Opeds

As the U.S. Supreme Court takes up Carson v. Makin, the facts are clear. Maine has chosen to subsidize private education. As such, it cannot disqualify all religious schools from receiving public dollars under its school choice program.

Given the failures of both appointed and elected school boards, perhaps the time has come to have the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education appoint the members of the Boston School Committee. Patience might be warranted if the Boston Public Schools were improving. But we have waited for decades, and they are only getting worse. Holding adults in the system accountable was a cornerstone of the Education Reform Act. If not now, when?

As a way to tackle drug prices, President Joe Biden recently announced that he supports the so-called “inflation rebate,” which would require drug companies to give the federal government any revenue from Medicare drug prices above the general rate of inflation. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have also publicly endorsed the inflation rebate.

The largest driver is the increase in prices by health systems that have the clout to command higher payments and work to recruit more patients to their high-cost facilities.

This op-ed originally appeared in the Boston Globe. It was written by Pioneer’s Charlie Chieppo along with AEI’s Beth Akers. There’s no doubt that the United States faces a student loan debt crisis. But the problem would be addressed much more effectively...

Massachusetts is in the midst of wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Thousands of convictions had to be vacated because of the corruption of state drug laboratory chemists. Thousands more convictions were vacated because of the combined misconduct of the chemists and prosecutors. And still more will be vacated because of the Commonwealth’s repeated and deliberate failures to investigate the extent to which its evidence was compromised.

The Boston-based Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) sells itself as an independent source of information on the value of pharmaceuticals. But earlier this month, their bias was again evident when they tried to kneecap a drug for a dreaded disease before there’s even enough data to determine how valuable the drug really is. ICER has adopted this same strategy in the past on innovative drugs for cancer, cystic fibrosis, and other devastating diseases. This time ICER’s target is aducanumab, Biogen’s drug for Alzheimer’s disease.

After decades of being overlooked, the importance of teaching US history and civics in public schools is at last gaining momentum. At the same time, the American Rescue Plan will bring an influx of tens of millions of dollars into Massachusetts schools. The confluence of these two events could transform civics education, but turning potential into reality will require combining a high-quality, fact-based curriculum with strong accountability measures.

For state governments, the good news is that the American Rescue Plan recently signed by President Biden will inject $350 billion into their budgets. The bad news is that it places unwise and possibly unconstitutional limitations on how states can use the money.

Massachusetts charter public schools have lived up to their decades-long record of excellence during the pandemic, developing innovative ways to continue providing high-quality education by maximizing the number of students who can safely learn in person.