Entries by Jim Stergios

Dynamic pricing for the Expressway

December 10, 2019 /0 Comments/in /by

By Jim Stergios & Conrad Crawford Published in The Boston Globe on December 6, 2019 Earlier this year, INRIX, a mobility analytics firm, announced that Greater Boston now has the nation’s worst rush hour traffic. Tell us something we don’t know. It’s been years since the informal New England salutation of choice was to commiserate about the weather. Standing in line waiting for a coffee, and the subject on everyone’s lips is the time it takes to get in and around Boston. Greater Boston stands out in another way: It is the only one of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the country that does not use time-of-day pricing on its toll roads. The Globe’s Shirley Leung has reported that MassDOT wants to conduct a test of […]

Tackling equity at Boston’s exam schools

August 5, 2019 /0 Comments/in , , , /by

By Jim Stergios August 2, 2019 This spring, The New York Times reported that of the 4,800 students admitted to New York’s nine exam schools, a mere 190, or 4 percent, were African-American. At Manhattan’s acclaimed Stuyvesant High School, just seven black students were among the 895 admitted. Less than 1 percent of the school’s total enrollees are black. Boston earns no bragging rights by beating the thoroughly broken New York City school system at equity of access to elite exam schools. But neither do the Boston Public Schools deserve the recent drubbing they are getting from the NAACP and Lawyers for Civil Rights, who wrote a stern letter to the city condemning the “discriminatory impact” of the schools’ admissions […]

Uber May Not Be Perfect, But Do We Want To Give The Transportation Revolution A Flat Tire?

May 16, 2019 /0 Comments/in /by

This op-ed appeared on WGBH News. You’d be right to shake your head at how the press hyperventilated about the “thousands of customers” that were going to be inconvenienced by the so-called “Uber strike.” If you live in the real world, you would, in fact, be hard pressed to find a single customer whose wait was related to the anemic driver participation in the action. The day-after media estimates clocked in at 25 protesters in London, 25 in Los Angeles, a couple of hundred in San Francisco (Uber’s headquarters), and 50 in New York City. It’s not as if there is no reason for drivers to register their displeasure. While Uber remains a source of needed supplemental income for its […]

Action on health care pricing transparency needed to stem rising costs

April 12, 2019 /0 Comments/in /by

The Hill BY JIM STERGIOS AND CHARLES CHIEPPO, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS — 04/12/19 10:35 AM EDT A patient repeatedly tries to find out the price for a medical procedure. The hospital refuses, but eventually quotes the price as $5,500. But one health insurer’s website includes a page with price guidelines for various procedures. Seeing that the expected cost for the test he was to undergo was $550, the patient pulled off his identification bracelet and left the hospital. What makes this story stand out is that the patient was U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar. If even someone who’s so knowledgeable about the health care system struggles to gain access to price information, then discovers a hospital is charging 10 times the […]

Troubling takeaways from the SJC ruling on charter schools

May 29, 2018 /0 Comments/in , , , , /by

These would be the best of times for Boston public charter schools were education policy decisions driven by evidence.  Boston’s charters are nationwide models and uniquely successful at closing pernicious achievement gaps.  But in education politics, where “momentum” is too often the benchmark, charter skeptics are crowing about the loss of a ballot initiative to expand school choice for disadvantaged students, unionization of three charters, and a recent SJC decision affirming a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to the state cap on charter schools. A close look at the SJC’s decision should keep even the most ardent charter haters from crowing. Twenty-five years ago, in a case known as McDuffy, the state’s highest court declared that the Massachusetts Constitution requires […]

Op-ed: Charters, Unions, And Public School Funding

February 28, 2018 /0 Comments/in , , , , /by

Read this full op-ed on WGBH News. In the midst of the 2016 ballot initiative campaign about whether to raise the state cap on charter schools, opponents questioned whether charters even are public schools.  It now appears that the answer to the public school question turns on whether a school’s teachers are unionized. When teachers at two City on a Hill charter schools in Boston chose to join the Boston Teachers Union, BTU President Jessica Tang said that creating successful learning experiences for students “means improving the working conditions of all educators, including those working at charter schools funded by taxpayer dollars.” The City on a Hill story, quickly followed by Conservatory Lab Charter School’s announcement that it hopes to become part of the Boston […]

What Janus Means for Massachusetts

February 27, 2018 /0 Comments/in , , , /by

In downtown Boston Monday there was a rally of a few hundred public union members, with a speaker roster that included U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, among many other elected officials.  The reason was that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) was hearing oral arguments on the Janus v. AFSCME case. The plaintiff in the case, Mark Janus, is a state child-support specialist in Illinois who had opted not to join the state employees’ union – AFSCME.  He has asked SCOTUS to overturn a precedent from a 1977 case that allows public employee unions to compel non-members working in the public sector to pay union ‘agency fees’ against their wishes.  Janus argues that compelling non-union members to pay union dues constitutes forced speech in violation […]

Op-ed: T privatization survives key union challenge

August 22, 2017 /0 Comments/in , , , , /by

THE MBTA’S BUDGET SHORTFALL, once pegged at $335 million for the current fiscal year, is now down to $30 million.  That’s good news for riders, taxpayers, employers, and legislators—really everyone except the T’s unions.  Much of the savings is the result of a three-year exemption from the Commonwealth’s anti-privatization law that the authority was granted in the wake of its 2015 winter implosion. In June the MBTA unions got even worse news when an arbitrator ruled against them on a grievance they brought under Section 13(c) of the federal Urban Mass Transit Act. For years, the T unions have used 13(c) as a “get out of jail free” card when faced with even the most modest reform proposal.  Read more at […]

Op-ed: Getting to yes on MassHealth

July 17, 2017 /0 Comments/in , , , , /by

State leaders need to work together to tackle Medicaid challenge MASSACHUSETTS HAS A unique culture when it comes to health care.  Over the last quarter century, we have seen the business, provider, payer, consumer, and academic sectors come together to advance reforms aimed at expanding coverage and containing the cost of care. Whether it was repeal of hospital rate-setting and passing insurance reforms in the 1990s, or the 2006 the passage of Romneycare, or major cost control legislation enacted in 2010 and 2012, stakeholders across the board have had a seat at the table. Consensus may not be the right goal in all cases, but given the way it has careened from one extreme to the other on health care in […]

Op-ed: Shame on the Senate for undoing Pacheco Law exemption

June 2, 2017 /0 Comments/in , , , /by

By Jim Stergios   JUNE 02, 2017 The MBTA has hundreds of thousands of daily riders and 6,000 employees. You would think that the interests of the people consuming 1.3 million daily rides might matter more than those of 6,000 public employees. Not so in the Massachusetts Senate, which used a voice vote to undo a key element of the 2015 reform package that has allowed the Fiscal and Management Control Board to cut the MBTA’s deficit and improve service. The budget amendment senators adopted would dramatically limit the T’s exemption from a state law that effectively bars privatization. Competitive contracting is a powerful tool to save money and improve service. Sometimes those goals can be achieved without the exemption […]

Op-ed: State should expand METCO

March 10, 2017 /0 Comments/in , , , , /by

By Cheryl Brown Henderson and Jim Stergios The Boston Globe | MARCH 08, 2017 THE 50TH anniversary of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (Metco), which allows about 3,300 Boston and Springfield students to attend school in surrounding districts, provides a good opportunity to take stock of the program and, in doing so, compare it with the intent of the landmark 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In its opinion, the court wrote that education is the “most important function of state and local governments. . . . It is doubtful that any child can be reasonably expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity […]

Op-ed: Will DeVos avoid the Beltway education trap?

January 3, 2017 /0 Comments/in , , , , , , /by

By Jim Stergios and Charles Chieppo Read this op-ed online at USA Today. Education nominee could improve on past secretaries by backing state and local innovation. Every administration since President George H.W. Bush’s has pinned its hopes of transforming American K-12 education on several thousand bureaucrats in the Lyndon B. Johnson Building in Washington, D.C. and the Beltway lobbyists perched on their doorstep. Betsy DeVos, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Education Department, needs a different plan. Given that the federal government contributes approximately 10% of the total spending in the nation’s sprawling, decentralized landscape of 100,000 public K-12 schools, it is neither plausible nor desirable that an Education secretary chase the chimera of a transformational national education policy. Arne Duncan’s seven years as President Obama’s secretary of Education were just the latest iteration […]

Remembering Fred Thorne

August 17, 2016 /0 Comments/in /by

Fred Thorne, a longtime Pioneer Board Director and major contributor to the Institute, died this weekend.  Fred was someone that Pioneer’s founder, Pete Peters, thought the world of — and for good reason. He was a man of deep intelligence, thoughtful judgment, class, and kindness. Roger Perry and I had a chance to sit with Fred two weeks ago; we spent part of a beautiful summer morning sitting on his porch overlooking the port in Manchester-by-the-Sea.  At the time, Fred’s liver was no longer functional, but his spirit was far from broken.  He was still holding weekly investor meetings, and had committed to two appointments after our morning visit. Fred was a founding force at Pioneer, and always cognizant of […]

Op-ed: Time for UMass system to implement needed fiscal reforms

July 6, 2016 /0 Comments/in , , , , /by

As University of Massachusetts President Marty Meehan considers raising tuitions yet again, his institution is at a crossroads. On the one hand, the University of Massachusetts has many achievements of which to be proud. Under the leadership of Meehan and his predecessors over a quarter century, the average grade point average of entering UMass Amherst freshmen shot up from around 2.9 to 3.8. In just the last five years, the flagship Amherst campus rose more than 20 spots in U.S. News & World Report rankings. While impressive, the strategies that produced such advances have compromised the university’s financial health and its mission of serving Massachusetts students. Read the rest of this op-ed in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Salem News, […]

Op-ed: Why Boston and Mass. need more walk-in clinics

June 1, 2016 /1 Comment/in , , , , /by

Published in The Boston Globe, JUNE 01, 2016 AFTER NEARLY a decade of opposition, Boston may be on the verge of getting its first for-profit walk-in clinic. Although it’s not yet official, it appears the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals has approved an urgent-care center application in West Roxbury. Almost 3,000 “convenience” clinics in 41 states have served 10 million people. They fall into two categories — retail and urgent-care clinics. The former are typically staffed by nurse practitioners, the latter by a doctor. Read more in The Boston Globe…

Column: For the T, riders should come first

February 3, 2016 /0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Excerpt from Jim Stergios’ column in The Boston Globe.  REVIEWS OF GOVERNOR Baker’s first year in office, capped off by General Electric’s decision to move its corporate headquarters to Boston, have been largely positive. A more important marker to evaluate his long-term performance began six months ago, when the Legislature passed significant MBTA reform. Read more in The Boston Globe…

GE comes to Boston: Here’s why

January 13, 2016 /0 Comments/in , , , , /by

The Globe‘s Shirley Leung gets it right in her piece this afternoon on General Electric’s decision to relocate its headquarters to Boston: This is better than hosting the Olympics. No controversy over potential cost overruns, or whether taxpayers will be on the hook for billions of dollars. No worries about traffic on Southeast Expressway, or whether an aging T can handle throngs of visitors. No collective handwringing over whether the pain of throwing what amounts to a three-week party would be worth it all. General Electric moving its headquarters to Boston is all glory, giving us a chance to step onto a global stage on our own terms. The world can now mention Boston in the same sentence as Silicon […]

Rather than Cut The Ride’s Services, Change the Service Delivery Model

January 11, 2016 /0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

On December 14th, the MBTA’s Fiscal and Management Control Board (FMCB) met to discuss how to rein in the agency’s spending and debated making changes to its paratransit system, The Ride. The FMCB faces a daunting task.  The MBTA is plagued with financial woes, including $5.5 billion in outstanding debt and $7 billion in deferred maintenance. That alone translates into $5,000 dollars per each of the commonwealth’s 2.5 million households. This is on top of the MBTA’s current budget shortfall of $170 million this year, annual operating losses, expensive collective bargaining agreements, and unexpected cost overruns with the Green Line Extension project.  The agency definitely needs to make some cuts. The FMCB has proposed a real innovation for MBTA paratransit: […]

West Virginia, Massachusetts and why the End Common Core ballot is going forward

December 17, 2015 /1 Comment/in , , , /by

When it comes to the “confidence game” that has been played around the country to advance Common Core standards, there are few places where connivance was more on display than in West Virginia.  As noted in a post in March of 2012, you had there “noted national standards boosters” including “former Governor Bob Wise, now of the Alliance for “Excellent” Education,  and Steven Paine, former state superintendent of schools for West Virginia, and CCSSO’s former Board President.”  West Virginia was also “ground zero of the agenda of “softy” 21st century skills and the home of Dane Linn, head of education policy for the National Governors Association (NGA), another leader of the push for national standards.”   Last I looked, in […]

What is the Lawn on D Costing Us?

December 2, 2015 /0 Comments/in , /by

Jon Chesto’s report in the Globe on Monday noted that the Lawn on D, an almost three-acre parcel immediately behind the South Boston Convention Center, is currently costing about $2.7 million to operate and generating about $424,000 in revenues, sponsorships, etc.  Both the operating costs and the revenues are up in 2015, from $2.1 million and $190,000, respectively, in 2014.  So the annual loss has also grown from 2014 to 2015, from about $1.9 million to around $2.3 million. There are many questions that should arise here.  Start with equity.  Should an authority be spending that much on programming at one park while other Boston’s neighborhoods compete for limited funds in a stressed City of Boston budget? Then there is […]

Op-Ed: Making ‘The Ride’ more cost-effective could help MBTA’s finances

November 30, 2015 /0 Comments/in , , , /by

Unseasonably warm November days have given way to increasing chill. Long-winded prescriptions for how to fix the MBTA will now give way to the immediacy of winter’s demands — and there are reasons to worry. Longer term, there’s also cause for optimism. One side of the ledger — recent delays, breakdowns and fires during a period of temperate weather — give us ample cause for worry. And heading into the frigid months, strained labor relations are never good. The opportunities for mischief are many. But so are the reasons to be hopeful. The Legislature’s willingness to bring what is essentially emergency management to the T is a sea change. The basic blocking and tackling that undergird the system like tracks, […]

Op-ed: Big money pushes PARCC and Common Core

September 1, 2015 /0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Each year, much is written and said about K-12 education when students head back to school. That will be especially true this fall, as the education policy community eagerly awaits a decision by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education about whether to keep the MCAS tests, or switch to assessments developed by the national Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). The decision will impact not only which test Massachusetts uses to assess student achievement, but also what is taught in Massachusetts public schools. PARCC is aligned with the controversial Common Core curriculum, with its emphasis on workplace readiness. MCAS, on the other hand, was aligned with Massachusetts’ own standards, which emphasized a liberal arts education and […]

The Boston Globe: Create work with on-the-job training

August 5, 2015 /0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

The value of work cannot be overstated. If you love what you’re doing — great. If you don’t, studies demonstrate that even mundane jobs carry broad psychic and material benefits. Work begets self-reliance and dignity. It provides resources to live, engage with society, and establish an identity. It stabilizes families. It makes social and economic mobility possible. Yet public policy often ignores the value of work, and discounts the harmful physical and mental impacts of the lack of work. Massachusetts’ just-passed increase in the earned income tax credit is a welcome exception: It will help people stay in the workplace, acquiring experience and skills, and, unlike a minimum wage hike, it won’t decrease the number of jobs available. Read the […]

COMMENTARY: More is needed to fix the MBTA

July 28, 2015 in , , , , /by

Read this op-ed in The Patriot Ledger, the Brockton Enterprise, the Fall River Herald News, the Taunton Gazette, the Salem News, the Gloucester Times, and The MetroWest Daily News. The budget lawmakers sent to Gov. Charlie Baker includes important new powers to reform the beleaguered MBTA, but ensuring an effective transit system will require additional common-sense policy changes in a pending transportation bill. The budget created the Fiscal and Management Control Board that Baker proposed and gave the MBTA a three-year exemption from the commonwealth’s anti-privatization law. These steps may improve service for 1.3 million transit riders, but they are insufficient for the momentous task ahead. That job requires that legislators protect current and retired transit employees’ pensions, eliminate union […]

Way off track

June 4, 2015 /0 Comments/in , , /by

A couple of weeks ago, Ari Ofsevit wrote a pretty scathing blog claiming that Pioneer is really, really bad at math.  We take math and transparency seriously here at Pioneer, so after sharing my reply with Ari last week, I wanted to post it publicly. Ofsevit’s piece is remarkable, not for the quality and length of his ranting, but rather for the fact that he complains about math errors without ever identifying a single math error.  Along the way, he misrepresents lots of stuff.  Here is the hit parade: Ofsevit is wrong in attributing the absenteeism numbers in the governor’s special panel to Pioneer.  The Institute had nothing to do with the absenteeism numbers they cite (which in part, I would guess, […]

The Single Biggest Obstacle to Reform at the MBTA

June 3, 2015 /0 Comments/in , , , /by

post by Gregory W. Sullivan & Matthew Blackbourn In an article published in the Globe last week, the MBTA Carmen’s union threatened to block MBTA federal transit funding if the legislature enacts the governor’s proposal to give the proposed fiscal and management control board final say on collective bargaining agreements. We hope that the legislature sees this threat for what it is: bully tactics by MBTA unions against the house and senate. This isn’t the first time MBTA unions have used the nuclear option of attempting to shut off federal funding to block a legislative reform that endeavored to do nothing more than treat MBTA employees exactly the same way other public employees in the state are treated. In 2009, Local […]

The Convention Center Expansion was a House of Cards

May 2, 2015 /0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

In a piece by Jack Encarnacao in the Boston Herald, Richard Rogers, executive secretary-treasurer of the Greater Boston Labor Council claimed that opponents of the South Boston Convention Center expansion were “ideological.”  He called out Pioneer for putting ideology “ahead of the best interests of our regional and state economy.” As I noted in the piece, Mr. Rogers is doing his job, seeking to advance the interests of his members.  But his are partial interests–and advancing the interests of the GBLC in this case harms the interest of hundreds of thousands of fellow Massachusetts residents. The fact is that the South Boston Convention Center expansion has always been a vanity project with no economic and financial data to back it up.  In the […]

A highly temporary solution on higher education

April 7, 2015 /0 Comments/in , , /by

With my older daughter heading off to college next year, the question of how much debt is too much debt for her take on is something I’m mulling over quite a bit these days. How much can you pay, how much will she need to borrow and work, and how much support, if any, can the institution provide? US Senator Elizabeth Warren has been asking this question, and she is right to raise the issue, given the burden on, as she puts it, their later “economic lives”—buying a house, leasing a car, building some savings, investing, etc. So what of Senator Warren’s proposal to cut federal borrowing rates from 10 to 4 percent?  Her call to wipe out the federal […]

Why the free fall in support for the Olympics

April 6, 2015 /0 Comments/in , , , /by

Notwithstanding articles that pass the blame off on John Fish, then Doug Rubin’s Northwind Strategies, then everybody else on the local committee, the striking fall in support for the Olympics has little to do with any one person. It has to do with trust. While not for or against the Olympics at this point, I will admit that, as is the case with any big bold project, we believe it is important to remain skeptical early and to ask lots of questions.  That was true of the debate over the South Boston convention center in the 1990s, when we came out in opposition to the project, or more recently casinos, where we limited our work to questions surrounding the public trust […]

How to measure the MBTA’s operational efficiency

March 23, 2015 /0 Comments/in , , , , /by

Pioneer has long been interested in the efficiency of the MBTA relative to other systems around the country.  As noted in a blog response to an organization critical of our work, we are not interested in ideological playtime with numbers. The organization, called the Frontier Group, which is allied with advocates of continued MBTA expansion, notes that Pioneer should focus its operational and efficiency analyses on costs per “unlinked passenger trips.”  When we began our recent series on the MBTA we had a number of in-house discussions regarding what would and would not provide useful information on operational efficiency.   In transit speak and then in basic laymen’s terms, here is why “unlinked passenger trips” don’t tell us much about efficiency, […]