Catholic schools are closing their doors all across America, leaving future generations with nowhere to turn for the high-quality academics and values-based education so many families are seeking. The number of students attending Catholic schools in the US fell from about 5.2 million in 1965 to around two million in 2008.
Pioneer Institute believes these schools are worth preserving. For over a decade, we have raised our voice in support of these excellent academic options, and tools such as tax credit scholarships that would enable more families to attend.
Pioneer has held public forums, published research on the benefits of Catholic education, on successful models such as Cristo Rey, and on policy changes that would stop the Massachusetts education department from depriving religious school students of special needs services and school nurses. The Institute has also convened key stakeholders, appeared in local and national press, filed amicus briefs, produced a feature a documentary film, and much more.
The Great Beacon Hill Foodfight has now reached the Big Apple’s fishwrap paper of record. Big news in the New York Times is that Governor Patrick has lost steam, and that this may portend what an Obama presidency would be like. Discussing his loss on resort casinos, the Governor noted in an interview:
“I don’t accept that we can’t get anything done because we lose one issue. Come on. People around here act like the only thing that happened last year was picking these drapes and buying a car. There’s a whole lot more.”
Mr. Patrick noted the incresae in state spending on education (ho-hum), housing (did I miss something?) and 300,000 residents with health insurance under the health care reform act (done by his predecessor — yes, you should applaud and blame him for much of that). He did forget to mention some pension reform. Still, kind of small beans, no?
What is amazing to the outside observer is that the Governor has completely forgotten the “Together” in his campaign mantra “Together We Can.” Is it really smart to take out the baton on the Speaker for not moving his agenda, when moving the agenda depends on the Speaker? Odd, naive, self-inflated and -inflating political strategy. Again, from the Times:
“Even the speaker doesn’t want to be in the position of saying no to everything the governor brings forward,” Mr. Patrick said. “Even he appreciates that there are consequences to his members that come from that.”
Oh, yeah, and just plain dumb.
Curious tie-in to the umpteenth Globe hand-wringer on the fate of the Dem presidential hopefuls as they try to grapple between the politics of hope and the presumption of dynasty, this time from the pen of Brian Mooney. As the politics of hope take a back seat to a sense of despair on Beacon Hill, at the national level Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee is pushing for a strategy to settle the superdelegate count well in advance of the August party convention. He notes that he cannot accept the “strategy” of many other Dem party elders, who are simply hoping that things will go well. I found his dictum that “Hope is not a strategy” compelling — and not just regarding the Democratic primaries…
I love the Education Intelligence Agency. Click HERE to enter the dimly lit cavernous corridors of the Agency and read the full version of what follows. The topic is teacher shortages, and it is a great concern; but Mike Antonucci (the Education Spymaster) scopes out a brief history of the teacher labor market to ensure that we are thinking about the current shortage without hysteria:
One would think that with all the technological and statistical tools at their disposal, school districts and state agencies would be able to make reasonably accurate predictions of enrollment and, therefore, hiring needs. However, in state after state we are seeing layoffs and marked competition for the job openings that do exist. In Florida, for example, the need for new teachers is about half what it was just two years ago. In the public school labor market, as with many other human endeavors, we often treat the problems of shortages and gluts as if they never existed before.
These problems existed before, and a lot of the same solutions were applied. JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive allows us to take a look at what the best minds in education research thought about problems way back when, and for our purposes JSTOR provides some access to old issues of Educational Research Bulletin.
The bulletin ran an annual feature of investigations of teacher supply and demand… The articles not only furnish information about shortages and gluts of the past, but challenge our current assumptions about their causes.
In the 1940s, it seems the war was the largest factor in the teacher labor market (also click HERE), followed by a shortage in the 50s caused by the baby boom:
The 1953 Bulletin cites this quote from a leading researcher: “This cumulative deficit of qualified teachers stretches back a decade or more and seems destined to worsen as far as we can see into the future. It is like a creeping paralysis!”
By the following year, the problem had grown to the point where it was a subject of an Edward R. Murrow news broadcast: “There are too few teachers, too many teachers who are not fully qualified to teacher, classrooms are too crowded, some schools will be working three shifts, holding classes in cafeterias, churches, synagogues and in at least one case a converted chicken coop.”
By the mid-50s, according to the Bulletin, the crisis abated as instructional staff increased by 55,000 (for 1.2 million new students, a 1:22 ratio). In comparison,
From Fall 2005 to Fall 2006, enrollment increased by 165,037 while instructional staff increased by 65,494. That’s one new instructor for every 2.5 new students.
As Antonucci notes, the good old days weren’t the good old days. And today’s challenge, put in perspective, is nothing to cry crisis about. And especially not, as some of our education leaders might suggest, a reason to relax teaching standards and teacher testing.
On the LA Times blog today there is a distressing bit of news about the distressed California housing market. Home prices in the state, the blog notes, fell 26 percent (three times the national average) between February 07 and February 08!
–Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed’s interest rate-cutting campaign “will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market.”
–In the San Fernando Valley, losing a home to foreclosure is now almost as common for families as buying a home. The L.A. Daily News: “During January and February, there were 1,084 foreclosures and 1,335 sales of houses and condos in Valley communities from Glendale to Calabasas, according to the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at California State University, Northridge.”
“It’s bad. It’s really bad,” market analyst Nima Nattagh told the Daily News.
We’re lucky. We don’t build houses anymore in Massachusetts (1980s production was around 40,000 units, from 2000-2006 around 20,000-23,000, and currently we are building at an annual rate of about 12,000 to 14,000). Very small increases in supply means that in a recession our housing prices should decline much less than elsewhere. But also expect a sharp upturn in already high prices as soon as consumer confidence comes back.
In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothing amendments prevent more than 100,000 urban families with children in chronically underperforming school districts from receiving scholarship vouchers that would allow them access to additional educational alternatives. These legal barriers, also known as Blaine amendments, restrict government funding from flowing to religiously affiliated organizations in nearly 40 states and are a violation of the first and fourteenth amendments.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case this year, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, that could end these amendments. In 2018, Pioneer produced a 30-minute documentary on the impact of the Blaine amendments on families in Massachusetts, Georgia, and Michigan.
“She’s a good girl. She helps me a lot. She has big, big dreams. I don’t have the money, but she has big dreams. I hope she’s going to get everything, but she works so hard. She works so hard in school.”
“Our family is needing to make some really big sacrifices because we believe this is important, and so, we’re basically going to do whatever it takes… Sometimes we look at each other and go ‘I don’t know if I can do it again another month…’”
“A lot of the families have to sacrifice and work multiple jobs… And just scraping together enough money to just make tuition, just the basics.”
“It is discriminatory, that parents who want to choose an alternative to public school for their children, would not in any way receive any compensation for that, whether it be tax credit, whether it be a voucher…”
In the 1840s, nativist movement leaders formed official political parties and local chapters of the national Native American Party (later the American Party), although they continued to be commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party. Politicians sought to insert provisions into state constitutions against Catholics who refused to renounce the pope. The Know-Nothing movement brought bigotry and hatred to a new level of violence and organization.
The party’s legacy endured in the post-Civil War era, with laws and constitutional amendments it supported, still today severely limiting parents’ educational choices. A federal constitutional amendment was proposed by Speaker of the House James Blaine prohibiting money raised by taxation in any State to be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations. These were then named the Blaine Amendments of 1875.
in recent decades, often in response to challenges to school choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court has demonstrated great interest in examining the issues of educational alternatives and attempts limit parental options. Massachusetts plays a key role in this debate. The Bay State was a key center of the Know-Nothing movement and has the oldest version of Anti-Aid Amendments in the nation, as well as a second such amendment approved in 1917. Two-fifths of Massachusetts residents are Catholic, and its Catholic schools outperform the state’s public schools, which are the best in the nation.
Help families like the Costons in Michigan to end the bigoted Blaine amendments in their state that are blocking tuition scholarships and other types of financial support that would make it possible for families to send their children to high-quality schools that are best suited for their children.
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The Great Beacon Hill Foodfight has now reached the Big Apple’s fishwrap paper of record. Big news in the New York Times is that Governor Patrick has lost steam, and that this may portend what an Obama presidency would be like. Discussing his loss on resort casinos, the Governor noted in an interview:
“I don’t accept that we can’t get anything done because we lose one issue. Come on. People around here act like the only thing that happened last year was picking these drapes and buying a car. There’s a whole lot more.”
Mr. Patrick noted the incresae in state spending on education (ho-hum), housing (did I miss something?) and 300,000 residents with health insurance under the health care reform act (done by his predecessor — yes, you should applaud and blame him for much of that). He did forget to mention some pension reform. Still, kind of small beans, no?
What is amazing to the outside observer is that the Governor has completely forgotten the “Together” in his campaign mantra “Together We Can.” Is it really smart to take out the baton on the Speaker for not moving his agenda, when moving the agenda depends on the Speaker? Odd, naive, self-inflated and -inflating political strategy. Again, from the Times:
“Even the speaker doesn’t want to be in the position of saying no to everything the governor brings forward,” Mr. Patrick said. “Even he appreciates that there are consequences to his members that come from that.”
Oh, yeah, and just plain dumb.
Curious tie-in to the umpteenth Globe hand-wringer on the fate of the Dem presidential hopefuls as they try to grapple between the politics of hope and the presumption of dynasty, this time from the pen of Brian Mooney. As the politics of hope take a back seat to a sense of despair on Beacon Hill, at the national level Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee is pushing for a strategy to settle the superdelegate count well in advance of the August party convention. He notes that he cannot accept the “strategy” of many other Dem party elders, who are simply hoping that things will go well. I found his dictum that “Hope is not a strategy” compelling — and not just regarding the Democratic primaries…
I love the Education Intelligence Agency. Click HERE to enter the dimly lit cavernous corridors of the Agency and read the full version of what follows. The topic is teacher shortages, and it is a great concern; but Mike Antonucci (the Education Spymaster) scopes out a brief history of the teacher labor market to ensure that we are thinking about the current shortage without hysteria:
One would think that with all the technological and statistical tools at their disposal, school districts and state agencies would be able to make reasonably accurate predictions of enrollment and, therefore, hiring needs. However, in state after state we are seeing layoffs and marked competition for the job openings that do exist. In Florida, for example, the need for new teachers is about half what it was just two years ago. In the public school labor market, as with many other human endeavors, we often treat the problems of shortages and gluts as if they never existed before.
These problems existed before, and a lot of the same solutions were applied. JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive allows us to take a look at what the best minds in education research thought about problems way back when, and for our purposes JSTOR provides some access to old issues of Educational Research Bulletin.
The bulletin ran an annual feature of investigations of teacher supply and demand… The articles not only furnish information about shortages and gluts of the past, but challenge our current assumptions about their causes.
In the 1940s, it seems the war was the largest factor in the teacher labor market (also click HERE), followed by a shortage in the 50s caused by the baby boom:
The 1953 Bulletin cites this quote from a leading researcher: “This cumulative deficit of qualified teachers stretches back a decade or more and seems destined to worsen as far as we can see into the future. It is like a creeping paralysis!”
By the following year, the problem had grown to the point where it was a subject of an Edward R. Murrow news broadcast: “There are too few teachers, too many teachers who are not fully qualified to teacher, classrooms are too crowded, some schools will be working three shifts, holding classes in cafeterias, churches, synagogues and in at least one case a converted chicken coop.”
By the mid-50s, according to the Bulletin, the crisis abated as instructional staff increased by 55,000 (for 1.2 million new students, a 1:22 ratio). In comparison,
From Fall 2005 to Fall 2006, enrollment increased by 165,037 while instructional staff increased by 65,494. That’s one new instructor for every 2.5 new students.
As Antonucci notes, the good old days weren’t the good old days. And today’s challenge, put in perspective, is nothing to cry crisis about. And especially not, as some of our education leaders might suggest, a reason to relax teaching standards and teacher testing.
On the LA Times blog today there is a distressing bit of news about the distressed California housing market. Home prices in the state, the blog notes, fell 26 percent (three times the national average) between February 07 and February 08!
–Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed’s interest rate-cutting campaign “will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market.”
–In the San Fernando Valley, losing a home to foreclosure is now almost as common for families as buying a home. The L.A. Daily News: “During January and February, there were 1,084 foreclosures and 1,335 sales of houses and condos in Valley communities from Glendale to Calabasas, according to the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at California State University, Northridge.”
“It’s bad. It’s really bad,” market analyst Nima Nattagh told the Daily News.
We’re lucky. We don’t build houses anymore in Massachusetts (1980s production was around 40,000 units, from 2000-2006 around 20,000-23,000, and currently we are building at an annual rate of about 12,000 to 14,000). Very small increases in supply means that in a recession our housing prices should decline much less than elsewhere. But also expect a sharp upturn in already high prices as soon as consumer confidence comes back.
Hope is not a strategy
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, News /byThe Great Beacon Hill Foodfight has now reached the Big Apple’s fishwrap paper of record. Big news in the New York Times is that Governor Patrick has lost steam, and that this may portend what an Obama presidency would be like. Discussing his loss on resort casinos, the Governor noted in an interview:
Mr. Patrick noted the incresae in state spending on education (ho-hum), housing (did I miss something?) and 300,000 residents with health insurance under the health care reform act (done by his predecessor — yes, you should applaud and blame him for much of that). He did forget to mention some pension reform. Still, kind of small beans, no?
What is amazing to the outside observer is that the Governor has completely forgotten the “Together” in his campaign mantra “Together We Can.” Is it really smart to take out the baton on the Speaker for not moving his agenda, when moving the agenda depends on the Speaker? Odd, naive, self-inflated and -inflating political strategy. Again, from the Times:
Oh, yeah, and just plain dumb.
Curious tie-in to the umpteenth Globe hand-wringer on the fate of the Dem presidential hopefuls as they try to grapple between the politics of hope and the presumption of dynasty, this time from the pen of Brian Mooney. As the politics of hope take a back seat to a sense of despair on Beacon Hill, at the national level Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee is pushing for a strategy to settle the superdelegate count well in advance of the August party convention. He notes that he cannot accept the “strategy” of many other Dem party elders, who are simply hoping that things will go well. I found his dictum that “Hope is not a strategy” compelling — and not just regarding the Democratic primaries…
Teacher shortages
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /byI love the Education Intelligence Agency. Click HERE to enter the dimly lit cavernous corridors of the Agency and read the full version of what follows. The topic is teacher shortages, and it is a great concern; but Mike Antonucci (the Education Spymaster) scopes out a brief history of the teacher labor market to ensure that we are thinking about the current shortage without hysteria:
In the 1940s, it seems the war was the largest factor in the teacher labor market (also click HERE), followed by a shortage in the 50s caused by the baby boom:
By the mid-50s, according to the Bulletin, the crisis abated as instructional staff increased by 55,000 (for 1.2 million new students, a 1:22 ratio). In comparison,
As Antonucci notes, the good old days weren’t the good old days. And today’s challenge, put in perspective, is nothing to cry crisis about. And especially not, as some of our education leaders might suggest, a reason to relax teaching standards and teacher testing.
Floor falls out in California housing
/0 Comments/in Blog, Economic Opportunity, Housing, News /byOn the LA Times blog today there is a distressing bit of news about the distressed California housing market. Home prices in the state, the blog notes, fell 26 percent (three times the national average) between February 07 and February 08!
We’re lucky. We don’t build houses anymore in Massachusetts (1980s production was around 40,000 units, from 2000-2006 around 20,000-23,000, and currently we are building at an annual rate of about 12,000 to 14,000). Very small increases in supply means that in a recession our housing prices should decline much less than elsewhere. But also expect a sharp upturn in already high prices as soon as consumer confidence comes back.