A cross-section of partners from the public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors sought to achieve this, in part, by embedding Family Resource Centers within the Lawrence Public Schools. To-date, these efforts have placed over 200 parents in new positions paying 25 percent higher wages on average than their previous jobs, with 200 more parents in the training pipeline.
More generally, the task of assessing the current state of the economy remains a formidable challenge. Indeed, our appreciation of that challenge has been enhanced by recent research using real time data sets. 1 For example, Athanasios Orphanides has shown that making such real-time assessments of the sustainable levels of economic activity and employment is considerably more difficult than estimating those levels retrospectively.