Editorial Staff

COVID-19 Roundup from Pioneer: How some countries are succeeding, Tips for maintenance staff safety, Shelter in place?, Equity in remote learning policies

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Pioneer staff share their top picks for COVID-19 stories highlighting useful resources, best practices, and questions we should be asking our public and private sector leaders. We hope you are staying safe, and we welcome your thoughts; you can always reach out to us via email:  pioneer@pioneerinstitute.org.

Our Top Picks for COVID-19 Pandemic News:

Jim Stergios, Executive Director, shares some news about the supply chain from Forbes: Puerto Rico Can Help The U.S. End Its Dependence On Chinese Pharmaceutical Ingredients.

William Smith, Visiting Fellow in Life Sciences: Here‘s one Stanford University professor’s take on where this could go.

Mary Connaughton, Director of Government Transparency: New York Times’ health reporter Donald McNeil writes: “If we had enough tests for every American, even the completely asymptomatic cases could be found and isolated… Obviously, there is no magic wand, and no 300 million tests. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze.”

Barbara Anthony, Senior Fellow in Healthcare: Terrific, must-read piece, in The Boston Globe: “Understanding what works: How some countries are beating back the coronavirus.”

Our Picks for Public & Private Sector Best Practices:

Barbara Anthony, Senior Fellow in Healthcare, offers some tips to help ensure the safety of our residential building maintenance and management staff.

Mary Connaughton, Director of Government Transparency: As a public service, along with major national news outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, many of our state’s newspapers have lifted their paywalls and are offering free online access to Coronavirus coverage including the Boston Herald, Berkshire Eagle, The Boston Globe (through Boston.com), Metrowest Daily News and many other regionals. If your newspaper is doing the same – please let us know. We’d love to give them a shout out for this terrific public service. Keeping people informed saves lives.

Micaela Dawson, Communications Director: Kudos to Chelmsford-based company Zoll for ramping up ventrilator production to fight COVID-19. Read the story in the Boston Herald.

Questions for Our Public & Private Sector Leaders:

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has just issued a stay-home advisory and emergency order regarding non-essential businesses. Should he issue a shelter-in-place order? Let us know your thoughts – take our poll below.

Jamie Gass, Education Director: On our latest episode of “The Learning Curve,” Cara Candal and Gerard Robinson discuss the Philadelphia school district’s decision not to offer remote instruction to any of its 200,000 students due to concerns that not all have access to technology. Is this reaction to COVID-19 reasonable or irresponsible?

Do YOU have interesting articles to share with us? Please email us, or message us through our social media channels below!

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The Republic of Gadgets – America’s Great Inventors – 25 Resources for K-12 Education

Understanding the enduring public and private benefit that great inventors and their contraptions have made to our civilization is to better appreciate the connections between human necessity, creativity, and ingenuity. Yet, in American K-12 education very little focus is placed on studying who America’s great inventors were and the central role they’ve played in shaping our republic of gadgets. We’re offering a variety of links on the topic for parents, teachers, and schoolchildren to enjoy and better realize authentic innovators.

Cheryl Brown Henderson, Daughter of Lead Plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Ed., on Race & Schooling

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This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Cheryl Brown Henderson, president of the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence, and Research. She shares her experience as the daughter of the lead plaintiff in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and thoughts on how the historic decision contributed to advancing civil rights in our country.

The Houses of Great American Writers – 25 Resources for K-12 Education

According to the Brookings Institution research, teaching great fiction is declining across America’s K-12 education system, so we’re offering resources to help parents, teachers, and schoolchildren to better appreciate great American writers and the places where they wrote.

Getting Nursing Home Care Right

Pioneer Institute has long recognized that seniors deserve the best of care and that innovative policy solutions are necessary to ensure that this population enjoys a high quality of life in their later years. In the 1990s, early 2000s and most recently in 2017, the Institute dedicated Better Government Competition topics to policy issues related to aging in America. Our goal each time was to find solutions and to take advantage of new innovations that would improve the quality of life and care for the elderly.

Harvard PEPG’s Prof. Paul Peterson on Charter Schools, Digital Learning, & Ed Next Polling

This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Paul Peterson, the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

Small Business Life Support: Policy Relief for Firms Sickened by COVID?

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Host Joe Selvaggi talks with Pioneer Institute’s Andrew Mikula and Retailers Association of Massachusetts' Jon Hurst about the state of small business in Massachusetts six months into the pandemic.