THE PIONEER BLOG

Scott Haller

MBTA Commuter Rail: New Boss, Same Problems

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We all know that the MBTA’s commuter rail trains can be late, but how late are they? Pioneer Institute looked into how the MBTA’s performance stacks up against other major commuter rail systems in the country, and the results are not pretty. Of the ten largest commuter rail systems in the country by ridership the MBTA consistently performs the worst. A train is considered on-time if it arrives within five minutes of its scheduled arrival time. The reliability of a commuter system’s timeliness is critical to public confidence, making on-time performance the most important measure of operational success. As the sixth biggest commuter rail system the MBTA serves approximately 130,000 people daily and millions per year, and yet it is […]

Editorial Staff

How an Obscure Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Ruling Crippled Public Records Law

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Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb? What color was Napoleon’s white horse? What constitutes a public record under Massachusetts public records law? On the surface, all of these seem like straightforward questions with equally straightforward answers. However, anyone whose been on the receiving end of those first two gotchas – Grant and his daughters, grey – know that what sounds straightforward can be anything but. Let’s take a closer look at the third question. Now, on the straightforward surface level, public records should constitute any records created by a Massachusetts public official while performing their public duties, right? Well, according to Massachusetts Supreme Court, wrong. It depends a great deal which public official you’re asking, and whether or not they’re in […]

Jim Stergios

What’s driving the state’s budget gap?

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With 2015 revenues off by a sliver ($18 million), the state is facing a $750 million hole in the budget.  My friend at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, Noah Berger, notes that tax cuts in the 1990s led to decreased state revenues on the order of $3 billion. I find his view unconvincing for a number of reasons, including the fact that those tax cuts were part of changing the brand and the reality of living and doing business in Massachusetts.  Notwithstanding my own view that taxes (and the regulatory costs of doing business) are too high in the state, it is really hard today to assail the state with the worn slur of Taxachusetts.  The change in brand and […]

Jim Stergios

A tax on accumulated wealth?

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Pioneers tend to be people who read words carefully.  When the president speaks, we listen.  And in the State of the Union, there was one sentence that stuck out.  He said, “ Let’s close loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top one percent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth.” Does anyone have a clear sense what this means?  Clearly, what the president has in mind is not a change in taxes on earnings.  Is the implication that he is looking at end-of-life taxes?   That wouldn’t be likely given the political downsides during an upcoming election cycle.  Is it a new tax?  The president’s is one of those odd locutions that didn’t just land there by accident. […]

Sandra Stotsky

Is it Time to Rethink State Boards of Education?

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Some political officials (Governor Sandoval of Nevada) and self-described policy wonks (Fordham Institute staff) are calling into question the usefulness of locally elected local school boards.  Governor Sandoval suggested replacing them with governor-appointed boards, while Fordham has argued for years against locally elected school boards and for regional authorities, possibly appointed by governors and/or legislatures. Trust us, they say, we’re from Washington and know how to make your teachers accountable.  Trust us, they say at the state level, we know how you should teach. That’s not how Massachusetts’ educational reform was ever envisioned – and the commonwealth’s reforms are well known as being the most successful educational reforms over the past half century. Trust us, they say, we’re from Washington […]

MuckRock

Our Transparency Resolutions for 2015

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A new year lies ahead, and with it comes new opportunities to right past wrongs. For transparency advocates in Massachusetts, those opportunities couldn’t come soon enough. After years of truly abysmal public records policy, 2015 is shaping up to be a valuable opportunity to not only get Massachusetts up to the national standard, but to set an example in open government that other states will follow. Here’s what we’re hoping to see in 2015: Create a State CBO We want to reaffirm our proposal to advance true legislative transparency through the statutory creation of a State Congressional Budget Office.  The Commonwealth should establish an independent office to conduct a cost-benefit analysis for bills that would either raise revenue or involve the […]

Sandra Stotsky

Don’t Waste the Crisis over Common Core

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The entire Common Core project is rapidly going south, and within two years may be no more than a dim memory of a nightmare in the minds of a growing army of angry parents and teachers from coast to coast. Before this dystopian scheme for upgrading the academic status of low-income children emerges in a more deadly form in a newly re-authorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), we could try to salvage one of the reasonable arguments for a “common core.” We could benefit from some research-based and internationally benchmarked common standards in elementary school reading, writing, and arithmetic across states.  But not up to grade 12. As educators in other countries and most parents everywhere know, many young […]

Editorial Staff

Congratulations to Gov. Charlie Baker

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As a new Governor takes office today, words of advice will flow from many quarters. Pioneer Institute has for 26 years shared advice with political leaders and policymakers, and most importantly with the media and the general public.  Our job is simple: Drive public debate on the handful of policy areas that will make Massachusetts residents better educated, healthier and more prosperous. We don’t mind admitting that our hopes for Governor Baker are high. With good reason – for over 25 years, we have known him as someone who appreciates the value of evidence-based research. He understands the potential impact of state policy. He understands that government must lend a helping hand, and that it can also act as a […]

Jim Stergios

Arne Duncan, fiction writer

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News flash for Washington watchers!  Now we know what Arne Duncan will do once his service as US Education Secretary comes to an end.  In the Boston Globe on Monday, he demonstrated a flair for fiction, with a panegyric to Gov. Patrick’s stewardship of education policy.  My reaction is posted here and at the Globe’s Podium section: Who says Common Core advocates don’t like fiction?  In his Globe opinion piece (Under Deval Patrick, Mass. has led the nation in education, January 5), US Education Secretary Arne Duncan got one fact right: Massachusetts leads the nation in education.  Attributing that progress to Gov. Patrick’s leadership is like suggesting that a pinch runner who finds himself on third base hit a triple. Massachusetts has led the […]

Jim Stergios

Thoughts on what everyone hates talking about (testing)

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No one wants to talk about testing except the people that want to get rid of it.  Which leaves the field of debate on a critical aspect of education reform in pretty partial hands. Above all other states, Massachusetts should understand the important role of standardized testing. Former Senate President Tom Birmingham, chief architect of the state’s landmark 1993 Education Reform Act (ERA) has noted that in 1992 the sole state-imposed graduation requirements were “one year of American history and four years of gym.  The “absence of a comprehensive statewide system of standards,” he continued, “imposed real hardships on poor and minority school districts” given “society’s low expectations as to what their kids could learn.” The ERA changed all that, leading to the development of […]

Sandra Stotsky

Steps for States to Follow to Replace Common Core

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To help out governors and state legislatures that really want to get state-tailored standards close to the quality of the pre-2010 Massachusetts and California standards–or the Indiana 2006 standards–I have provided an outline of the steps or procedures a state legislature could follow (see below). The outcomes remain open-ended.  But these procedures, based on my experiences in Massachusetts over 10 years ago, and in other states in recent years, ensure that no special interest groups, including a state’s board, commissioner, or department of education, can take control of the “process,” deceive the parents of the state, and feed back a warmed-over version of Common Core as is now happening in South Carolina and Oklahoma, and as has happened in Indiana and […]

Sandra Stotsky

Common Core’s standards can be replaced by first-rate standards overnight

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In a funny story in the Washington Post on December 24, 2014, Mike Petrilli and Michael Brickman (experts on nothing at all) claim that it will not be easy to replace Common Core’s standards with something better. They even go so far as to claim that “The basic problem is that it’s impossible to draft standards that prepare students for college and career readiness and that look nothing like Common Core.” Why is their claim funny?  Because we have already had standards that did exactly that, looked nothing like Common Core, and were remarkably easy to implement. As I noted here: Unlike Common Core’s standards, which are not designed to prepare American high school students for authentic college coursework, the […]

Sandra Stotsky

How to Make Common Core Useful?

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What could be done to make the idea of a common core across 50 states make sense in this country?  I finally have come up with what could be the solution that Governor Huckabee simply missed.  We need to relabel them high school-ready standards and give the so-called “college readiness” tests based on them in grade 8, which is where they belong with respect to content and cut scores. The contents and pass scores for the current Common Core-based tests are a better indication of whether students can do authentic high school-level work in grade 9 or 10 than of college-level work. A common core can make sense at the right grade levels. We need to compress most of the […]

Sandra Stotsky

How to Maintain the Massachusetts “Education Miracle”

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Not by using Common Core-based standards and tests, for sure, or anything that looks like them. The English language arts and mathematics standards dumped by the Governor Patrick-appointed Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in July 2010 are nothing like Common Core’s standards. Unlike Common Core’s standards, which are not designed to prepare American high school students for authentic college coursework, the Commonwealth’s previous standards accelerated the academic achievement of minority groups in the state and did prepare our grade 10 students for authentic college coursework. Yet, Massachusetts parents, legislators, and teachers have been regularly told for five years that standards cleverly labeled “college and career ready” are better than those they replaced because the old ones didn’t prepare our […]

Editorial Staff

Why We Need Transparency at the MBTA Retirement Fund Now

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A story in today’s Boston Globe again reminds us of the secretiveness of the MBTA Retirement Fund (MBTARF) and its complicated funding structure – enabling Fund managers to mask very costly decisions. Over the past year, The Boston Globe published a series of articles chronicling a potentially fraudulent $25 million loss at the MBTARF from a hedge fund investment proposed by a former MBTARF executive director. Pioneer Institute has served as an indispensable resource for media, public officials, and taxpayers, providing relevant and timely research on the deteriorating condition of MBTARF‘s finances. Pioneer has released a series of reports on the Fund‘s lack of transparency and mismanagement. In a recent report, Hard Lessons for Institutional Investors from theMBTA Retirement Fund, Pioneer focused on […]