THE PIONEER BLOG

Taylor Armerding

Your vote is sacred, unless we don’t like it

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The vote of the people is sacred. Except when it’s not. And it obviously is not sacred in Nahant, where town officials are perpetuating a dangerous trend – if your vote doesn’t conform with the wishes of those in power, you have to vote again. On April 30, voters in the town election rejected a proposed $260,000 override for the local schools. So, earlier this week, after receiving a petition from 173 residents, the Board of Selectmen voted to hold a special election on June 25 to reconsider it. Such things don’t happen often, but they should never happen. The justifications for it are the same lame talking points always presented in such circumstances, the worst of which is the […]

Steve Poftak

We’re #5! No wait, we’re #43!

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During last year’s gubernatorial campaign, CNBC ranked Massachusetts #5 as one of the best places to do business. The ranking (and some of the subindexes that weren’t quite so positive) got bandied around by the campaigns as evidence and counterevidence of the state of our business climate. (Even some of my fellow bloggers have referenced it.) If you look at the subindexes for that ranking, you can quickly figure out our strengths and weaknesses – on productivity/quality of life measures, we are very strong; and on business cost/tax policy issues, we are pretty weak. And that gets replicated in lots of similar surveys – depending on which measures are chosen, Massachusetts does very well or quite poorly. So what matters? […]

Jim Stergios

King of New York

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Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times If the weekend sweep of the Yankees was not enough for you, here is a story of a great Boston reformer who has made good in the Big Apple. John B. King Jr., who credits teachers for helping him surmount an isolated childhood as an orphan in Brooklyn and who ran celebrated charter schools in New York and Massachusetts, was named Monday as the state’s next education commissioner, with a unanimous vote of the Board of Regents. At 36, Dr. King, who previously served as deputy commissioner, will be among the nation’s youngest educational leaders… After losing both of his parents to illness by age 12, Dr. King earned an undergraduate degree from […]

Jim Stergios

4 lessons from vocational-technical schools

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve shared a number of videos on the way in which regional vocational-technical schools have made impressive progress on key metrics of academic learning, leveraged parental involvement and the business community, and provided lessons for all schools on how to support special needs students and lower dropout rates. With such success in the 26 regional vocational-technical schools, which function as standalone schools, two questions arise: How do we show the same level of success in Massachusetts’ other vocational-technical schools that operate within larger districts and do not have the same level of autonomy seen in the regionals? What are the lessons for the rest of the schools or for specific student populations? Here are […]

Joshua Archambault

Gov. Patrick’s Regulatory Regime for Payment Reform

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This was the testimony I submitted today to the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing for the hearing on the Governor’s proposal to reform the payment methods we use in health care and to change the delivery system. Thank you to Chairman Moore and Chairman Walsh and to the Committee members for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Josh Archambault, Director of Health Care Policy at Pioneer Institute. The issue before the Committee today—the Governor’s proposal to change the payment methodologies for the delivery of health care—would as currently written set up a framework for momentous regulatory intervention in the health care marketplace, and possible significant adverse impacts on health care access and spending in the […]

Jim Stergios

An education in history

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On Monday, a Globe editorial noted that THE STATE’S new education reform law has been, by some measures, a highly utilized weapon. Turnaround efforts for the lowest-performing schools are proceeding apace, and the charter school community has responded eagerly to the challenge of expansion. But not every provision of the new law, approved in January of last year, has been fully utilized: Hopes that innovative school-transformation plans would bubble up from the community level have yet to be realized. The 35 Turnaround efforts and the robust response from charter school operators have, in fact, led to big steps forward, even though success is by no means assured. Turnaround efforts around the country have had disappointingly low rates of success. And […]

Jim Stergios

Voc-tech schools lowering the dropout rate

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This is the fifth and final leg of my series on the tremendous progress being made in our regional vocational-technical (VTE) schools in Massachusetts. These schools have changed markedly in the past ten years, as they moved from a stance of opposition to the major pillars of Massachusetts’ landmark education reform law of 1993. By embracing accountability and the high-quality academic standards the state developed in the late 1990s, the regional VTEs were able to nurture students in an individual way that made sense given their interest in academics as well as career preparation. The unique vocational-technical education attributes of close adult relationship, individualized instruction to recognized benchmarks, and student choice and commitment to programs studied have combined to great […]

Taylor Armerding

Pay-to-play is rampant in Boston

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Interesting juxtaposition in the news of the week. Sal DiMasi, the former Massachusetts House Speaker, is now on trial for allegedly taking thousands of dollars in payoffs from software company Cognos, in exchange for steering state contracts its way. Meanwhile, Boston Mayor Tom Menino persists in publicly demanding payoffs – ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands – from a select group of local nonprofits, in the form of payments in lieu of taxes worth 25 percent of what they would owe if they were not tax-exempt. Yes, they are tax exempt. The law says they owe no property taxes. But, apparently, since Boston is a city of men, not laws, Menino is putting the hammer down on […]

Taylor Armerding

Jobs for kids? Try cutting the minimum wage

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The Boston Globe remains an unapologetic public-relations arm for government at all levels. Yet another story in today’s paper unquestioningly feeds us the government line that government funding is a requirement for kids aged 14-21 to get summer jobs. It opens with the obligatory anecdote – the teen who suggests that if government hadn’t provided a job for him, he would have spent last summer either idle or hanging out on the street, getting in trouble. See, your tax dollars are hard at work not only transforming the lives of teens, but cutting crime! It bemoaned the fact that funding for YouthWorks, the state jobs program, has declined from $8 million to $6 million this year – largely because one-time […]

Jim Stergios

Voc-tech success with special needs students

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Whenever I talk to education experts and people interested in education about the impressive improvements in academic performance and the low dropout rates at the state’s regional vocational-technical schools (VTEs), they often react by leaning on easy explanations such as the self-selection because they are schools of choice. The problem with that argument is that 26 stand-along regional VTEs can boast of providing an education to double the percentage of special needs students found in schools across the state. What makes the voice of experts from the regional VTE world important is that fact that the graduation rate for special needs students in regional VTEs is almost 20 percent higher than the statewide average for that category of students. Again, […]

Steve Poftak

Flawed Foundation of the Pacheco Law

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Those seeking more competition in government have opposed the so-called Pacheco Law (see here, here, here, and here) for years. The foundation of the law puts the State Auditor in the position of prosecutor, judge, and jury for anyone seeking to allow private competition for a state-provided service. In the conceptual sense, it made little sense to have one position play such conflicting roles in a supposedly objective process. In the real world, the ideological bias of the then-auditor Joe DeNucci was well-known, a steady favorite of the unions who benefited from avoiding competition. Now, our worst fears have been confirmed. Following DeNucci’s retirement, a new Auditor, Suzanne Bump, brought in the National State Auditors Association to review the operations […]

Jim Stergios

Cracks in the national standards consensus

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Back in the fall, I mentioned that I thought that after the election we were going to see a lot of cracks in the façade of unity on national standards, and perhaps a separate group coalescing around Texas, as the point in opposing national standards. Last month, I was in Texas as the Lone Star state’s commissioner of education Robert Scott advanced with State Representative Daniel Huberty a bill that would prohibit Texas from adopting the national standards or national assessments. That same day, they rolled out the most ambitious set of math standards in the country—standards that surpassed even the quality of the once-nation-leading Massachusetts and California math standards. Now Texas has the best academic K-12 standards in the […]

Jim Stergios

Vocational-technical schools working with business

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The local business community has always been heavily involved in our public institutions, through voluntary associations, of course, but also ensuring the good functioning and affordability of a once very robust network of community hospitals as well as our public schools. Throughout the robust education reform debates of the 1990s, figures like William S. Edgerly of State Street Corporation and Ray Stata of Analog Devices brought to bear the view of employers who were wedded to their communities, to a strong liberal arts foundation, and to the idea of preparing students for the workforce. The state’s vocational-technical (VTE) schools have clearly put an emphasis on building relationships with the business community, for resource needs, connections for employment, and for input […]

Jim Stergios

Choosing to succeed in regional vocational-technical schools

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What sets Massachusetts’s education reform efforts apart from those in other states can be reduced to three things. The reforms begun with the 1993 landmark law: Put into place were comprehensive in that they spanned content, accountability, and choice. Massachusetts did not put all of its eggs into one basket, avoiding the stale conversation about whether choice or standards was the real driver of improvements in student achievement. Recognized what the state could do well and left to the local school districts and individual schools what was best left to them. For example, the Board and Department worked to develop academic goals and teacher and student tests to make sure the schools delivered results, but they did not prescribe teaching […]

Joshua Archambault

Maine Moving on Health Care

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An interesting experiment is about to be unleashed in one of our neighbors to the north–Maine. The newly Republican controlled House and Senate are moving quickly (too quickly for some) to strip away state regulations and mandates that were put in place over the past two decades and open up the individual and small group insurance market to more competition. The bill, among many things, will allow individuals to purchase insurance from companies licensed in other states (including Massachusetts.) And it will permit the price differential that insurers can charge sicker residents when compared to healthier residents to grow. Maine currently only allows a very narrow ratio of 1.5 to 1. The current law translates into healthier (mostly younger) folks […]