This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Gerard Robinson and Cara Candal talk with Arif Panju, a managing attorney with the Institute for Justice and co-counsel in the U.S. Supreme Court school choice case, Carson v. Makin; and David Carson, the lead plaintiff. Panju shares the key legal contours of Carson v. Makin and the potential impact of the Court’s decision in favor of the plaintiffs.
This week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Dr. Celina Miranda, executive director of the Hyde Square Task Force in Jamaica Plain’s Latin Quarter, today one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Massachusetts.
This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Gerard Robinson and Cara Candal talk with David Hackett Fischer, University Professor and Earl Warren Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University, and the author of numerous books, including Paul Revere’s Ride and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington’s Crossing. As America prepares to celebrate the Fourth of July, they review key figures who helped secure independence from Great Britain, including Paul Revere, immortalized in Longfellow’s classic poem, and Founding Father George Washington, known among his contemporaries as the “indispensable man” of the revolutionary cause.
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Gerard and Cara talk with Dr. Marguerite Roza, Research Professor and Director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Professor Roza describes the three distinct phases of how American K-12 education has been funded over the last 40 years, and implications for equity and overall student achievement.
Host Joe Selvaggi and Pioneer Institute’s Bill Smith talk with Valerie Sullivan, President and CEO of EtectRX about the health care costs of improperly taking prescriptions and the promise of smart pills to signal and track medicines when ingested.
Pioneer Institute Board Chairman Stephen Fantone introduces Boston Mayor Martin Walsh, who delivered the keynote address at the 2014 Better Government Competition Awards Dinner. Mayor Walsh discussed his key priorities, and technological innovations that his administration has successfully launched. A Q&A session followed his remarks. This event was held at the Boston Harbor Hotel on September 11, 2014. More information on the Competition can be found here.
Washington, D.C. Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith delivered the keynote address for “District and Charter Early Childhood Ed: Lessons from D.C.,” a public forum held on July 31, 2014 in Boston, Mass.
Uwe Reinhardt speaks at the Pioneer Institute’s 2014 Hewitt Health Care Lecture: “What Just Happened & What’s Ahead for the Affordable Care Act.” Reinhardt is the James Madison Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Economics at Princeton University.
With the death of Lady Margaret Thatcher the world has lost a great champion of human liberty. Along with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Poland’s Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, Lady Thatcher is rightfully credited with helping defeat Soviet Communism and ending the Cold War. Video of Lady Thatcher in Poland 1988: [youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cADKFsQRl2s[/youtube] There is little doubt Margaret Thatcher was among the greatest political leaders of the 20th century. England and the world are more just places due to her courageous example. At Pioneer Institute, her life, good works, and friendship had a profound influence on our founder Lovett C. Peters.
Pioneer Executive Director Jim Stergios participated as a panelist at the 21st Century Brookline High Fund forum.
Enter Pioneer Institute’s 2013 Better Government Competition for your chance to win $10,000. Read the contest guidelines and details about the topic.
Pioneer Institute is thrilled to announce the second annual Ruth and Lovett Peters Fellowship, an opportunity for a current or recent graduate student with a passionate interest in education policy and strong entrepreneurial and analytic abilities.
Pioneer Institute hosted a forum on September 19, 2012 at the Omni Parker Hotel. “Why Huck Finn Matters: Classic Literature in Schooling” with keynote speakers Jocelyn Chadwick, author of The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn, who makes her return to Harvard this year, and Ron Powers, Pulitzer and Emmy Award winning Twain biographer and co-author of the bestseller, Flags of Our Fathers. [vimeo height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://vimeo.com/50257665[/vimeo] The event also featured a lively panel moderated by David Steiner, Dean, School of Education, Hunter College. Panelists included: Mark Bauerlein, Emory University; Robert Pondiscio, Core Knowledge Foundation; and Sandra Stotsky, University of Arkansas.[vimeo height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://vimeo.com/50004970[/vimeo] “Why Huck Finn Matters: Classic Literature in K-12 Schooling” with Noted Authors Jocelyn Chadwick & Ron Powers Related […]
[vimeo height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://vimeo.com/50264658[/vimeo] On September 24, 2012, Pioneer Institute held its annual Better Government Competition Awards Ceremony. Grace-Marie Turner, Galen Institute, and Robert Helms, Ph.D., American Enterprise Institute, winners of the 2012 Better Government Competition, accept their awards for their paper titled “Coordinated Care Management for Medicare and Medicaid Beneficiaries.”
On July 31, 2012, Pioneer held a public forum, “The Lawrence Reforms and School Choice,” featuring Lawrence Superintendent Jeffrey Riley and a panel of distinguished education experts, including SABIS Education System’s Jose Afonso, Phoenix Academy’s Beth Anderson, Boston University Professor Charles Glenn, and AFT-MA President Tom Gosnell. In this clip, Superintendent Riley presents his goals.
On July 31, 2012, Pioneer held a public forum, “The Lawrence Reforms and School Choice,” featuring Lawrence Superintendent Jeffrey Riley and a panel of distinguished education experts, including SABIS Education System’s Jose Afonso, Phoenix Academy’s Beth Anderson, Boston University Professor Charles Glenn, and AFT-MA President Tom Gosnell.
National education policy expert Jay Greene addressed a Pioneer Institute forum, “No More Know Nothing Laws: School Choice in Massachusetts,” on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 in Boston.
On March 1st, 2012, Pioneer welcomed education experts from across the country: Susan Patrick, CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning; Hanna Skandera, New Mexico Secretary of Education; Julie Young, President of Florida Virtual School; Healther Staker, Innosight Institute; as well as Martha Walz, Massachusetts State Representative; Michael Sentance, former New England Administrator, U.S. Department of Education; and Will Fitzhugh, Founder and Editor, The Concord Review. They discussed regulatory barriers to digital learning. Susan Patrick, CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning: [youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyHgLQSjZ9U&feature=youtu.be[/youtube] Hanna Skandera, New Mexico Secretary of Education: [vimeo height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]https://vimeo.com/43176807[/vimeo]
[vimeo height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://vimeo.com/33534003[/vimeo] In this clip, Julie Young, Florida Virtual School, describes the phenomenal success of Florida Virtual School in making high-quality, online instruction accessible for over a hundred thousand K-12 students. This video was filmed at Pioneer’s Dec. 2011 event: “Virtual Schools, Actual Learning: Digital Education in America.” Julie Young, Florida Virtual School, Keynote Speaker
[vimeo height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://vimeo.com/32422784[/vimeo] Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, speaks with Jim Stergios, Executive Director of Pioneer Institute. Khan was the honoree at Pioneer’s 14th annual Lovett C. Peters Lecture in Public Policy. The lecture’s mission is to “encourage individuals of vision, to inform and enrich intellectual debate surrounding the great public issues of our day, and to honor individuals whose ideas or accomplishments have left a mark on our world.”
Pioneer Institute lays out seven steps to correct the Connector’s over-reliance on revenue generated from subsidized insurance products, and aid the small business community.
What level of concentration of poverty is the right amount? Is it right for the state to create destination cities for the poor? As it stands, the state will, whenever possible, place the poor it is “helping” in areas of cities where housing values are extremely low in order to maximize their own ability to give people shelter. Seems to be right from the immediate bean-counting standpoint, but if you think about it, it can create a death spiral for cities, which are already deep in the trough fiscally. Let’s start with the numbers. In Massachusetts, the following Middle Cities have easily met their “state target for affordable housing”: Holyoke – 21% Springfield – 17% Lawrence – 15% Worcester – […]
Jane Jacobs was the maven of public input, but she is also in many respects a common sense proponent of organic, private market growth in our cities. Try this on for size, from The Death and life of Great American Cities, published in 1961 when Robert Moses still held the marionette of New York in his hands: There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend — the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars — we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse the decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday’s and day-before yester-day’s suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and […]
In Radiohead’s latest, In Rainbows (buy it here!), there is a cut called House of Cards about love gone awry… (Already, stop with the carping! I know it’s a been-there, done-that kind of theme. After all, what else does love do?) But Pioneer demonstrates its impact across the globe when Thom Yorke quotes in House of Cards that “infrastructure will collapse.” And to think that the band wrote the song before the Minneapolis tragedy. Prescient, though I have a sneaky feeling that the line was lifted directly from Pioneer’s A Legacy of Neglect, which was equally prescient. We are looking forward to the new release from Radiohead, perhaps a follow-up to Kid A that will support school choice and some […]
Choice. For most Democrats it rings as a clarion call… except when it comes to education. When school choice is mentioned, most D’s line up with the usual suspects, as was the case in Arizona this summer, when a Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Arizona’s voucher program for foster children and children with special needs. The usual suspects in this case were the Arizona Education Association, People for the American Way (ugh), and the ACLU Foundation of AZ. In AZ, children placed in foster care can receive a scholarship of $5,000 to cover tuition and fees for a school of their choice. Kids who have received an Individualized Education Program by the state can receive an amount equivalent […]
Joseph Stiglitz was spot on about the costs of the Iraq War. But, like many Nobel Prize economists, he’s gained a tendency to believe he has a pulpit from which to preach. Sort of like being an economist and a New York Times columnist, except that Stiglitz still is an economist. I enjoy Stiglitz less and less, I admit, but being cooped up in an airplane for 20 hours does something to you. You read what you brought or you watch the Transformers. (On that score, god, please let the Screenwriters strike stretch on –at least this year we will have fewer lousy movies.) In one of the articles, Stiglitz, taking a page out of the John Edwards-Mike Huckabee-Barack Obama […]
The ethical controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells engendered by the scientific use of stem cells may now be at an end. Dr. Maureen Condic and Dr. Markus Grompe write in the Wall Street Journal (11/23/07): Two major scientific papers published this week in Science and Cell magazines unveil a proven way to generate patient-matche, human pluripotent stem cells without human cloning, and with the use of human embryos or human or animal eggs. Exciting stuff. And, one hopes, a way past what many considered a slippery slope of giving ethical “easements” on the basis pure hope (and as we are not sure of the potential yet, perhaps even hype). Science has provided a resolution to the ethical and political debate, […]
Been traveling so catching up on some items. In case you missed it, the Globe‘s circulation is down 6.66% (to 361,000) and the Herald‘s 8.7% (to 186,000). I loved the November 6 Globe’s headline: “Newspaper circulation still on decline.” All true, though the numbers for the Globe and the Herald were decidedly steeper than for all newspapers except for the Dallas Morning News and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While it might be interesting to understand why the circulations of Boston papers are headed in the opposite direction from that of the Philadelphia Inquirer (up 2.3% to 338,000), the broader, more important question is why the decline in newspaper readership is steeper in Boston than elsewhere? Other cities and regions have Metro […]
The Reason Foundation has posted up some data on the number of deficient bridges across the nation. The feds track this stuff for obvious reasons (mobility across states, an understanding as to how states are doing and what they are doing with fed money, and also because bridges that are rated ‘deficient’ become eligible for federal funding for repair. Overall, Reason notes that The condition of the nation’s highway bridges continued to improve from 2004 to 2005. Of the 596,980 highway bridges in the current National Bridge Inventory, 147,913—about 24.52 percent—were reported deficient for 2005 (see table), a slight improvement from 2004. In 1998 about 29.0 percent were rated deficient. However, progress is slow; at the current rate of improvement, […]
In the High Court of Common Sense, the people will always win. Consider Youngstown or Buffalo. Both have seen a complete collapse in their populations. Youngstown is half the city it once was in terms of population. As Ed Glaeser points out in the Autumn 2007 City Journal, Buffalo hit a ceiling of 580,000 in the 1920s and has gone to 300,000. Noting the “billions upon billions” spent by the feds since the 50s on Buffalo and other failed “middle cities”, Ed lists out the usual suspects–Urban Renewal funds, HUD money, and lots of dough for the metropolitan rail system, even as ridership went down, down, down, as people left, left, left. Ed’s money quotes: All this spending aimed at […]