What is the best way to divide a pie equitably? It’s simple enough when there are only two people involved–one slices, the other chooses. But this is child’s play compared […]
Reforming School Funding
Posted inPolitics
Lani Guinier on merit opportunity and redistricting
As much as she might wish otherwise, Lani Guinier will probably always be best known as roadkill on the Washington, DC, Beltway. Nominated in 1993 to be assistant attorney general […]
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Gerrymandering is alive and well
All summer and into the fall, politics junkies have been treated to an unexpected sideshow: a battle of insiders over congressional redistricting. That the redrawing of district lines gives rise […]
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Counterpoints
Changes in technology have opened up amazing new frontiers in business and commerce over the past several years. Advances in biotechnology and science are changing the course of our daily […]
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Argument
The Internet revolution is touching all of our lives, giving us exciting new choices, services, and knowledge. Whether it is information, products, or services, chances are you can find it […]
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Mending the security blanket
“Life is risky. You can decide to, you know, live your life afraid of that happening, or you can decide to live your life the way Americans live their lives, […]
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Easy being Green
Before he stepped down to become clerk magistrate of Ware District Court in May after nearly 27 years in the State House, Democratic state Rep. William P. Nagle of Northampton […]
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Billboards on school buses
Students at the Fenway High School in Boston pound away on keyboards in the CVS Pharmacies Computer Lab and check out books from the Harcourt General Library without giving the […]
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NotSo Green Acres
Every now and then I’ll be talking to my friend Jack, who works in Boston and lives in Newton, and he’ll say: “So, when are you moving back to civilization?” […]
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Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered
When Bernice Speliotis downs the nine pills she takes each day or reaches for the inhaler she relies on to keep her asthma in check, the 72-year-old Lynn resident admits […]
Posted inPolitics
Keeping the customers ‘satisficed’
This year’s election campaign for mayor of Boston has hardly revved the city’s engines. But at least somebody is running against Tom Menino. Four years ago, Boston held a mayoral […]
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Small Business Climate
High-tax, high-cost Massachusetts is often portrayed as hostile to the entrepreneurial spirit. But in the new Small Business Survival Index, compiled by a Washington, DC-based advocacy group, the Bay State […]
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Bringing a practical science into the classroom
Nancy Cianchetta is moving back and forth between adjoining lab rooms, where about a dozen fifth-to-seventh-graders seem oblivious to the made-to-order July weather outside. At benches, students chatter as they […]
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The long morning after
One of the challenges in publishing a quarterly magazine is trying to anticipate what’s going to be on readers’ minds three to six months down the line. But the grim […]
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Bill Bennetts family values
The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American FamilyBy William J. BennettDoubleday, New York, 199 pagesWilliam Bennett, perhaps the leading conservative voice in American public life today, turns […]
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Americas Irish Ascendancy
Tocqueville coined the word “individualism” to define a new form of life he saw emerging in North America in the 1830s. Here as never before in history it became possible […]
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Making the deans list
Capitol Hill is generally considered a den of publicity hounds, free agents, and egomaniacs–folks who mean well, perhaps, but would get low marks in the “plays well with others” category […]
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Zoning dispute turns ugly in Freetown
For more than three centuries, Freetown’s attitude toward land and development was pretty much described by its name. The 38-square-mile town next to New Bedford had no zoning restrictions at […]
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Ode to New Englands mills reborn
Reused factories provide haunts for the ghosts of our industrial past In western Massachusetts, where I live, many rivers bear resonant names. A few conjure up attributes (the Swift, the […]
Posted inOpinion, Uncategorized
Time to unclog water permits
Massachusetts municipalities that seek approvals for new water supplies are entering into an intensifying public policy debate and treacherous regulatory terrain (“Tapped Out,” CW, Fall ’00). The permitting process is […]
Posted inEducation
Harry Spence turns his fixit skills toward schools
Harry Spence has been reinventing government since before the term was, well, invented. Massachusetts’s pre-eminent public sector turnaround specialist, Spence has spent his adult life fixing dysfunctional public institutions. He […]
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The only solution to lawmakingbybudget is legislative democracy
Last year about this time, Steve Crosby, the newly installed secretary for administration and finance, was shocked to discover a plethora of new laws attached to the state budget, which […]
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Counterpoint
In 1995, welfare reform was signed into law in Massachusetts with a strong work requirement at the cornerstone of the sweeping reforms. Adults who were able to work were required […]
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Argument
A match between the area’s largest charity and the state’s leading fiscal watchdog may not qualify as a marriage of opposites, but it’s close. Boston Herald columnist Wayne Woodlief recently […]