THE PIONEER BLOG

Sandra Stotsky

9 Signs of Academic Rigor in English Standards (by Sandra Stotsky)

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What makes one set of English language arts standards more rigorous than another set? How can reporters or policy makers tell? What makes Tom Luna of Idaho or Kathleen Porter Magee at the Fordham Institute think Common Core’s English language arts standards are more rigorous than Idaho’s or many other states’ previous standards? We don’t know because they don’t tell us. They don’t know, either, we suspect. They simply repeat the R word like well-trained parrots. [quote align=”right” color=”#999999″]So, how can one judge the academic rigor of a set of English language arts standards. What are some of the things to do or look for?[/quote] Many researchers and state department of education staff love to do “crosswalks.” What they do is […]

Jim Stergios

Some takeaways on FL Commissioner’s resignation

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Tom LoBianco of the Associated Press (Indiana office) did some crack reporting on the question of how the A to F accountability system worked in Indiana.  What he dug up were emails that clearly showed troubling lapses in judgment on the part of former Indiana state superintendent of schools and current Florida commissioner of education Tony Bennett.  It is alleged that Dr. Bennett stayed on the case with his analysts until a school went from a C rating to a B rating ultimately to an A rating.  You can see the emails here, here, here, here and here. Pioneer came out early and called for Bennett’s resignation, saying that: Bennett needs to resign his Florida position for violating the trust […]

Jim Stergios

Public statement on the resignation of Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett

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Dr. Tony Bennett did some good work in Indiana and more recently in Florida to advance key K-12 education reforms. Some of these reforms were very important, including expanding parental choice options. Pioneer Institute believes that public accountability for school performance is an integral part of state K-12 education reform efforts. Without strong accountability, it becomes very difficult to undertake hard reforms like raising the academic expectations we have for our children and providing high quality school options such as private school choice, public charter schools, and digital learning. But all public leadership and especially public educational leadership must teach by example and uphold the public trust by setting the very highest standards of conduct. In regards to schooling and […]

Editorial Staff

Lawrence’s Failed Public Pension System

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by Guest Blogger Rohit Chaparala Pioneer’s newest transparency tool, MassPensions.com reveals a pressing need for reform in Lawrence’s public pension system. Launched earlier this month, the site allows Massachusetts residents to view details of public pension plans throughout the state, providing access to performance indicators including a plan’s financial condition, investment performance, and asset allocation.  From this data, the site then generates an overall composite grade for the plan. The City of Lawrence’s plan ranks among the worst in the state.  Over the past five years (2008-2012), Lawrence’s public pension system has yielded a D, F, C, D, and an F. Here’s a statistical breakdown:  From 2009 to 2010, Lawrence’s funded ratio, the percentage of pension assets available to cover […]

Jim Stergios

The implosion of the PARCC assessments

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As they say, where there is smoke, there may be fire. EdWeek was reporting last week that the Partnership for Readiness in College and Careers (PARCC) assessment, one of the two state consortia developing national assessments, announced its product pricing.  At $29.50 a student, it was in line with Massachusetts’ pricing for the MCAS test, but it is two and three times the amount in many of the member states.  There are also big questions about the assessments viability. In recent months, a number of states have pulled out of PARCC.  After the pricing announcement, Georgia pulled out of PARCC.  Just now came a press release from Indiana: GOVERNOR PENCE ANNOUNCES INTENT TO WITHDRAW INDIANA AS A MEMBER FROM THE […]

Jim Stergios

Is Detroit coming to Massachusetts’ cities?

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Anybody who expects a Chapter 9 filing in Massachusetts in the next couple of years does not know what he or she is talking about.  Feel better now?  You shouldn’t. Not that I want it to occur — hardly the case as it is painful, unfair, and proof that our political institutions are showing rot. Here are some basic facts on Detroit’s Chapter 9 filing and what it means for Massachusetts. Chapter 9 is not a frequent occurrence, and Detroit’s filing should not lead us to expect a wave of Chapter 9 filings. Only a few states allow it. It’s tough medicine. Chapter 9 wipes clean the past – all pension deals, all bargained wage agreements can be rendered null […]

Sandra Stotsky

4 Steps to Upgrade Teacher & Administrator Prep Programs (by Sandra Stotsky)

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How to Upgrade Teacher and Administrator Preparation Programs The part of public education that has received the least attention for reform is the most important: whom our education schools admit and how they are prepared to be teachers, administrators, education researchers, and education policy makers. Although there is very little high quality research on these topics, useful information for reforming education schools came from the massive review undertaken by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel for its report in 2008. It found no relationship between student achievement and traditional teacher education programs, certification status, and mentoring and induction programs. That means that teachers who have completed a traditional teacher preparation program, hold a teaching license, and have participated in an induction […]

Joshua Archambault

Promising State “Duals” Pilot (One Care), Late and Losing Carriers

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Pioneer has long advocated for reforming the way that healthcare is delivered to those on both Medicaid and Medicare. In fact the idea won the 2012 Better Government Competition. Winners of the 2012 Better Government Competition from Mike Dean on Vimeo. This morning State House News Service reported that the state has finalized agreements with three carriers in the newly renamed “One Care” program. PLANS TO SERVE “ONE CARE” PROGRAM FOR THOSE WITH COMPLEX HEALTH NEEDS: Three health plans have signed contracts to participate in a new pilot aimed at serving adults with disabilities who receive both MassHealth and Medicare benefits.   The Patrick administration announced Tuesday that its integrated health care pilot, called One Care, will better coordinate care for those […]

Editorial Staff

Introducing MassPensions.com – New Site Rates MA’s 100+ Pension Systems

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User-Friendly Online Tool Provides Easily Accessible Data, Rates Performance Of Commonwealth’s 100+ Public Pension Systems Pioneer Institute is unveiling the MassPensions data accessibility tool that provides year-by-year comparative data and ratings for the performance of each of the commonwealth’s more than 100 retirement systems. “This low-cost, easily updatable Internet tool is a straightforward way to grasp the fiscal status of each public pension system,” said Pioneer Institute Executive Director Jim Stergios. “It also demonstrates just how easy technology makes it to share government information with the public in a transparent way.” The tool is available at MassPensions.com (as well as .org) and includes most of the data provided in the annual reports of the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission (PERAC) […]

Editorial Staff

Pioneer’s Public Statement on the Conference Committee Budget

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LEGISLATURE’S FY 2014 BUDGET IS THE STATUS QUO, JUST MORE OF IT: YES TO NEW SPENDING, NO TO REFORM Public Statement on the Conference Committee Budget The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Massachusetts’s 2014 Status Quo Budget The legislature produced a budget for FY 2014 as it began last week. The budget does not address persistent structural deficits. In a year during which baseline revenues have grown because of a slowly recovering economy, we have set ourselves on a course to raise taxes and, remarkably, also to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars from the rainy-day fund. The budget blueprint is projected to increase spending by more than 5 percent in FY 2014. With tax revenue rising just under […]

Sandra Stotsky

How Long Before Duncan and the Media Speak Out Honestly? (by Sandra Stotsky)

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The notion that Common Core’s college and career readiness standards are “rigorous” needs to be publicly put to bed by Arne Duncan, his erstwhile friends at the Fordham Institute, and the media. Two of Common Core’s own mathematics standards writers have publicly stated how weak Common Core’s college readiness mathematics standards are. At a public meeting of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in March 2010, physics professor Jason Zimba said: “the concept of college readiness is minimal and focuses on non-selective colleges.” Mathematics professor William McCallum told a group of mathematicians: “the overall standards would not be too high, certainly not in comparison [to] other nations, including East Asia, where math education excels.” What words don’t Duncan, […]

Editorial Staff

From Rum to Musket Balls: The Fourth of July in History

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By Guest Blogger Ellen M. Nye As people across the country gather for fireworks displays, reenactments, and parades, we celebrate our country’s history and discover again the joys of learning about the United States’ past. Independence Day was only declared a federal holiday in 1870, and it was not until 1941 that it was designated as a paid holiday for federal employees. Yet people have been celebrating the official adoption of the Declaration of Independence in a variety of ways since 1776. Many cities and towns marked the schism with Britain by reading the Declaration of Independence aloud before a crowd. On July 9th, 1776 George Washington himself read the document in New York City, not far from the British […]

Sandra Stotsky

Common Core’s Cloudy Vision of College Readiness in Math (by Sandra Stotsky)

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Common Core’s egalitarian tentacles are now slithering towards high school diploma requirements. In states that respond to a current prod to “align” their high school graduation requirements in mathematics with the academic level reflected in Common Core’s college-readiness mathematics standards, the mathematics coursework taken by our low-achieving high school students may indeed become stronger. But if such an alignment is not strategically altered, states may be unwittingly reducing other students’ participation in more demanding mathematics curricula and their academic eligibility for undergraduate STEM majors and internationally competitive jobs in mathematics-dependent areas. Common Core has carefully disguised its road to equally low outcomes for all demographic groups, and many state boards of education may quickly follow up their unexamined adoption of […]

Sandra Stotsky

More Than One Fatal Flaw in Common Core’s ELA Standards (by Sandra Stotsky)

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There isn’t just one fatal flaw in Common Core’s English language arts standards: its arbitrary division of reading standards into two groups: 10 standards for “informational” text and 9 for “literature” at all grade levels from K to 12. Based on these numbers, school administrators have told English teachers to reduce literary study to less than 50% of reading instructional time. And their interpretation of this 50/50 division in ELA reading standards has not been contradicted by the chief architect of Common Core’s literature standards, now head of the College Board, who has managed to confuse everyone by insisting that literature remains the focus of the English class. A second flaw is Common Core’s writing standards. They are an intellectual […]

Editorial Staff

Why Common Core’s Math Standards Don’t Measure Up (by Guest Blogger Ze’ev Wurman)

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Guest Post by Ze’ev Wurman (biography below)  Last year William Schmidt and Richard Houang published a paper in the Educational Researcher that claimed to have explored the coherence of the Common Core state standards in mathematics (CCSSM) and their similarity to those of other high achieving nations. The study (Schmidt & Houang, “Curricular Coherence and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics,” 41(8), 2012) has received significant attention, and defenders of the Common Core started to use it in support of their claims of CCSSM’s high quality. Schmidt himself testified before the Michigan House Education Committee last March and made the following claims. Common Core’s standards are very consistent with the standards in the world’s top-achieving countries; States with standards […]