Category: Education
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Ranking Georgia’s counties on key economic, education, and population health metrics
As some TIGC readers know, I’ve been concentrating lately on stirring my research into some kind of semi-coherent book form. As part of that process, I’ve been updating a lot of data, and fairly regularly I run across buckets of numbers that are worth a quick post. This is one of those times. Over the…
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CNBC puts out latest “Top States for Business” rankings, and guess what …
CNBC, the nation’s leading business network, came out this morning with its 2025 list of “America’s Top States for Business” and awarded top honors, once again, to Geor — Oh, wait. No. Not Georgia. North Carolina. Georgia, whose leaders have been crowing for about a decade now about the No. 1 state for business award…
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Bill Shipp is still right
I’ve written a couple of pieces over the years detailing the educational attainment gaps between the various parts of the state. The main hook I used for those pieces was an old Bill Shipp quote that without Metro Atlanta, the state of Georgia would be more poorly educated than Mississippi. As a native Mississippian, I…
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Georgia vs. North Carolina, Chapter II: Educational Attainment
The second in a series of occasional posts comparing Georgia and North Carolina.
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New NAEP documents Covid-19’s staggering impact on K-12 students, but begs a question: How much worse was damage in rural areas?
One of the stories I was working on late last year, when my wife’s illness forced me to take a hiatus from TIGC, was a deeper dive into the state’s K-12 performance. Up until then, my evaluation of education at a county level had focused on educational attainment levels; I was studying local populations after…
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A first look at some new educational attainment data for Georgia’s counties (it ain’t pretty)
Lately I’ve been wallowing around in about a dozen different datasets and working on at least as many posts without getting any of them finished. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there are moments when I miss having an editor yelling at me. So, now I’ve started yelling at myself and have given myself…
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Forget the “two Georgias,” welcome to Massassippi
I can’t remember whether he wrote it or said it, but years ago the legendary Atlanta Constitution editor Bill Shipp opined that if you lifted Metro Atlanta out of Georgia, what was left would be worse off than Mississippi. I remember it because I’m from Mississippi and my first reaction was: Really? There might be…
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Updating TIGC’s Gwinnett County-South Georgia comparison, Part II: Education
A week or so ago I published a post that looked at South Georgia’s population trends. This was the first of what will likely be four or more posts updating a December 2016 comparison between my 56-county South Georgia region and Gwinnett County alone. For the past few days I’ve been mucking around in various…
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Rural Georgia: Doing its part to send Metro Atlanta kids to college
One recurring theme in my Trouble in God’s Country research is that Metro Atlanta is paying the lion’s share of taxes in Georgia while consuming a much smaller portion of social services, such as Medicaid and food stamp benefits. Rural Georgia, generally speaking, doesn’t cover its costs for those services. In at least one regard, however,…