THE PIONEER BLOG

Taylor Armerding

Kerry should leave lending standards alone

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Our compassionate Sen. John Kerry is at it again, in behalf of the demographic he professes to understand so well – the middle class. The multi-millionaire Massachusetts senator is complaining that the federal lending rules created to prevent another mortgage meltdown will prevent middle-class, credit-worthy borrowers from buying a home. What he dislikes in particular is a proposed regulation that would require some homebuyers to make a down payment of 20 percent to qualify for a low-interest loan. In a letter to Shaun Donovan, secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development; Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke; and Sheila C. Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Kerry wrote, “None of us — and none of you […]

Jim Stergios

Squishy jobs

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What to make from the latest jobs report? After the April jobs report which showed an increase of around 250,000 jobs, and expectations that the non-farm payroll would increase around 150-175,000 jobs, the creation of only 54,000 jobs in May is a huge disappointment — especially coming a full year after the Summer of Recovery. Of course, there are snarky responses, and lots of people I’ve spoken to this morning have focused on the fact that the hiring announcement from McDonald’s nominally constituted May’s entire job growth number. The more meaningful response is what we gave to Mark Mardell of BBC TV: There is just a ton of uncertainty out there. The economy’s growth rate is slowing, and we know […]

Jim Stergios

Mother Courage

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Earlier this week, I shared a couple of videos introducing the Chelsea-based Phoenix Charter Academy (PCA). PCA is unique in that it focuses on getting at-risk students back working at school, but also insists on high-quality academic achievement. The academic culture at PCA is critical to the school’s success, and in order to establish a culture of learning, there has to be a foundational behavioral culture of order, respect and rules. In order to get to that point, PCA seeks to provide a base of support for its students that will give them room to focus on academics. The goal is not just to stay in school, but to meet and beating academic and behavioral expectations. PCA’s in-school support ranges […]

Joshua Archambault

More Bad News for Governor’s Regulatory Regime for Payment Reform

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A Washington Post article today is sure to influence the debate in the beltway on reforming our health delivery system towards accountable care organizations (ACOs), one can only hope it will reach the leaders of the Commonwealth before they pass the Governor’s “phase II” payment reform legislation. ACOs are the skeleton that Governor Patrick is attempting to fuse his alternative payment methods with. ACOs are the hot concept in health policy circles, as the Obama Administration is rolling out new regulations to form ACOs for the Medicare population. Many experts believe that as the Medicare delivery system goes, so does the rest of the health care market. So the article brings to light many concerning devolpments that should influence the […]

Steve Poftak

Smaller, Fewer is Not Better

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While the rest of the US created jobs after the 2001 recession, Massachusetts shrank. Understanding why is important if we want to avoid a ‘jobless recovery’ from the most recent recession. The above chart shows US jobs (thin black line) versus MA jobs (bold red line) starting in 2001. What you see is both dropping in response to the recession but the US economy comes back by 2005 and creates net new jobs. The Massachusetts economy never comes back far enough to reach early 2001 levels. Two connected factors explain a significant portion of our stagnation – Massachusetts is failing to create new businesses at the same rate it did in the ‘90s and the new businesses we manage to […]

Jim Stergios

If walls could speak

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Walk into a building and you can already tell a lot about an institution. An excellent teacher can be found in a building that screams stasis, but a culture of excellence in a school will not over time abide such a feeling of immobility. That’s why you can feel the energy in a school that works–and most often you can see it upon coming to an entrance, walking the hallways, and viewing the classroom walls. And walking through the section of Our Lady of Grace in Chelsea, home to Phoenix Charter Academy, the walls of the classrooms show serious purpose. Sure, the school does not have the level of resources that district schools get for facilities; but that’s part of […]

Taylor Armerding

Bob Haynes will leave labor worse than he found it

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Nobody should shed any tears for Bobby Haynes, the longtime president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, when he rides off this fall into the kind of gilded retirement he generally decries for private-sector CEOs – unless, of course, it is an $11-million package for the former CEO of a nonprofit health corporation on whose board Haynes is paid a cool $72,000 to sit. Nor should they give him any thanks. Haynes, who announced his retirement this week, is leaving labor worse than he found it. And not because public employee unions look to be “losing” a battle on Beacon Hill over health care benefits. It is because Haynes, described by the Boston Globe as a “tough-talking former iron worker,” is more […]

Jim Stergios

Mend over matter

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For those of you who are inclined to think that Massachusetts is on the mend and on the move, perhaps some graphics will shake you from your dream-space. G. Scott Thomas of the Business Journals provides the goods: Texas has enjoyed an unequaled economic boom the past 10 years. The inventory of private-sector jobs in Texas increased by 732,800 between April 2001 and the same month this year, according to an On Numbers analysis of new federal employment data. Meanwhile, Massachusetts is 42nd in the nation for job creation oops, 8th in the nation for job loss since 2001. In the past year (April 2010 to April 2011), the state of TX has added 250,000 jobs. In the past year, […]

Jim Stergios

Phoenix Charter Academy’s Mission Impossible?

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The month of May opened with the official granting of 16 charters. That’s a great start by the Patrick administration on implementing the charter provision of the January 2010 education law. Full implementation of the law will double the number of students (reaching perhaps 55-60,000 students) and will likely double the number of charter schools operating in the Bay State. With the announcement of the Boston Compact, charters are working hard to identify and secure locations for the new schools. And with charters moving from a focus on poor, minority students to attracting higher percentages of special needs students and English language learners, many operators are looking for models that successfully drive high academic achievement for these populations. In the […]

Jim Stergios

School dollars and health reform

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Calls for more funding for education are common. Policy organizations may have played a significant role in the ideas included in the framework for Massachusetts’ nation-leading education reform, but teachers unions played the big role in pushing for more dollars into schools and insisting on more equity in school funding. The push for more school dollars by no means excuses the quality of education we are getting in some urban areas. And by no means absolves teachers unions for seeking monopoly status in opposing the expansion of private school options, like parochial schools, for urban students. (The parochial schools largely do a better job at a much lower cost.) But money is important. And that’s what budget season is all […]

Steve Poftak

Not Like The Other

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In general, good manners are to be respected. But our dear friends in the business community are overdoing it. In the ongoing debate over municipal healthcare costs, there are now three competing proposals on the table, the Governor’s, the House, and the Senate. The Governor’s effort is largely a bunt — signaling a desire to get communities into GIC or give them control over plan design but pushing the details off onto the regulatory process. The House is much clearer — communities can adjust plan design up to the equivalent of the biggest plan for state workers or enter GIC, so long as 10% of first year savings is returned to workers. The Senate takes a different approach — communities […]

Joshua Archambault

Is Medicaid (MassHealth) Preventing the Poor from Breaking out of Addiction?

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Lawrence Harmon of The Boston Globe had a very interesting article that highlights the intersection of medicine and public policy. The issue was the debate whether MassHealth, our state’s Medicaid program, should move to pay for Suboxone versus methodone for opioid-addicted patients (for example heroin addicts). The article examines the growing medical evidence of the clinical effectiveness of Suboxone and the benefits versus commonly utilized methadone. I suggest you read the whole article for yourself to get the full medical discussion of the upsides of Suboxone versus methodone, but here are the sections I found most interesting on the public policy front: In 2007, MassHealth paid $325 million to treat 18,000 low-income addicts with either methadone or Suboxone, according to […]

Steve Poftak

(Almost) Everything You Wanted to Know About the MBTA

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[WARNING: Hard-core transportation nerdiness ahead. Consider yourself warned.] As a user of the MBTA and a fan of transit (no, really), there’s no better place to learn about the minutiae of the system than the T’s Blue Book. It tells you everything (well, almost) you could want to know about the system. Within its pages, you find stuff like: • Most heavily used subway line? Red Line at 74.45m trips per year, which narrowly edges out the Green Line. And the Blue Line lags way behind at 17.88m trips per year. • Most popular station? Downtown Crossing, with 22,880 entries and transfers on a typical weekday. Least popular? Suffolk Downs, with only 794. • Who’s on the bus? The T […]

Steve Poftak

Tuesday Quick Hits

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– Holub out? I haven’t followed it closely but the Globe suggests that UMASS-Amherst Chancellor Holub is on his way out after just three years. One of the data points the article refers to is a survey of professors that shows dissatisfaction with the Chancellor. Its not entirely clear but the survey appears to be one of those on-line, opt-in surveys, not a scientific sampling. So that means approximately 100 (self-selected?) respondents (out of 1000+ faculty members) are responsible for the failing grade given to Holub. – Referee Needed. The Patrick Administration is claiming big $$$ savings from the opening of the automobile insurance market to competition. (A view I agree with and a stance for which the Governor does […]

Steve Poftak

The Soft Cost of Doing Business In Massachusetts?

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If you talk with business leaders, you hear stories about the hidden costs of doing business in Massachusetts – huge building projects idled by recalcitrant local building inspectors, regulators blithely ignoring legitimate concerns raised by companies, and a general lack of understanding of how businesses work. I’ve always wanted to quantify these ‘soft costs’ to see if they amounted to much, or were just so much complaining. As I compiled information for my last post on business rankings, one pattern in the data caught my eye. If you look at Massachusetts strictly by the taxation and business cost numbers, we come out in the mid-30s. This year, we were ranked 32nd for tax climate by the Tax Foundation and 39th […]