Useful information about COVID cases or deaths at individual homes has become less available at a time when cases are increasing again, even among vaccinated residents. Pioneer urges Massachusetts to immediately reinstate the so-called Weekly Report, which contains cases and deaths inside individual nursing homes.
Despite being awash in cash, the state Legislature just overrode Gov. Charlie Baker’s veto of a provision to delay by yet another year a tax deduction for charitable donations. Rep. Mark Cusack, House chair of the Joint Committee on Revenue, said “it doesn’t mean no, just not now.” If not now, when?
If you want a window into taxation, to learn where Massachusetts residents move to and where new residents are coming from, Pioneer Institute has an innovative research tool for you. With Pioneer’s new Mass IRS Data Discovery Tool, you can now compare state-to-state or year-to-year tax data without downloading up to 2,000 IRS files in many different, cumbersome formats.
Pioneer Institute today announced that it has submitted an amicus curiae urging the United States Supreme Court to hear Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which challenges a state constitutional amendment marked by religious bias.
Pioneer Institute, through its public interest law arm, PioneerLegal, has filed an amicus curiae brief in the case prepared by WilmerHale’s Mark Matuschak and Robert Kingsley Smith.
Pioneer Institute is grateful for the opportunity to share brief thoughts on the work of the Governor’s Commission on the Future of Transportation. Our comments are focused on four issues: (1) governance, (2) budgeting and operations, (3) the role of public transportation at a time of rapid private market transformation, and (4) the need to set increasing ridership as the top strategic transit goal.
Through its public interest law initiative PioneerLegal, Pioneer Institute has filed an amicus brief in an important case about public education that will be argued today before Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court (SJC). Download Brief:
The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE) continues its advocacy for Common Core and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a federally funded testing consortium, with the release of a study concluding that Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) performance is not an indicator of preparedness for higher education success.
This manual was prepared as part of the Urban Business Alliance (UBA)- a unique initiative of Pioneer’s Center for Urban Entrepreneurship that helps low- and moderate-income entrepreneurs by bolstering the skills of the community-based business advisors they look to for assistance.
The fact is that the unemployment rate doesn’t tell the whole story. Strictly defined as the percentage of the population who are out of work and actively seeking employment, this metric provides a very narrow lens through which to evaluate labor market performance. A look at labor participation rates — the labor force as a percentage of the civilian non-institutional population — helps paint a more accurate picture.
Successful removal of the Common Core State Standards requires parents, educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders to have facts about what the standards are and what they are not. The following Claims and Facts address Common Core myths about the development, intent, content, and implementation of the standards.
When President Obama unveiled his “Race to the Top” (RttT) initiative in 2009, the idea was to award $4.35 billion in federal grant money to states to replicate policies that boosted student achievement. That quickly changed and the federal money was instead used to persuade states to adopt administration-backed nationalized K-12 English and math standards and tests.
This guide is intended to help engaged citizens, particularly the members of municipal finance committees, understand how best to perform an analysis of the effectiveness and efficiency of municipal spending.
“Pioneer Institute Report on History in Schools” was presented in 2012.
“School Choice Survey” was presented in 2012.
Significant new costs are projected in three key areas of standards-based reform: assessment, professional development, and textbooks and instructional materials. In addition, states and local communities are expected to face substantial new expenditures for technology infrastructure and support.
All but five (5) states have committed to adopting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts and mathematics and are participating in one of the federally-sponsored consortia developing aligned assessments (see Figure I ). Few of the participants, however, have carefully analyzed the costs involved.
2012 Better Government Competition Compendium of Winning Entries – “Restoring Federalism”
I’ve known E.D. Hirsch for some years, having spoken on the same programs with him on a number of occasions. I have the greatest respect for Professor Hirsch’s work and am happy to consider him a friend. Professor Hirsch is the author of several books including the seminal work Cultural Literacy and most recently, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, where he makes the case that a paramount goal of American public education is to produce sentient human beings capable of participating as intelligent citizens in a democracy.
I’m pleased to be here this morning. I’d like to thank Pioneer Institute for hosting this event, as well as the co-sponsors, including the Parents Alliance for Catholic Education, the Becket Fund, the Black Alliance for Educational,Options, and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.
The results of this study show that factory model contracts are more likely to be found in the Commonwealth’s lowest-performing school districts, many of which serve disproportionate numbers of poor and minority students. This policy brief concludes with six recommendations for actions that school districts can take to ensure that teacher collective bargaining contracts in the state of Massachusetts become better aligned with the professional model.
Compendium of Winning Entries from Pioneer’s Better Government Competition 2011 – “Budget Busters”
I want to start by thanking Jim, Jamie, and the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) for having me today. I’m a board member at DFER, so perhaps they didn’t have any choice, but I’m grateful to Pioneer for the opportunity. And on behalf of Joe Williams, greetings.
Massachusetts has seen dramatic changes in the transportation landscape over the last two years. Major reforms have been enacted to restructure how transportation assets are managed and bring efficiencies to the system. With these major changes, many observers view transportation reform as ‘done’ and much of the attention to transportation reform has ebbed away. To keep the conversation moving, Pioneer and the Center for Strategic Studies at the College of Business at Northeastern University sponsored a forum in May of2010 to bring together some of the innovators in transportation strategic thinking.
2010 Better Government Competition Compendium of Winning Entries – “Governing in a Time of Crisis”
The tests Massachusetts uses for licensing teachers, the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure (MTEL), have been developed for the state by the Evaluation Systems group of Pearson (ESP) under continuously renewed contracts with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). Prospective teachers in Massachusetts must take a reading and writing skills test as well as a test of their subject-area knowledge.
The purpose of this policy brief is to help DESE set priorities for implementation of the task force’s recommendations. It outlines areas where Pioneer believes the task force has crafted useful recommendations and suggests how they might be implemented. It also calls attention to recommendations that we believe are mistaken in their emphasis on skills and pedagogy over academic content, and display a lack of practicality and knowledge of both state policy and local, district-level realities.
The combined use of limited, or selective, provider networks and a defined contribution strategy presents an immediate opportunity for government entities and employer groups to achieve significant and sustainable health insurance savings and reduce medical cost trends, while maintaining coverage levels and quality of care. This solution illustrates the impact of changes in consumer behavior that occur as a result of economic conditions and opportunities.
The combined use of limited, or selective, provider networks and a defined contribution strategy presents an immediate opportunity for government entities and employer groups to achieve significant and sustainable health insurance savings and reduce medical cost trends, while maintaining coverage levels and quality of care. This solution illustrates the impact of changes in consumer behavior that occur as a result of economic conditions and opportunities.
Health insurance markets are regulated by the states under the McCarran-Ferguson Act (15 U.S.C. 1011) of 1945. The ‘purpose clause’ of the Act states that regulation and taxation of the business of insurance by the states is in the public interest. As a result of McCarran-Ferguson, every health insurer must be licensed in the policyholder’s state of residence. The states have responded with a complex patchwork of mandates and laws that vary widely across the country.