Fall 1999

The Street Ministers

For urban youth, who face a world of trouble, Boston's streetworkers are doing a world of good.

By Michael Jonas 0 Comments Dec 1, 1999

LARRY MAYES IS pacing the hallway of Dorchester District Court like a man on a mission. Mayes is a youth outreach worker, more commonly known as a “streetworker,” who is employed by the Ella J. Baker House in Boston’s Four Corners neighborhood, not far from the courthouse. He’s here to advocate for a man we’ll(...)

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A Visit With David Driscoll

By Dave Denison 0 Comments Dec 1, 1999

The first day of September was looking pretty good for Education Commissioner David Driscoll. As he sat that afternoon in the conference room adjoining his office, he could see something more than the usual view from the fifth floor of the state Department of Education headquarters in Malden–he could see education reform in Massachusetts beginning(...)

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Executive Compensation

By CommonWealth Staff 0 Comments Dec 1, 1999

There’s a move afoot in the Legislature to hike the salaries of the state’s six constitutional officers, who are now laboring at pay rates set six years ago. So CommonWealth set out to find how Massachusetts measures up, salary-wise, as a place to be chief executive of state government. It turns out that gubernatorial salaries,(...)

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The Case for AfterSchool Learning

By Millicent Lawton 0 Comments Dec 1, 1999

In most ways, it looked like just another day at the new federal courthouse in downtown Boston. On a recent afternoon in one of the cavernous building’s wood-paneled courtrooms, Judge Joseph L. Tauro called the proceedings in a civil case to order, addressing each of the smartly dressed lawyers as “Mr.” or “Ms.” The attorneys(...)

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A fond farewell

By Tripp Jones and Michael Gritton 0 Comments Dec 1, 1999

A little over four years ago, we set out to launch a new quarterly magazine about “politics, ideas and civic life in Massachusetts.” We had studied the publications of think tanks around the country and had a clear idea of what we wanted to create. We wanted a real magazine that would complement the organization’s(...)

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The Last Harrumph

By Dave Denison 0 Comments Dec 1, 1999

PREFACE.This is my last issue as editor of CommonWealth. It was my intention, believe it or not, to go out with something light and lively in this space. I wanted to reflect on how much fun Massachusetts politics can be. I suspect that hasn’t been evident enough in our pages–that we enjoy our subject considerably.(...)

Arts and Culture/ Uncategorized

Looking backward at 2000

By Ronnie Dugger 0 Comments Oct 1, 1999

Utopia, from the Greek, means “not a place.” Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, in contrast, was his visualization of a real and better place, the society he thought Boston and the United States should be in the year 2000. At the time he was writing, the millennial year was 113 years in the future: He was(...)

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