Last year’s endless budget impasse demonstrated that it can be just as tough to decide how to spend an abundance of state revenue as it is to parcel out budget […]
Playing The Budget Surplus Game
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Mario Faces Deportation
When Armando Baptiste walked into Dorchester District Court last summer, he was hoping to settle accounts with the law and get on with his life. Indeed, not eager to draw […]
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Fortune Teller Deregulation
It takes more than a crystal ball, a set of tarot cards, and some New Age music to make it as a psychic in Massachusetts. State law requires all fortune […]
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Fighting Crime Doesnt Pay
It was Tom Campbell’s dream to be a prosecutor. He lived that dream for six years, joining the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office straight out of Northeastern Law School in […]
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Exporting Clout
For most lobbyists, mystery is the name of the game. After all, how do you justify those high hourly fees to corporate clients if getting your way on Beacon Hill […]
Posted inEducation
Bragging Rights For College Towns
Apparently, the title “University Capital of North America” is one worth tussling over. So far, a three-way international wresting match for bragging rights has developed among Boston, Montreal, and now […]
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The Acid Test
At an event like the annual winter meeting of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, discussions of school safety or finance issues are as commonplace as the coffee-and-danish breakfast. But […]
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Teaching to the Test
Inside Massachusetts public schools, MCAS has become a cyclone whose fury knows no bounds. In just two short years, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System has whipped up a mixture of […]
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Battlin’ Bill Galvin
TO SEE JUST how good it’s gotten for Secretary of State William Galvin, consider the front-page Boston Globe headline one morning in early January, at the height of Harvard Pilgrim […]
Posted inEducation
Five Ways to Reinvent Education
When it comes to education reform, two topics have dominated the debate on Beacon Hill of late–money and MCAS. What’s been lost is much discussion of what education reform was […]
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New Englands Embattled Men of The Sea
Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman By Richard Adams Carey Houghton Mifflin, Boston, New York, 1999, 381 pages. Many people hold two simultaneous images of the […]
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Examining the books in Hopkington
HOPKINTON — Dr. John Duffy, who has been involved in Hopkinton politics for more than 30 years, says he’s never seen the town’s finances in such a mess. The bungled […]
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A jaundiced emEye on Winthropem
WINTHROP — It’s a mid-winter evening, Eye on Winthrop is on the air — or, more accurately, cable — and Dick Bangs is perturbed. That in itself is not so […]
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School Funding and Accountability
The state’s school-funding formula, which equalizes spending between poor and rich communities, will soon be up for debate. Massachusetts ranks 19th in per-pupil funding, but only six states spend less […]
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Wormtown News
To talk with anyone privy to or affected by the sale of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette to the New York Times Co., which also owns The Boston Globe, is […]
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Politics: A Trivial Pursuit
By early December, most of us had read quite enough about the greatest entertainers of the 20th century, not to mention the most amazing athletes and most appalling crimes. We’d […]
Posted inEducation, Opinion
Schools and unions
In Brockton, they helped establish a Horace Mann Charter School that serves high school dropouts; in this, the school’s second year, enrollment has doubled to 110 students. In Worcester, they […]
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Alan Wolfe on politics and the public mood
The hoopla over the millennium has come and—thankfully—gone. But as the odometer of our times has turned over to zero-zero, there is no denying that we have begun a new […]
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Counterpoints
MCAS: Almost overnight it has become a household term in Massachusetts. Yet the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System remains misunderstood by many students, teachers, and parents. What, is the MCAS meant […]
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Argument
With our 1991 publication Every Child a Winner!, the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE) presented the Commonwealth with a challenge to elevate standards of academic achievement for all students. […]
Posted inPolitics
Voters Young And Old
It’s not a sprawling metropolis, a center of industry, or an academic mecca, but West Tisbury takes the MVP Award. Most Voter Participation, that is. In the second of CommonWealth’s […]
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Two Bits For Massachusetts
The Connecticut charter tree and the Georgia peach will soon have to compete for pocket space with the Massachusetts man and his musket. In early February, the Massachusetts state quarter […]
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The Budgets Fine Print
In layman’s terms, they’re addenda to the state’s annual budget. In Beacon Hill lingo, they’re called “outside sections,” sections of the budget law outside the actual appropriations. But in State […]
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Revving up the Registry
Ah, the Registry. It’s the state agency everyone loves to hate. But Massachusetts drivers may just have to start looking for a new public-sector scapegoat. That is, if the new […]