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Vitamin Parents Part 2: Twin Moms Converting a Decent Traditional School Experience Into a “Wow” Homeschool OneSeptember 26, 2024 - 11:50 am
Edward Achorn on Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, & SlaverySeptember 25, 2024 - 11:45 am
Vitamin Parents Part 1: Twin Moms Converting a Decent Traditional School Experience Into a “Wow” Homeschool OneSeptember 19, 2024 - 12:21 pm
PRI’s Lance Izumi on The Great Classroom CollapseSeptember 18, 2024 - 7:20 am
Learning From California: Policy Lessons From Golden State ExodusSeptember 17, 2024 - 10:35 am
Is Massachusetts at a Turning Point – 10 Data Points That Give Me PauseSeptember 12, 2024 - 3:57 pm
From Stress to Success: How Daniella Transformed Her Son’s Learning with ESA FundsSeptember 12, 2024 - 11:46 am
AFC’s Denisha Allen on School Choice & Black Minds MatterSeptember 12, 2024 - 9:54 am
New England Short Circuit: Distorted Incentives Drive Energy Prices Up and Reliability DownSeptember 10, 2024 - 10:30 am
From Garden to Table: How Alicia Garcia Reshapes Home Ec with ESAsSeptember 5, 2024 - 11:59 am
Phoenix Charter Academy’s Mission Impossible?
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Education, Blog: School Choice, Jim Stergios, Related Education Blogs /byThe month of May opened with the official granting of 16 charters. That’s a great start by the Patrick administration on implementing the charter provision of the January 2010 education law. Full implementation of the law will double the number of students (reaching perhaps 55-60,000 students) and will likely double the number of charter schools operating in the Bay State. With the announcement of the Boston Compact, charters are working hard to identify and secure locations for the new schools. And with charters moving from a focus on poor, minority students to attracting higher percentages of special needs students and English language learners, many operators are looking for models that successfully drive high academic achievement for these populations. In the […]
School dollars and health reform
/0 Comments/in Blog, Related Education Blogs /byCalls for more funding for education are common. Policy organizations may have played a significant role in the ideas included in the framework for Massachusetts’ nation-leading education reform, but teachers unions played the big role in pushing for more dollars into schools and insisting on more equity in school funding. The push for more school dollars by no means excuses the quality of education we are getting in some urban areas. And by no means absolves teachers unions for seeking monopoly status in opposing the expansion of private school options, like parochial schools, for urban students. (The parochial schools largely do a better job at a much lower cost.) But money is important. And that’s what budget season is all […]
Not Like The Other
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byIn general, good manners are to be respected. But our dear friends in the business community are overdoing it. In the ongoing debate over municipal healthcare costs, there are now three competing proposals on the table, the Governor’s, the House, and the Senate. The Governor’s effort is largely a bunt — signaling a desire to get communities into GIC or give them control over plan design but pushing the details off onto the regulatory process. The House is much clearer — communities can adjust plan design up to the equivalent of the biggest plan for state workers or enter GIC, so long as 10% of first year savings is returned to workers. The Senate takes a different approach — communities […]
Is Medicaid (MassHealth) Preventing the Poor from Breaking out of Addiction?
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Healthcare, Healthcare, News /byLawrence Harmon of The Boston Globe had a very interesting article that highlights the intersection of medicine and public policy. The issue was the debate whether MassHealth, our state’s Medicaid program, should move to pay for Suboxone versus methodone for opioid-addicted patients (for example heroin addicts). The article examines the growing medical evidence of the clinical effectiveness of Suboxone and the benefits versus commonly utilized methadone. I suggest you read the whole article for yourself to get the full medical discussion of the upsides of Suboxone versus methodone, but here are the sections I found most interesting on the public policy front: In 2007, MassHealth paid $325 million to treat 18,000 low-income addicts with either methadone or Suboxone, according to […]
(Almost) Everything You Wanted to Know About the MBTA
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /by[WARNING: Hard-core transportation nerdiness ahead. Consider yourself warned.] As a user of the MBTA and a fan of transit (no, really), there’s no better place to learn about the minutiae of the system than the T’s Blue Book. It tells you everything (well, almost) you could want to know about the system. Within its pages, you find stuff like: • Most heavily used subway line? Red Line at 74.45m trips per year, which narrowly edges out the Green Line. And the Blue Line lags way behind at 17.88m trips per year. • Most popular station? Downtown Crossing, with 22,880 entries and transfers on a typical weekday. Least popular? Suffolk Downs, with only 794. • Who’s on the bus? The T […]