The Midwest Governors Association (MGA) has announced that it will hold an investment summit in Coloumbus, Ohio, that will focus on how to increase investment in the Midwest. Creating investment through a new energy economy will the central focus for the event. The summit is set to take place September 21-22, 2010.

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland leads the MGA and said in his announcement that the Governors’ will be looking at ways to attract investment capital, new businesses and make the region the global leader in new energy technology and production. The Governors will be examining ways that venture capitalists, angel investors and traditional financial institutions can partner with regional business and government to further economic development for the region.

During his tenure, Governor Strickland has focused on increasing investment capital opportunities for the Midwest’s small and mid-sized businesses. He contends that the Midwest has the resources needed to lead the nation in the new energy economy, including a strong manufacturing and agri-business base. These resources will serve as the chief selling points for attracting new business.

The two-day meeting has two components. Day one will highlight governors’ vision for the region’s investment climate and introduce issues from Midwestern business leaders and other stakeholders. Day two in an invitation only event, with sessions that focus on developing a Midwestern investment strategy platform.

“As governor, I see firsthand how important investment capital is in attracting new businesses to Ohio. If we want to continue the Midwest’s progress in becoming a global leader in the new energy economy, we must find ways to increase investment opportunities in our region,” said Strickland. “I look forward to welcoming my fellow governors and other summit participants to Columbus for a productive discussion on how we can strengthen the Midwest as an innovator in energy development.”

More information, including registration for the first day of the summit is available here.

Virginia has passed new legislation that will expand charter schools throughout the state. The bills are part of the Governor’s “Opportunity to Learn” agenda, focused on education reform.

The laws aim to improve the application and review process for public charter school applicants, as well as establishing uniform statewide input standards for the application process. Children will also be allowed to choose schools that fall outside their zip codes, expand college laboratory schools and improve and promote virtual learning.

Additionally, charter school applications that are denied or existing schools that fail the renewal process will now receive written reasons for such denial and can thereafter petition the local school board for reconsideration. The bills include provisions for public comment at all steps of the process for new and existing charter school applications and renewals. Final decisions will ultimately rest with the local school boards where the the school is applying.

The Governor also hopes to use the new laws to bolster the state’s Race To The Top application for federal education funding.

“Without a world-class education our young people will not be able to compete with their peers in the global marketplace. States that move proactively to bring innovation, competition and reform to their public schools are not only serving their young people well, they are improving their prospects for future economic prosperity and job-creation,” Governor McDonnell said.

The state of Wisconsin will get $50,708,839 in federal grant money to fix struggling schools statewide. The Federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) program is offering the money which is part of the $3.5 billion marked for education funding in the stimulus.

The money will be distributed by the state to schools that are identified as lacking in achievement. The schools identified are considered “persistently lowest achieving” or a Tier III school, which is defined as a school that has failed to meet annual yearly progress for two years and is not identified as a persistently lowest achieving school. Schools who receive SIG grants will be able to spend the money immediately, with the goal of supporting the school year starting this fall.

Schools that apply for the funding will also have to demonstrate that they are ready to implement one of four models to turn the school around. The models include measures such as replacing the principal, re-screening the teaching staff, closing schools and re-opening them as charter schools, or changing curriculum.

Wisconsin’s Governor Jim Doyle, has had education at the top of his agenda since 2003. The Governor has supported initiatives for smaller class sizes, increased funding for special education, expanding 4-year old kindergarten programs and increased funding for early childhood education programs.

“This funding will help us take a significant step toward turning around our struggling schools,” Governor Doyle said. “I want to thank Congressman Dave Obey, as well as Secretary Duncan and the Obama Administration, for helping make this funding possible. Their focus on moving our education system forward will greatly improve the education our kids receive.”

In an announcement last Friday in New York City, the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) named Suwon, South Korea as the 2010 Intelligent Community of the Year. ICF Co-Founder Louis Zacharilla said Suwon’s commitment to educational investments helped push the city past the other six in what could have been a “seven-way tie.”

Suwon is South Korea’s second largest city and home to one of Samsung Electronics’ main factories. The city has a population of just over 1 million and it is known as a major educational center with 14 university campuses. The city has laid much of the technological groundwork that ICF believes will lead successful communities in the broadband economy: investments in e-government and fiber optic networks in the city has created a ubiquitous online environment for connecting to law enforcement, fire prevention, traffic information, e-learning and citizen services. The city developed its own governmental network despite South Korea’s impressive broadband infrastructure, currently ranked number one in the world, allowing Suwon to boost connection speeds from 32 Mbps to 1 Gbps.

But in naming Suwon its Intelligent Community of the Year, ICF focused less on technology than on Suwon’s development of the “human software” within its highly-educated community. Suwon has invested hundreds of millions of dollars grooming their curriculum for a global economy and workforce, officials said, which spoke directly to ICF’s theme during this year’s Building the Broadband Economy Summit.

“The levels of educational investment in Suwon, sends a signal that, as we emerge from the global economic crisis, it is the investment made in people that produce the truly impressive financial return,” Mr. Zacharilla said during the presentation ceremony.

The award was the culmination of a year-long process where potential candidates were vetted by an independent team of judges. The process began in 2009 when a list of Smart21 cities was named and in January that list was whittled down to a Top Seven. Suwon’s mayor, Yong Seo Kim called education “one of the most sound and rational outlays of capital that a government can ever make.” But he was not alone in his assessment during the summit.

In a blog post from BBE, ICF co-founder Robert Bell argued today’s teaching environment demanded much more from teachers in terms of technology knowledge and usage.

Many summit-goers echoed the need for a restructured educational system that was integrated with a community’s economic development and long-term growth strategies. “We tend to teach the technology and think we’re done,” Bell wrote. “Instead, we should be harnessing these tools to teach young people how to learn. Today’s educators have to know how to teach students to learn, not just convey information to them.”

But he also said strong government policy was needed to enable such developments. “Community leaders need to be relentless about promoting educational achievement, and ensure that education does not stop at the school wall.”

“Educational outcomes improve when classrooms connect to local business and institutional expertise,” Mr. Bell continued, “which also tends to keep graduating students in the community, where their skills can contribute to local prosperity.”

Washington State and Colorado both announced Recovery Act grant awards that will institute longitudinal education data systems designed to provide records of student performance from kindergarten through adult employment. Washington was awarded a $17.3 million grant for their system which will provide funding for the system over the next three years.

Washington’s new system will combine the state’s K-12 system with data from pre-kindergarten programs, as well as post-secondary and workforce information, creating a P-20 system.  Currently, K-12 data is managed by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). The new system will build on the work already done by OSPI, as well as the Education Research and Data Center, to focus on five areas of their education data collection: data governance, research and reporting, creation of a data warehouse environment, interoperability and strengthening the overall system.

“We know that transitions in school – from preschool to kindergarten, and from high school to college – present challenges to students,” Gov. Chris Gregoire said. “Having a data system to look at the progress of a student from pre-kindergarten through college is something that will help us better understand their needs. This grant will be an important part of our efforts to implement education reform and improve the quality of education for our children.”

Colorado was awarded a $17.4 million grant for their P-20 data project. The grant will build on the state’s P-20 agenda recommended by Governor Ritter’s P-20 Education Council and legislation passed last year which authorizes the inter-departmental data sharing needed to complete the project. The new system will be called Project SchoolView, and will capture data from a variety of state agencies to inform policy, parents, students, educators and researchers.

“This Recovery Act grant provides a critical component of Colorado’s education reforms that we have been spearheading over the last few years through a strong collaboration with stakeholders in the Colorado education community,” Gov. Ritter said. “By establishing a statewide data system of this scale, we will be able to track student progress in a way that has never been done before and then use this data to create a world-class education system that prepares our students for success in the global workforce.”

The grants in both states are some of the largest of the $250 million awarded this year through a grant competition between all 50 states – 20 states were awarded grants of various sizes through the competition.

The Recovery Act, signed into law in February by President Obama, is expected to bring Colorado at least $7.1 billion through more than 140 different programs, including tax cuts for most working families, increased safety net services and investment in infrastructure projects and growth industries.

The grant process was administered by the Institute of Education Sciences at the Department of Education. All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands applied.

In this year’s annual Building the Broadband Economy Summit, the Intelligent Community Forum looks at how cities across the globe are tying educational requirements to workforce needs, as jobs ebb and flow to disparate parts of the world according to the availability of low-cost, high-speed communications technology.

The unemployment rate in the United States is 9.9 percent, according to the latest figures by the Department of Labor. And nearly 7 million of those jobless have gone more than twenty-seven weeks without work. Billions of dollars more are likely to be flushed through the economy over the coming months, through unemployment insurance or “jobs bills,” to help sections of the economy emerge from the Great Recession.

But according to Louis Zacharilla and the Intelligent Community Forum, a global think tank, the task of creating lasting jobs in an ever-changing world has to be more closely aligned with the educational system that produces the workforce. Mr. Zacharilla and his colleagues at ICF are gearing up for their annual Building the Broadband Economy Summit this week to announce the 2010 Intelligent Community of the Year. This year’s theme is “The Education Last Mile: Closing the Gap between School and Work.”

“We are seeing a requirement for the education systems throughout the world to produce a type of person that was not required 20 years ago, as we came to the end of the industrial age,” Mr. Zacharilla said in an interview.

The concept of a knowledge worker has been around since the 1970’s when Peter Drucker coined the term, but only recently has the world seen his predictions come true. According to a white paper produced by ICF, the manufacturing sector of the world’s economy has lost a significant amount its job-generating power and that the skills gap between secondary and higher education is widening in terms of earning potential. “For citizens with a poor educational history and few skills, [the change to a knowledge-based workforce] has been devastating,” the report says. “In earlier decades, they would have found work in manufacturing and earned wages that would have put them solidly in the middle class.”

The new worker, according to Mr. Zacharilla, needs to not only have the skills to perform in the new knowledge workforce, but she needs to be able to achieve at significant levels of skill performance.

“It’s important that the workforce look to the educational systems of the world to help close the gap and produce people that are capable of thinking in ways that are consistent with the requirements of the modern community.”

For the past decade, as part of its annual awards process, ICF has been studying the modern community and identifying cities throughout the world that are setting the bar for innovation in the Broadband Economy. The Broadband Economy is how ICF explains the rapid expansion of low-cost, high-speed communications and information technology within a global context. Every year, communities are chosen from a group of Smart21 Communities for their integration of broadband, and related technologies, with community development and citizen outreach strategies.

This year’s Top Seven winners included two US-based communities – Arlington County, Virginia and Dublin, Ohio. They were joined by cities in Canada, the Netherlands, South Korea, Estonia and the UK. Mr. Zacharilla said the primary strength of this year’s Top Seven Communities has been their concerted efforts to increase innovation. He said that local government officials have been at the heart of successful efforts to bring once failing and old economies into the 21st century – and they are leveraging private partnerships to build upon enabling policies.

“What we’ve arrived at now, is a Top Seven that have enshrined innovation and are beginning to absorb it into the DNA of their cultures.”

One example comes from Ottawa, Ontario where a reported five new businesses are started every week. “People say ‘wow,’” Zacharilla explained, “But I say ‘why isn’t everyone else doing it?’ because that is going to be the requirement for every local economy going forward.”

“Jobs have to come from somewhere, so creating five businesses every seven days shouldn’t be something that gets an exclamation point behind it. It should be the standard.”

Moving forward, the global think tank is trying to understand education’s role in the Broadband Economy and identifying some of those cities that have laid a high-speed communications infrastructure, but are now fostering a workforce to maximize the use of that fiber backbone.

“Now we’re trying to understand weather the educational system can be disintermediated by knowledge.”

According to Mr. Zacharilla, some communities are reassessing their continuing education model and trying to understand if rather than be a supplemental to the tradition of secondary and higher education, it could be part of a “twenty-year educational package.”

With the understanding that most people will have five to seven new jobs over a lifetime, and each of those jobs requiring new levels of education and new forms of training, conversations are emerging in some communities about developing a model where parents can buy an educational product upfront, at a discount, and make it part of an ecosystem, Zacharilla said.

“People are working hard to solve the systemic problem of not looking at the workforce and tying it back into the educational requirements.”

ICF’s BBE Summit “The Education Last Mile: Closing the Gap between School and Work” begins Wednesday May 19 through May 21 where the 2010 Intelligent Community of the Year will be announced at the Polytechnic University at its Metrotech campus in Brooklyn, New York. For more information, click here.

Both Ohio and Massachusetts announced new initiatives to foster science, technology, engineering and mathematics education and jobs this week.

Ohio launched What’s Next? Ohio Career Sim, a Sim designed to help students find careers in the state that rely on STEM education and show them the pathway to getting hired in those fields. The site was created in collaboration with Scholastic and is part of the state’s plan to develop a 21st century workforce. The site’s launch is in concert with a regional STEM conference in Northwest Ohio, part of the state’s STEM Conference Series.

“Today’s students are tomorrow’s creators and entrepreneurs,”  Governor Strickland said of the site. “By encouraging our young people to match their interests with potential career paths, we’re helping them discover growing industries right here in Ohio while also preparing them for a purposeful and productive future.”

The Ohio Career Sim will offer students information on scholarships, the state university system and will let them “try-on” different career choices.

Massachusetts is also working with NASA to support STEM education in the state. Massachusetts along with six other states will receive NASA’s Summer of Innovation Grants. Massachusetts will get a $1,515,024 grant as part of the pilot program designed by NASA to foster innovation and outreach for students in communities that are underserved or are underperforming in STEM education.

Throughout the summer, NASA will engage with middle school teachers and students in science-based education programming with the goal of increasing the number of future scientists, mathematicians and engineers.

“Through the Summer of Innovation project, NASA will work with partners and educators across America, to bring the excitement of space to thousands of middle school students, with an emphasis on broadening participation of underrepresented and underserved students,” NASA Administrator Bolden said.

Massachusetts’ proposal outlined six intensive summer programs that will focus on NASA’s robotics, Earth and space science, astrophysics and engineering missions to reach a diverse sample of the student population, with additional outreach for low-income and minority students.

Tyler Technologies continues to land deals in the education sector, announcing today a contract with the Contra Costa County Office of Education to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Through Tyler’s Munis ERP solution, CCCOE and its 15 member districts will have access to a variety of financial, human capital management and content management business processes, the company said Tuesday.

CCCOE is home to over 160,000 K-12 students. And according to the Office’s associate superintendent of business, Bill Clark, Tyler Tech performed a weeklong demonstration of the Munis ERP system. Clark says the new system could mean huge savings through reduced annual software maintenance and support costs.

“The implementation of Tyler’s Munis ERP solution will provide significant opportunities to modernize financial functions, improve budget and position monitoring, and more effectively use technologies such as automated workflow and document imaging that we could not take advantage of with our previous system,” Clark said in a statement. “Additionally, we expect our investment in Munis will reduce CCCOE’s annual software maintenance and support costs by approximately fifty percent after implementation.”

In a previous conversation with CivSource, Tyler Pulse division President Mark Rigsby spoke about the company’s education-specific offerings, including data warehousing and longitudinal data systems. To read more, click here.

Delaware and Tennessee were the only recipients of money in the first round of funding available through Race to the Top’s $4.3 billion purse. Central to the two states’ strategies was commitment to data-driven reforms, officials say, by both school administrators and unions. Additional factors included a public-private partnership in Delaware to develop a 2015 plan (in 2006) and Tennessee’s plan to share educational data with welfare and childcare agencies.

According to this morning’s Tennessean, the state has been collecting detailed records and statistics on its students and teachers for some time. Using what is known as a state longitudinal data system, or SLDS, Tennessee and other states can track students from as early as pre-Kindergarten through college. But after receiving $500 million, the state can turn its database into a user-friendly tool for educational diagnostics and collaboration efforts.

In the future, Tennessee Education Commissioner Tim Webb said, a teacher would be able to look at the data on a student and recognize that she is struggling in one subject area — say, linear equations. The database would help the teacher find a school on the other side of the state where a teacher has had success teaching linear equations to students who have the same background and challenges as the student in Nashville. The teachers could then share lesson plans.

The Tennessee system, for the first time, will link educational data to the state’s Human Services and Children’s Services departments. Ideally, this will help schools better handle those students who are recently placed in foster care or are with families struggling to make ends meet.

The Delaware application boasted a legacy of reforms, officials in that state boasted, to win $100 million in Race funds. In 2006, the state developed plans to construct Vision 2015, a privately funded coalition of business, community and education officials. The group charted a path towards reforms using technology, including a computer-adaptive test tracking students’ improvements over time, a system designed to give teachers immediate feedback on students’ needs and a system of “data coaches” intended to help schools use the information they are already collecting.

“Some states were starting this summer,” Paul Herdman, president and CEO of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware and a major backer of Vision 2015, told the News Journal. “We had a four-year head start.”

“This will allow us to try things that we never had the implementation money for before,” he said. “It will continue to be a long process. This is just a huge step.”

There wasn’t even a bronze medal awarded in the Obama administration’s education Race to the Top. But administration officials maintain the importance of setting high standards and pledge to fund as many strong applications as possible in round two.

The National League of Cities’ Congressional City Conference kicked off Monday with a call to pass jobs legislation and keynotes from various Obama administration officials, including Secretaries of Energy, Education and Transportation. Each Cabinet member underscored initiatives championed by President Obama aimed at helping local officials address job shortages, while helping cities compete against their international counterparts.

During the opening address to NLC members, Ronald Loveridge, mayor of Riverside, Calif. and President of the organization, renewed his calls for passage of the Local Jobs for America Act. Introduced last week, the Local Jobs for America Act would send billions directly to local governments to address budget shortfalls of up to $83 billion over the next two years.

“We represent cities where unemployment numbers are not statistics. We represent small businesses that are laying off employees or closing their doors,” Mayor Loveridge said in his address. “The pain is real and we feel it.”

In addition to jobs, competitiveness was continued theme in the afternoon sessions. A thirty-minute presentation, Energy Secretary Steven Chu used solar panel production to set the stage for his policy arguments and strategies. Solar technology, specifically silicon and photovoltaic cells, is indicative of the United States’ path in energy competitiveness, Chu indicated. In the mid 90’s, the US had the lion’s share of production. “We invented silicon in the United States,” Chu reminded the audience. “But due to policy decisions in Europe, and especially China, we have slipped to near the bottom of the list now.”

Sec. Chu said a priority of the Obama administration was to refocus the manufacturing sector on the clean energy economy. Combining tax incentives with stimulus money, Chu said “advanced batteries” production for wind turbines, water turbines and other renewable machines presented the kind of opportunity that would boost job growth, wean the country off fossil fuels and give the US a competitive advantage in battery production.

“We want to recapture manufacturing in this country,” Chu said to a round of cheers and claps. “We can not solely rely on services and financial instruments for our economic prosperity.”

Continuing the competitiveness theme, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke about President Obama’s commitment to reauthorize No Child Left Behind with much-needed revisions. Secretary Duncan said the only way to ensure America’s competitiveness was to improve education. “We need to educate our way to a better economy.” The president is taking a “support but not prescribe” role with education policy, Duncan said, focusing on setting high-standards and measuring improvements.

Honing his message for the audience, Duncan finished by urging, “When schools don’t work, cities don’t work…There are no great cities without great school systems.”