Posts tagged ‘Education’

Feb 13

TIGC’s first bowl of 2023 alphabet soup: PCI, JTC, DOR & GOP

Lately I’ve been working on about a half-dozen pieces that have to do in one way or another with the “cold case” I began focusing on about a year ago. Today I’ll hit the highlights (or lowlights) of some of those pieces and tease the follow-ups to come.

First, the 2021 PCI numbers are out and Georgia is still at the bottom of the heap. It was a little over a year ago that I took a deep dive into 2020 per capita income data produced by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and discovered that Georgia had more counties and more people in the bottom national quartile for PCI than any other state. The 2021 data is no better. One-hundred-and-five of the 778 counties in the bottom national quartile are Georgia counties, and those counties are home to 3.2 million people — right at 30 percent of the state’s population. Only Texas, with nearly triple Georgia’s population, has more residents — 3.4 million — in that bottom quartile. North Carolina, with roughly the same population as Georgia and comparable economic and education metrics, has less than a third as many of its citizens in that bottom quartile. Poor ol’ hapless Wheeler County, Ga., still ranks 3,113th out of 3,113 U.S. counties for the second year in a row.

Second, it’s increasingly difficult to ignore the juxtaposition between the state’s PCI performance and its shift to Republican governance. As I noted in one piece on this issue, Georgia made remarkable progress in raising the state’s per capita income in the final years of the 20th century and then surrendered all that progress in the opening years of the 21st century. That rise-and-fall pattern coincided perfectly with the final years of Democratic leadership at the Gold Dome and the opening years of Republican leadership. I said in my early pieces on this subject that I was reluctant to blame Republicans for the collapse in PCI performance, but the question seems a fair one. Sonny Perdue, who defeated incumbent Democratic Governor Roy Barnes in 2002 and became Georgia’s first Republican governor in more than a century, oversaw the biggest decline in PCI performance in at least the last half-century. Under his leadership, Georgia’s per capita income fell from 94.6 percent of the national average to 85.6 percent and we dropped in rank from 26th place to 41st. To be fair, Perdue presided over one of the most challenging economies in the state’s history; he took office in the wake of 9/11 and governed through the Great Recession. But he was hardly alone; 49 other governors faced the same challenges. The question is, why did Georgia fare so much worse during this period than nearly all other states? In the 20 years from the beginning of Democrat Joe Frank Harris’s first term in 1983 and the end of Barnes’s four-year tenure, only one state — Vermont — gained more ground; in the 20 years from the beginning of Perdue’s tenure through the first three years of Governor Brian Kemp’s first term, only one state — Delaware — lost more ground.

Third, one possible answer to that question that deserves more attention is whether Georgia is paying an economic development price for cuts to education. Governor Perdue and his successor Nathan Deal chopped billions of dollars out of the state’s education budget. In what may have been a prescient Georgia Trend column headlined “Perdue’s sad legacy,” the late Tom Crawford wrote this in March 2009: “Georgia is competing against other states to lure sophisticated, high-tech businesses at the same time that we’re spending $2 billion less to train and educate the prospective work force. This doesn’t make any sense at all.” At the same time Crawford wrote that column, rural Georgia enrollment in University System of Georgia institutions was beginning a significant downhill slide. In 2013, the Fiscal Research Center at Georgia State University produced a report titled “Population, Employment, and Income Trends for Georgia and Atlanta.” Authored by Professor David Sjoquist, that report noted several softening economic trends and listed educational performance as one of the possible reasons why. “It is possible that the relative low performance of the K-12 education system is slowing growth,” Sjoquist’s report said. “The skill level required for most jobs has increased, which means an educated labor force has become increasingly important for attracting jobs. On lots of dimensions, Georgia’s K-12 education system performs well below the national average.” That report went on to note that Georgia ranked “19th in terms of the percentage of the population with at least a college degree,” but neglected to mention that those college graduates were concentrated overwhelmingly in the Atlanta area.

Fourth (and this is being really, really, really charitable), Georgia’s Job Tax Credit ain’t working as originally planned. This program was created in the early 1990s and basically codified raising per capita income, reducing poverty, and creating jobs as important economic development objectives. Initially, the JTC program focused solely on the state’s 40 poorest counties — as determined by a formula that factored in county-level PCI, poverty rates, and unemployment rates. Over time, the program has been expanded in several ways. It now includes all 159 counties, no matter how prosperous, and the counties have been placed in one of four tiers, depending on how they score on the PCI/Poverty/Unemployment formula. Tax credit amounts have been increased and the number of new jobs a business has to create to qualify for the credits has been reduced. When the program was launched in 1991, a company had to create a minimum of 10 jobs in one of the state’s Bottom-40 counties to qualify for a $1,000 per job credit; now, the minimum requirement for those Bottom-40 is down to two jobs and each one entitles the job creator to a $3,500 tax credit. But even that isn’t working — at least not for Georgia’s poorest counties. According to a report by the Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR), $56.7 million in tax credits were claimed in 2021 for the creation of 20,417 jobs. My analysis of that report found that only 1,734 of those jobs were created in that year’s Bottom 40 counties, and 20 of those counties didn’t get a single new JTC-supported job. In contrast, Fulton County alone picked up 5,974 new JTC-supported jobs.

Fifth and last, stir all this data together in a big pot and it pretty much boils over with irony. Perhaps the biggest of these is political. According to the above-mentioned DOR report, 79 of Georgia’s 159 counties didn’t get a single new JTC-supported job in 2021; in the 2022 governor’s race, 71 of those counties went for incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp. This includes three of the four counties — Brantley, Glascock and Pierce — that gave 90 percent of their vote to Kemp; the fourth of Kemp’s 90-percent counties — Banks — snagged 22 such jobs. Fully 60 percent of the 2021 jobs created under the JTC program went to Democratic counties.

Watch this space. There’s more to come on all these topics.

Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2023

Sep 8

Stacey Abrams does an interview with TIGC. It was pretty long. Here’s Chapter One.

A couple of months ago, I began tracking the approach our gubernatorial candidates – incumbent Republican Brian Kemp and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams – were taking toward rural Georgia and its mounting problems. I started doing this after reading that Abrams had launched her campaign in Cuthbert, Ga., a tiny town near the Alabama line in southwest Georgia. My first reaction was that Abrams had somehow gotten lost, but it turns out she did this on purpose.

After that, I scoured the Kemp and Abrams campaign websites for evidence of their approach to rural Georgia and eventually reached out to the Abrams campaign with two requests. One was to talk with the campaign team members helping to craft her rural policies. The other was to interview Abrams herself. Over a period of a few weeks, I had a couple of conversations about rural issues with campaign staff members and volunteers.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams speaks outside of closed hospital in Cuthbert, Georgia, Monday, March 14, 2022.

Then last Friday I interviewed Abrams herself, and one thing became quickly apparent: the person crafting Stacey Abrams’s rural policies was Stacey Abrams herself.

The interview ran just under less than an hour and yielded more material than I could possibly cram into a single post. In the course of the interview, we covered a range of topics in some depth – education, healthcare, economic development, and the complicated politics facing any Democrat trying to harvest votes in bright red rural Georgia these days. Over the next few days, I plan to post several posts reporting on Abrams’s views on these subjects.

To open the interview, I threw her a softball. Talk to me, I said, about how you view the complicated set of problems facing rural Georgia, and about how you would tackle them. Does state government have the tactical tools it needs to help rural Georgia? Or do we need a new strategic approach?

“For me, the goal in rural Georgia is not to become Atlanta, but it is to be able to be self-sustaining and successful within the construct of being small and not having your neighbors live right on top of you. It is the ability to have the amenities of rural with the modernity of time… “
–stacey abrams

I hereby yield the floor to Ms. Abrams. Her answers and comments, lightly edited for length, follow.

“We have the tools,” she said, “but they’re jumbled, they are often misused, and they rarely target with the precision necessary to address the challenge…. Rural economic decline is real. Population decline is real. There has been insufficient funding of education. There is a very marked lack of quality healthcare. There is crumbling and sometimes non-existent infrastructure. And there has been a lack of economic opportunity that has really focused more on sort of big-game hunting to bring in solutions for targeted counties.

“But the systemic and I would say sustainable approach has been missing and what is more concerning to me is that the solutions are often premised on leveraging the poverty as opposed to solving the poverty. Meaning, that Georgia often touts economic development coming to the state by saying you don’t have to pay fair wages, that it is the low-income, low-wealth nature of our state that is used as a selling point. Which then means that those who bring jobs do not bring those kinds of jobs that could lift economic capacity, (that) could address those economic challenges…

“For me, the goal in rural Georgia is not to become Atlanta, but it is to be able to be self-sustaining and successful within the construct of being small and not having your neighbors live right on top of you. It is the ability to have the amenities of rural with the modernity of time, and that’s what’s missing too often in a rural community. That billions of dollars in tax revenue have been spent on essentially bringing in out-of-state corporations who come to Georgia not simply to create jobs but to create jobs that are not going to lift all of our communities, and that has a concomitant effect of also depressing those who stay and driving out those who might have stayed.

“And so, when I think about how we tackle the challenge of rural Georgia, it is to first acknowledge the repeated failures of recent administrations that have overseen a decline in real wages, a decline in economic capacity, a decline in education, a decline in healthcare, a decline in infrastructure, a decline across the board. And to not cherry pick the winners.

“My mission is to focus on reinvestment but also to think about placemaking. How do we ensure that the nature of our small towns and rural communities are celebrated and that that celebration actually has economic effects? How do we revitalize? And then how do we expand? Because there are some places that have never seen opportunity. When you go into those communities whether you’re talking about parts of Chattooga County or parts of Randolph County, where the rumor of opportunity has been about in the land for years, but never actually manifested. That’s the kind of work that I want to do (and) why my focus on rural communities is so strong.”

Here I interrupted Abrams and asked her a couple of questions. One was whether she was suggesting it was wrong to recruit companies like Rivian and Hyundai, both of which have chosen sites in Georgia under Kemp’s watch? Or Kia, which was recruited to west Georgia under Governor Sonny Perdue more than 15 years ago?

“Well let’s start with that. No, it’s not a mistake to bring in jobs. The challenge is, which jobs are you bringing in? And what are you doing to ensure that those jobs lead to long-term economic lift for everyone? My challenge and my critique is that bringing in those jobs is not the end of the story. It is part of the story but too often it becomes the whole of the story — that because you can tout some massive corporation coming in that will absolutely have economic benefit, then you are absolved of responsibility for all of the places that still have nothing.

“And you get a really great headline and real-world, real-time improvement for some. But the long-term impact on others is that nothing happens. That’s deeply problematic or worse than nothing happening. Things actually continue to deteriorate. So, great for Troup County; that is fantastic. And I would never begrudge the success. But if you’re in Early County, what happened in Troup County is not changing your outcome, and, in fact, it is now, once again, distracting from the very real needs that you have.”

The other question I asked Abrams when I interrupted her was for more of a “nuts-and-bolts” focus on how she would act on her vision for rural Georgia – and how she would pay for it. Following are two chunks of her response, and we’ll expand on these in the next post.

Chunk One: “So here are the nuts-and-bolts… One is investment. How do we make investment more effective and efficient? And what are those investment needs? The major investment needs in Georgia for rural communities are education, Infrastructure, and small business.”

Chunk Two focused on financing those investments, and there’s a lot more to come here. Basically, Abrams contends that – thanks in part to a huge influx in federal funding and a healthy state budget surplus – Georgia is now in a position to make some unprecedented investments in the present and the future. She also identifies this as a “fundamental philosophical difference” between her and Kemp.

“Here’s the analogy I use,” she says. “We’ve got a house (whose) roof has been leaking for years and every time there’s a hard rain, the basement floods. And so we’re used to going up on the roof, patching the roof, and we go bail out the basement. We finally have the money to replace the roof and fix the plumbing. That’s what I want us to do, because if you replace the roof and fix the plumbing, it doesn’t mean the new storms won’t come, but when they come, we’re actually focused on other challenges. We’re not focused on, do we have to find more buckets for the roof? We’ve actually solved that problem. Using the surplus to invest in the next twenty years of Georgia opportunity is the smartest way to use this money because it does not require that we borrow from the future to solve the present. It tells us if we invest in the present, we’re actually better situated for the future.”

We’ll flesh out these chunks – and other topics – in the next post. Watch this space.

(c) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2022

Aug 14

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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 buckets of education data for the purpose of updating that part of the comparison.

I swear I’ve been looking for some good news, but there’s just not much. The best I could come up with is that South Georgia, as a region, has seen a significant reduction in its population of adults (aged 25 and over) who never finished high school, and my best guess is that’s probably because a lot of poorly educated, older people died. Whatever the reason, estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey indicate that the number of South Georgia’s adult population who never finished high school dropped by more than 16,000 from the Bureau’s 2009-2013 average to its most recent 2014-2018 estimates.

South Georgia also made a little headway in growing its percentage of college graduates. From the 2009-2013 period to 2014-2018, it pushed that share of its adult population from 14.9 percent to 16.3 percent. By comparison, Gwinnett County grew its portion of college grads from 33.9 percent to 36.1 percent.

Indeed, college graduates comprise the largest share of Gwinnett County’s adult population while, in South Georgia, high school graduates comprise the largest single cohort: 36.3 percent of the region’s adults held a high school diploma as of the 2014-2018 period. As another point of comparison, Gwinnett County is home to nearly three times as many college graduates as high school dropouts (206,823 versus 70,656) while high school dropouts still outnumber college graduates across South Georgia (146,100 dropouts versus 123,424 college grads).

This column chart shows the population for each educational level — less than high school, high school diploma only, some college, and college graduate — in Gwinnett County and South Georgia.

Only six South Georgia counties can boast having more college graduates than adults who never finished high school: Bulloch, Lee, Lowndes, Thomas, Dougherty and Long. Sixteen have at least twice as many high school dropouts as college graduates, and four of those – Quitman, Telfair, Echols, and Atkinson – had more than three times as many dropouts as college graduates.

It’s possible to argue, of course, that given the nature of the economy across South Georgia, college degrees aren’t as important as they are in Gwinnett County – that, indeed, the more important metric is whether a sufficient share of the population has graduated from high school or perhaps has gotten at least some college education. And in fact South Georgia has made some improvement in both those categories.

But over half its adult population – 55.6 percent – still has no more than a high school diploma, while nearly two-thirds of Gwinnett County’s population – 64.9 percent – has at least some college.

A second education metric I follow is annual fall admissions to University System of Georgia (USG) institutions. This might be viewed as the pipeline of college-educated talent most communities arguably need to prosper, and it produced one of the biggest surprises I found in that first round of research back in 2016.

Through the first decade of this century, South Georgia was still sending substantially more high school graduates to USG institutions than Gwinnett County. But that began to change in about 2009. South Georgia’s admissions trajectory stalled while Gwinnett County’s continued to chug upward for a couple of years. They were basically tied in 2011 – 5,498 for South Georgia versus 5,493 for Gwinnett County.

But since then (as the chart below shows), Gwinnett County – even with a smaller population – has sent larger numbers to USG colleges and universities. The trend lines, however, are interesting, and I’ve come to believe they reflect one of the long-term impacts of the Great Recession on different parts of the state.

South Georgia’s admissions slumped pretty much immediately in 2009 and began what has turned into a decade-long slide; Gwinnett County’s upward trajectory was slowed and basically morphed into a plateau. It enjoyed a one-year spike in 2017 before falling back to its plateau level in 2018.

The Gwinnett-South Georgia contrast becomes even starker when you focus on total enrollment at the state’s two flagship universities, the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech. While South Georgia was still sending more freshmen to all 30-plus University System colleges combined through 2011, the 56-county region’s total enrollment at UGA and Tech had long since fallen behind Gwinnett County’s, as this chart illustrates.

In 2008, nine of the 56 counties in the TIGC South Georgia region didn’t have a single student enrolled at Georgia Tech, according to data pulled from the institution’s annual Fact Book; by 2018, that number was up to 19 — and those numbers seem certain to get worse.

In 2018, South Georgia couldn’t muster but 41 high school graduates to send as freshmen to Georgia Tech and 220 to send to the University of Georgia. Thirty-six of the 56 South Georgia counties didn’t send a single freshman to Tech, and 14 posted goose eggs at UGA. Gwinnett County, meanwhile, with about 80 percent of South Georgia’s population, sent 224 new freshmen to Tech and 627 to UGA.

May 3

Rural Georgia never recovered from the Great Recession. Now comes COVID-19

There’s a persistent pattern I’ve noticed in various buckets of economic, population, and education data, but I’ve never fully connected the dots or taken a stab at suggesting what it all might mean. Now seems like a good time to do that.

Rural Georgia — and especially Middle and South Georgia — got the crap kicked out of it by the Great Recession and never has recovered. Maybe that’s been obvious to everybody else, but it might be useful to look at several data points to get a sense of just how bad the damage has been — especially now that COVID-19 has rolled in and begun raining its own special brand of hell down on the state, and especially southwest Georgia.

I think the first part of the Great Recession picture I noticed was the result of an almost whimsical notion on my part. I’d made numerous references to “the death of rural Georgia,” but I was thinking metaphorically about local economies and the collapse of various critical parts of community infrastructures, like school systems and hospitals.

Then one day I wondered if some of them might really be, literally, dying.

Turns out that’s an easy enough thing to check. Thanks to the Georgia Department of Public Health’s excellent, publicly-accessible OASIS database, you can easily download county-level birth and death data for the past 24 years (since 1994) and use it to easily see whether many counties were reporting more deaths than births.

For about the first dozen or so years — from 1994 until 2009 — there wasn’t much news in those numbers. The number of counties reporting more deaths than births floated up and down between a high of 19 (2002) and a low of eight (2006).

But then, coinciding with the onset of Great Recession, that number began a steady climb. The year 2007 saw 13 counties report more deaths than births, an average year; in 2008, the number rose to 18, a significant jump but still within the range seen up until that point. In 2010, the number of counties reporting more deaths than births ticked up to 20 — not much of an increase, but a new high. Since then, as this graph shows, the number has climbed steadily and dramatically.

As of 2018, 79 of Georgia’s 159 counties reported more deaths than births. Of those, 78 are outside Metro Atlanta and the vast majority are small rural counties, as the map to the right illustrates.

The only Metro Atlanta county to make this group was Fayette County, long recognized as a redoubt for retirees well beyond child-bearing age.

Of course, suffering more deaths than births is not the only way to lose population, but it can hardly be regarded as a positive trend. More than 60 counties lost population in the 10-year period from 2009 through 2018.

The second data point I noticed had to do with education — specifically, the number of high school graduates each county was sending to a University System of Georgia (USG) college or university. I’ve written about this before, but I’ve never really spotlighted how the pattern changed with the onset of the Great Recession.

Up until 2011, the 147 counties outside Metro Atlanta sent more freshmen to University System of Georgia institutions than the 12 Metro Atlanta counties, which is probably what you’d expect. But (as this graph shows) the number of freshmen being sent from those counties to USG institutions started to flatten out and decline in 2008 and ’09, and then basically fell off a cliff for the next several years before beginning what looks like a relatively weak recovery.

Metro Atlanta enrollment also took a significant hit, but it recovered faster and finally got back to its high-water mark in 2017 and ’18. The other 147 counties saw their combined numbers drop through 2014 before showing any improvement, and they are still well below the numbers they posted prior to the Great Recession.

Finally, economics. Based on various pots of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data, I’ve reported that Metro Atlanta suffered a bigger initial economic hit but recovered faster and has since widened the gap between itself and the rest of the state. But perhaps the clearest picture emerged late last year when the BEA, a unit of the Commerce Department, published county-level Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data for the first 18 years of this century.

The pattern is the same, as this graph illustrates.

The 12 Metro Atlanta counties suffered significant drops in GDP in 2008 and ’09, and it took the region until 2013 to get back to pre-Great Recession levels. The rest of the state took a softer hit but needed an extra year — until 2014 — to get back to pre-recession highs, and the growth since then has been fairly tepid.

This table shows GDP by region for each of the Trouble in God’s Country regions for selected years ($s in 000s). The key takeaways from this are that — since the state began emerging from the recession in about 2013 — my TIGC Middle Georgia and South Georgia regions have lagged badly behind the rest of the state (and Metro Atlanta in particular), struggling to average a growth rate of one percent a year.

I can probably get an argument from actual economists or statisticians about cause-and-effect, but I’ll go out on a limb here and conjecture that the Great Recession set in motion forces that have contributed dramatically to the continued decimation of Georgia’s (and no doubt America’s) rural regions.

Significant areas of rural Georgia were suffering population loss and economic contraction even before COVID-19 hit (and now they’re sending fewer young people to college, let alone getting them back home if and when they graduate).

As perhaps the most dramatic example, Dougherty County lost more than three percent of its population and five percent of its GDP between 2009 and 2018 — and that, obviously, was before the novel coronavirus turned it into the public health equivalent of Chernobyl.

The same, indeed, is true for the entire southwest Georgia region. Nearly every county in the Albany region has suffered both population losses and GDP contractions in the past decade, and now they have among the worst COVID-19 case rates in the nation and probably on the planet.

That, I think, is the new definition of trouble in God’s country, and it’s difficult to even envision what a recovery strategy and process might look like. Whatever that strategy and process turns out to be, it will probably take generations to accomplish.

Mar 19

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Covid-19 may stir a perfect storm for rural Georgia

When I began work on this project some years back and came up with the title “Trouble in God’s Country,” I was thinking about things like the urban-rural divide in economics, education, healthcare, and politics. It never crossed my mind that a new plague might come along that would stir up what might be a perfect storm for rural Georgia.

To be sure, Metro Atlanta and the state’s other urban areas will obviously take huge beatings in this as well, but rural communities may prove even more vulnerable, and not even in the long run. Without even bothering to run through my usual tons of data, we can take judicial note of certain indisputable realities.

The most basic is that Georgia’s rural communities are older and less healthy. That alone puts a Covid-19 target on their backs. Add to that a healthcare delivery system that might charitably be described as frail and you’ve already got the makings of a heaping helping of trouble in God’s country.

But there’s more. You can stir politics, religion, and crime into the mix. As I’ve documented before, rural Georgia is overwhelmingly Republican and pro-Trump, and there’s already national polling by Pew Research suggesting that Republicans are taking Covid-19 less seriously than Democrats (or at least were until President Trump and FOX News began shifting tone earlier this week).

From the Pew report on its polling: “ … a vast majority of Republicans (76%) say the news media have exaggerated the risks associated with the virus – 53% greatly and 24% slightly – while far fewer (17%) say the media have gotten it about right. Democrats, on the other hand, are much more likely than Republicans to think the news media have gotten the level of risk about right (41%).”

As for religion and crime, it’s not for nothing that the region of Georgia from the gnat line south is known as both the Bible Belt and the Prison Belt. Both churches and prisons hold the potential to serve as lethal vectors for the bug. I started canvassing rural Georgia contacts earlier this week and one common theme in the feedback revolved around a reluctance to cancel church services; as things have worked out, it sounds like the cancellations are indeed taking place, maybe a week later than they might have. In several communities, churches are reportedly planning to live-stream their services via Facebook and other technologies.

Prisons are a different story. According to the Georgia Department of Corrections’ website, its 34 state prisons house 52,000 felony offenders, and it’s difficult to imagine a more active breeding ground for Covid-19. The vast majority of those prisons are in rural Georgia, most of them in Middle and South Georgia (as the red dots on GDC’s facilities map, here, illustrate).

Those prison populations are constantly ebbing and flowing, as newly sentenced felons begin serving their time and those who have completed their sentences are freed. Meanwhile, thousands of rural Georgians who work at those prisons come and go to fill the three daily shifts at each of them.

As it turns out, one of those employees has already tested positive for Covid-19, as both GDC and the AJC reported yesterday, although GDC hasn’t said where the employee worked. So far, the department hasn’t reported any inmate infections, but it’s obviously a significant concern: GDC’s home page currently features a “COVID-19 UPDATES” banner and a “Covid19 Response” statement detailing the department’s response to the bug. Among other things, all visitation has been suspended and prisoner movement is being limited to “required medical transfers.”

As for positive tests around the state, those now appear to be seeping rapidly into rural Georgia. Any early expectations that the virus might do most of its damage in urban areas and not find its way to the hinterlands is being undercut by daily reports from the Georgia Department of Public Health. The number of positive tests went from 197 in 28 counties on Tuesday to 287 in 34 counties on Wednesday (with the home counties of a half-dozen victims “unknown”).

If, as these maps suggest, it turned up first in Metro Atlanta and North Georgia, it is now making its way below the gnat line.

And there’s some evidence that the reality on the ground in some localities is outpacing the information being reported on a daily basis by DPH. Albany and Dougherty County have emerged as a South Georgia hot spot, and DPH today put the number of confirmed cases there at 20. But at about the same time DPH was posting its Wednesday numbers, Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany was holding a press conference where, according to the Albany Herald, it reported two more deaths (for a total of four), a total of 40 patients who had tested positive (and were either in the hospital or at home), and nearly 500 more area residents who were still awaiting test results. Six Phoebe Putney employees have tested positive, the Herald reported.

And Thursday evening, the Tallahassee (Fla.) Memorial Hospital reported that an Early County, Ga., woman had died there of the virus.

_________

If rural Georgians were a little slower than their city cousins to react to the Coronavirus threat, they may now be taking it more seriously. I canvassed a half-dozen contacts early in the week and then again yesterday and today. All reported that the pace seemed to be picking up. One South Georgia contact who reported earlier this week that people were mocking the “panic” and not changing their behavior indicated earlier today that was changing; more and more businesses cutting hours and more people were self-isolating.

Another contact, Jason Dunn, executive director of the Fitzgerald and Ben Hill County Development Authority, emailed me around mid-afternoon that it was “safe to say that we are seeing changes in day-to-day behavior. Foot traffic in our office is down and the citizens that continuously support our locally owned eateries are more than likely to get their meal to-go rather than dining in. The best that I can put it is that social distancing is tough in a tight-knit community, yet a majority of our citizens are taking precautions.”

And this from a northeast Georgia weekly newspaper editor: “Day-to-day has changed drastically. A lot of parents are getting a crash course in home-schooling and remote, electronic and digital learning. It also shows in dramatic fashion how a lack of adequate broadband can be a real disadvantage to a rural county without that kind of infrastructure!

“The question about the seriousness of the situation being slow to take hold was a good one,” he added. “On a Tuesday, the track coach was planning on winning the state championship. On Friday he was bemoaning the fact that his team would probably not even get a shot at that achievement.”

Sep 22

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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, rural Georgians seem to be doing their best to balance the books. They’re spending millions of dollars on Georgia lottery tickets that help send tens of thousands of Metro Atlanta kids to college.

Of course, a fair number of rural Georgians get advanced education through lottery-funded HOPE scholarship grants – at either University System of Georgia (USG) institutions or one of the state’s technical colleges – but Metro Atlanta is clearly getting the better end of this particular deal.

I’m not sure this qualifies as real news. It probably won’t come as a surprise to political leaders and policymakers who work in these areas. Also, I should stipulate that the Georgia lottery and HOPE scholarship data I’ve been studying comes with a handful of significant caveats. Available data from the University System of Georgia (USG) and the U.S. Census Bureau make it possible to paint pretty precise county-level and regional pictures of educational attainment patterns and college enrollment trends throughout the state.

The lottery and HOPE data are a little fuzzier and the resulting pictures are therefore a bit blurrier. After studying the data for a bit, I’ve decided the best way to tell this story is to present two views – a big-picture, macro view, and then a more isolated micro snapshot.

First, the big picture, and here the caveats are especially important. Lottery sales are reported on a county-specific basis, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a lottery ticket sold in a particular county is purchased by a resident of that same county – or even a Georgia resident. Inter-county or interstate sales aren’t tracked, although it’s pretty obvious that many of the Georgia counties on the Alabama border are pulling in millions of dollars from that state[i].

HOPE scholarships, meanwhile, are awarded to students in their county of residence, not their county of origin. Odds are that the initial awards do go to students in their county of origin, but it’s also obvious that many students effectively move to their college towns and establish residence there while they’re still receiving HOPE awards. Even a cursory review of data for college communities makes that clear.

Still, the big picture is a useful starting point. For that I organized lottery sales and HOPE scholarship data by my five Trouble in God’s Country regions – 12 Metro Atlanta counties, 41 North Georgia counties, 43 Middle Georgia counties, 56 South Georgia counties, and seven Coastal Georgia counties. Here’s how those numbers shake out:

The obvious takeaway from this is that Metro Atlanta and North Georgia were the only two regions that got larger shares of the HOPE scholarship grants than they ponied up for lottery tickets. The largely rural areas of Middle, South and Coastal Georgia didn’t do nearly as well.

For the micro view, I organized a cluster of 16 largely rural counties in interior Middle and South Georgia; I’m calling it the South Central Georgia Cluster[ii]. All these counties are far enough away from a state line that they shouldn’t get a lot of interstate lottery dollars, and most (with a couple of exceptions) are well off the beaten path of the major interstate highways. In other words, it’s a fair presumption that their lottery sales are largely local.

As a point of comparison, I chose Cherokee County, an exurban county on the northern edge of Metro Atlanta (that’s the green county in the northern part of the map). In 1994, the 16-county cluster of rural counties was home to a little more than twice as many people as Cherokee County – 231,402 to 107,569, according to Census estimates for that year. But from the git-go, the rural counties were more enthusiastic lottery players. In 1994 (the first full year of the lottery), lottery sales in those 16 counties were 3.6 times as much as in Cherokee County.

Today, the populations are roughly equivalent: 254,149 for Cherokee County versus 271,182 for the 16 rural counties, based on 2018 Census Bureau estimates (the latest available).

But lottery sales in those 16 counties are still more than double Cherokee County’s: $151.9 million to $69.3 million. If Cherokee County and the 16 South Central Georgia counties constituted a state of sorts, here’s what their total respective shares of the lottery sales and HOPE grants would look like over the life of the programs:

Perhaps more interesting than the total shares of lottery sales and HOPE grants is the way the trend lines evolved over time. From 1994 through 2011, the 16-county South Central Georgia Cluster received more in HOPE scholarships than Cherokee County. But in 2012, both areas took major hits in HOPE funding (as did the state as a whole). The South Central counties suffered a 43.2 percent hit in HOPE scholarship grants and still haven’t gotten back to their 2011 level; Cherokee County dropped 26.5 percent but recovered more quickly and had gotten nearly all the way back to its 2011 high by 2017. The result has been that Cherokee County passed the 16 rural counties in HOPE grants in 2012 and has been widening the gap ever since.

This matches a pattern I’ve seen in other education-related data. As I noted in my last post, up through 2010, Metro Atlanta had trailed the other 147 counties in the state in fall freshman enrollment at USG colleges. But those lines crossed in 2011 and the gap has been widening ever since. The same pattern shows up in a comparison of Gwinnett County and all 56 counties of interior South Georgia from late 2016.

I’ve got more work to do on all this. I need to take a deep dive into enrollment patterns at the state’s technical colleges, and I’m expecting to get a breakout on HOPE scholarship grants by type of institution – USG, technical college, or private college – fairly soon. I’ll try to update all this within a couple of weeks.

Even with that work still to be done – and with all the caveats stipulated above – it seems fair to suggest that a lot of poor folks in rural Georgia are sending a lot of Metro Atlanta kids to college.

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[i] I figured this out when I was trying to get a handle on lottery sales patterns in different parts of the state. One approach I took was to calculate lottery sales per capita – in other words, to divide total lottery sales by population. The state average for 2018 was $437.08 per capita. Far and away the top producer was Quitman County at more than $4,800 per capita. One of the smallest and poorest counties in the state, Quitman County sits forlornly on a stretch of the Chattahoochee River that is known as Walter F. George Lake in Georgia and Lake Eufaula in Alabama; Quitman County’s top economic asset in this regard is no doubt the Ernest Vandiver Causeway, which spans the lake and connects it to the State of Alabama, which is one of about a half-dozen U.S. states that still doesn’t have a lottery of its own. While Quitman County’s per capita sales dwarf those of all other counties, seven of the top 10 per capita sales counties border Alabama, and two others are just east of Quitman County.

[ii] The counties included in the South Central Georgia Cluster are: Atkinson, Bacon, Ben Hill, Bleckley, Coffee, Dodge, Irwin, Jeff Davis, Laurens, Montgomery, Pulaski, Telfair, Toombs, Treutlen, Wheeler, and Wilcox.

May 25

Breaking News: Pierce County GOP opposes secession

Well, darn.

For a few days there I thought we had a major story brewing down in Pierce County.

Leaders of the Republican Party in that deep South Georgia community had included a question on Tuesday’s party primary ballot asking whether the “counties South of Macon (should) join together to form the 51st state of South Georgia.”

Going into Tuesday’s election, I would have bet a cup of coffee it had a fair chance of passing. I have spent a good bit of time in South Georgia over the years and folks down there can be a provincial lot. Many don’t much care for Atlanta.

But in a perhaps surprising display of common sense, Pierce County’s Republicans voted better than two-to-one not to break away from North Georgia and Metro Atlanta. The final tally was 703 ayes to 1,844 nays.

On a personal level, I’ll confess to a certain amount of disappointment a new State of South Georgia is now apparently off the table.

It probably would have moved my home state of Mississippi up in the national rankings overnight.

In one fell swoop, it would almost certainly have created the poorest, sickest and least educated state in the union. Folks in Mississippi (and for that matter Alabama) would have been able to look forward to saying “thank God for South Georgia” when all the new national education and economic rankings come out each year.

Alas, I guess that’s not to be.

More seriously, the Pierce County initiative, unsuccessful though it was, does beg a serious discussion about the relationship between South Georgia (and, more generally, rural Georgia) and Metro Atlanta in particular – especially given the way the head of the Pierce County Republican Party, Kay Godwin, framed the issue going into Tuesday’s election.

“We don’t get anything from Atlanta,” she told The Blackshear Times. “This is an effort to force them to pay attention to us. We are not going to secede, but I hope it passes so maybe it will produce action across the state.”

As the talking heads on cable news like to say, there’s a lot there to unpack. I’ve emailed Ms. Godwin and asked her to expand on her comments, but at this writing I have not heard back from her.

Let’s start with “we don’t get anything from Atlanta.”

That’s nonsense.

The reality, probably not fully appreciated in any region of the state, is that Metro Atlanta has been subsidizing the rest of the state — and South Georgia in particular — for decades.

The Fiscal Research Center at Georgia State University took a mind-numbingly deep dive into this issue nearly a decade ago and found, basically, that as of 2004 (the most recent year for which the author could get comprehensive data) the 10 core Metro Atlanta counties generated 51 percent of state government revenues and consumed only 37 percent of the state’s expenditures, leaving the rest for the other 149 counties.

That’s very much in line with my own Trouble in God’s Country (TIGC) research. Working with federal IRS data that’s available online, I found that in 2013 the 12 counties I classify as Metro Atlanta incurred right at two-thirds of the state’s federal tax liability — $20.4 billion versus $10.6 billion for the other 147 counties – while consuming, to cite just one example, only about a third of the state’s Medicaid expenses. And that was with less than half the population: 4.65 million people in Metro Atlanta versus 5.34 million in the other 147 counties.

Let’s narrow that focus to South Georgia. Working with that same 2013 data, we find that the 56 counties that make up my TIGC South Georgia region incurred about $1.7 billion in 2013 federal income tax liability, or about 5.5 percent of the state’s total. At the same time, it consumed about 17.2 percent of the state’s Medicaid benefits. The level of subsidy implied by these numbers should cause local leaders to pause before they start complaining about Atlanta not doing anything for them.

Truth is, South Georgia (and for that matter most of rural Georgia) is in a world of hurt. In some respects these areas are literally dying, and the breadth and scope of the problems afflicting just about everything from the gnat line south demand some sort of comprehensive solution.

I’ve touched on economics in this piece, but I could make parallel cases using educational and healthcare data.

South Georgia is the least educated and least healthy region of the state, and those facts translate into both an inability to support itself and a dependency on public support for Medicaid and other services.

Atlanta will have to be involved — both in the form of state-driven remedies and as a source of necessary funding. The longer the problems go untended, the bigger — and more expensive — they will become.

The real problem for Ms. Godwin and South Georgia is that these societal and fiscal problems are coming to a head just as their worst political nightmares are also coming true.

For all of Georgia’s history — up until right about now — rural Georgia ruled the political roost. Rural areas generally were smart enough to elect wily young politicians to the legislature and leave them in place to hold Atlanta at bay.

But that’s changing.

By my count, just under half of the current House and Senate districts lie partly or wholly within my TIGC 12-county Metro Atlanta. With the next census and reapportionment, political power will concentrate even further in Metro Atlanta, probably giving it a majority of the legislature.

South Georgia can forget about ever again electing a governor.

What this means is that the political powers who will soon hold virtually all the purse strings may soon be asking why they should be diverting tax dollars generated in Metro Atlanta —which has its own problems — to South Georgia.

Given that reality, South Georgia probably needs a better strategy than demanding “action” and “attention” by threatening to secede.

Who knows? We might take you up on it.

Jan 18

Thanks, Mr. President, for giving us a new way to think about Georgia’s declining regions

By Charles Hayslett

File this under every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining. President Trump’s characterization of Haiti and various South American and African countries as “shitholes” may have torpedoed a DACA deal, triggered a global diplomatic uproar and made it more likely that the federal government will shut down this weekend. On the bright side, it also gives us a memorable way to think about the deteriorating counties and communities right here in Georgia.

Now, because I am a nice guy and don’t want to offend my friends in rural Georgia (and especially because my wife is from South Georgia and would not appreciate it), I am going to refrain from personally applying the president’s epithet to our state’s more unfortunate areas. You’ll just have to use your imagination.

In the wake of the president’s unfortunate description, his surrogates have worked hard to shift the debate from the seemingly racist overtones of Trump’s reported language to a broader discussion about a merit-based approach to immigration. I’m generalizing here, but they seem to be saying that Trump’s language wasn’t a commentary on the racial make-up of the nations he referenced (overwhelmingly black or brown), but the supposed economic prowess and productivity of their citizens.

I’m happy to take them at their word. In that context, and by that standard, it seems reasonable to suggest that America has its own share of such areas – specifically, counties and communities that have long been on a downhill slide just about any way you want to measure it: economically, educationally, in terms of health status, etc. It also seems reasonable to point out that these areas voted overwhelmingly for Donald J. Trump, and to wonder what he would like to do for voters who were among his most ardent supporters – who, indeed, were a large chunk of his base.

To be fair, Trump also won many of the state’s most affluent counties, which also tend to be deeply Republican, including growing suburban and exurban counties like Fayette, Forsyth, Cherokee and Dawson. But a review of 2016 General Election results suggests Trump owes a large measure of his margin in Georgia to what might indelicately be called the, well, you-know-what vote.

Altogether, Trump carried 127 counties in Georgia. Of the 4.7 million people living in those counties, 77.1 percent were white and 18.4 percent were black. Based on the most recent educational attainment data available, they were also home to slightly more high school dropouts than college graduates – 625,808 adults without a high school degree versus 625,161 with at least a bachelor’s degree. In contrast, the other 32 counties that went for Clinton were home to more than twice as many college graduates than high school dropouts – 1.2 million to 532,000.

That educational disadvantage translates, among other things, into weaker economic output, poorer health and higher healthcare costs. The 127 Trump counties generated $10.45 billion in 2013 federal taxes (the most recent IRS data I’ve analyzed) versus $20.5 billion from the 32 Clinton counties. At the same time, while generating basically twice as much in federal taxes, the Clinton counties (home to the larger population) consumed only about 17 percent more in FY2017 Medicaid costs than the Trump counties: $5.03 billion versus $4.3 billion. One result of that math is that Medicaid patients from the Trump counties cost the state about 2.2 percent more per patient than those in the Clinton counties: $5,136 to $5,026 each.

What’s more, if educational trends are any indication, the economic and health gaps will almost certainly continue to widen. In the fall of 2016, the University System of Georgia admitted a total of 41,906 students from throughout the state; 23,325 came from the Clinton counties and 18,581 from the Trump counties.

But those overall numbers actually mask the extent of the differences. Of the 41,906 students admitted that fall, 11,756 were accepted at the state’s top four research universities – Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Georgia State University and Regents University. Of those, more than twice as many were from the more economically productive Clinton counties than the Trump counties: 8,421 versus 3,335.

An even starker picture emerges when you look at the state’s most economically depressed counties. The Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA) manages the state’s job tax credit program, which is designed to steer businesses and jobs to the state’s poorest counties by offering substantial tax credits for each new job created. This year, DCA lists 71 counties in its Tier 1 category. Only 721 students from those counties made it into one of the top four research universities.

And even that number is deceptive. Of the 71 Tier 1 counties, the only one in Metro Atlanta is Clayton County, which sent 233 high school graduates to one or the other of the research universities. The other 70 counties split the remaining 488 students. Ten of those failed to send a single student to one of the top four Georgia schools.

In contrast, Fulton County, whose 5^th congressional district Trump once said was in “horrible shape and falling apart,” sent 3,924 students to University System institutions in the fall of 2016, more than all the Trump counties combined; 1,971 of those were selected to one of the top four research universities. It also generated 8.5 times as much in 2013 federal taxes as it consumed in FY2017 Medicaid benefits (and, of course, it went heavily for Clinton over Trump).

My purpose in writing this is in no way to denigrate Georgia’s poorest and least educated counties, or to in any way re-litigate the 2016 presidential campaign (although I suppose candor requires an acknowledgement that I am no fan of President Trump). Indeed, I have devoted a fair chunk of the past several years to researching and writing a book aimed at putting a spotlight on the widening divide between Metro Atlanta and the rest of Georgia, especially the state’s poorest areas, and to exploring public policy solutions to the challenges posed. It’s a tough nut to crack, and there are no easy solutions – either for, well, Georgia’s you-know-what holes, or for the more affluent areas that will inevitably be stuck with the tab.

In an odd sort of way, President Trump may have performed a useful service where this issue is concerned. In condemning countries whose emigrants to the United States he obviously sees as unproductive and uneducated drags on the nation’s resources, he has invited what could be a useful discussion about American communities that could be characterized in the same manner.

Dec 13

13 Comments

South Georgia vs. Gwinnett County

By Charles Hayslett

Here’s an easy way to understand the widening gap between Metro Atlanta and the rest of Georgia.

Compare all 56 counties of interior South Georgia to Gwinnett County alone.

Gwinnett County’s 2013 population was estimated at 859,304 – just under three-fourths of the 1.16 million people living in our 56-county South Georgia region.

But despite that population disadvantage, Gwinnett County:

Generates more income and contributes more in taxes than all 56 counties of South Georgia combined. According to IRS data, Gwinnett County’s total income for 2013 was $21.2 billion versus $17.4 billion for South Georgia. Similarly, Gwinnett County taxpayers paid $2.5 billion in federal taxes while South Georgia taxpayers contributed $1.7 billion.
Consumes substantially less in social services than South Georgia. In 2013, as one example, Gwinnett County consumed less than a third as much in Medicaid services than South Georgia. The federal share of South Georgia’s Medicaid costs totaled $927.6 million; Gwinnett County, $266.2 million. The picture for SNAP (food stamps) and other social benefits is similar.
Is home to significantly more college graduates than South Georgia. Based on data compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (ERS), there were 175,290 college graduates in Gwinnett County over the period 2009-13 versus 110,576 for all of South Georgia. This hasn’t always been the case. As recently as 1990, Gwinnett County and South Georgia were basically tied in this category: 65,281 for Gwinnett and 63,073 for South Georgia.
Sends more students to University System of Georgia colleges than all of South Georgia. This is also a recent development. A decade ago South Georgia still sent significantly more kids to college than Gwinnett County – 5,117 versus 3,762. But by 2011 they were basically tied. South Georgia sent 5,498 kids to college while Gwinnett County sent 5,493, according to University System of Georgia data. Since then the gap has widened steadily, and in 2015 Gwinnett County sent 1,100 more freshmen to University System colleges than South Georgia.
Is substantially healthier than South Georgia. Using premature death rates as a proxy for health status, Gwinnett County is about twice as healthy as South Georgia. The 2015 YPLL 75 rate for the 56-county South Georgia region was 9,823.3; for Gwinnett County, it was 5,163.2 (with YPLL 75 rates, the lower the number, the better). In this category, South Georgia has actually gained a little ground over the past 20 years. It’s improved about 5.4 percent over that period while Gwinnett County has been essentially flat. But South Georgia’s numbers in this category are abysmal while Gwinnett County’s are pretty close to optimal, especially for a county as large and diverse as it is. For 2015, Gwinnett County’s YPLL 75 rate was the fifth best in the state, and it has consistently been in the top tier of counties in this category.
Produces about half as many criminals as South Georgia. In 2015, according to Georgia Department of Corrections data, South Georgia sent more than twice as many people to prison than Gwinnett County did: 2,403 for South Georgia versus 1,049 for Gwinnett. The picture for new probationers is similar: 5,956 for South Georgia versus 2,630 for Gwinnett County.

In a future post, we’ll take a look at political and cultural trends in Gwinnett County and South Georgia.

Connecting the Dots: Health, Education, Economics and Politics in Rural Georgia.