The Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability (FERA), based in Albany, New York, has been implementing a school-choice initiative — the Albany Project — that has created high-quality charter schools to serve more than half of the local public school student population in the state's capital city. FERA believes that a district composed of choice schools can better serve students, parents, and the community than the traditional urban school district system. The Albany Project is demonstrating that the charter school model — freedom from state regulations and education bureaucracy, freedom to innovate, and increased accountability—can better serve all students, not just the small segment of the population fortunate enough to win an enrollment lottery or afford a private school.

Buildings in Florida's Miami-Dade County typically fill up as quickly as they can be built. Between glimmering high-rise towers for vacationers or retirees, banks and offices that serve as the nerve centers of Miami's south-ward-looking economy, or schools and public buildings to support a growing population, South Florida has the look of a perpetual hard-hat zone. This steady pace of needed construction is maintained by an innovative building department and its Building Permitting Automation Efficiency Program.

The Massachusetts Estuaries Project, through the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), supports the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in the development and implementation of policies to protect nitrogen-sensitive coastal embayments. The Project collects data and develops models to manage and restore the 89 embayment systems that comprise the coastline of southeastern Massachusetts. The Project encompasses new technologies, regulatory approaches and funding mechanisms to reduce the costs of conducting estuarine restoration.

The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents has implemented numerous reforms that have improved the safety of workplaces throughout the state since Governor Mitt Romney’s election in 2002. In the process, the DIA has reduced the number companies that do not adhere to the state’s worker compensation laws.

This report surveys 14 Massachusetts cities outside the immediate Boston metropolitan market, which other studies have identified as “weak market” or “gateway” cities. While useful designations, this report employs the term “Middle Cities.”

While the pension system is not overly generous for typical employees, it is riddled with exceptions, ambiguities, and loopholes that allow some of them to abuse the system and collect unwarranted benefits, resulting in tremendous cost to the state and ultimately to taxpayers. The root of these problems is that the calculation of benefits is not based on the simple concept of contributions but the complicated interplay of four factors—years of eligible service, maximum three years of compensation, "group" or job classification, and retirement age.

Few dispute the idea that Greater Boston faces a serious housing crisis that threatens the continued economic growth of the region. Evidence of a housing crisis in the Boston area includes high apartment rents, high home prices, and an insufficient supply of housing units. The lack of a varied housing stock prices many workers out of the market—and drives both households and businesses out of the region, including entrepreneurs and their colleagues who are engaged in the start-up phase of business.

This report explores the current budgeting and staffing process and the problems arising from it—striking productivity declines, rapidly rising costs, and, most importantly, systemic inequities in the distribution of resources.

The central objective of the Government Effectiveness Index (GEI) is to assess how Massachusetts is doing in comparison to other states. It seeks to provide measures of effectiveness based on the efficient use of resources (inputs as a function of quantity or output) and on performance outcomes (quality of output). It does so in regard to eight “core” functions of state government (functions common to most states): K-12 education, higher education, highways, transit, state police, the judiciary, corrections, and financial administration.

The study then looks at potential savings from implementing alternative delivery methods that employ a quality- and price-based selection process, and found that the three other states have indeed benefited from their experiments with A+B Bidding and Partnering.