MORE ARTICLES
Becket Fund’s Eric Rassbach on Loffman v. CA DOE, Religious Liberty, & SchoolingNovember 27, 2024 - 10:30 am
Pioneer Institute Statement on Vocational-Technical School AdmissionsNovember 26, 2024 - 8:00 am
FY2026 Consensus Revenue Hearing – Forecasting of Revenues is Tricky BusinessNovember 25, 2024 - 8:00 am
CUNY’s Carl Rollyson on William Faulkner & Southern LiteratureNovember 20, 2024 - 10:36 am
Pioneer Institute Study Finds Massachusetts Saw Four-Fold Loss of Income to Net OutmigrationNovember 19, 2024 - 11:25 am
Massachusetts Job Market Bears WatchingNovember 18, 2024 - 2:10 pm
NH Gov. Chris Sununu on School ChoiceNovember 13, 2024 - 2:02 pm
Five Reasons Why Project Labor Agreements Are Bad Public PolicyNovember 12, 2024 - 9:27 am
Statement of Pioneer Institute on MCAS Ballot Failure and State of Education in MassachusettsNovember 6, 2024 - 2:01 pm
Dr. Helen Baxendale on Great Hearts Classical Liberal Arts Charter SchoolsNovember 6, 2024 - 12:08 pm
A Few Wrinkles in the DiMasi Indictment
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byFormer House Speaker Sal DiMasi was indicted today. You can read the indictment itself here. I won’t belabor the obvious, but a few secondary points stuck out to me: – COGS at Cognos — Cognos agreed to pay one of the other indictees, Joe Lally, a 20% commission on sales. Is that standard in the industry — to pay a middleman 20% of the deal? Maybe it is standard, but it doesn’t make me feel great about our IT procurement process if that’s built into the price of a typical deal. – Conflict of Interest Laws — Part of the allegations involve DiMasi receiving a kickback for referrals that went to his law partner. I’m not sure how you fix […]
We will be able to do this soon
/1 Comment/in Better Government, Blog /byMy favorite Education Intelligence Agent Mike Antonucci had this news out of California: There are 3,000 retired educators receiving a six-figure state pension. And that’s out of a total of just over 5,000 for all types of state employees. Pretty outstanding performance for educators in the Golden Parachute State. Now the good news. Pioneer is building MassOpenBooks.org as well as a number of other government transparency sites for release this summer and fall. We’ll be able to pull out all kinds of gems like that back here in the Bay State for folks who are interested in understanding how the numbers stack up.
Will MA forfeit education stimulus dollars?
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, Related Education Blogs /byEdNews.org passes on this AP report on US Ed Secretary Arne Duncan’s threat to stonewallers on charter schools. As part of the federal stimulus package, there is a $5 billion fund to promote innovations, and President Obama is a clear proponent of charters. So what if a state does not promote charters, has caps, makes excuses, and all the rest? Ah, so glad that you ask a question pertinent to our dear Bay State. States will hurt their chance to compete for millions of federal stimulus dollars if they fail to embrace innovations like charter schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Thursday. Duncan was responding to a question about Tennessee, where Democratic state lawmakers have blocked an effort to let […]
13 is not the right number
/2 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byReading about the investigation into misconduct at the MBTA Police Academy jogged my memory to a story earlier in the week about little-used police academies. Let’s look at the list of police academies: State Entities — MBTA, State Police State-Run for Localities — Randolph, Springfield, Reading, Boylston, Plymouth, New Bedford, and Foxborough Locally-Run — Boston, Lowell, Springfield, and Worcester Does this make any sense, particularly in this period when few new officers are being hired? Wouldn’t consolidation lower costs (for the state and municipalities) and improve the level of training? My favorite part of the story is the chief from Walpole stating that they don’t use the Randolph training center because the drive is too long in the mornings. I […]
About Time
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /by Liam DayAfter ten long years, Time Warner has finally made the decision to kick AOL to the curb. All I can say is about time. The best analogy I can come up with is if Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra lasted 10 years instead of the two weeks they did. At its height, AOL’s dial up served roughly 26 million customers. I believe that number is now somewhere around 6 million. In a truly frightening display of the speed with which Schumpeter’s creative destruction works in the digital age, who would have guessed that dial up internet service would go the way of the buggy so quickly?