Mass Open Books
Your Money. Your Government.
Valuable tools and resources to help you navigate Massachusetts public policy.
Your Money. Your Government.
Community Solutions
Know Your Schools
A Citizen’s Resource
Reports, Media, Videos, and More.
Understanding Retirement Benefits
Pay-to-play is rampant in Boston
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog /byInteresting 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 […]
Jobs for kids? Try cutting the minimum wage
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog /byThe 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 […]
Voc-tech success with special needs students
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byWhenever 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, […]
Flawed Foundation of the Pacheco Law
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byThose 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 […]
Cracks in the national standards consensus
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byBack 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 […]
Vocational-technical schools working with business
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Education, Blog: School Choice, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byThe 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 […]
Choosing to succeed in regional vocational-technical schools
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Education, Blog: School Choice, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byWhat 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 […]
Maine Moving on Health Care
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Healthcare, Healthcare, News /byAn 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 […]
Another Department of Public Safety Issue
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byThis space has raised questions in the past about the staffing levels and performance at the Department of Public Safety. Several years ago, then Auditor DeNucci found that 30% of elevators in the state had expired inspection stickers. Following the death of a child at a mall due to an accident on an escalator, there has been increased scrutiny of the department. Now, after a review of escalators across the state, there comes news that the two inspectors who certified that mall escalator are to be fired, six will be suspended for five days, and 26 will be reprimanded. Depending on whose numbers you believe, there are either 51 or 57 inspectors in the department. That means that between 60% […]
Massachusetts Medicaid “Savings” in Trouble?
/1 Comment/in Blog, Blog: Healthcare, Healthcare /byThe New York Times reports In a new effort to increase access to health care for poor people, the Obama administration is proposing a rule that would make it much more difficult for states to cut Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals. I wonder if this will impact Governor Patrick and the Legislature’s reduction in reimbursement levels included in the FY 12 budget? If yes, there goes another chunk of the $1 billion in projected “savings”–making the near-impossible prediction of reducing per enrollee spending by 3.5% this year all that more improbable. See Poftak’s Do You Believe in Medicaid Miracles? This is also an interesting move from the Obama Administration as the Secretary of HHS recently advised states to use […]
Dear Abigail on History
/2 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /byIn what is a textbook example of bad policy on the teaching of history, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is signaling that it has no intention of instituting the MCAS requirement for US History. Currently, the state tests students on three subjects–English Language Arts, Mathematics and Science. In 2009, the US History MCAS requirement was to go into place and three years later, in 2012, graduates were supposed to have passed it. Cue the primary source material–the relevant provision in the regulations (603 CMR 30.03 (4)): (4) Students starting with the graduating class of 2012, in addition to meeting the requirements contained in 603 CMR 30.02(2) and (3), shall meet or exceed the Needs Improvement scaled […]
Fight of the Century
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, News, Transparency /byEducation does not only take place in our schools, though we often get caught up debating the merit of governance schemes for our bricks-and-mortar institutions. That is important. While I think digital learning is going to transform our concepts of school and learning, I also think the role of the teacher (the “master” in a way), the adult who hands off a tradition, will always be preserved. The relationship between a kid (and of course even an adult) and a teacher is a special one, which is why we spend so much time, ink and treasure trying to make sure we have effective ones. It’s also why we often have debates (and residual distrust) about things like distance learning, blended […]
Whither METCO?
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Education, Blog: School Choice, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byIf METCO closes the achievement gap, and if closing the achievement gap is a top priority, why are we cutting METCO funding?
Transparency, To a Point
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byJust 99 days after filing the first in a series of requests, I finally received some records from the Massachusetts’ Human Resources Division yesterday. I had planned to blog again on the issue after the counter hit 100 days, so the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is saved by the bell. And what a bargain: For 6 pages, Pioneer Institute paid just $61.33 per sheet. The Division of Human Resources graciously waived the 64 cents postage fee, but a number of questions still linger. When Governor Deval Patrick took office, for example, he promised a “more modern and accessible and accountable” government. While there have been some progress (MassDot has rightly won praise for some of its transparency initiatives), transparency is often […]
No Free Lunch
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byWhat do the recent kerfuffle involving Boloco and Boston’s new plan to collect a “voluntary” payment from tax-exempt organizations with properties valued at $15 million or more have in common? As it has already been put well on this blog, the city’s request that tax-exempt organizations pay money that they do not actually owe is essentially an example of extortion—of the city’s requesting a “voluntary” payment from certain tax-exempt organizations with the implicit threat that if the organization does not comply with the city’s demands, the city could wreak havoc on it in any number of ways. The request at the heart of the Boloco incident is no different. According to the Boston Globe’s account, the Boloco incident “all started […]