INTRO TEXT James Madden will be ousted from the state Board of Education in June, but it’s not because he asks too many questions. Madden’s term will end when he graduates from Randolph High School and gives up the chairmanship of the State Student Advisory Council, a job that includes a seat–and a full vote–on […]
Robert David Sullivan
Posted inUncategorized
Toy towns
All Bay State cities and towns have children to educate, but the burden isn’t evenly distributed. The Kids Count Census, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, used US Census figures to rank all 351 Massachusetts towns by the percentage of households with children under 18. As the map above shows, towns with a […]
Posted inUncategorized
Gee monikers
Lots of people wish they could have filled out their own birth certificates, but no one is saddled with a name their parents picked in 1740. That burden falls upon the city of Leominster, named after a town in England and plagued by constant mispronunciation (the “o” is silent) ever since. As soon as it […]
Posted inPolitics, State House News Service
Government reform in a time of crisis
INTRO TEXT Following the events of September 11, the need to reinvent government “is only more stark,” former Al Gore advisor Elaine Kamarck told the Commonwealth Forum October 18, in a discussion of government reform. “The Challenge of Change: The Future of Government Reform,” moderated by MassINC executive director Tripp Jones, examined the effects of […]
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 election with only one name on the ballot, an acute embarrassment in a city renowned for its politics. But the 2001 race is barely an […]
Posted inPolitics
CPR for the GOP
Despite national ascendancy and a 10-year hold on the governor’s office, Massachusetts Republicans seem weaker than ever. We asked diagnosticians from both ends of the political spectrum how to revive the state’s GOP. See Mickey Edwards’s response here. There’s an old joke about a dog-food company on the verge of bankruptcy. For years, the company […]
Posted inPolitics
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 like to point out that the art of politics has also changed a great deal in the past 100 years — in Massachusetts more than […]