“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.
WaPo on Michelle Rhee and quality teachers
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Education, Blog: School Choice, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byThe keynote for this year’s Better Government Competition, which is focused solely on improving our educational system, is Michelle Rhee. In addition to a recent shakeup in the bureaucracy, she has been closing some schools. All very focused on improvement. Probably more important, as the WaPo notes, are hiring and retention rules for teachers. As noted in the Friday WaPo:
The joys of contract negotiations!
A rose by another name
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /by Liam DayTotally off topic, but I do want to acknowledge Kevin Cullen’s column in today’s Globe. One of my first jobs out of college was as one of the teen directors at the Daniel Marr Boys and Girls Club in Dorchester, which has now changed its name – to reflect how much it’s grown – to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dorchester.
In all, I spent three years at the Club. The men and women who work there – Bob Scannell, Mike Joyce, Dave Bonnell, Bruce Seals and Queenie Santos, the person I worked with most closely – are among the finest people I know. The club has been an anchor and an oasis in a neighborhood that too often needs them.
Getting the Incentives Right
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byAt the end of the day, compensation systems are intended to attract a workforce appropriate to the task.
So, the details in Monday’s Globe story on expanded State Police recruitment are alarming. The story leads with a push for greater diversity but quickly gets to the point:
As our 2006 paper on state pensions points out, the Commonwealth builds all kinds of perverse incentives into the state pension system, then declares a “crisis” when people behave in an economically rational way.
State troopers are the only class of public employee (besides MBTA employees) who don’t have an ‘age of retirement’ component to their pensions. After you’ve worked for twenty years, your pension is basically maxed out, save for salary increases.
If you are like Superintendent Delaney (hired at roughly age 22), he qualified for a full pension by the time he was 42 and has only increased it based on salary increases. That’s not a dig at the Superintendent (a genuinely good guy), just an illustration of a typical case.
For many of these officers, they have maxed out their pension by their mid-40s and have the prospect of well-paid, lower risk employment in the private sector (e.g. campus police, medical center security) with the potential to accumulate many years of service towards another pension.
For the Commonwealth, that means trained officers in the prime of their careers have every incentive to leave the job — a ‘crisis’ that we brought upon ourselves.