calendar gives them time to learn and design. They are invited to bring aspects of their own interests and enthusiasms into the classroom. Teachers are interested in why the world is the way it is.
• Teachers are skilled in recognizing the attributes, curiosities, and learning styles of their kids, to see them as individuals—even though they need to make some decisions to efficiently move the entire class along.
• Teachers are skilled in assessing students from observation and review of work. Teacher feedback for students and parents is in-depth and based in these observations and the opportunities for growth that matter most to the individual child.
• Teachers have freedom to alter how they facilitate their classroom to best engage the individual students in the classroom, while balancing that engagement against adequate progress on some of the basic skills and sets of knowledge that kids need.
• At least some of the learning is project-based, allowing kids to build deep expertise—expertise that outpaces the teacher’s—in areas of interest, and building the skills that come with having to focus on a specific topic for an extended period of time (the definition of “extended” varies for different grade levels).
• Timelines for learning are flexible and generous. I am not so concerned about the how quickly or at exactly what age in elementary school my kids become readers or learn about the three branches of government. I would sacrifice speed of skill-development or content acquisition any day for depth of understanding and for keeping at bay any resentment/feelings of, “I’m not good at this; I’ll never get this.” Slow learning is OK.
• The flow of the day and the classroom is designed around how kids’ brains and bodies need to work, including movement, play, rest, and creativity. This is as true for high schoolers as kindergarteners.
• Work is interdisciplinary. Teachers knit together the subjects we think of as siloed to reflect the real world and how brains best make meaning of learning.
• There are opportunities—not necessarily on every day or in every subject—to somehow engage authentically with the world outside the classroom, whether by interviewing experts, undertaking a community service project, or advocating for new speed bumps by the school.
• The school as a whole has a unified vision or philosophy about how learning happens there and how to support and empower teachers and students in a way that builds community, builds on strengths, and creates room for individuals.

What are the attributes of a system that fosters these types of schools?

• It articulates the goals as the development of critical skills or human capacities.
• The system incentivizes leaders who want to undertake a district transformation, and rewards districts whose schools have developed a unified strategic approach that includes skill development.
• The system articulates a streamlined set of content knowledge and/or standards that is required across the system, but provides flexibility about when those sets of knowledge must be the centerpiece of learning.
• It funds schools adequately to fund quality teachers and makes investments in ongoing learning and collaboration.
• It pays teachers a family-supporting wage that increases with expertise.
• It creates objective, research-based rubrics for districts who are embracing skills-based approaches to allow them to share meaningfully across districts and to provide evidence for what’s working, or not working.
• It takes advantage of some economies of scale to subsidize the expense of curricular pivots.
• The system overall assesses and shares what schools are doing and how well these strategies are working to contribute to the overall body of knowledge of how learning happens. (Through qualitative as well as quantitative measurement.)
• The system avoids adding requirements that are not essential to meeting the goals.
• It adds a layer of statewide “double checking” to ensure students and schools aren’t slipping through the cracks, with an emphasis on hidden inequities in opportunity.
• It helps align the teacher development system around the facilitation, observation, and lesson design skills that are described in the previous section.
• It provides support for the districts to care for student needs outside of the classroom, especially in higher-need districts or for higher-need kids.

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So today I’m delighted that we are releasing a conversation with Dale Robertson, the president and CEO of the Grand Rapids Public Museum, as our 11th and final What Now? video (Dale is also a board member here at Michigan Future). In addition to prioritizing accessible, curiosity-driven education at the museum, Dale was involved in the founding of the Public Museum School, a partnership between the museum, Grand Rapids Public Schools, the Kendall College of Art and Design, and the ed school at Grand Valley. This unique partnership brings a number of disciplines and ways of thinking and learning into GRPS, and was acknowledged as one of ten winners around the nation of the XQ: The Super Schools Project for “reimagining education” in 2016.

The museum’s approach to learning is driven by some of the natural values and mindsets of curators. And there are two that I think are so crucial for us to understand and design into all learning environments.

The first mindset is one that expects the learning to be driven by the sincere curiosity of the learner, and not by the performance of the educator. A physical interaction with an object drives questioning, which drives exploration, which drives learning. The educators at the museum may not all be experts in every single artifact in the museum’s collection. And so they embrace a type of facilitation and guiding that is open to broader learning, rather than a proscribed set of facts and figures. We believe this is the type of engaging learning that builds skills as well as knowledge in young people.

Second, the learning is contextual and tends to be cross-disciplinary. An item in a museum has stories to tell in science, history, society, and often, math and language arts. Human brains don’t think in discrete subject matters and research tells us that learning that creates room for more integrated understanding is “stickier.” We learn more deeply and retain more.

This interview is a part of our What Now? video interview series on education.

What Now? asks: how should we navigate through this pandemic, and ensure a more prosperous Michigan in our recovery? Click the icon for other videos in this series.

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In the conversation we’re featuring today, one of our guests, Ira Socol, who has taken a historical look at education, explains that our system and many of its features were originally designed to filter students out at every level. In other words, from an historical perspective, our system is not designed to lift all students. Its tradition is not equity. This doesn’t mean that educators haven’t been striving to upend those original intents for decades–but they are fighting against a system that still carries many of those historical elements: to filter, not to elevate all. In this context, Colin’s reminder shouldn’t be a surprise.

I interviewed Ira alongside Pam Moran. The two are co-authors (with Chad Ratliff) of Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools. Their book is a motivating read, blending research and anecdotes from their own time as the leadership of Albermarle County Public Schools (Pam as Superintendent, and Ira as the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer), for people who are tired of the filtering traditions of schooling. I found that it puts forward a thesis about what is necessary to rebel against those antiquated designs still baked into our system: to radically embrace innovation requires saying yes to innovation all the time, and inviting students to be at the center of it. This mentality is about creating a pathway for every single child. Enjoy!

This interview is a part of our What Now? video interview series on education.

What Now? asks: how should we navigate through this pandemic, and ensure a more prosperous Michigan in our recovery? Click the icon for other videos in this series.

The post A Pathway for Every Child: What Now? Ep. 10 with Pam Moran and Ira Socol appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

Furthermore–this interview with Lisa Bergman, the Executive Director, and Lisa Diaz, a board member, is a demonstration of creative, productive collaboration. Often, our best learning comes when we tackle questions as a community, push each other, ask questions, and wrestle through, knowing there’s no “right” answer. Again, when I reflect on what Lisa and Lisa demonstrate in this conversation as thought partners to each other, I think about how they are essentially modeling inquiry-based education for their students. For them, the inquiry is how to make school richer and more meaningful for their students, by allowing their students to show up in their own identity, take risks, and pursue the answers to the questions that interest them. You can imagine how exciting it might feel to be a teacher in this school, where inquiry and innovation are modeled by the leaders.

This interview isn’t just full of abstraction–but examples. For instance, the school’s wonder workshops are occasional projects where each student becomes an expert on a topic and then shares that expertise with classmates. The topics, from pokemon to horses and anything real (or imagined) in between, allow students the opportunity to shape their learning, build confidence from their growing expertise, respond to feedback, and learn more about the other students in their community.

I hope you enjoy hearing about this, alongside other tangible strategies the school has put in place to allow students to grow in wonder and in skill.

This interview is a part of our What Now? video interview series on education.

What Now? asks: how should we navigate through this pandemic, and ensure a more prosperous Michigan in our recovery? Click the icon for other videos in this series.

The post Wonder Workshops: Bringing Identity and Inquiry Into Schooling: What Now? Ep. 9 with Lisa Bergman and Lisa Diaz appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

What emerged is the Saline Area Schools Learner Profile, which takes the form of a compass. The cardinal directions are the key skills that Saline now organizes its learning around: collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity. Between these directions are the tools the district leverages, and around the outside, are the eight attributes that they’d like to build in every Saline graduate. In our interview, we discuss how the district has realigned itself to focus on skill-building in kids, what real rigor means, how they know what’s working, and how the system could make innovation easier for districts everywhere.

Eventually we turned to the hoped-for emergence from the pandemic. I found Scot’s concern about how we’re going to respond as kids return to school insightful, worrisome, and important. He wants to challenge the framing of “learning loss,” saying, “We’ve learned a lot, but it’s different learning.” He worries about the response being more seat time, more structure, diagnostics, and “beating the pandemic learning loss” with antiquated approaches that demotivate students. This section especially is a must-listen. Enjoy.

Scot’s interview is a part of our What Now? video interview series on education.

What Now? asks: how should we navigate through this pandemic, and ensure a more prosperous Michigan in our recovery? Click the icon for other videos in this series.

The post A District In Alignment: What Now? Ep. 8 with Scot Graden appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

We invite you to a presentation and discussion with Colin Seale, a lawyer, educator, and the founder of thinkLaw, which helps educators provide students with the tools they need to lead, innovate, and break the things that need to be broken.

Colin holds dual beliefs that (1) preparing historically overlooked and underestimated children for a world where they often must work twice as hard to get half as far requires a bold “college for all” level of academic preparation and (2) these are the same children who need to be the change we’ve been waiting for. Changes to these systemic inequities could not be more timely for Michigan’s education context.

Colin will be joined by three visionary Michigan leaders who are walking the walk to accomplish whatmust be done to prepare all of Michigan’s children for future success in and beyond the classroom.

• Danielle Jackson, CEO, Detroit 90/90, U Prep Schools
• Kevin Polston, Superintendent, Godfrey-Lee Public Schools
• Tiffany Taylor, Vice President, Deputy Chief People Officer, Teach for America

Educators, policy makers, business and other community leaders are all invited to join usfor this important conversation. Please register today.

Registration required by March 16: https://tinyurl.com/MFIequity

For more of Michigan Future’s education content, check out our series of interviews with education leaders. In What Now? we’re asking transformative national and Michigan leaders: what are we learning from the pandemic, and how do we emerge from the pandemic better able to prepare all Michigan kids for the future?

The post Beyond Learning Loss: Tangible Outcomes for Education Equity Post-Covid appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

We are continually confronted by the myth that there are lots of good-paying jobs that don’t require higher education. “Not everyone should go to college,” people claim. While that’s true on a personal level–not every person will benefit from college, and people find fulfillment on the job in a myriad of ways–on a community level, it’s a dangerous message. The economic data we update year-to-year show that, more and more, jobs that pay well require post-secondary education. And the best way to ensure a good-paying job is to earn a B.A. or higher.

Today we’re sharing an update to an analysis we ran in 2019, which looks at the jobs in Michigan, what those occupations pay, and what education they require. (The previous analysis used 2017 data; today’s analysis uses 2019 data).

For this analysis, we define lower-, middle-, and higher-paying jobs in relationship to the national median (half of American workers earn less, and half more) and the national 75th percentile. So, here are the headlines.

The majority of jobs in Michigan are in occupations that are lower-wage.

First, we start by looking at the 4.3 million total jobs in Michigan, and how many fall into which category. More than half–56 percent–of Michigan jobs are in lower-wage occupations. The percentages here haven’t changed much since our last analysis. If we were performing level with the national median, another 258,000 Michiganders would be in jobs in occupations that pay above the median.

This figure often surprises people. When we ask why 43 percent of Michigan households can’t afford basic necessities, this is a big part of the answer. Structurally, there are simply too many jobs that are in lower-wage occupations.

The remaining Michigan jobs are split evenly into middle-wage (between the national 50th and 75th percentiles) and high-wage occupations (top 25 percent, nationally).

Next, we look at those segments and the education levels required.

A preponderance of jobs in the higher-wage occupations require a Bachelor’s degree–or more.

Now we turn to looking at higher-wage jobs. The vast majority of these jobs are in occupations that require a four-year college degree: almost 80 percent. This is up from 77 percent when we ran this analysis on 2017 data. Even apprenticeships and associate degrees don’t land many people in the this higher-paid category (three percent of these jobs are in occupations that require apprenticeships; two percent require associate degrees).

The largest category of higher-paying occupations that don’t require a B.A. are jobs that one is promoted into–they aren’t the result of a particular educational achievement.

This one takes a bit of explaining. The category of “no B.A., promoted to occupation” that you see in the chart above (of higher-paying occupations) includes managerial roles that don’t require specific educational backgrounds. We know from other research that these jobs are not necessarily easy to come by. They tend to require job experience and really strong interpersonal skills such as collaboration and communication–the skills that make good managers.

One implication of this category’s prominence here is that it is difficult to build a strategy around, except to know that in all educational efforts, from K-12 to various post-secondary, the development of these interpersonal skills should be a goal.

The number of jobs that both pay well and require less than a B.A. is smaller than you think.

So if most of the jobs that pay higher wages require either a B.A. or are in managerial roles, what opportunities exist for those who have earned a post-secondary credential that isn’t a B.A.? As noted above, the number of jobs in middle-wage occupations is simply smaller than you might expect (especially if you still think of Michigan as a place with a broad middle class). Only 22 percent of total jobs, or around 946,000 jobs in the entire state, are in the middle-pay occupations. Within that segment, we see a wide range of educational requirements. Yet still 24 percent of those jobs require a B.A. Which means the number of jobs in middle-pay occupations that require an associate degree is 161,000. The number that require an apprenticeship or some college is around 218,000. This is not the foundation of a large, prosperous middle class that we might wish it was.

The idea that Michigan has a bunch of good-paying jobs that don’t require at least a Bachelor’s degree is a fallacy. This data are consistent with the data that show significantly higher lifetime earnings with greater education, and emerging data that people with higher education levels are weathering this pandemic more successfully (at least, by their wallets).

Data analysis by Don Grimes, University of Michigan, for Michigan Future Inc. Charts by Michigan Future. You are welcome to download and use these infographics in your own work, with proper credit.

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The 6Cs framework, as Dr. Carol Lautenbach explains in this video interview, appealed to them partly because it included content, embedding content within the other skills so critical to future learning. When these skills and content knowledge are developed jointly, they are integrated more successfully.

Superintendent Kevin Polston and Assistant Superintendent Dr. Carol Lautenbach, the tremendous leadership team at Godfrey-Lee, joined us back in November to discuss how their district–with its focus on equity, broad skills development, and clarity about the mission of education–has transformed over the last few years, and how it’s responding to covid.

This was a really great conversation, touching on thematic learning, teacher innovation, and the current accountability system. Kevin and Carol have a challenge to all of us: they see clearly that educational equity is not going to occur if we keep doing what we’re doing slightly better. It’s time to figure out how to infuse education with a new practice of innovation.

Kevin and Carol’s interview is a part of our What Now? video interview series on education.

What Now? asks: how should we navigate through this pandemic, and ensure a more prosperous Michigan in our recovery? Click the icon for other videos in this series.

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