It should come as no surprise that education emerged as this community’s top priority in the Studer Community Institute’s inaugural 2014 Pensacola Metro Report.

Improving our economy, our health, our overall quality of life depends on a quality educational system.

It’s reassuring — and a self-fulfilling prophecy — to know that the Institute is not alone in understanding the importance of education in making people’s lives and the places in which they live better.

In an EdNC.org column, “Friday with Ferrel,” academician and former journalist Ferrel Guillory crystalizes the relationship between education and the vitality of a community.

Ferrel Guillory

“Schools are among the factors that determine the quality of a neighborhood, town, or city, and public education is among the levers that state and local leaders can use to enhance the quality of neighborhoods, towns, and cities,” Guillory wrote in his column, “Schools remains a key to the American Dream.” Schools are elements in both people-based and place-based strategy.”

Guillory, director of the Program in Public Life and professor of the Practice at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, vice chairman of EducationNC and a former journalist with the Raleigh News & Observer, reached his hypothesis as the result of what he called the “stunning of Raj Chetty and his colleagues in 2014.

The researchers’ mobility study found that “the neighborhood environment during childhood is a key determinant of a child’s long-range success.”

In a nutshell, the Harvard researchers’ mobility showed it matters a lot where a person grows up, and the sooner you leave, the better.

The study contains a chart that shows Pensacola is among the worst places in the U.S. for poor children to grow up and climb the economic ladder.

Out of 2,478 counties, Escambia County ranks 47^th, better than only about 2 percent of counties nationwide, according to researchers Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren.

Guillory was enthralled with the ramifications of the study in regards to cities and counties surrounding the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina.

The in-depth research suggests that North Carolina’s metropolitan prosperity does not provide enough mobility lift to many young people in families in or near poverty.

That’s where quality education comes in play.

Guillory points out that distressed rural communities need strong schools, even if it means educating young peole to leave and thrive somewhere else.

“I know this is a difficult message to public officials to deliver, because it sounds like abandonment,” Guillory said. In fact, strong schools enable people to enhance their lives whether they chose to leave or stay where they grow up. The movement of people from countryside-to-city, from one place to another, is central to the American story.