THE PIONEER BLOG

Steve Poftak

5 Things to Watch in Tuesday’s At Large City Council Race

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Next Tuesday’s municipal election in Boston has a competitive at-large race and its outcome will provide some advance info on what to expect in the next mayor’s race. Here are 5 things to watch: 1) Is the Flaherty-Pressley Competition A Legit Thesis? The narrative for the early part of the race was based on Michael Flaherty’s entry into the at-large race after giving up his seat to run against Mayor Menino. This created the dynamic of four incumbents, and Flaherty (practically a incumbent as well with strong citywide name recognition) running for only four seats. As the lowest votegetter in the last race, Ayanna Pressley was viewed as the most vulnerable. Her potential exit from the council raised the possibility […]

Jim Stergios

Massachusetts: Flatlined on national tests?

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EdWeek‘s Erik Robelen is reporting on the just released national test data. He notes that they show that 4th and 8th graders have inched up in mathematics, but the results are more mixed in reading, with 4th grade scores flat compared with two years ago. Former Massachusetts Commissioner of Education and current chairman of the national tests’ National Assessment Governing Board, David P. Driscoll, is paraphrased as saying that: the nation has made major gains in math over the past two decades, but that in reading, the growth has been “quite small.” And he called the 4th grade reading scores “deeply disappointing,” noting that they have been flat since 2007… Mr. Driscoll, a former commissioner of education in Massachusetts, highlighted […]

Michael Morisy

Could Solyndra have happened in Massachusetts?

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Solyndra could serve as a textbook case for the dangers of government trying to turn investor, mixing ideology, economics and the appearance of favoritism. The Department of Energy’s $535 million loan guarantee also seems to echo Massachusetts’ own failed investment in luring Evergreen Solar to Devens. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Solyndra, which manufactured solar panels and was a poster child for President Barack Obama’s green jobs push, is now being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation over allegations that executives knowingly misled the government to secure the loan guarantee. These are currently just allegations and Solyndra executives are innocent until proven guilty, but the matter is further complicated by the fact that the company had financial ties with the White House, […]

Steve Poftak

Horses for Courses; Fire Trucks for Fires

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I’ve written previously about Boston About Results and I’ll repeat my recommendation. It’s fascinating to see what city government does when its presented as data, rather than anecdote. Here are some facts that caught my eye…. The Boston Fire Department responds to approximately 70,000 incidents per year. How many of those responses are for fires? Less than 6,000. (To be fair, that count is for actual fires, not false alarms, so that low percentage shouldn’t be construed as a knock on BFD.). How about medical incidents? Those are much more prevalent — about 40 – 45% of incidents are medical in nature. (See Boston About Results for the above data and more.) So, why are we sending 10 – 25+ […]

Jim Stergios

Halloween, Headless Horsemen and Literature in our Schools

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The Headless Horseman, painting by John Quidor. In this season of ghosts and goblins, it seems only appropriate to think about the stories that for many generations served to frame our imagination of what Halloween should look like. For generations, schoolchildren of all backgrounds learned about literature and life in America via Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Herman Meville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. That list is a partial trajectory of the American spirit. On Halloween a different sort of literary spirit has […]

Steve Poftak

BPS Meets the Market

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Boston Public Schools are competing for students, whether you like it or not. In the early 1970s, the system had enrollment of over 90,000. This school year, they only have enrollment of just over 57,000. Just under a quarter of the school-aged children are educated outside the district – private, parochial, charter, METCO, special ed placement, or homeschooling. If the BPS wants to stem this long-term trend, it needs to compete for students (and parents). And that message seems to have gotten through. For years, the BPS has had access to an incredible wealth of data about what parents want – what do parents pick as their most desirable schools in the dreaded school lottery? They seem to tapping into […]

Taylor Armerding

Elizabeth Warren – selectively smart

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Politicians have all sorts of ways of avoiding questions they don’t like. There’s VP Joe Biden’s recent, “Don’t mess with me,” threat to a reporter. There’s the standard, “That’s a great question … “ followed by an answer or a speech about something entirely off the topic and unresponsive to the question. But it seems like false humility is gaining some traction too, as in: “I can’t answer your question because I’m not smart enough.” The Boston Herald reports that Elizabeth Warren, seeking to unseat Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, wasn’t very responsive recently when she was asked by Jim Braude on the Jim & Margery radio show about “the symbolism of President Obama tapping GE president Jeffery Immelt to serve […]

Steve Poftak

A Scorecard for MassDOT

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I keep seeing trial balloons for a gas tax hike. And I keep thinking they’ve got the process wrong. MassDOT should be telling us how they are doing first before asking for money. The 2009 reforms put a process in place to report consistently on key performance measures but MassDOT is only doing it in part, and only on a yearly basis. They’ve done a far better job of communicating tactical successes — innovative projects and reform-related events. Without this strategic communication, MassDOT will struggle to make the public case that they are managing our assets and our money more wisely than in the past. When you’ve got Big Dig cost overruns and MBTA service failures as part of your […]

Steve Poftak

MassDOT, Scorecards, and the Gas Tax

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In my last post, I put together a model of what MassDOT communicating results to the public might look like. (And I know it’s not perfect — weigh in below with suggestions for improving it.) But getting this part right is the foundation of any discussion of a gas tax. It has to look like a contract — you taxpayers pay this, and MassDOT will give you value in return. Without refocusing the transportation agency on consumer-centered metrics, why would the public think that an increase in the gas tax will lead to service improvements?

Jim Stergios

Inspector Clouseau-style accountability

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I noted two weeks ago that recent MCAS data don’t tell a pretty story on urban achievement gaps. Since 2007, the Commonwealth’s performance on national (so-called NAEP) assessments is not so great, flatlining for almost every subject and grade tested. (Note: Stay tuned for the latest round of NAEP data, which is to be released this fall.) The Commonwealth’s Board and its Department of Elementary and Secondary Education sure have lots of task forces, committees, and extra-long board jawboning sessions. (Board meetings have almost doubled in length; I’ll let you decide if the same can be said on substance.) I certainly wish some of the words and time of these officials would go toward programs that have a record of […]

Steve Poftak

Unemployment – It’s Worse Than You Think

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Massachusetts has done relatively well (or maybe less bad is more apt) in terms of unemployment. Our current rate is 7.4 percent, far better than the national average of 9.1 percent. But even with a rate of 7.4 percent, that means we’ve got about 130,000 more unemployed people than our pre-recession level of unemployment. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics.

Steve Poftak

Whose Money Talks in Mass Politics?

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The Occupy protesters still have a variety of viewpoints represented but a clear theme is a rejection of corporate influence that they view as having taken over politics. At the same time, the success of the protests in generating attention has attracted the labor movement, which sees a popular vehicle for their goals. If you’d allow me to take the focus down to the specifics of Massachusetts politics for a moment, I’d urge the OccupyBoston folks to think long and hard about what influence money has over politics here and who wields that influence. Take a look at the top 20 PAC donors in Massachusetts from 2010 – 16 of the top 20 PACs were labor-related. Put another way, from […]

Steve Poftak

Boston About Results 3.0

/in , /by Steve Poftak

The grandiose promises of politicians frequently disappoint. Initiatives launched with tremendous fanfare lose momentum as their champions turn their interest elsewhere and move onto other things. So its nice to see exactly the opposite happening in Boston. The city has been talking about its performance management system, Boston About Results, for a number of years. It initially was introduced in 2006 and first appeared as a series of goals and measures in the city budget. Then it progressed into a section of the city website with additional information and graphics for a variety of measures in each department (see BPS example here). As a long-time observer, I was pleased to see the additional data but still felt that improvements could […]

Jim Stergios

Steve Jobs on education in America

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Tip of the hat to Whitney Tilson for passing around excerpts from an interview Steve Jobs gave in 1995, during which he talked extensively about his view on education and what should be done to fix it. SJ: I’m a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. I don’t believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life’s not like that. It would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education. Maybe even more important than a great family life, but I don’t know how to do that. Nobody knows how to do that. But it pains me because we […]

Jim Stergios

Life Lessons From Steve Jobs

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In a blog post entitled Bill Gates doesn’t like the liberal arts, Steve Jobs does, I noted that unlike Gates’ view that higher education spending should be a lot less about liberal arts and much more focused on job-producing disciplines, Steve Jobs believed the liberal arts were critical to business in an age of hyper-communication: It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. That post closed with File under: Who would you rather talk with, go to the museum with, go to a concert with, share books with… […]