THE PIONEER BLOG

Jim Stergios

6 Takeaways on New Orleans’ charter initiative

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Earlier this week, at a Pioneer forum we had the pleasure of hosting an impressive roster of speakers on the enormous shifts in the charter and school choice sectors in New Orleans and Washington DC.  Representing NOLA, we had Neerav Kingsland, the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, who gave an overview of the student outcome data resulting from the significant expansion of charter schools in New Orleans post-Katrina, and Jed Horne, the author of  Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City. (Representing DC, we had former Mayor Adrian Fenty and University of Arkansas scholar Patrick Wolf, who has studied the impact of the DC Opportunity Opportunity Scholarship program for the federal […]

Joshua Archambault

Mass Health Connector 2.0: Limited Function and Unable to Provide Subsidy and Medicaid Information

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The Health Connector has spent the last 3 years telling everyone how great the new “Health Connector 2.0” will be. The state has  received $180 million to change the tires on health reform in the state, yet during week one of open enrollment…There were messages like this on Twitter: According to The New York Times, “the exchange is currently unable to provide subsidy or Medicaid information.” And from personal experience last week, the website was returning error messages for none enrollment information. For example, I spent 30 minutes trying to pull up past Board meeting minutes on both the new and old versions of the site with no luck. Is there a return policy for our tax dollars? Or at […]

Sandra Stotsky

Needed: Matriculation exams tailored to each state’s higher education system

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Several decades ago, self-appointed education reformers decided that more low-performing students should go to college and graduate than now do. They concluded that the quickest route to their goal was to lower the admissions requirements at public colleges. But they also realized that sending an even larger number of low-performing students on to any form of post-secondary education would increase the number now needing remediation in their freshman year. So they came up with what they thought was a clever idea. Call the K-12 standards “college readiness” standards so that those who pass a test based on these so-named standards in grade 11 get credit for courses they take in their college freshman year. No remediation. After all, they have […]

Shawn Musgrave

Watertown Police Department stubbornly refuses electronic public records requests

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Despite repeated appeals to reason and official state guidance, the Watertown Police Department stubbornly refuses to step into 2013 and accept electronic public records requests. Nor, apparently, will the department’s records chief even respond to electronic requests to direct their resubmission in another form. The citizens of Watertown and of the entire Commonwealth deserve access to their public documents by means that are both straightforward and which entail minimal difficulty. In the 21st century, that means being able to request records electronically. Having submitted five records requests since May to the Watertown police records unit – including one on behalf of the Pioneer Institute – without receiving any reply, MuckRock sent a direct message to the department on September 18 to […]

Joshua Archambault

Healthcare.gov Crashes During First Day, Why Massachusetts Never Had This Problem

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In the grand scheme of the ACA, the first day of open enrollment today is pure symbolism and nothing else, however the early signs are not good. Healthcare.gov has crashed, and users are receiving error messages as seen below. The Washington Post has just put up a story highlighting the crash of the Maryland exchange, which is full of irony given that often quoted consultant Bob Laszewski wrote in April that Maryland will be, “A Health Insurance Exchange That Won’t be a ‘Train Wreck‘” There have been reports on social media about the California exchange crashing as well, and Sarah Kliff has a sad story of a man that stayed up late in West Virginia, yet failed after two separate […]

Matt Blackbourn

An anniversary you may have missed

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With the acrimonious standoff in Congress bringing about the first federal government shutdown in seventeen years, one can’t help but feel deep frustration and disappointment with our elected officials. At the beginning of a new fiscal year, we aim to look forward with optimism and faith in the direction of our government. Instead, we find ourselves observing playground bickering and refusal to compromise on critical issues—a bitter tug-of-war that puts a damper on any hopes of progress. Unfortunately, this soap opera of unwavering partisanship in Washington overshadows the first anniversary of something very much worth celebrating: the launch of the online government transparency tool, FOIAonline. A year after its initial launch, FOIAonline remains a dynamic concept that sets a great […]

Editorial Staff

Announcing The Frederick Douglass Prize U.S. History Essay Contest

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Your History Paper Could Win $2,500! Announcing The Frederick Douglass Prize U.S. History Essay Contest for Massachusetts High School Students New U.S. History Online Resource for Bay State Students: ACommonSense.org Pioneer Institute is pleased to announce The Frederick Douglass Prize U.S. History Essay Contest for Massachusetts’s high school students. Pioneer Institute is a private, non-partisan public policy think tank with a longstanding reputation for innovative education reform. We believe that Massachusetts’s students are capable of excellence in history. We need your essays to prove us right. Learn about The Frederick Douglass Prize US History Essay Contest (1st Prize: $2,500). Hear from Massachusetts’ students, policy makers, and education leaders on the importance of US History instruction. Explore our gallery of primary […]

Sandra Stotsky

Schizophrenia in the New York Times Editorial Office (by Sandra Stotsky)

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The New York Times is suffering from a split personality about what the quality of public education should be. It claims it likes rigor. At the same time, it supports Common Core and its even poorer relative in the standards arena, Next Generation Science Standards. The NYT has apparently infected its education reporters with the same schizophrenia. Kenneth Chang is the latest victim. On September 2, the NYT published his article titled “With Common Core, Fewer Topics but Covered More Rigorously.” Centered on Common Core math, the article implicitly praises New York officials who claim Common Core math is modeled on “the teaching strategies” of high-performing countries—especially “attention to memorization and recall, drilling around math facts.” The article ends with […]

Jim Stergios

Who you calling dumb?

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Calling your opponents “stupid” is the refuge of those who can’t be bothered to consider their arguments.  That is precisely what Bill Keller does in his New York Times piece on Common Core. There are certainly some who, as Keller writes, disapprove of anything President Obama supports.  As Keller notes there is indeed a “if-that-Kenyan-socialist-in-the-White-House-is-for-it-I’m-against-it crowd.” But driving to make our schools internationally competitive requires that we all (and that includes the at times very partisan Keller) put political friendships in the back seat.  There are those on the right and left who support Common Core — some are friends.  The same is true of the opposition. At Pioneer Institute, our focus for 25 years has been on getting education […]

Joshua Archambault

Will ACA Cause Rate Shock in Massachusetts? It Appears So, Small Biz To See Premiums Rise Up to 97%

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Conventional wisdom has held that the ACA impact on Massachusetts will be small. Some high profile academics have gone as far as to attack presidential candidates with colorful language if they suggest otherwise. Well, the conventional wisdom has had a nuclear bomb dropped on its head with the release of an independent analysis by the major insurance companies in Massachusetts. The implications are clear– the ACA will supply a rough ride for many small companies in the state. Unlike other states where the rate shock will be most pronounced in the individual marketplace and/or for younger adults, the ACA will cause the most turmoil in the much larger small business market in the Bay State. For some companies in Massachusetts, the shock will be […]

Editorial Staff

Have the T’s Retirement Plans Gone Off the Rails?

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Study Finds Financial Condition of MBTA Retirement Plan Deteriorated Sharply, But Lack of Transparency Makes It Impossible To Know Why Plan doesn’t post financial statements or investment performance online, isn’t subject to state pension regulations BOSTON – The MBTA Retirement Plan’s financial condition has been deteriorating and a lack of transparency makes it impossible to know all the reasons why, according to Have the T’s Retirement Plans Gone Off the Rails, a Pioneer Institute policy brief by Senior Fellow on Finance Iliya Atanasov published today. Have the T’s Retirement Plans Gone Off the Rail The MBTA Retirement Plan (MBTARP), which until very recently did not publish a database of retiree benefits, was not established under Chapter 32 of the Massachusetts […]

Joshua Archambault

Do Insurer Rate Filings Tell Us About the ACA/Obamacare in Mass? Not really

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This morning the state of Massachusetts released quarterly rate filings from insurers for Q4 2013, and Q1 2014. Some will interpret these as the first sign of the impact of the ACA on Massachusetts residents, but it is far from that. A few thoughts on the filing: 1. These are base rate increases (or decreases), so they will not reflect the rating factor changes that are coming under the ACA. This is well worth mentioning since the ACA rating factor changes will be responsible for roller-coasting premiums +/-50%. As I discussed in this Pioneer blog post there are many other factors to consider.  In other words these will not be the percent increases or decreases that residents will actually see next year.   2. […]

Sandra Stotsky

New York State Test Results: Uninterpretable But a Portent of the Future (by Sandra Stotsky)

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In the original version of David Steiner’s talk on the meaning of the drop in test scores in New York State, he says: “The truth we are now trying to tell, for the first time, is relative to something called college- and career-readiness, roughly equivalent to the ability to enter a community college without the need for remediation.” That statement is also in the version appearing in his Education Next blog. Something happened to this truth in his op-ed in the New York Post on August 8, 2013. The truth is still relative to something called college-and career-readiness, but that concept is now “roughly equivalent to the ability to enter and succeed in college.” Not “community college.” Two very different […]

Jim Stergios

Common Core is neither internationally benchmarked nor state-led

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I have nothing against IHOP.  I eat there if there is nothing else better around.  But I wouldn’t take my kids there on a regular basis. The food may have the moniker of “international” but I don’t think that anyone actually believes that.  (It’s not even close to mom’s cooking.) Alas, the syrupy Common Core website dishes all kinds of nonsense about the national standards.  I’m glad to see that it wiped the website clean of its claim that Common Core was “internationally benchmarked.”   Many other proponents, such as the Foundation for Excellence in Education, say similar things (“benchmarked to top performing schools around the world”).  Interestingly, if you look at Common Core’s website today, their claim has been watered down […]

Jim Stergios

Brief take on the tax holiday

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(from the Providence Journal) Tax holidays are fine.  I like feel-good events as much as the next guy.  But the fact is that they have little long-term impact on investment, business growth and job creation.  No business owner I know will hire anything more than temporary help for that one Sales Tax Holiday. Comparing the number of jobs in Massachusetts today to the number in 1990, one observes really no growth in jobs.  Meanwhile entire cities in Massachusetts have had over 10% unemployment for the last half a decade. What we need instead is a different approach to business – where we lower the costs compared to their competitors elsewhere and where we make it easier to hire people.  That’s […]