THE PIONEER BLOG

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 […]

Editorial Staff

Our View: Keep the Hotel Subsidy Out of the BCEC Expansion Bill

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Today (Thursday), the Massachusetts State Senate is planning to vote on the proposed $1 billion expansion of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center.  Pioneer has been working hard to shine the spotlight on problems with the project. The good news is that added public attention helped bring about a revision in the Senate Ways and Means draft, removing the $100 million hotel subsidy that Pioneer found troubling. Last week, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote about our concerns that the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) would have been allowed to select a developer to build and operate a 1,000- to 1,200-room hotel on land owned by Massport, with $110 million in public subsidies. There is no provision in the bill requiring MassPort and MCCA to award […]

Editorial Staff

WCVB Team 5 Reports on Pioneer’s Analysis of $92M Boston Fire Contract

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Pioneer Institute Executive Director Greg Sullivan appeared on a WCVB Team 5 Investigates news report about the City of Boston’s $92 million contract with the Fire Department, which disproportionately benefits highly paid administrators and supervisors over rank and file firefighters. Watch the WCVB video here. Read the story here. Study: Boston fire, EMS most expensive in US 148 supervisors earn more than Gov. Deval Patrick BOSTON —Team 5 Investigates exclusive new details about the $92 million deal just inked for the city of Boston’s firefighters. Read more: http://www.wcvb.com/news/study-boston-fire-ems-most-expensive-in-us/26405806#ixzz34F21XGpT Greg Sullivan said, ““The top brass is overstaffed and overpaid.” These graphics from the WCVB report compare the average salaries of district chiefs in 4 large cities: Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, and […]

Jamie Gass

To Be a National Curriculum, or Not to Be a National Curriculum: More Fordham-Finn Flip Flopping

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Who says that Common Core ELA cuts classic literature, poetry, and drama? Our good friends at the Fordham Institute (see Checker & Co. as Gates Foundation vendor) must wake up early to start writing their dramatic “exemplar” texts and examples for America’s kids and policymakers. But here’s a dramatic exemplar of Common Core’s Surrealist art imitating life: Checker Finn as ed reform’s very own Hamlet. A new episode in the Common Core drama demonstrates once again the situational ethics involved with Common Core advocacy. Let’s take it from the top. [quote align=”right” color=”#999999″]As people in the K-12 edu-sphere now know, Fordham has had more costume changes than Madonna…[/quote] Back in 2011 (the Era of Good Feelings for the Common Core) one time […]

Jim Stergios

The Globe on Common Core and Poetry

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It is not stereotyping poets to say that they burn with a particular passion.  Just as a biochemist has insatiable curiosity about living organisms, the ways in which genetic information gets stamped into DNA, nucleic acids and lipids, poets have a burning passion for creating worlds, images and associative metaphors and paradoxes with words.  They are believers in The Word. That’s why it may seem so unthinkable for a curmudgeonly poet like Philip Larkin to insist that his diaries be shredded and burned.  But of course, that is easily understood given that he likely saw himself as editing out unreadable stuff or at least stuff that others would use to reduce his poetry to “buggery,” as he’d put it. (Well, […]

Sandra Stotsky

Legislative Common Core Remedy No Panacea

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The next phase of the Great Game to control the minds of the next generation of Americans has just begun. Oklahoma is the most recent state to try to eliminate the academic malignancies entailed by Common Core.  Many Oklahomans deserve credit for the bill Governor Fallin may sign this week, especially Jenni White, an energetic mother of six. But there will be no end to the Gates Foundation’s effort to impose weak secondary school standards on this country in the name of ending “white privilege” (the motivation acknowledged by New Hampshire teacher David Pook at a Cornerstone Institute debate two weeks ago), rather than to strengthen secondary school coursework for all students with academically rigorous and internationally benchmarked standards. The following steps […]

Jim Stergios

A Fractured Testing Landscape

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One of the benefits of waking up at 3 am to do some work is that you get to read everything without interruption from kids who have questions about their Common Core-aligned homework. EdWeek just emailed out this nifty map on the status of testing plans for states in the US. It interested me for a number of reasons but here is my list of four big takeaways: What will happen to the ever dwindling PARCC?  Nine states?  They started out with 25 states participating and now they are down to 9?  (Just a year ago, according to the USED, they stood at 19.)  How tenable with that be going forward given that with fewer states come fewer student customers and […]

Editorial Staff

Another Misleading Attack on Charter Schools from the BTU

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A recent Boston Teachers Union e-bulletin grossly misrepresented data on Boston students’ performance on Advanced Placement (AP) exams, claiming that district high schools outperform public charter high schools.  Pioneer’s analysis demonstrates that the BTU’s manipulation of the data is meant to create a false perception about charter schools and to cover up dismayingly poor results in BPS’s non-exam schools. The BTU newsletter shamefully includes in its calculation of districtwide AP exam results the City’s three exam schools, which have a passing rate (an AP test score of three or better) of 72%.  Remove the City’s elite exam schools, and BPS’s non-exam district schools have a passing rate of only 14%. The City’s public charter schools do not accept students on the basis of entrance exams; rather they accept students based on lottery.  […]

Joshua Archambault

Massachusetts to Default to Healthcare.gov, After Hail Mary to Save Its Exchange

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Yesterday Massachusetts officials announced plans to default to Healthcare.gov, but also announced a quixotic sprint to try first try to rebuild the entire site in five months with a brand new, no-bid taxpayer-paid contract to health care software developer hCentive. This move comes eight months into open enrollment, after launching the worst performing exchange in the country, spending most of the $180 million from Washington and announcing that original contractor CGI would be fired—even though it is still working on the project. The announcement should leave taxpayers and policymakers scratching their heads and wondering about the lack of accountability, government management and procurement.  A “Dual-Track” Strategy Kyle Cheney at Politico broke the story: Massachusetts is taking steps this week to […]