THE PIONEER BLOG

Jim Stergios

We Now Have a Smart Exit Strategy from Common Core

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Rick Hess and Mike McShane back in the spring wrote in the National Review Online that At the end of March, Indiana became the first state to repeal the Common Core standards. The aftermath has not been pretty. And they were right.  Hess and McShane noted that Critics have raised valid concerns but failed to put forward a notion of what happens next. This is a problem. Common Core adoption meant that Indiana schools set in place not only new reading and math standards but also new tests, curricula, instructional materials, and teaching strategies. And the abrupt shift could be a train wreck for students and educators. Already back in 2011, Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation and a few others […]

Greg Sullivan

6 Reasons Gov. Patrick Should Veto the Convention Center Expansion Bill

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Pioneer Institute’s Research Director, Greg Sullivan, sent a letter today to Governor Patrick asking him to veto the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center expansion bill. He outlined six reasons why Governor Patrick should do so: The BCEC expansion will saddle the next administration with hundreds of millions of dollars in deficiencies as a result of Massachusetts Convention Center Authority’s overly optimistic revenue projections. The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority assumes that hotel tax receipts will increase over the next 30 years at an average annual rate nearly three times greater than the historical growth rate of the statewide hotel tax.  If its rosy projections are wrong, as they have been in the past, the legislation authorizes statewide taxes to be used […]

Sandra Stotsky

What Wakefield, NH’s School Board Is Doing to Ensure a First-Rate Education for All Its Students

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As state legislatures begin to pick up steam in their efforts to get rid of the Common Core octopus, with its many hidden tentacles reaching into the entire curriculum (under the guise of “literacy” standards), Common Core advocates have come up with a new ploy to ward off efforts to repeal Common Core and put first-rate standards in their place. It takes too long and costs too much money, Common Core advocates are now saying, to come up with another set of standards for ELA and math.  Here is what was in a newsletter put out by the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas. States that drop Common Core standards under the gun for replacing them: States that […]

Editorial Staff

Pioneer Institute Statement on Senate Charter School Cap Lift Vote

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The Senate Turns Back the Clock Today, the Massachusetts State Senate voted against S2262, a bill to lift the cap on charter school enrollment in the state’s lowest-performing public school districts. The Senate bill would have tied charter school expansion to full funding of reimbursement to sending districts. Under the bill, charter schools would have been responsible for 50 percent of extended day and extended year transportation costs. The Senate also filed dozens of amendments to the bill, which, with few exceptions, would have imposed unrealistic, harmful, and petty regulations on charter schools. The Senate gets a low grade for the quality of the debate and a failing grade for the misrepresentations made about charter schools. Senator Barry Finegold said […]

Jim Stergios

Representative misrepresenting

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Chalk this one up to elected officials representing people other than their constituents, Rep. Aaron Vega of Holyoke tells MassLive.com all the reasons why he opposed the charter school cap lift in the House a few weeks back. Vega was asked if he would have supported the House bill if his two favored amendments had been adopted. “I would be more inclined to,” said Vega. “But there are other issues around compensation for the teachers; they’re not unionized.” So, in Holyoke, where 734 schoolchildren are served in two schools, and where there are 324 schoolchildren on waitlists, he opposes the charter bill because, well, they need to be unionized.  Why is that? Yes, you know. In a wonderful demonstration of someone who […]

Wenli Fei

Is ELD Hiding Its Real Performance?

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The Executive Office of Elder Affairs (ELD) is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (EOHHS). ELD works to improve the quality of life for elderly Massachusetts residents, aiming to ensure their security by expanding income and financial support opportunities. The agency is also dedicated to increasing civic engagement and opportunities for social connection among the elderly. [quote align=”right” color=”#999999″]Has ELD really been successful or did the agency simply report positive outcomes and remain silent on progress toward achieving other goals?[/quote] Under Governor Patrick’s Mass Results program, each of his eight secretaries established specific, measurable performance goals for their departments.  Each then reports their performance against the goals on the state’s website. As described in EOHHS’ latest Strategic Plan, […]

Sandra Stotsky

On Common Core, a Study in Contrasts

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In a front-page article in June, the Washington Post featured corporate billionaire Bill Gates as a political sinner who deserves sainthood because his heart is in the right place.  He bought off every organization in the country and colluded with the U.S. Department of Education just to ensure that low-income students would get the same low education he wants other people’s kids to get.  Not, mind you, his own kids; they will get a first-class non-Common Core education in a private school in Seattle. [quote align=”right” color=”#999999″]What remains to be teased out is why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and our major teacher unions were so willing to be “useful idiots.”[/quote] On the other hand, the National Review Online featured […]

Greg Sullivan

New Life Science Industry report: Mass. gained only 55 life science jobs between 2010 and 2012

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Last week, Pioneer Institute issued a report calling for Massachusetts to adopt two enhanced research and development tax credits, pointing out that research and development expenditures by Massachusetts industries dropped by 19% between 2007 and 2011 while California’s increased by 16.9% and the rest of states by 9.2% on average.  We also pointed out that California, which offers R&D tax credits vastly superior to Massachusetts’, has outpaced the nation in R&D growth.  Over the past two decades, the growth of industrial R&D expenditures by California business was greater than that of its top seven competitor states combined, Massachusetts included. But the part of our report that generated the biggest controversy was the calculation that Massachusetts had added only 571 life […]

Sandra Stotsky

7 Major Differences between No Child Left Behind and Common Core/Race to the Top

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1. Focus of Accountability: Schools or Teachers Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools and school districts were held accountable based on student scores. Under Common Core/Race to the Top (CC/RttT), teachers are to be held accountable based on varying percentages of student scores from state to state. 2. Source of State Standards: State Agencies or Private DC-Based Organizations Under NCLB or earlier, standards were developed by state departments of education guided by education schools, national teacher organizations, teachers, and higher education academic experts.  They were approved through a public process applied to multiple drafts. Under CC/RttT, academic standards were developed by private organizations with no transparent review and finalization process, and no public discussion of the final draft. The […]

Matt Blackbourn

Uber Against the World

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Of all the ridesharing services under the public microscope today, there is no doubt that Uber is the loudest start-up in the petri dish. With a tenacious leader in Travis Kalanick, who has been no stranger to controversy during his company’s rise to popularity, Uber is on the cutting edge of a much larger movement: a generational change in perspective regarding the relationship between producer and consumer. AirBnB, TaskRabbit and “ridesharing services” similar to Uber, like Lyft, Hailo and Sidecar, are all shaking up their respective marketplaces, and the paradigm shift has sent shockwaves throughout industries ill-prepared for the revolution. Leading the charge in this rise of the “sharing economy”, Uber grows larger by the day. Of course, so does […]

Jamie Gass

Massachusetts Charter Schools: “A Fire You Can’t Put Out”

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This past week, at the urging of state K-12 education commissioner Mitch Chester, Deval Patrick’s Massachusetts Board of Education took a vote against Massachusetts’ nation-leading and achievement gap-closing charter schools. The vote reminds us once again how intellectually warped so much of K-12 education policymaking remains. The biggest victims of this BOE vote are the tens-of-thousands of underserved poor and minority children trapped in chronically underperforming urban school districts with no school choices and zero way out. The vote reminds us that despite the huge gains the country has made since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education and the events in places like Birmingham, Alabama, in the early 1960s, as a people America still has, in the words of […]

Editorial Staff

Open Letter: Regarding Reform of the MBTA Retirement Fund

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The past year has seen the MBTA Retirement Fund mired in scandals involving conflicts of interest, losses of taxpayer money and, to put it mildly, imprudent attitudes towards the general public and the public trust. A high-quality mass transit system is critical to Greater Boston’s economy and the well-being of its residents.  As a result, the financial health of the authority’s pension system is a real public-policy concern. Please make no mistake about it: The deteriorating financial condition of the fund and exploding pension costs, a heavy burden on an MBTA already saddled with debt, are no accident. The fund’s governance is broken. Without bringing it into a state of good repair, no amount of money or temporary fix will […]

Editorial Staff

Public Statement on MA BESE Vote Limiting Charter School Enrollment

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Today, at the recommendation of Commissioner Mitchell Chester, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted unanimously in favor of a regulatory policy that will alter the way that the state determines and measures school district performance, limiting charter public school enrollment in low-performing districts. Growth in student performance is always a worthy goal. But we know the Commonwealth has lost its way in K-12 education policymaking when it accepts modest growth in student test scores in failing districts (the lowest 10% of performers) as an excuse to block new charter public schools from opening.  It is worth remembering that Massachusetts’ charter schools are the best in the nation.  We need more high-quality charter schools, not fewer.  And it […]

Sandra Stotsky

How to Turn a Sow’s Ear into a Silk Purse

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Gates, Duncan, Fordham et al misunderstood from the beginning who the strongest critics of Common Core would be.  Just because they successfully sold Common Core as a workforce development panacea to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce didn’t mean that mothers across the country were going to give up fighting for their children’s education when they saw what was being taught to their children in the name of Common Core.  Every year of education their kids lose, the angrier they get.  And the Gates-funded or influenced sources have fired their last cannons. [quote align=”right” color=”#999999″]”Most elected local school boards, in most states, still have the legal authority (and responsibility) to try to give their students a decent education in K-12 at […]

Greg Sullivan

Biotech job creation estimates don’t add up

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Pioneer today released a new report entitled “Regaining Massachusetts’ Edge in Research and Development.”  The report focuses on three important takeaways from the job creation and investment data as related to R&D-related companies: A broader tax credit strategy put into place in the early 1990s worked quite well in advancing Massachusetts’ R&D-related job base and expanding R&D investments in the Commonwealth Since then California has put into place a more cutting edge tax credit strategy that has helped the state become a category killer – truly the first among equals in the hunt for expansion of R&D-related sectors While Massachusetts’ life sciences initiative was much ballyhooed as having the potential to create 250,000 new jobs in a decade, after five […]