Archive for March, 2008
Hot trends in local zoning include age-restricted villages, in-law abodes, and inclusionary zoning - a requirement or incentives to include affordable houses in market rate developments. Our 2004 survey revealed that 99 of the 187 communities within 50 miles of Boston have inclusionary bylaws on the books.
Developers argue that some inclusionary laws drive up the cost of development (and ultimately the price of market rate housing), and can make some projects infeasible. Housing advocates argue that inclusionary policies are the best way to ensure that affordable housing is integrated throughout communities, and built in the first place.
NYU just released a study comparing inclusionary laws in MA localities to San Francisco and DC regions. If you are considering inclusionary zoning for your community, this is worth reading. Some but not all inclusionary laws work to produce affordable housing.
The study cautions that inclusionary zoning should not be considered a panacea to the lack of affordable housing in a region. I agree - there are other tools. Let’s see… age-restricted villages, in-law flats…
March 31st, 2008
What kind of impact does the influx of young, motivated people (ahem, without formal training in our dear schools of education) have on student performance? A big thank you to the Urban Institute for looking into this question. From their press release (last week):
Teach for America teachers may be new to the profession, but they are generally more effective than their experienced colleagues, finds a new Urban Institute analysis. On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers’ effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience.
The study is the first rigorous analysis that I have seen of the impact of TFA, which recruits graduates from prestigious colleges and does not require that they have coursework in schools of education.
In analyzing the experience of TFA instructors in North Carolina high schools, the authors looked not only at test scores and student demographics, but also teacher characteristics, such as what colleges they came from and how they fared on teacher-licensing exams. Interesting is that, even though they did not generally attend schools of ed, they performed better on teacher-licensing exams. Hmm. Say no more, say no more.
One of the study’s authors, Jane Hannaway, who directs the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center, makes the following point:
School systems working to improve their neediest schools may find that focusing on teacher selection has a greater payoff in high schools than focusing on teacher retention. In our study, we don’t know whether it was the strong academic credentials of TFA corps members or some kind of special motivation that came with being a TFA teacher that made the difference, but the results were clear: students performed better when they had an inexperienced TFA teacher than when they had a veteran educator at the blackboard.
March 31st, 2008
Your Excellency,
We at Pioneer were feeling as double-crossed as perhaps Bobby Haynes. We were feeling it on school choice, knowing that you benefited from the school choice opportunity provided by the “A Better Chance” foundation to attend Milton Academy. Bobby felt it on being double-crossed by the Doubleday deal, when you double-booked on the day of the casino vote. He stayed on the Hill and earned himself the Speaker’s ire. As someone who respects the free-market, I hope you got a good deal.
Now, I know that it is difficult to come right out and say you are for school choice, so I think the sophisticated way you did it is just great. According to today’s Globe, “an unspecified portion of [your] royalties and speaking fees will go to ‘A Better Chance’” — yes, the very same organization that helped you in your personal trajectory and growth, and ultimately to electoral success. We all know it will be an inspiring autobiography.
All I ask now is that you either sell an awful lot of books to make school choice an option for the thousands of urban kids in “underperforming” (what we educated people call failing) schools, or you have a change of heart and change state policies to make that a reality.
March 28th, 2008
Yesterday’s Globe had an article critical of the film tax credit offered by the Commonwealth.
I will say that it has significantly improved the celebrity level of the gossip columns, minimizing the Globe’s Names & Faces section’s embarassing fascination with C-list celebrities eating chinese food at the Kowloon. Wow! John Waite? Pro wrestlers? Wasn’t exactly Page 6 material.
However, the Department of Revenue’s report makes one fact clear — these are temporary jobs:
…the 20 film productions for which tax credits were claimed in calendar year 2006 employed approximately 2,267 individuals, with an average employment duration of 3.2 months, with the employment duration ranging from one week to 12 months. Weighted for the number employed and the duration of employment for particular productions (with large productions receiving a higher weighting than small productions), the average duration of employment was 1.4 months. However, these estimates are not definitive, as it is not currently possible for DOR to independently verify the accuracy of employment figures included in the applications. For the 27 calendar year 2007 film credit applications received thus far, productions employed 1,477 individuals with an average employment duration of 3.7 months, ranging from 1 week to 12 months. Weighted for the number employed and the duration of employment for particular productions, the average duration of employment was 1.7 months.
Rumors abound that a studio may set up full-time shop in Quincy or elsewhere but until then this is not a major employer — approximately 4-5,000 people on average per month.
These employment levels are roughly equivalent to the knifemaking and wholesale plumbing supply businesses in Massachusetts. Except those industries pay 2 - 3x the average weekly wage of the motion picture industry. I’ll watch out for their tax credits, complete with pretty pictures of the stars….
March 28th, 2008
The Commonwealth released a mundane piece of annual debt disclosure a few days ago.
One interesting section, on page 11, is the number of budgeted workers in the state’s workforce, which has grown by almost 6,000 employees (from a base of 62,000) since June 2004.
Leading the charge? The Department of Higher Education, which has added almost 2,700 employees during that span, an increase of 22.5%. Yet, their enrollment levels have only increased by 6% at best during the span.
What gives?
March 28th, 2008
You are constantly berated for not saving money, folks. You overspend. You should put the money in bank accounts and let the government do all the borrowing to pay for the promises it makes to you. From John Goodman (and health blog HERE) is a neat packaging of Social Security and Medicare liabilities we are racking up… As John suggested in his email, read and weep.
On Good Friday (when most people were off, including most reporters) the Administration announced that the following Tuesday during Spring Break (when Congress was in recess and everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere) the Social Security/Medicare Trustees annual report would be released.
Apparently someone isn’t anxious for you to pay close attention to this year’s report. The table below may explain why. The federal government has promised more that $100 trillion in benefits over and above expected taxes and premium payments!
| PRESENT VALUE OF UNFUNDED LIABILITIES |
| Program |
75-Year |
Infinite Horizon |
| Social Security |
$6.6 trillion |
$15.8 trillion |
| Medicare Part A |
$12.7 trillion |
$34.7 trillion |
| Medicare Part B |
$15.7 trillion |
$34.0 trillion |
| Medicare Part D |
$7.9 trillion |
$17.2 trillion |
| Total Medicare |
$36.3 trillion |
$85.9 trillion |
| Total Medicare & Social Security |
$42.9 trillion |
$101.7 trillion |
*These calculations ignore the existence of the trust fund, estimated at a little more than $2 trillion.
Source: Social Security/Medicare Trustees Reports 2008
March 28th, 2008
Interested in how your town fares under the Lottery — take a look here: Lottery Workbook
This spreadsheet tells you how much your town gets from the lottery relative to the sales of lottery tickets in the community. It also calculates how much people win from those tickets and adds it into the amount of aid to give another angle to the notion of return on investment.
Feel free to comment on tweaks, mistakes, or observations from the data.
March 27th, 2008
The Great Beacon Hill Foodfight has now reached the Big Apple’s fishwrap paper of record. Big news in the New York Times is that Governor Patrick has lost steam, and that this may portend what an Obama presidency would be like. Discussing his loss on resort casinos, the Governor noted in an interview:
“I don’t accept that we can’t get anything done because we lose one issue. Come on. People around here act like the only thing that happened last year was picking these drapes and buying a car. There’s a whole lot more.”
Mr. Patrick noted the incresae in state spending on education (ho-hum), housing (did I miss something?) and 300,000 residents with health insurance under the health care reform act (done by his predecessor — yes, you should applaud and blame him for much of that). He did forget to mention some pension reform. Still, kind of small beans, no?
What is amazing to the outside observer is that the Governor has completely forgotten the “Together” in his campaign mantra “Together We Can.” Is it really smart to take out the baton on the Speaker for not moving his agenda, when moving the agenda depends on the Speaker? Odd, naive, self-inflated and -inflating political strategy. Again, from the Times:
“Even the speaker doesn’t want to be in the position of saying no to everything the governor brings forward,” Mr. Patrick said. “Even he appreciates that there are consequences to his members that come from that.”
Oh, yeah, and just plain dumb.
Curious tie-in to the umpteenth Globe hand-wringer on the fate of the Dem presidential hopefuls as they try to grapple between the politics of hope and the presumption of dynasty, this time from the pen of Brian Mooney. As the politics of hope take a back seat to a sense of despair on Beacon Hill, at the national level Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee is pushing for a strategy to settle the superdelegate count well in advance of the August party convention. He notes that he cannot accept the “strategy” of many other Dem party elders, who are simply hoping that things will go well. I found his dictum that “Hope is not a strategy” compelling — and not just regarding the Democratic primaries…
March 27th, 2008
I love the Education Intelligence Agency. Click HERE to enter the dimly lit cavernous corridors of the Agency and read the full version of what follows. The topic is teacher shortages, and it is a great concern; but Mike Antonucci (the Education Spymaster) scopes out a brief history of the teacher labor market to ensure that we are thinking about the current shortage without hysteria:
One would think that with all the technological and statistical tools at their disposal, school districts and state agencies would be able to make reasonably accurate predictions of enrollment and, therefore, hiring needs. However, in state after state we are seeing layoffs and marked competition for the job openings that do exist. In Florida, for example, the need for new teachers is about half what it was just two years ago. In the public school labor market, as with many other human endeavors, we often treat the problems of shortages and gluts as if they never existed before.
These problems existed before, and a lot of the same solutions were applied. JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive allows us to take a look at what the best minds in education research thought about problems way back when, and for our purposes JSTOR provides some access to old issues of Educational Research Bulletin.
The bulletin ran an annual feature of investigations of teacher supply and demand… The articles not only furnish information about shortages and gluts of the past, but challenge our current assumptions about their causes.
In the 1940s, it seems the war was the largest factor in the teacher labor market (also click HERE), followed by a shortage in the 50s caused by the baby boom:
The 1953 Bulletin cites this quote from a leading researcher: “This cumulative deficit of qualified teachers stretches back a decade or more and seems destined to worsen as far as we can see into the future. It is like a creeping paralysis!”
By the following year, the problem had grown to the point where it was a subject of an Edward R. Murrow news broadcast: “There are too few teachers, too many teachers who are not fully qualified to teacher, classrooms are too crowded, some schools will be working three shifts, holding classes in cafeterias, churches, synagogues and in at least one case a converted chicken coop.”
By the mid-50s, according to the Bulletin, the crisis abated as instructional staff increased by 55,000 (for 1.2 million new students, a 1:22 ratio). In comparison,
From Fall 2005 to Fall 2006, enrollment increased by 165,037 while instructional staff increased by 65,494. That’s one new instructor for every 2.5 new students.
As Antonucci notes, the good old days weren’t the good old days. And today’s challenge, put in perspective, is nothing to cry crisis about. And especially not, as some of our education leaders might suggest, a reason to relax teaching standards and teacher testing.
March 27th, 2008
On the LA Times blog today there is a distressing bit of news about the distressed California housing market. Home prices in the state, the blog notes, fell 26 percent (three times the national average) between February 07 and February 08!
–Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed’s interest rate-cutting campaign “will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market.”
–In the San Fernando Valley, losing a home to foreclosure is now almost as common for families as buying a home. The L.A. Daily News: “During January and February, there were 1,084 foreclosures and 1,335 sales of houses and condos in Valley communities from Glendale to Calabasas, according to the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at California State University, Northridge.”
“It’s bad. It’s really bad,” market analyst Nima Nattagh told the Daily News.
We’re lucky. We don’t build houses anymore in Massachusetts (1980s production was around 40,000 units, from 2000-2006 around 20,000-23,000, and currently we are building at an annual rate of about 12,000 to 14,000). Very small increases in supply means that in a recession our housing prices should decline much less than elsewhere. But also expect a sharp upturn in already high prices as soon as consumer confidence comes back.
March 26th, 2008
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