THE PIONEER BLOG

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 […]

Jim Stergios

Weak on Unemployment Insurance Reform

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As we head into the end of the first half of the two-year session, it’s a good time to reflect on the promises that we began with.  During the second week in January came a raft of proposals from the governor’s office on reforms.  It was a Week of Reform, with announcements of pending change regarding public housing authorities, budget savings and unemployment insurance.  Not all of the details were fully baked or, to be honest, even truly well thought out, but it seemed clear that the governor was not going to be a lame duck cooped up in the Corner Office.  He was ready and willing to engage the legislature on some key issues that affect the cost of […]

Sandra Stotsky

What To Do Once Common Core Is Halted (by Sandra Stotsky)

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What could states do once implementation of Common Core’s standards is halted? Most states are unlikely to want to return to the standards they once had, mainly because their boards and departments of education loudly claimed they were adopting more rigorous standards when they adopted Common Core. In most cases, they would be rightly accused of returning to equally non-rigorous standards. It will also be difficult for 45 state boards and departments of education to say to the public and their state legislators that Common Core’s standards are really not more rigorous than what they had because they will look foolish. How can they justify having voted to adopt Common Core’s standards and committing the state to huge future technological […]

Joshua Archambault

10 Questions About ACA/Obamacare Implementation in Massachusetts That Need to be Answered

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1.      Why is Massachusetts giving the federal government a free pass to overtake the states right to regulate our insurance marketplace? For an example, see the ongoing saga over rating factors changes, under which 60% of small companies will experience premium increases. Bob Dylan singing  The Times They Are a-Changin’ 2.      Why is Massachusetts letting the federal government push 100,000 low-income individuals out of the Connector and onto the flawed MassHealth (Medicaid) program? Arkansas has obtained approval from the federal government for a different approach that Massachusetts should learn from. When the ACA is fully implemented roughly 25 percent of our total state population will be on Medicaid. The MassHealth budget is scheduled to balloon well over 10 percent next […]

Sandra Stotsky

Why Do They Lie? And Why Do Others Believe Them? (by Sandra Stotsky)

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One of the most puzzling phenomena in recent years is the unquestioned acceptance by seemingly rational people of the many claims made by the proponents of Common Core’s standards. The claims have been made repeatedly despite the fact that they have been shown to be either lies or simply utopian hopes. So, what are the lies or the utopian hopes? And why do others repeat these lies or pie-in-the-sky claims about what these standards will achieve? First, we are regularly told that Common Core’s standards are internationally benchmarked. Joel Klein, former head of the New York City schools, most recently repeated this myth in an interview with Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal editor, during the first week in June. […]

Joshua Archambault

ACA Premium Roller Coaster for Small Business Coming to Massachusetts

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A handful of owners of small companies in the Commonwealth have recently shared with me their deep sense of uncertainty and apprehension about what the ACA will mean for their health insurance premiums. They finally realized that local politicians were not telling the whole story when delivering speeches highlighting some of the similarities between RomneyCare and ObamaCare. In fact, implementation by federal HHS has only served to confuse them further and repeatedly moved the goal posts. The latest example is the ongoing saga of the ACA’s rating factors mandate on the Commonwealth. Beacon Hill is set to take up a bill on Wednesday that would place Massachusetts on track to be compliant with the federal health care law. A recently released Division […]

Jim Stergios

Ed Glaeser’s Straw Man on Common Core (by Jim Stergios)

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In today’s Globe, Ed Glaeser, an economist by trade and a member of the Gates Foundation advisory board for domestic programs, shares his thoughts on education standards – a topic on which we generally refer to experts. Think national education experts like Sandra Stotsky, James Milgram, Ze’ev Wurman, Mark Bauerlein, and folks who have worked in states and studied this topic closely. Ed attributes opposition to Common Core to fear (the title of the piece is “Fear of Common Core”). It’s the old win-an-argument-against-a-straw-man tactic, which he compounds by saying that critics of Common Core (I’m a card-carrying member of a loose affiliation of tribes opposing the Core) are even scared of a “bogeyman.” A ghost, a chimera, we’re seeing […]

Jim Stergios

Mass. charter schools: No sector like it in the US

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In 1992, Pioneer published a book that had the kind of squishy title and wishy-washy message you have all come to expect from Pioneer Institute: “Reinventing the Schools: A Radical Plan for Boston.” Its core message was nested in the dozens of pages of the state’s landmark 1993 Education Reform Act, along with high-quality standards and accountability through teacher and student testing. Thus began the charter experiment in Massachusetts. How would it turn out? Public charter schools here as elsewhere were an experiment, the success of which would depend on state policy decisions about how to authorize, hold accountable and expand the emerging charter sector. Interestingly, in the minds of the Massachusetts Senate and the Governor at the time, charters […]