Community Colleges are a popular topic these days – with two research reports (here and here) being issued in the past weeks. The first came from the Boston Healthcare Careers Consortium. It was released with a host of ‘stakeholders’ taking credit. This report has its share of consensus-speak but a few items jump off the page. First, the K-12 preparation level for many students is stunningly low – in Bunker Hill Community College’s entering 2009 class, 98% of students needed a remedial placement for at least one discipline (reading, English, and math) and over a third needed placements for all three. More importantly, the paper digs into the lack of coordination across the community college system – different requirements for […]

It feels like a familiar story – an obscure public sector entity with a clueless (or worse) board of directors fails to do their job and the executive director makes off with bags of money. Except this time, the setting is the Chelsea Public Housing Authority rather than the Merrimack Valley (see here and here). Briefly, the Director of the Authority managed to pay himself $360,000 per year (far more than any other Housing Authority director in the state) while claiming that he was only making $160,000. His explanation for lying to the state and federal government: He’s a ‘rebel’. Once he figured out his days were numbered, he got the Authority’s bookkeeper to write him checks cashing out his […]