MORE ARTICLES
Statement: Pioneer Institute in Support of Accessory Dwelling UnitsMay 2, 2024 - 12:50 pm
Study: Expand Voc-Tech Seats, Don’t Require Lottery- Based AdmissionsMay 2, 2024 - 8:50 am
Colonel Peter Hayden on U.S. Cyber Command & National SecurityMay 1, 2024 - 1:52 pm
Losing Local Labor: Retaining Workers Remains a Massachusetts ChallengeApril 30, 2024 - 10:49 am
Outmigration and the Labor ForceApril 25, 2024 - 11:44 am
Study Finds Obstacles to Search for Opioid SubstituteApril 25, 2024 - 9:11 am
Annual Massachusetts Outmigration Hits 39,000, Up 1,100% Over The Last Decade: BU StudyApril 24, 2024 - 1:00 pm
Hoover at Stanford’s Stephen Kotkin on Stalin’s Tyranny, WWII, & the Cold WarApril 24, 2024 - 12:33 pm
Superior Court Judge Invalidates “Equity Theft” Law as UnconstitutionalApril 23, 2024 - 1:04 pm
Tax Man Confounded: Why High Rates Haven’t Yielded Higher RevenueApril 23, 2024 - 12:58 pm
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 […]