Education
A Role For City Hall
Google Fiber, the new streetcar and a booming downtown have all helped Kansas City recruit talented young people, Mayor Sly James said when a group of mayors sat down to talk about workforce development at Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s Conference on Economic Development. Not so long ago, he observed, people moved to a place because…
Read MoreBlue Collar Jobs Make (Lots Of) Cents
What would you say to making $18 per hour after less than half a year of postsecondary training? Or $35 an hour in a union job? Those aren’t hypotheticals. Workforce experts say those jobs exist in the Kansas City area, and workers are in demand. One of the biggest hurdles in matching people with those…
Read MorePoor Report Card
Educators from around Missouri were brutally honest when they met as a panel at Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s Conference on Economic Development. Many of the state’s schools, including the ones they lead, are not doing enough to prepare students to succeed beyond graduation. When he came to Kansas City two years ago to lead the…
Read MoreAre School Buildings Obsolete?
A “school without walls” is typically a euphuism for a building that substitutes collaborative learning for the standard approach of stationing teachers in front of a classroom full of students. But the internet age has brought us to a point where walls literally are superfluous — where students do their work online as part of…
Read MoreBuilding A Better Future
Clyde McQueen seethed recently when an employer — a friend, no less — moved 20 welding jobs to Iowa. “Because we didn’t have enough welding classes going on,” McQueen told an audience at Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s Conference on Economic Development in Kansas City recently. As the chief executive of Kansas City’s Full Employment Council,…
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