THE PIONEER BLOG

Jim Stergios

MATCH School inspires my home town

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The Mayor of my home town (Cumberland, RI), Daniel McKee, is engaged in a very interesting experiment. As Ed Week noted, if McKee: and a coalition of other Rhode Island town leaders have their way, they’ll ditch public education’s current bureaucracy and start over with a clean slate. It’s just not clear yet exactly what they will be able to write on it. The plan, as Mr. McKee and his Coalition of Communities Improving Rhode Island were planning to announce it late last week, is to set up a regional, mayorally headed network of charter schools—something that charter school experts say has never been attempted in quite the way the coalition is proposing. Yes, the Cumberland teachers union rep is […]

Steve Poftak

Some Good Bridge News

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You may recall our recent report — Our Legacy of Neglect — that examined the condition of the Longfellow Bridge and the condition of our state’s assets. MSNBC has done an enterprising bit of reporting on national bridge inspection standards and come up with some shocking results — massive numbers of bridges go uninspected for more than two years at a time (the absolute maximum recommended time between inspections). The good news is that Massachusetts has none of these bridges, although some other states (Illinois, Arizona) look pretty shabby. Sadly, we are still in the top 3 for structurally deficient and functionally obsolete bridges (at more than 50%) but we have improved by .6% in a year! Finally, if you […]

Steve Poftak

More Commuter Rail Chatter

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To make my bias plain, I’m a regular commuter rail user and a big fan. That said, Tuesday’s Globe had some dispiriting news about the newest commuter line — Greenbush. Its getting roughly 2700 riders per day (or around 1350 round-trip passengers) but a quarter of those are from another form of public transit — the commuter boat out of Hingham. So, we paid $500m+ to get about a thousand people a ride into the city (that’s a cool $500,000 per person). To be fair, the line may become more popular as time goes on, but this is not an encouraging sign. Looking back at the planning documents (see pg. 19 of this document), the seeds of this problem were […]

Jim Stergios

A bit like asking if we should build the South Coast rail link

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A friend on Friday mentioned her visit to infamous Gravina Island. Ah, Gravina Island, you ask. Pray tell, where is that? You may recall a certain Bridge To Nowhere. You may also remember that at the end of the summer Governor Palin from her perch in the fair capital city, Juneau (yes, that is the capital), decided not to push for the construction of the BTN, thereby putting the $200+ million to use on other highways and bridges in the Last Frontier State. You may also recall that the BTN was to have run from the balmy (for Alaska) city of Ketchikan (pop. 8,000) to Gravina Island (home to 50 permanent residents). What I did not know was that the […]

Jim Stergios

Green Dots in LA and now in NYC

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Steve Barr has become a lightning rod for many in LA and now also in NYC (and here infecting UFT chief Randi Weingarten) as he works with the State University of New York to open up a Green Dot school in the South Bronx. What union opponents (and it is not everyone) don’t seem to get about Green Dot schools is that the formula is very attractive to many teachers.  Especially younger teachers, many of whom would otherwise leave the teaching profession. Attractive?  Why?  Site-based management means teachers and principals have authority over 80-90 cents of each budget dollar, over curricula, and over work rules.  As a result,  decisions are made closer to the student and are more relevant to […]

Jim Stergios

Noble rhetoric, base motives

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Wrap Gov. Patrick’s proposal to overhaul public education governance in whatever rhetoric you want, at its core, his plan is about taking control of the Board of Education. His plan, simply put, is to give the Urban Superintendents, Mass Association of Superintendents, the Mass Association of School Committees and the Mass Teachers Association what they have been clamoring for the past decade.  Reminder to all: These are all a really nice bunch of well-meaning people who never forget to mention the children when they talk about their own interests, which are control, control, control and, hmm, control… in that order. They’ve had enough of the pressure to change business as usual. That pressure comes from the state’s accountability system, competition […]

Jim Stergios

Mother’s wisdom

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I am visiting my mom, who is really nice. Hard to believe, huh? Apple falls far from the tree in this case. We are enjoying a coffee and leafing through Roxbury Prep Charter School (a public middle school) annual report. First, how many district schools provide an annual report as clear as the one distributed by the Roxbury Prep Charter School? How many focus as clearly on results? On values? Harumph. The MCAS results are important and inspiring. Consider the following comparisons on the Math portion of the MCAS: Boston District students are proficient in the following percentages for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders: 29, 26 and 27 percent, respectively. (Not a good trend line, for the math-phobic.) Massachusetts District […]

Alan Petrillo

State of the State? Skip the speech and check out the budget.

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Almost exactly a year ago, one sage wondered if Governor Patrick would fulfill the promise of candidate Patrick. Since then, Pioneer has welcomed the Governor to our annual Better Government Competition and been heartened by many of his initiatives. So what’s in store for year two? Glad you asked – here’s Pioneer’s take on this year’s proposed budget. Just as historians judge Presidents by their performance during wartime, we’re about to learn how our Governor responds to economic uncertainty. As Pioneer’s release makes clear, we’re pulling for him, but we wonder if he’s reading the same bad news as the rest of us.

Jim Stergios

NEA dollars at work for whom?

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This is a long one. But if you like following the money, it is pretty interesting. A friend passed on an analysis of the National Education Association’s financial disclosure report for 2006-7. And you wonder why certain special interests support higher taxes and government largesse to the non-profit sector. As you read this list of advocacy groups who received funding from the NEA, remember that Pioneer takes no money from government sources and therefore can be objective about how to improve government. We don’t take your money via government and that’s why we ask for your support. The [NEA] nearly tripled its contributions [to advocacy groups] from the previous fiscal year. The expenditures include a host of payments connected with […]

Alan Petrillo

You can still make money in Boston real estate

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In today’s Metro, Mayor Menino is asked why the Hynes Center can’t be put to more productive use. In his reply, the Mayor says: …friends at the Hynes tell me in 2007, the center generated $10.1 million in revenue — the highest in the history of the building…. Ten Point One Million Dollars! 175,000 square feet of state-owned prime real estate that, in its best year ever (no inflation adjustment, please) barely makes $10 million! I bet there are a bunch of stores in the Pru mall that make that kind of money, and they pay taxes too. Imagine what another 175,000 square feet worth of clothing stores – or donut shops, or sports bars – could earn on Boylston […]

Liam Day

Small Things Matter

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We are sometimes so focused on what doesn’t work, that we sometimes miss the small successes. Here’s to the Dracut police force, which, as reported in this morning’s Lowell Sun, reduced sick-time use in 2007 by 54%. In fact, the total of 155.25 sick days used in 2007 is down from 497 used in 2005, a 69% reduction. Chief Richardson and his officers are to be commended for recognizing the strain that high absenteeism places on a force’s fiscal and human resources and for making it a departmental priority.

Steve Poftak

Overheated Extrapolation Department

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Ok, maybe I didn’t pay as much attention to the NH primary as I should have. But the Globe’s Derrick Jackson brings us another of his unique insights today. After a brief bit of throat-clearing about Obama ‘defending’ Hilary’s likability, he rips into the former First Lady : But this pales next to the steady drip, drip, drip of stereotyping from the Clinton camp of a lazy, drug-using, Muslim black man who believes in fairy tales. Mr. Jackson is the early leader in the Globe Op-Ed page’s yearly “Did-They-Really-Just-Say-That” competition. James Carroll is disqualified (see this week’s entry — Football reveals the rotting heart at the core of America).

Liam Day

The Week in Review

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It certainly has been a busy one, both nationally and here at Pioneer. We are set to release a short policy brief on the inequities in Unemployment Insurance in Massachusetts and are gearing up for an education event Tuesday to discuss issues around student test data, including MCAS, TIMSS, the state’s data warehouse and the need to use data to guide professional development and inform classroom practice. For that reason, I saved up my thoughts this week for one weekend post. Here goes; from lightest to most serious. 1) This week’s sign of the apocalypse – According to The Week (a periodical I’ve trumped here before) a Colorado inmate is suing the prison where he is incarcerated because he was […]

Jim Stergios

One reason we do not pay teachers more

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Passed on by a friend is the shocking bulge in hiring for grades K-8: In the past year, there were 52,000 new K-8 students nationwide, and 42,500 new K-8 teachers hired. The National Education Association today released its annual report, Rankings and Estimates: Rankings of the States 2006 and Estimates of School Statistics 2007… Teacher hiring is completely out of control. Yes, believers in the eternal teacher shortage, you read that correctly. A trend that was obvious after last year’s edition of Rankings and Estimates is now glaring. The last of the Baby Boomer’s kids are working their way through high school and they are not being replaced. NEA estimates that K-12 enrollment grew by only 0.3 percent in 2006-07, […]

Steve Poftak

Minute Clinics are coming

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This space has been a supporter of in-store limited service clinics in the past. And the state’s Public Health Council, despite some misgivings, just approved the regulations which will allow these clinics to begin opening. And good for them, they approved blanket regulations, not just case-by-case waivers, which would tied the process up in red tape. But then, Mayor Menino steps into the frame with a vociferous and very public condemnation of the clinics. Its not clear to this writer why he’s so focussed on the issue. Sure, these clinics bring up some clear issues about our healthcare delivery system — discontinuity of care, fragmented recordkeeping, etc. But, guess what, these problems exist today and will exist tomorrow, regardless of […]