THE PIONEER BLOG

Jim Stergios

Go back to the Governor's bill

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The Senate is going to be debating a bill that on the face of it lifts the charter school cap. But it is deeply flawed. Some of it goes back to the Governor’s first proposal on charters in February 2009. With the Race to the Top fund in the balance, he showed leadership in changing his view in July, when he issued a proposal that maximizes the possibility of receiving federal funds and (1) doubles the number of kids in charters, (2) leaves the rest of the existing in tact, with a framework to ensure that charter operators redouble their efforts to enroll special needs and English language learners. The Senate Ways & Means bill under consideration is deeply flawed. […]

Jim Stergios

Innovation or re-inventing the flat tire

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The state legislature’s rewrite of the governor’s two education bills, to expand charter schools and to create new “readiness” schools, is now one bill. Readiness schools are now called “innovation” schools. The charter sections seem to be ok, though we will see as it moves forward if quotas for specific types of students will be part of the final package. That would not be helpful, though requiring charters to do robust outreach to special needs and English language learners is ok with me. One big question I have on the readiness, now innovation, schools. Given that the statutory draft calls for approval by two-thirds of the teachers in the school in order to move forward, I am wondering if we […]

Amy Lischko

Transparency — Bring it on

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On Friday, my old agency released a report entitled “Measuring Health Care Quality and Cost in Massachusetts.”  The report can be found here:  http://www.statehousenews.com/qualitycost.pdf.  This report is full of really useful information on quality and costs for various procedures at hospitals in Massachusetts.   Unfortunately the report received very little press and consumers probably don’t even know it is available.  The information can also be found on the consumer website, developed by the Health Care Quality and Cost Council.  This new report allows you to see a profile of a  hospital’s indicators on one page and allows you to compare all hospitals in the state (compared to the website which only allows you to compare 4 hospitals at a time).   This is […]

Jim Stergios

Charter opponents have no more legs to stand on

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So the unions and superintendents tried the argument that charters do not serve as many disadvantaged students. We dismantled that argument. While charters don’t serve as many special needs kids and English Language learners, both categories designated by adults, they serve many more minority and poor students. So, then the Mass Teachers Association cries out about high attrition in a handful of high-powered charter schools in Boston. But they forget that choice schools are about parents making choices. And, oops, they forget that in fact there is more attrition in the Boston Public Schools. And, uh, ooh, ah, they forget that in the charters they are pointing fingers at there is only a dropout rate of 10 percent, which is […]

Steve Poftak

Defining Political Capital

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Thursday’s Globe relates that Mayor Tom Menino is considering a number of new initiatives. He states that there is a particular opportunity to get things done now: “I have the political capital to do it right now that I haven’t had in the past,’’ Menino said. So, winning 17 of 22 wards with 57% of the vote provides an opportunity that winning every single ward in the city with 76% (2001) of the vote and 67% (2005) of the vote does not?

Jim Stergios

More on the US DOE Inspector General's report

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I have been at a meeting in North Carolina with budget watchdog and fiscal conservative groups for the last two days. Lots of great ideas, but clearly being from Massachusetts sets you apart from other folks in some ways. One example is how Governors have used their stimulus money. When I discussed with them how we cut deep into our education budget and plugged the hole with stimulus dollars, they said, hey, your Governor’s being fiscally conservative. I disagree because I think you have to prioritize education. The Governor definitely does, as I have noted, if he wants to assert, as he did in a recent video (now pulled?), that he has made “extraordinary efforts to invest in… education.” I […]

Jim Stergios

Will He Make History?

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Tom Menino already has by ensuring that he will be mayor of Boston for 20 years. 20 years. Boston has been an American city for only two and a quarter centuries. 20 years is a long time. Things have gotten better over those two decades, and there is a promise that the Mayor has made to use his “political capital”, as he put it, to make major changes. To make history. We are rooting for the mayor, and we hope that he can use the 15-part series that we did together with the Boston Municipal Research Bureau on the major issues facing our fair city as buoys as, in his final four years, he takes the ship of city government […]

Jim Stergios

Federal health care mandate and the Commerce Clause

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Robert Levy, chairman of the CATO Institute, is a brilliant guy. He was talking today in Asheville about the fact that conservatives and liberals both abuse the interstate commerce clause in the US Constitution, for their own purposes. Liberals have used it to clamp down on everything from growing your own produce (in FDR’s time) to promoting any number of regulations on businesses, even those that only operate within a single state’s boundaries. Conservatives have been pushing, and continue to push, tort reform through federal action. Levy’s argument is that both abuse the commerce clause. But then he noted something I hadn’t thought of: What allows the federal government to establish a mandate to purchase health care insurance? Even though […]

Amy Lischko

Rethinking EMTALA

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On the drive in this morning I heard an interesting idea being tested in Fort Worth Texas (isn’t that one of the highest health cost cities in the country?).  See the link here http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local-beat/Call-An-Ambulance-Get-a-Taxi-66723887.html.     They are using EMTs as triage agents for patients who call 911 for an ambulance.  In many cases, the EMTs are telling patients, “you don’t need to go to the hospital.” If the patient insists on visiting the ER, and it is not an emergency, the EMT calls a cab.     Policymakers should re-think how EMTALA  (the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) gets operationalized and whether it needs some updating to encourage appropriate use of our scarce resources.   With the flu season upon […]

Jim Stergios

Just. Not. Smart.

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The Governor is now talking about layoffs. I suppose Pioneer is responsible for starting the discussion about headcount growth a year ago, when we suggested that the data is telling us that state government grew from 2004 to then by about 7500 positions. We said it in October 2008, January 2009 and then again in June 2009. Our view is that the addition of 1,100 safety net program positions during that period should be maintained but that an equivalent of the 6,400 new hires are not sustainable in the face of thousands of local layoffs and over a billion-dollar-plus structural deficit. That’s been the mantra over and over. Over the past five months or so we’ve been asking the state’s […]

Amy Lischko

Let the Patients Choose

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(Editor’s Note: Pioneer welcomes our Senior Fellow on Healthcare, Amy Lischko, to the blog. Amy will be writing on healthcare here from time to time, as well as working on research for Pioneer. Welcome.) It’s worrisome when the state tells us what kind of provider network we need.  Today’s Globe article “Insurer told to hold off in Mass.” highlights one of the reasons behind our increasing health care costs.  Carriers have often remarked that they have difficulty creating both tiered provider networks and narrow provider networks that offer lower costs.  Why can’t the state (via the Connector or DOI) allow Centene to offer these plans to consumers and let the consumers vote with their feet?  If no one signs up, […]

Steve Poftak

Running the Numbers, Stimulus Style

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You’ll forgive me for being a skeptic about job creation numbers. There’s a history there. So, the GOV’s announcement that Stimulus Act Spending had “created or retained 23,533 jobs” caught my eye. Reading the press release more closely, I saw this qualification: Stimulus spending has created or retained 8,792 full-time equivalents (FTEs), representing 23,533 individual citizens put to work. If we take the $1.9b already spent by the state on stimulus and spread it across the number of FTEs, that comes to a subsidy of over $200k for each preserved or retained full-time job. I don’t have a good frame of reference (and I’d be curious how other states are doing) but that strikes me as a pretty big number […]

Steve Poftak

Time to Activate the PAFNDAS

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UPDATE BELOW What’s that? Why, its the Patrick Administration Friday News Drop Alert System. We noticed the habit of shuffling certain pieces of news out the door late on Fridays and so have others. So, I note that as of 10 AM on Thursday, the Governor’s Office has not released his Friday calendar (to SHNS, that is). Yet, the centerpiece of transportation reform, a central authority — MassDOT, springs to life on Sunday, November 1. MassDOT will be governed by a five member board that will take on a massive array of responsibility — oversight of transportation policy in general and, through incorporation, will take over the responsibilities of the former Turnpike and MBTA Boards of Directors. But we still […]

Jim Stergios

Good news on charter performance

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From Marc Kenen of the Mass Charter School Association comes some good news. The new MCAS growth model analysis shows that charter public schools are producing very strong academic gains for their students statewide (see the data at the Boston Globe online): * In Grade 6, charters represented 9 of the top 10 growth districts in math and 6 of the top 10 districts in English; * In Grade 8, charters represented 7 of the top 10 growth districts in math and 4 of the top 10 districts in English; * In Grade 10, charters represented 5 of the top 10 growth districts in both math and English.

Jim Stergios

How is this for pushing hard, part 2

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Whitney Tilson passes on additional news from RI. Given that the state department of education certifies schools of education, RI Education Commissioner Gist also raised the minimum score required to get into RI teacher training programs. “cut score” required to enter the teacher training program at all RI colleges. We previously had the lowest cut score in the country, tied with Guam. To set the new cut score, she asked her staff to research who had the highest in the country, and learned it was Virginia. So she set our cut score one point higher than theirs. From Jennifer Jordan’s report in the Providence Journal: It’s going to get harder to become a teacher in Rhode Island. Education Commissioner Deborah […]