THE PIONEER BLOG

After the charter hearing, more quotes

Paul Vallas, Superintendent of the New Orleans Recovery School District “I have said over and over again that if charters are performing, they should be expanded” “I think charters provide an excellent tool for school districts to expand educational choice. But I like charters that work. The great thing about charters is that if the school is failing, you don’t have to try to reconstitute it. You can just shut it down” Thanks again to Mike Goldstein of the MATCH School for passing these on.

Equal Treatment for All!

Just returned from a packed State House hearing on charter schools, which included enough material to fuel the blogosphere for the foreseeable future.   Due to the number of people wishing to testify, the education committee was unusually strict about enforcing a three-minute limit on individual testimony — which led to my personal favorite moment of the afternoon.  Sen. Marc Pacheco (D-Taunton),  the most unquestioning of public employee union supporters, railed against inequality, claiming charter schools call themselves public but are more like privates in their entrance requirements.  The alarm marking the end of his three minutes sounded.  Undaunted, he continued — this time accusing charters of busing people to the hearing and feeding them with public funds.  After all, the same rules should apply to everyone. The […]

After the charter hearing, some quotes

I hope our legislators are open to understanding the wisdom of these statements from Joel Klein, Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools: “Our parents are on the waiting lists and it seems to me unconscionable, quite frankly, when we have parents who want these opportunities and these choices, and they’re being denied them.” “Giving people choices is always empowering and almost always will lead to better outcomes for kids… You want people to vote with their feet and then take appropriate action (as the district).” “To me it’s unimaginable that we wouldn’t be allowed to create more charter schools. It’s not like you’ve got a whole bunch of high-performing schools in the South Bronx or Central Brooklyn. What […]

Ed Policy Schizophrenia

A great press release from the Mass Department of Education notes: For the second time, Massachusetts has outscored every other state in the country on three of four National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exams, and has tied for first on the fourth, Governor Patrick announced at the Aborn Elementary School in Lynn on Tuesday.The only other time one state has ever ranked first on all four NAEP exams was when Massachusetts outscored the nation for the first time in 2005. So the grand bargain of the 1993 Ed reform Act (more money, more accountability and more innovation) is working. But the press release suggests that the administration’s “left” hand does not know what the “right” hand is doing. Makes […]

Deb Meier v. The Powerful, Dark Phantom that Pioneer is

I can see it now: The heavy-footed, giant, unforgiving Dark Phantom of Pioneer up against meek, never-attacking Deb Meier, who is only armed with a sling-shot to take on her powerful adversary. On the blog she shares with Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences, Deborah laments again the oh-so-powerful Pioneer. She continues to show hurt: You suggest I needn’t worry about annoying those “with more power”. But I felt badly recently when (as I mentioned) somebody took after Mission Hill school as a way to attack me on another issue altogether. So they can “touch me”—but not stop me! Alas, my travels remind me that others have less wiggle room—even for saying what’s on their minds. Deb, you wrote in a letter […]

News flash – healthcare costs are rising fast

Thought I would remind you of that just in case you forgot. The April Governing magazine notes that State and local spending for health care is rising significantly. Medicaid accounts for the bulk of those expenditures, especially as the costs of long-term care continue to rise. Pointing to a recent study published in Health Affairs policy journal, Governing goes on to assert that fallout from Medicare Part D, the federal government’s prescription drug program, is also contributing to the increase. Private payers are covering fewer health care costs, thus increasing the need for state and local governments to step in. “We are,” the study noted, “moving incrementally away from traditional sources of insurance, such as employer-based coverage, to a system […]

Who will train Portland to love transit?

So, back to Randal O’Toole’s Debunking Portland. Everyone would have to admit that a key goal of the whole Portland effort was to reduce the use of cars. So a couple of decades, if not more, into this experiment and how are we doing? Overall Transit Usage is Down “More than 97 percent of all motorized passenger travel (and virtually all freight movement) in the Portland area is by automobile.” “Portland transit usage grew faster than driving in the 1990s,” but “transit’s share declined in the 1980s, when the region’s first light-rail line was under construction. In 1980 more than 2.6 percent of motorized passenger travel in the Portland area used transit. By 1990, that had fallen to 1.8 percent. […]

Savonarola still wrong: another lesson from the mortgage mess

I lead with a fire-and-brimstone Renaissance preacher partly to make a point, and also to provoke Director Stergios, who I hope will comment in flawless Florentine dialect. This morning’s Globe features a point-counterpoint worthy of Curtin and Belushi. Bruce Marks blames evil lenders for the mortgage crisis; Bruce A. Percelay has it in for evil borrowers. To sum up: America is entering a recession because of the stain on each of our souls. Today’s forecast: Plague, followed by a French army and some locusts. Maybe because they have no boosterish agenda (other than Microsoft’s), MSN Money tends to offer some clear thinking about the macroeconomics behind the news. This Jon Markman piece is based on a discussion with Satyajit Das, […]

Portland is a City that Doesn’t Work?

I walk to work, and I cannot for the life of me understand how people can sit in traffic for hours. I love cars–especially fast cars. Schizophrenic? No, just a pretty even-handed observer of the Smart Growthies’ passion for mass transit and walkable cities and the car-lovers’ and business’ passion for get up and go. I have given up on seeing an absolutely objective narrative of how well or poorly Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary/transit-oriented development experiment has gone. I would note that Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, long-time resident of Portland and author of the about to be released The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook and Your Future, is as systematic an […]

Shoot, did I miss Bastille Day?

First of all, let me just say how proud I am of my fellow Pioneers: eight, now nine, blog posts in a single day. A new Institute record, I do believe. And let me just also say how honored I am to have inspired two of them, which, I suppose, require me to respond. I was looking forward to posting on the Red Sox’ disappearing lead, but no matter. My own research had led me to believe the ancient Egyptians invented the tie, but I will defer to my learned colleague. Where we agree is in its modern inception: the court of the Sun King. Where we also agree is Jim’s suspicion of my revolutionary tendencies, but, alas, I am […]

Questionable ties

From a website providing “the history of the necktie” come several hypotheses re: M. Day’s refusal to provision himself of a necktie: He is anti-Chinese: The first neckties, it seems, date back to the China B.C. He is anti-Croat or anti-French. Per the above-mentioned site: “The Sun King,” Louis XIV of France, was intrigued and delighted by the colorful silk kerchiefs worn around the necks of Croatian mercenaries. A crack regiment, the soldiers were presented at court around 1660 so the King could thank them for a victory against the Hapsburg Empire… Many experts believe the French word for tie, cravat, is a corruption of “Croat.” Or he is a revolutionary. Per the same: In fact, French kings maintained an […]

The Emerging Anti-Necktie Consensus

The necktie debate has roiled through our office several times. The following was brought to our attention by the Liam Day Joint Harvard-Oxford-Middlebury Institute for the Elimination of Class Distinctions: The National Health Service of Britain has called for the elimination of neckties for health workers, based on sanitary reasons, claiming that: Ties are rarely laundered but worn daily. They perform no beneficial function in patient care and have been shown to be colonised by pathogens.

A LOT of GBH tote bags

I like “Sesame Street,” as I don’t think pre-school children should be exposed to the latest in advertiser-driven brain-stem stimulation. I also enjoy “Greater Boston.” That said, I do object to the Olympian enshrinement of Ken Burns, Buster Bunny, and Emily Rooney in WGBH’s new technicolor monstrosity of a road hazard. How can a place that really, really needs $20 gifts from Inspector Lynley-loving librarians toss so much coin around? Is anyone else nervous about Boston’s annexation by Nonprofitstan? Private citizens and businesses default and run, bridges rot and slot machines jingle as colleges and “non-commercial” media outlets splurge on name-brand architects. [Black Kettle Alert: Yes, Pioneer is a nonprofit too. If anyone would like to engage Renzo Piano or […]

Great Pension Resource

We did a paper last year detailing the cost of pension gaming to the Commonwealth.  The Herald has just put up a database of all the pension recipients and their yearly payouts.  Many old friends show up….

A Big Wet Kiss for Racinos

The Globe’s Stan Grossfeld plants exactly that in today’s Globe with a puff piece on Pennsylvania’s experience with racinos.  Unsurprisingly, a declining industry that receives a massive subsidy experiences a bit of resurgence, but the unasked question is why should we be subsidizing horse owners above any number of other worthy recipients.  Also conveniently absent is any reference to the massive profits that the former track owners made when they sold their facilities after purchasing below-market fixed price licenses. One of the details in the Patrick Administration’s casino plan that we were glad to see is the presence of a competitive bid process (as opposed to granting fixed-price licenses to racetracks, which was floated last year).  Check out our op-ed […]