Trump does some truth-telling
I must admit that sometimes the great huckster Donald Trump can do some healthy truth-telling. That's a major reason why he seems to be hanging on to such strong support. For instance, he has been the only GOP presidential candidate to note that all the presidential candidates are whores to various degrees to economic interest groups -- that the current system is utterly corrupt. The Koch Brothers summon the GOP candidates and give them marching orders. Hillary Clinton answers to Wall Street.
Yessir, Boss!
He also noted accurately that Canada's popular single-payer health-insurance system (which even the current conservative regime up there does not try to dislodge) works very well -- much, much better than the U.S. joke of a mercenary and chaotic healthcare "system.''
He also reminds people that illegal aliens are, indeed, here illegally, eschewing such ridiculous euphemisms as "undocumented residents.''
-- Robert Whitcomb
Universalist if not universal
"Universalist Church (in Gloucester)" (watercolor over graphite on cream wove paper, 1926), by EDWARD HOPPER, at Princeton University Art Museum.
Van Gogh's angst on a Maine bulletin board
Anything for attention
"Glitter Girls'' (oil and mixed media on campus), by HILARY TAIT NOROD, at Liquid Art House, Boston.
Nitrogen pollution threatens Cape Cod
HARWICH, Mass. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has scheduled a public meeting for Aug. 26 to seek comment on a draft document identifying the need to reduce nitrogen pollution in the Cape Cod coastal waters of Allen, Saquatucket and Wychmere harbors and in the Herring River.
The public meeting will be held at 3 p.m. in Town Hall, 732 Main St.
The restoration plan for this estuary system, formulated by DEP and the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), is proposed as part of theMassachusetts Estuaries Project, intended to improve estuarine water quality in 70 embayments along the southeastern Massachusetts coastline.
This coastal water body system is currently impaired because of excess nutrients, mainly nitrogen, according to a SMAST study. Nitrogen is the primary cause of eutrophication, which can lead to:
Loss of eelgrass beds, which are critical habitats for fish and macro-invertebrates such as sea worms, snails and crabs.
Undesirable increases in macro algae, which are much less beneficial than eelgrass.
Periodic extreme decreases in dissolved oxygen concentrations that threaten aquatic life.
Reduced diversity in sea-bottom-dwelling species such as worms and clams.
Periodic algae blooms.
Steady population growth and increased development, particularly during the past several decades in southeastern Massachusetts, has led to an overabundance of nitrogen in Cape Cod harbors, bays and estuaries, according to the study. The primary controllable source of nitrogen is wastewater discharged from septic systems, stormwater runoff, leaching lawn fertilizers and discharges from agricultural land uses. Atmospheric deposition also contributes varying quantities of nitrogen.
At the public meeting, DEP staff will present a draft total maximum daily load (TMDL) for limiting nitrogen to the amounts that the water bodies can absorb without violating water-quality standards and impairing uses such as fishing and recreational activities. The plan calls for reducing watershed sources of nitrogen by up to 80 percent. Most of the reductions will be from better treatment and handling of wastewater, but nitrogen from stormwater and fertilizer use should also be controlled wherever possible.
This effort included three years of chemical, physical and biological studies within the Herring River and Allen, Saquatucket and Wychmere harbors. Another component was the use of a dynamic water-quality model to determine the present sources of nitrogen and the loading rates, the nitrogen concentrations in the embayment, the nitrogen concentrations that will result in the restoration and protection of the embayment, and the target nitrogen loading rates that will achieve those protective concentrations.
This watershed modeling and TMDL analysis will serve as a planning tool for communities to implement new comprehensive wastewater management strategies in order to improve estuarine water quality, according to the DEP.
The Herring River Estuary Restoration Project also recently received a $1 million state grant to help restore the estuarine habitat in the area.
The public comment period for this draft document ends Sept. 30 at 5 p.m. Written comments can be submitted to: Barbara Kickham, Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Watershed Management, 8 New Bond St., Worcester, MA 01606. Electronic format comments should be sent to barbara.kickham@state.ma.us.
All Lovecraft, all the time
"Tentacles" (digital print illustration), by JOHN COULTHART, in the "Ars Necronomica'' show, Aug. 20-Sept. 4 at the Providence Art Club. "Ars Necronomica'' features work by artists from near and far inspired by the life and work of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft.
I must admit that I find most of Lovecraft irritating and do not understand the enthusiasm for his (to me) tedious fantasizing. Why can't Providence celebrate another literary figure connected with Providence? I nominate S.J. Perelman.
--- Robert Whitcomb
Not tonight: I have a mask on
Roster of bloviators is too pale and male
Anna Quindlen relayed an eye-opening and hair-raising experience to her readers in 1990. “A newspaper editor said to me not long ago, with no hint of self-consciousness, ‘I’d love to run your column, but we already run Ellen Goodman,’” the New York Times columnist wrote. “Not only was there a quota; there was a quota of one.”
A quarter of a century later, many newspapers still have far to go. On a recent slow news day, white men wrote every bylined commentary in the The Washington Post’s op-ed pages.
Even the most well-meaning white men can’t speak for the rest of us.
Granted, The Post regularly features the analyses of Eugene Robinson, an African-American man, and Fareed Zakaria, an immigrant born in India. It also runs Kathleen Parker and other white women. Several of the paper’s Metro and Business section columnists are people of color, including at least two black women.
But that pale and male lineup that caught my eye was no blip.
While The Post does distribute columns written by Esther Cepeda and Ruben Navarrette, it doesn’t publish work by either of them or any other people of Latin American descent in its own pages. Given that the 54 million Latinos living in the United States compose our largest minority, can’t Washington’s dominant news source find room for the opinions expressed by a single person from this community?
Detailed research on byline balance is clear if infrequent. A 2012 Op-Ed Project study found that male opinion-page writers still outnumber female writers four-to-one.
This leaves most op-ed sections more testosterone-laced than the subset of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers who cheer when he disses Megyn Kelly.
In addition to this quantity problem, there are quality concerns. The Op-Ed Project found that a disproportionate share of women’s commentaries address “pink” things such as gender, food, and family, versus economics, politics, national security, and other hard-news topics.
The mainstream media’s even more muffled when it comes to amplifying voices from communities of color. The last time the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did the bean-counting, whites wrote up to 94 percent of the opinion pieces that ran in the three most prominent newspapers.
And like The Washington Post, The New York Times still doesn’t publish a single Latino columnist.
How does OtherWords, the editorial service I run, measure up?
Some background: William A. Collins founded Minuteman Media in 1998 as a bulwark against the growing dominance of conservatives in the nation’s opinion pages. When this avuncular former Norwalk, Conn., mayor handed me the reins of his editorial service six years ago, most of the folks writing the commentaries we distributed were pale and male.
By 2012, women were writing a quarter of the pieces that this editorial service, by then renamed, got published in newspapers. That was better but not good enough. Today, partly because of my column, women pen half of our work.
Achieving gender equality makes our scrappy outfit stand out. But people of color wrote only 5 percent of our commentaries in the first half of this year, in line with the media’s overall lack of diversity.
Working within the confines of a shoestring budget, OtherWords brings under-exposed yet bold voices to the kitchen tables of the good people from Union, South Carolina to Gardena, California — and hundreds of towns in between. Now that we’re less male, can we get less pale? We can and we must.
Because byline inequality matters.
Reveling in aloneness
Work by photographer BLAIR RESIKA at Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown.
Medical-price secrecy alive and well in Mass.
By MARTHA BEBINGER For WBUR in cooperation with Kaiser Health News
Let’s say that you’re having trouble reading this. The words are a little fuzzy. You might need glasses or a new prescription. So you call to make an appointment for an eye exam and ask how much the visit will cost. You’re going to pay for the appointment because your insurance plan has a deductible that you haven’t met.
Seems like a simple question, but be prepared: There’s a good chance you won’t get a simple answer. A new study shows this is true even in Massachusetts where a 2012 healthcare-cost control law requires that hospitals and doctors provide patients with the price of a test, exam or treatment within two business days of the request.
“Sometimes people were downright rude,” says Barbara Anthony, a senior fellow in health care at the Pioneer Institute. “Other times, staff said they weren’t allowed to give price information over the phone.”
The Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based public-policy research group, called the offices of 96 dentists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists and gastroenterologists across the state last month, asking for the price of five basic services.
The results show that prices vary widely. But getting the information wasn’t easy.
Dentists tended to have prices handy and offer them without resistance, said Anthony, the study’s author. “Ophthalmologists were pretty good. Dermatologists were problematic. Their staffs did not know that there is a law in place.”
Anthony, who was the undersecretary for consumer affairs in Massachusetts when the law took effect, says the fact that some offices she contacted refused to provide price information is very disappointing.
Anthony says medical office personnel need more training so that “when someone calls they aren’t treated like they just landed from the moon.” She asks, if some offices can provide prices, then why can’t everyone in the industry?
It’s not that simple, says Dr. Dennis Dimitri, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, who acknowledges the need to educate front office staff. He says physicians in small practices have more control over the fees they charge, while physicians in large group practices may not know what the billing office will charge for each visit or test.
And then there’s the fact that doctors negotiate different rates for their work with each insurer and are rarely paid the charge they might quote a patient. “It’s the complexity of the payment system that makes this so difficult,” Dimitri says.
To avoid that complexity, Anthony asked for the price a patient without insurance would pay. She and her team still had a hard time.
Finding the price of colonoscopy took three to 10 days, said Anthony, and took at least three phone calls because the total cost of this test may include fees from the gastroenterologist, an anesthesiologist and the facility where the test takes place.
There is no penalty in the state law for hospitals or doctors who give inaccurate prices or don’t tell patients how much something will cost. Anthony says the attorney general could hold those providers in violation of state consumer protection laws.
“Access to high quality, affordable healthcare remains a priority for our office. We look forward to reviewing the report,” said Christopher Loh, spokesman for Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Maura Healey.
Gov. Charlie Baker, a longtime supporter of making healthcare costs more transparent, said during his campaign last year that he would ask hospitals to begin posting their prices. A Baker aide says the governor is looking at various ways to make prices more accessible for consumers including, but not limited to, a price list at hospitals and physician offices.
Patients who have health insurance could also try to find the price of a medical service through their health plan. The state law requires that insurers post real-time prices online. But none of the state’s top three health plans earned better than a C for their online health care shopping tools in a review out last month.
Insurers have pledged to improve their sites. Demand is not high so far, but that may be changing as more employers switch to health plans with high deductibles or co-pays that are higher at high-cost hospitals.
Dimitri says many doctors see the value of giving patients prices when they ask for them.
“We don’t want patients to not get the care they need because they’re afraid it’s too expensive,” Dimitri said, but “it’s reasonable for patients to understand the cost of their own care and ask, ‘Is this something that is really necessary? Is there a way to do this that will still be of good quality but not as expensive?’ ”
That conversation, says Dimitri, “will lead to better control of the cost of care in the future.”
This story is part of a reporting partnership that includes WBUR, NPR and Kaiser Health News.
Don Pesci: Toward a state zoning board in Conn.
The Stamford Advocate puts it this way: “[Governor Dannel] Malloy has proposed House Bill 6851 now before the Legislature. It would create an 11-member quasi-public agency and give it control of train station projects statewide.
“The agency would be called the Connecticut Transit Corridor Development Authority. Four members would be appointed by the governor and three by other political leaders in the Legislature. The other four members would be state commissioners, whose jobs are bestowed by the governor.
“The new authority would have the power to seize property within half a mile of any train station, enter into contracts with private developers, build what projects it chose and sell bonds to finance them.”
“According to the bill, the authority would "ensure that development near transit stations occurs more quickly and in concert with statewide transportation initiatives."
“The authority would have no obligation to city leaders except to ‘coordinate.’ Mayors could not vote on projects but would be ‘consulted.’"
But for a sharp-eyed legislator, State Rep. Gail Lavielle of Wilton, the bill might have passed through the usual legislative process without much fuss or notice.
Mrs. Lavielle asked DOT Commissioner Jim Redeker whether he was aware of the bill. Nope – never heard of it.
Scholars now tell us that Otto Von Bismark, the Iron Chancellor of Germany, did NOT say, “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” But Bismark, who knew how to turn a phrase, very easily could have said it. The making of laws in other than a totalitarian state is not a pretty process. In a one-party state like Connecticut, it is fairly easy for the dominant party to stick a pig in a poke and slide it, unobserved, through the sausage making machine.
Governor Dannel Malloy has a genius for opacity and secrecy. But this pig, thanks largely to Mrs. Lavielle, is now out of the poke, squealing about the countryside. House Bill 6851 simply replaces the operations of municipal zoning boards with the equivalent of a state zoning board, and the noise it has made in Stamford, Mr. Malloy’s old stomping grounds when he was Mayor of the city from 1995 to 2009, is raucous and rebellious. As Stamford Mayor, Mr. Malloy was not on good terms with opposition to his authoritarian rule, but he may have met his match in Stamford Zoning Board member Barry Michelson, who is not alone in considering House Bill 6851 an undemocratic land grab and a reckless abridgment of local control.
The intent of the bill is clear on the face of it. “This means,” Mr. Michelson said, “the state doesn't want local folks to control their development as they see fit. They want to tell local folks what they feel is in the best interest of local folks."
And who is “they”? According to the bill, four members of the Board are appointed by Mr. Malloy, three by political leaders in the Democratic dominated General Assembly, and the remaining four are state commissioners who serve at the behest of Mr. Malloy. It is Mr. Malloy who will control the decisions made by the new state zoning board. These decisions, unlike those of a municipal zoning board, need not be affirmed at public hearings. The new zoning process is on auto pilot; all land within a half mile of any train station – on both side of the track – may be seized by a state that does not wish to observe the niceties of eminent domain possession. The bill carves out a corridor one half mile on both sides of a rail station in which municipal zoning laws are inoperative, legislators are deprived of representing the interests of businesses people in their districts, and property is treated as if it belonged to the state which, under the auspices House Bill 6851, rents the property at will to its nominal owners.
Even Bismarck in all his glory would have flinched in the presence of such an arrogant, undemocratic and likely unconstitutional raid on private property. The ownership of property and the disposition of property are married together in such a way as to be indivisible. The person – or in this case the gubernatorial board invested with kingly powers – who may dispose of the property is the true owner of it. And the ownership of property is no little thing under constitutional governance, because it is bound up with “the inalienable” rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, “among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.”
The Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason and adopted in 1776, makes plain the vital connection between property rights and happiness: “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Owing to Mrs. Lavielle’s timely intervention, the bill has been sent back to the legislative shop for much needed repairs.
Giants from childhood
Sculpture by PENELOPE JENCKS, at Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown.
She has been creating oversized sculptures that depict naked adults who are middle aged and older. The gallery says her idea is for the figures "to have the same relationship to the viewer as her own parents and parents' friends did to her when she was a child.''
That reminds me: I was a party on a porch in South Dartmouth, Mass., the other day. I was much enjoying talking with all these interesting old people. Then I remembered, with a start, that they're my contemporaries.
The old cliche about having young children came to mind: "the days are long and the years are short.''
Her Iceland and mine
From the "My Iceland'' show, by LAURA MARCONI, at the Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery, Center Sandwich, N.H.
I remember the bizarre beauty of Iceland from a stopover I made there in 1974 via Icelandic Airlines, which offered the cheapest flights to Europe.
The catches were that you had to stop in Iceland and (the Icelanders hoped) buy something there and that the flights to Europe all terminated in Luxembourg, a charming duchy but from which you had to get to where you really wanted to go, such as Paris.
-- Robert Whitcomb
The stadium scam: Read 'Field of Schemes'
Don't believe any promises about a Providence stadium deal being "revenue neutral.'' All deals for professional sports stadiums are overwhelmingly for the benefit of the team owners. This note was sent along to me to respond to the attempt by Rhode Island House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and his pals to cheat the public with a deal to put a baseball stadium in prime land in downtown Providence. They have thought that Rhode Islanders were too stupid and/or passive to stop this special-interest scam.
"A message for those elected officials still supporting the PawSox stadium deal: With all the data and analysis now available ) a ‘yes’ vote on a stadium deal allows for only one explanation. You can no longer run your mouth about it being good for business (see Forbes, see WSJ). And you can no longer pretend it will encourage development in the neighborhood and benefit anyone but the owners (see sports economist Victor Matheson and John Oliver.) -- and, ultimately, their political friends.
"Still not convinced and need a book for the beach? Try “Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profits” by Neil deMause and Joanna Cagan. It came out in 2008!''
"Field of Schemes is a play-by-play account of how the drive for new sports stadiums and arenas drains $2 billion a year from public treasuries for the sake of private profit. While the millionaires who own sports franchises have seen the value of their assets soar under this scheme, taxpayers, urban residents, and sports fans have all come out losers, forced to pay both higher taxes and higher ticket prices for seats that, thanks to the layers of luxury seating that typify new stadiums, usually offer a worse view of the action.''
Robert Whitcomb: Private-sector passenger rail?
Since the disappearance of private-sector passenger rail service decades ago, intrepid entrepreneurs have tried to bring it back. None have succeeded.
However, in some densely populated places, passenger rail has even thrived in the public sector, at least as measured by passenger volume. This mostly means Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor and several major cities’ long-established commuter-rail networks. But new commuter rail is also catching on in some unlikely places, including such Sunbelt cities as Dallas and Phoenix, which now have popular light-rail systems.
Now, with an aging population, the proliferation of digital devices that many people would prefer to stare at rather than at the road and the increasing unpleasantness of traveling on America’s decaying highway infrastructure amidst texting and angry drivers, private passenger rail looks more capitalistically attractive.
Consider All Aboard Florida, a company that plans to offer extensive rail service starting in 2017. It will connect Miami and Orlando in just under three hours, with stops in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
Its advertising copy eloquently describes commuter rail’s allure in populous areas: “{Y}ou can turn your stressful daily {car} commute into a productive or peaceful time by choosing to take the train instead of driving your car. By becoming a train commuter, you’ll also help the economy and environment while you’re at it.’’
Southern New England, like much of Florida, is densely populated, with some unused or underused rail rights of way. So our entrepreneurs occasionally propose private passenger rail for routes not served by Amtrak or such regional mass-transit organizations as Metro North and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
Consider the Worcester-Providence route, on which a new company called the Boston Surface Railroad Co. wants to start operating commuter rail service in 2017 on the (now freight-only) Providence and Worcester Railroad’s tracks. Most of the commuters going to work would be traveling from the Worcester area, via Woonsocket, where there would be a stop, to Greater Providence. While Providence itself has fewer people -- about 178,000 -- than Worcester (about 183,000), the two-state Providence metro area -- about 1.6 million -- is much bigger than the latter’s metro area’s about 813,000.
The density is there for rail service. That the region has an older population than the national average and frequent bad winter weather also give the idea a lift.
But the old rail line needs to be upgraded if the trips are to be made fast enough to lure many travelers. The company hopes to offer a one-way time of about 70 minutes on a route that you can drive in about 45 minutes in moderate traffic and clement weather. That could be a killer.
What this project and similar ones need is new welded track, rebuilt rail beds (with help of public money?) and some entirely new routes to make service competitive with car-driving times. We need more passenger and duel-purpose passenger-freight rail lines, not more highways. But getting them will be tough in a country that so blithely tolerates crumbling transportation infrastructure and has a deeply entrenched libertarian commuting habit of a single person driving long distances to work. Unless gasoline tops $5 a gallon and stays there for at least a year, it’s hard to see millions of Americans deciding that they’ll quit their cars to take the train.
Still, I applaud the project’s CEO, Vincent Bono, and hope that thousands of commuters will give his railroad a try. While the trip would be long, think of how much uninterrupted Web surfing (free Wi-Fi!), reading and snoozing you could get on these trains, with their reclining seats.
xxx
An Aug. 10 USA Today story was headlined “Smaller cities emerge among top picks for biz meetings.’’ Depressingly, Providence was not on the list of the top 50 places for “meetings and events’’ in 2015, say evaluations by Cvent. But many far less interesting and attractive places were.
The reasons probably include Rhode Island’s under-funded and balkanized self-promotion and the long delay (now finally being addressed) in building a longer runway at T.F. Green Airport.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a Providence-based editor, writer and consultant, oversees newenglanddiary.com and is a partner in Cambridge Management Group, (cmg625.com), a healthcare consultancy, and a fellow at the Pell Center. He used to be the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal and the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, among other jobs.
Jim Hightower: National Park Service is selling its soul
While Americans celebrate the 100th anniversary of our National Park Service, America’s so-called “leaders” are aggressively converting these jewels of the common good into just another corporate cash cow.
This commercialization started with “co-branding” agreements,rationalized by NPS officials as “aligning the economic and historical legacies” of parks with advertisers. In other words, they’re selling the Park Service’s proud public brand…as well as its soul.
First in line was Coca-Cola. A few years back, the multibillion-dollar colossus became a “Proud Partner” of our National Parks by making a mere $2.5 million tax-deductible donation to support their stewardship.
In return, Coke got exclusive rights to use park logos in its ads — and it was allowed to veto the Park Service’s plan to ban sales of bottled water in the Grand Canyon.
Then this April, the Park Service abandoned its policy of rejecting any ties to alcohol products when Anheuser-Busch became another proud partner by making its own $2.5 million tax-deductible “gift.”Disposable plastic bottles are that park’s biggest source of trash, but Coke owns the Dasani brand of water, so bye-bye ban. Public outrage forced officials to reverse this crass move, but the agency’s integrity has yet to recover.
In turn, the Budweiser brand got the Statue of Liberty. Not literally, but symbolically: Bud now has the right to plaster Lady Liberty, an iconic symbol of the United States itself, on its cans.
And get a whiff of this: In return for a big contribution, the government authorized Air Wick to market a new fragrance collection as being “uniquely inspired by America’s national parks.”
The commercialization of these priceless public places isn’t creeping — it’s running rampant.
Mixing memory, desire and coal dust
"The seasons with Chandelier'' (coal dust on archival digital photo), by LAUREN EWING, in the show "Eight Artists,'' at The Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, Mass., through Aug. 26.
The gallery says she addresses "the relationship of individuals to institutions, the collapse of nature into culture and the vast construct of material culture in relation to memory and desire.''
A lot to hang on a chandelier. Don't stand below!
Chris Powell: Repealing death penalty by legal contrivance
Having determined four years ago that capital punishment was constitutional in Connecticut, the state Supreme Court decided Aug. 13 that it isn't constitutional anymore, because of a law passed three years ago that repealed capital punishment for new offenses while confirming the death sentences already pending. The court found Aug. 13 that the new law signified a consensus in society that capital punishment is indecent and that this makes the pending death sentences "cruel and unusual" and thus unconstitutional.
No all-star first baseman ever accomplished such a stretch.
In fact, the new law was a political compromise recognizing that there was no consensus against capital punishment in Connecticut -- that, as polls long have shown and as the court recognized four years ago, most people support capital punishment in general; that even more support it in regard to the 11 murderers whose death sentences were pending and whose guilt was unquestioned; that many people regret the expense incurred by the long appeals of death sentences; that many people fear that death sentences might be imposed mistakenly in the future; and that opinion so favors capital punishment that repeal could be arranged only by splitting the difference.
As Gov. Dannel Malloy put it three years ago: "Any legislation I would sign would be prospective -- out into the future." The governor even "guaranteed" that any repeal of capital punishment would not affect death sentences imposed for the murder of the Petit family in Cheshire, an atrocity that shook the state.
A similar "guarantee" was offered by legislators advocating the repeal legislation, like then-Sen. Edward Meyer, (D.-Guilford), who said: "It doesn't affect the 11 inmates who are on Death Row right now." Then-Sen. Edith Prague (D.-Columbia), said she would not support repeal if it saved the perpetrators of the Cheshire atrocity.
Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane knew better. He warned the legislature that the state Supreme Court would use any "prospective" repeal of capital punishment to undo all the pending death sentences as well. Indeed, that seemed to be the secret hope of many of the legislation's advocates -- that they could pretend to their constituents to be keeping the pending death sentences and the Supreme Court would take the responsibility for getting rid of them.
Writing for the court's 4-3 majority, Justice Richard Palmer acknowledged suspicion that such deception was the strategy of the repealers all along. Palmer even argued that the governor and legislators didn't really mean the assurances they gave the state about splitting the difference, that they really were part of the supposed consensus against capital punishment in all circumstances, including the circumstances in which the governor and legislators were assuring the state that death sentences would be imposed.
That was enough to cause the court's majority to invoke the constitutional doctrine most loved by judicial supremacists -- that "evolving standards of decency" let courts rewrite constitutions without benefit of public participation, so that, for example, a constitution that explicitly recognizes capital punishment, as Connecticut's does, can be cleansed of it by applying a phrase, "cruel and usual," that doesn't appear in that constitution but rather in the federal constitution, though the latter's arbiter, the U.S. Supreme Court, construes the phrase not to forbid capital punishment.
Judicial imperialism as it is, the Aug. 13 decision was no surprise. For 30 years Connecticut's Supreme Court has been a "results-oriented" court, a court that first chooses the policy it favors and then contrives a judicial rationale for it, the facts of the case, the law, and precedent notwithstanding. The only real change here since the court upheld capital punishment four years ago has been in the court's own composition -- the addition of another liberal justice, the former state senator and Malloy aide Andrew J. McDonald.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Charles Chieppo: Teacher-development programs a waste
BOSTON Given that it's become a truism that teacher quality affects student learning more than any other variable within the four walls of a school, the results of a new study of teachers' professional-development programs are particularly troubling. There are two main takeaways from the report by TNTP, a nonprofit formerly known as The New Teacher Project: Taxpayers invest a lot more resources in teacher-development programs than previously thought, and there is no link between these programs and improved classroom performance.
That second finding, in particular, will have a positive impact if it prompts school districts to clearly define what teacher effectiveness looks like and to measure professional-development programs in terms of how they help teachers get closer to that goal.
The study, entitled "The Mirage," was based on surveys of 10,000 teachers and 500 school leaders, along with interviews with more than 100 staff involved in teacher development. The surveys and interviews were conducted in three large school districts and a mid-sized charter-school network.
Improvements in performance that were found seemed to stem more from learning the job, almost invariably coming in the first few years of a teacher's career. The difference in effectiveness between the average fifth-year teacher compared to a rookie was more than nine times greater than the difference between the average fifth-year teacher and those in their 20th year.
There is plenty of room to improve. Using multiple measures such as teacher evaluations, classroom observation and student test scores, TNTP rated about half the teachers in their 10th year or beyond as below "effective" in core instructional practices such as developing students' critical thinking.
For this to change, districts need to begin by improving communication with teachers about their performance and areas where improvement is needed. The vast majority of teachers studied received ratings from their districts or charter operator of "meeting expectations" or better. Amazingly, fewer than half the teachers surveyed agreed that they had any weaknesses in their performance. Even among the few teachers who earned low ratings from their own school districts, 60 percent gave themselves high performance ratings.
The line from the study that jumps off the page is that the findings suggest "a pervasive culture of low expectations for teacher development and performance."
The problems are certainly not due to a lack of resources. The districts and charter-school network that were the focus of the study spent nearly $18,000 per teacher per year on professional development. They also dedicated 19 full school days, about 10 percent of a typical school year, to the programs. Based on these findings, TNTP estimates that the 50 largest U.S. school districts alone spend about $8 billion annually on teacher development, far more than was previously thought.
TNTP makes several common-sense recommendations for fixing the problem. In addition to giving teachers a much better picture of their own performance and progress, districts must explore alternative approaches to professional development. They should evaluate the effectiveness of all teacher-development programs based on the programs' ability to yield measurable progress toward a clearly defined standard for teaching and student learning. Resources should be reallocated to the programs that yield the greatest improvement.
"The Mirage" is no outlier. Over the last decade, two federally funded studies of teacher-development programs reached similar conclusions. School leaders should heed TNTP's recommendations, which would make for a good start toward changing that "pervasive culture of low expectations."
Charles Chieppo (Charlie_Chieppo@hks.harvard.edu) is a research fellow at the Ash Center in Harvard's Kennedy School. This piece originated on the Web site of Governing magazine (governing.com).
Partners invading the urgent-care-clinic industry
It also poses a threat to nearby, Rhode Island-based CVS, whose drugstores are rapidly adding urgent-care centers. The prestige of Partners' famous hospitals may take some business away from CVS's urgent-care centers, which it calls MinuteClinics. It may also lighten the load a bit in some area hospitals' emergency rooms.
Partners is late to urgent care in Massachusetts. Steward Health Care System, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Lahey Health, and others are already in the business, either directly or with partners, The Boston Globe reports.
But, The Globe reports, "Partners has advantages in its size and reputation. It is the parent of 10 hospitals, including Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s, and has 6,000 doctors, the largest network in the state. It also is planning more urgent care locations than most of its competitors.''
“This is more than a pilot for us,” said Dr. Gregg S. Meyer, chief clinical officer of Partners, told The Globe. “These are meant to be extensions of availability and convenience for patients. We know we are not always as available as possible for our patients.”