Jim Crow: ethnic discrimination especially against blacks by legal enforcement or traditional sanctions. We’ve been thinking about this a lot as a result of our give and take yesterday with our friend, albeit adversary on this issue, Ken Hoover, when he suggested that we are off-base in saying that the current debate about unifying our [...]

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By Roberta Brandes Gratz / Dec 24 2010 For Release Sunday, December 26, 2010 Citiwire.net DETROIT — Organic development, not “big bang projects” — that’s the sane, and effective way, to build and rebuild great cities. For evidence check out hard-pressed Detroit’s corner of Michigan Avenue and 14th Street, located at the nexus of Corktown [...]

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As we predicted in an earlier post, the anti-school consolidation folks position themselves as experts on schools and are coming out of the woodwork with specious “facts,” stilted arguments, and more trafficking in fear and fiction. In many respects, they act like we are a community of amnesiacs.  Just yesterday, more red herrings and alleged [...]

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A recent speech by Thomas Sevcik, managing director of Arthesia, (a think tank that consults large institutions on cultural positioning and strategies), caught our eye for its provocative conclusions, but also because he and his firm have been hired by Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce and Memphis Area Convention and Visitors Bureau to develop a [...]

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Previously posted November 17, 2009: Here we go again. It seems that Memphis economic development officials have an addiction to tax freezes that the Betty Ford Clinic couldn’t cure. Meanwhile, they have an obsession with North Mississippi that Sigmund Freud couldn’t have shaken. As a result, real reform of our community’s Payment-in-lieu-of-tax (PILOT) program always [...]

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GOP lawmakers want to know how millions in tax breaks and incentives will be used before they vote. State officials are taking steps to improve oversight over two government offices responsible for much of Tennessee’s recruitment of business and industry — as well as the incentives and tax deals that attract those companies. Republican lawmakers [...]

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Previously posted December 24, 2009: This time of the year, it’s impossible for us to not think about Peggy Edmiston, who died seven years ago. It wasn’t the glittery Christmas sweaters, complete with blinking ornaments,  that no one else had the courage to wear.  It wasn’t the permanent collection of Christmas decorations and miniature villages [...]

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The cast of characters in suburban politics would flunk a remedial course in elementary logic. Here’s the syllogism they offer up: One, Shelby County Schools are superior to Memphis City Schools and the paragon of exceptional education. Two, our only concern is about the kids and getting them a quality education. Therefore, we will do [...]

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A 2009 study by the Department of Agriculture found that 2.3 million households do not have access to a car and live more than a mile from a supermarket. Much of the public health debate over rising obesity rates has turned to these “food deserts,” where convenience store fare is more accessible—and more expensive—than healthier [...]

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Previously posted July 12, 2006: It’s time for a modest proposal regarding the controversial city-county PILOT program waiving $50 million in property taxes this year. “Modest” being the operative word, since it seems obvious at this point that is what government officials are going for as they study the tax freeze programs to death and [...]

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As 2010 comes to a close, it is a good time to pause and reflect on the stack of reports released over the past year that comment on the well-being of children, and ask how these studies apply to Memphis, particularly in terms of what they can tell us about early childhood brain development, and [...]

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There are times when it seems that Memphis can’t get its economic development strategies into the 21st century. It’s as if we just don’t want to compete in a knowledge economy in a global marketplace.  Our economic development strategies are caught in the commodity trap, stemming from our background as an agricultural center and continuing [...]

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From Memphis Business Journal: Memphis did not recruit much new industry to the area in 2010, which isn’t a surprise, given the economy is experiencing what Charles Gulotta calls the “worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.” But as director of the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Economic Development, Gulotta is tasked with finding [...]

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The Flyer’s John Branston weighs in on tonight’s  vote on the surrender of the Memphis City Schools charter, and decides that “For better for worse, MCS and Shelby County schools should get married.” He writes: You never know if a marriage or divorce is going to work out. You just have a feeling that it’s [...]

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State officials have confirmed they are negotiating with Amazon.com about locating two centers in the Chattanooga area. Gov. Phil Bredesen and Economic and Community Development Commissioner Matt Kisber said in a news release Monday night that the potential sites are at the Enterprise South Industrial Park in Chattanooga and along Tennessee 308 in Bradley County. [...]

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The Center on Education Policy (CEP) released a study that tracks trends in achievement gaps for minority and low-income students in all 50 states, and the picture is bleak, according to The Christian Science Monitor. The report calculates how long it would take to close various gaps at their current rates. For Florida, which is [...]

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John O’Leary is a research fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School and co-author of “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government.”  This post is from Governing: One thing government has in abundance is data. Most of it is buried in agency computers. What [...]

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They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. That’s Hosea 8:7 and it’s a verse familiar to the small group of African-American ministers who this week sang Kumbaya with leaders of a county school district who have repeatedly made racially-based decisions about its students’ future. That’s precisely how we ended up with segregated county schools [...]

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The better the education people get, the stronger the U.S. economy will be, a poll shows. But don’t count on people to support higher taxes to improve schools. Eighty-eight percent say a country’s education system has a major effect on its economic health. Nearly as many — 79 percent — say the U.S. economy would [...]

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The modern information age ushered in by the rise of computers and the Internet has made the transfer of knowledge a rather trivial matter. What once took many hours of time and labor to gather and disseminate now takes a few minutes, if not seconds. Consequently, there’s a growing expectation for people to have instant [...]

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The job of the executive director of the Metropolitan Planning Organization for our community is vacant, and we are dreaming of how nice it would be if we had someone like the one in Nashville.  He actually feels that his job is to speak out against sprawl.  Here, the MPO director can’t speak the total [...]

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