AS MASSACHUSETTS CONTENDS with an enormous crisis of housing affordability and availability, building more homes to bring supply into alignment with demand is essential. Even when market conditions are good, this has been a challenge for the state, with housing starts lagging far behind what’s needed to support a growing population.  

But things are poised to get even more difficult. The number of housing units permitted has already fallen by nearly 30 percent over the past three years, and the housing construction pipeline could become even more constrained by Trump administration policies if tariffs on materials and reductions in the immigrant workforce drive construction costs even higher.  

Against that backdrop, it will become even more important to find ways to make more efficient use of the state’s existing housing stock. That’s where there’s a role for the Special Commission on Senior Housing, which was created by the Affordable Homes Act signed last year by Gov. Maura Healey.  

The commission held its first meeting in late March. As it works to recommend policies, programs, and investments to expand the supply of housing for seniors, devising strategies to help older adults move into smaller homes should also be high on the commission’s agenda.  

Effective downsizing strategies would give more seniors the chance to live in homes that are easier and less expensive to maintain, while freeing up larger homes for Millennials and Gen Z-ers stuck in one- and two-bedroom apartments. To be sure, not every senior will want to downsize. It is just as important therefore to put equal thought into approaches that help seniors who want to stay in larger homes plan for how to maintain them, both for their safety and well-being and so these homes can eventually be passed down to the next generation in relatively good repair. 

A comprehensive plan that gives seniors in larger homes a variety of options makes sense. But it can also be a fraught topic. Two decades ago, then-Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey drew blowback with the mere suggestion that helping “overhoused” seniors move to smaller quarters fit with Gov. Mitt Romney’s prudent approach to smart growth. 

At the time, it was dubbed “smart policy and bad politics,” but with the right approach it doesn’t have to present that challenging tradeoff.  

In hindsight, Kerry Healey was right to start this conversation more than 20 years ago. Census data reveal the extent to which this problem has magnified over the years by giving us a look at who has traditionally lived in the state’s family-sized homes across the generations.  

In 1980, only about one-third of older households (those headed by an adult who was 65 or older) occupied a home with three or more bedrooms; today, more than half of households headed by an adult age 65 or older still live in these family-sized homes.  

We might chalk this trend up to homes generally getting larger in recent decades. But the data show a striking pattern—younger households in Massachusetts are far less likely to occupy a family-sized home today than they were four decades ago.  

Over 70 percent of the 36-to-45-year-old cohort had a home with three or more bedrooms in 1980. Now the figure is down to around 60 percent for this age group. For 26-to-35-year-olds, there has been an 8 percentage point decline in family-sized home occupancy since 1980. Those in their prime childrearing age today live in three-bedroom homes at about the same rate as the 65+ cohort did four decades ago.  

To a degree, these patterns reflect recent generations delaying marriage, putting off having kids, and ultimately giving birth to fewer children. But those trends are endogenous to the housing market problem: The inability to afford housing is shaping household formation decisions and it is certainly changing the mix of family households in Massachusetts through migration.  

With school enrollments falling and workforce challenges looming, it is important to recognize that the largest share (26 percent) of family-sized homes in Massachusetts are now occupied by those in the 65 and over age bracket. If the same share of older Massachusetts residents were living in family-sized homes today as in 1980, Massachusetts would have an additional 142,000 properties with three or more bedrooms for young families to occupy on the market.  

Of course, this would mean more seniors living in existing smaller homes. But to put that number of family-sized homes in perspective, consider that the Healey administration has said 222,000 new housing units are needed over the next decade to stabilize the market and rein in costs.  

To be sure, many seniors are just fine with their larger homes, and no one should pressure these residents to make a change. But two decades after this issue was raised and briefly became the subject of public debate and scrutiny, anecdotal reports suggest many older adults want to downsize.  

The new commission can provide much needed leadership by helping us better understand the various obstacles faced by seniors who may wish to make a move. Maybe it’s moving costs, tax and estate planning concerns, or the idea of packing and setting up camp somewhere new is just too overwhelming. It could also be that they don’t want to leave friends and loved ones behind, and there is a lack of smaller housing units in their communities.  

A quick public opinion poll could give housing leaders a better handle on these issues and help guide policy recommendations. With limited resources and many challenges, data insight to make smarter decisions has become even more paramount as we work to tackle the state’s housing crisis on multiple fronts.   

Ben Forman is director and Elise Rapoza is senior research associate at the MassINC Policy Center.

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MASSACHUSETTS IS POCKMARKED by a web of correctional facilities, 484 buildings in total with nearly 10 million square feet of space among them. Picture the Hancock, the Pru, the Boston Convention Center, the Hynes Convention Center, the DCU Center, and the MassMutual Center. Together, these cavernous buildings couldn’t hold half of the space contained in our prisons and jails.   

This mountain of carceral real estate is the product of tough on crime laws, which tripled Massachusetts’s incarceration rate between the 1980s and 2000s. In recent years, crime prevention, treatment, and other level-headed approaches to public safety have taken hold. These evidence-based practices are keeping thousands of people out of prison each year. As a result, correctional facilities across the state now sit half-empty. Yet the cost of maintaining and operating them keeps rising—a year at a state prison is approaching $100,000, about $25,000 more than a year at Harvard.  

In 2019, the Legislature formed the Special Commission on Correctional Funding to look at how Massachusetts completes its break with tough on crime policies from a facilities standpoint. The panel recently issued a long-awaited report.  

For the first time, the public can see the number of housing units within each building, the various functions they serve (e.g., mental health treatment), how many beds they contain, and the number of inmates currently occupying them. This information is invaluable because closing units is the key to reducing marginal costs as inmate populations fall. At present, most units continue to operate at half of their capacity. With the pandemic subsiding and the social distancing of inmates no longer necessary, two considerations will dictate how many units should close. 

The first is whether operating below capacity significantly benefits inmate well-being and staff safety. During the crowded tough on crime days, some units were built to hold more beds than ideal. Filling these units to capacity simply to allow others to close would be counterproductive.  

The second major factor is the need for specialized units. In recent years, agencies have responded to calls for more rehabilitation with separate housing units for young adults, veterans, inmates with serious mental illness, and those receiving medication-assisted treatment for addiction. While segmentation may produce significant benefits, the proliferation of specialized units produces large inefficiencies from a space perspective. There are also significant staffing inefficiencies given the program managers and clinicians that these units require.   

As an interim recommendation, the commission suggests facilities should provide regular updates on the number of inmates in each housing unit. This is a logical first step to pinpoint opportunities for consolidation. However, reducing the footprint of the state’s corrections system will require more than just transparent reporting. The next governor must provide executive leadership. 

Voters concerned about the intersection of criminal justice and behavioral health must press candidates to describe how they would transform these systems. Reforms intended to keep individuals with severe mental illness and substance use disorders out of prisons and jails are inadvertently leaving many of them on the streets without adequate care. So long as the Commonwealth continues to invest in correctional facilities that are no longer needed, Massachusetts will have more difficulty finding money to build and maintain residential treatment facilities outside of the criminal justice system. This makes the will to close surplus correctional facilities a vital qualification for any leader pledging to solve the sorts of problems manifested at Mass. and Cass in Boston.   

Executive leadership is also required to ensure that every correctional facility in Massachusetts provides quality recidivism reduction services. The commission found that state and county correctional agencies offer dozens of programs on paper. However, there is little information to determine how these offerings align with the criminogenic risks and needs of inmates, how many inmates receive them, and the impact of these programs on recidivism. This finding is deeply troubling because data are the lifeblood of evidence-based practice. Collecting information to troubleshoot and continuously improve is particularly vital in correctional agencies, where service quality has life and death implications for the inmates, agency staff, and the general public. 

To ensure that all inmates return to our communities positioned for success, the commission suggested the Commonwealth consider a new office to oversee the administration of recidivism reduction programs in correctional facilities statewide. While this may sound like bloated bureaucracy, a centralized office could produce real savings by consolidating program management functions, increasing both efficiency and performance. For this to occur, the next governor must make a strong commitment to advancing evidence-based correctional practices across the state.  

With the Legislature’s leadership, Massachusetts has made considerable progress correcting course on failed tough on crime policies. Prison populations have fallen sharply. Despite the extreme stress imposed by the pandemic, crime remains low, largely due to these reforms and significant investments that the Legislature has made in housing, job training, and community health. The commission’s report provides the insight needed to double down on what’s working. All that’s required now is a new governor with the courage and conviction to take the reins. 

Ben Forman is the research director of MassINC, the nonprofit research organization that is also the corporate parent of  CommonWealth. He served as a member of the Special Commission on Correctional Funding.  

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LAST MONTH, members of the MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board took one last stand to advance a low-income fare program before their tenure over the agency expired. The board has valiantly prodded the agency to provide discounts to low-income riders for a number of years, but progress remained elusive. In a final vote, board members chose to instruct agency staff to prepare scenarios for a pilot program. Members reluctantly opted for this step out of fear that bolder action was inappropriate at time when they were handing over governance to some new entity that still hasn’t been determined yet.

The decision was flawed because it failed to acknowledge the varying levels of urgency and clear cost-benefit distinctions between commuter rail and bus and subway service. If we want a stronger, more equitable post-pandemic Commonwealth, discounting commuter rail fares for low-income residents is as close to a no-brainer as they come.

Control board Chair Joseph Aiello prefaced the discussion of a pilot program by noting how a “K-shaped” recovery is increasing inequality beyond already troublingly high pre-pandemic levels. This imbalance is most visible in hard-hit Gateway Cities. As of May, 183,000 Gateway City residents remained out of work. The vast majority (110,000) of these unemployed workers live in communities served by MBTA commuter rail.

Most of these residents are low-wage workers who could never afford monthly commuter rail passes, which cost almost $300 per month for close-in Gateway Cities such as Brockton and Lynn and nearly $400 per month for end-of-the-line communities such as Fitchburg and Worcester. At these prices, you could lease a luxury vehicle, but residents clearly don’t have the funds to make that substitution; one out five live in households without any car at all.

Many of these transit-dependent residents are relatively new arrivals, priced out of Boston neighborhoods in recent years. In their former lives, they possibly could have paid $90 a month for unlimited use of the bus or subway, but now they depend on buses operated by regional transit agencies with sporadic service. In desperation, they often turned to Uber or Lyft, but that’s harder now with rideshare prices soaring.

The difficulty Gateway City residents have making it to jobs that have slowly moved outward to suburban office and industrial parks is one of the major reasons why many of these communities struggle with troublingly low labor force participation rates. This “spatial mismatch” between where jobs are located and where residents live has been an especially large challenge in Fall River and New Bedford. The MBTA is spending over a billion dollars to add service to these communities. With the current fare structure, this extension is an inexplicable investment decision (unless the move is intended entirely as a strategy to generate gentrification).

There are two primary obstacles to implementing a discounted fare program: providing the extra capacity to serve additional riders and replacing lost revenue from current riders. These are significant hurdles for the agency to overcome for bus and subway service. However, these problems simply don’t apply to commuter rail.

At the board’s May meeting, MBTA staff indicated the commuter rail had sufficient capacity to carry more riders without incurring additional expenses. Lost revenue isn’t an issue either. Prior to the pandemic, the MBTA estimates just 2,000 low-income riders utilized commuter rail. A low-income fare would open the travel option to hundreds of thousands of low-income workers. Even if they paid heavily discounted fares, these new riders would provide a significant source of new revenue for the system.

In all of their analyses, the MBTA has never considered this significant net new revenue opportunity. Instead, they publish figures suggesting the system would lose a few million dollars in fare revenue based on current ridership. At the May presentation, the staff explained that it would be difficult to consider revenue collected from new riders because it would take years for low-income households to make residential moves to station areas. At a time when tens of thousands of Gateway City residents live within a short distance of dozens of mostly empty diesel trains passing through their communities each day, this analysis shows a painful lack of awareness of the economic and environmental justice challenges presented by the current fare structure.

Assuming the T’s next governing board gathers in the fall, the agency staff will likely present them with plans to establish a pilot program that would enroll a few thousand riders and run for less than a year. A limited test like this will tell us little about how residents will alter their job search in response to affordable commuter rail service. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Massachusetts residents who suffered heavy losses in the pandemic and who remain at-risk in an unequal recovery will still be stuck watching trains go by that they cannot afford to ride.\

This is not a matter of finances or technical feasibility. It simply comes down to vision and will. Achieving an equitable recovery will demand action from leaders who are in position to bring about the necessary change. The MBTA’s new board members should come to their first meeting prepared to push the agency away from a pilot and toward full implementation of a discounted commuter rail fare program.

Ben Forman is the research director of MassINC, the nonprofit research organization that is also the corporate parent of CommonWealth.

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STUDENTS FROM FAMILIES with financial means are two and half times more likely to earn a college degree in Massachusetts than students who come from low-income families. This disparity isn’t breaking news, nor are the consequences, which include high levels of income inequality and enormous racial wealth gaps.

What is new is that there is actually something, now backed by strong evidence, that we can do about it.

Early college programs, which let students pursue college-level coursework and gain post-secondary credits while still in high school, represent a rare example of a straightforward approach that can take a large chunk out of the growing post-secondary completion gap.

In the education sphere, we often struggle to find scalable interventions that make a meaningful difference in addressing long-standing challenges. If we want a less divided post-pandemic Commonwealth, expanding the state’s budding Early College Initiative is a tangible way to give more students an equal shot at a college degree. The fate of the initiative in the House budget next week will provide an important test of our resolve.

Like so many innovations in education, the concept of designing high schools to help students transition to college-level coursework has roots in Massachusetts. In 1966, Simon’s Rock early college opened in Great Barrington. The private institution sought to demonstrate that teenagers could tackle far more demanding work than the typical high school curriculum asked of them. Years later, Bard College (which acquired Simon’s Rock in the 1980s) recognized the model’s promise to help underserved students succeed in higher education. Beginning in New York City, and expanding over time to Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark, New Orleans, and Washington, DC, Bard built a network of early college high schools.

Through trial and error, these schools transformed the high school experience to address multiple challenges that combine to create a formidable barrier to college completion. Across the country, there are now hundreds of early college high schools that partner with local colleges and universities to deliver a very specific formula that positions underserved students for post-secondary success.

By challenging students to tackle more rigorous coursework in high school, and providing intensive advising, tutoring, and counseling, early colleges build academic skills, confidence, and direction. Students earn a significant number of transferable credits for free, significantly reducing the total cost of college. Early colleges also offer a variety of fields of study, integrating career exploration and internships to make the coursework more relevant and give students solid pathways to rewarding employment opportunities in growing industries.

Nationally, two separate randomized controlled trials have found that this model doubles post-secondary completion rates for low-income students and students of color. While providing early college costs a few thousand dollars more per student than the traditional high school format, rigorous estimates suggest each dollar invested returns $15 in benefits.

Massachusetts may have given birth to the early college concept, but it trails far behind leading states when it comes to leveraging it to increase equity in higher education. North Carolina and Texas put the full might of their public higher education systems behind the approach, making the opportunity available to tens of thousands of students in just a few short years. In 2016, the boards of higher education and elementary and secondary education passed a joint resolution calling for a strategic effort to grow early college in Massachusetts.

A new MassINC study evaluating the progress of this effort finds early college is making a tremendous difference for those who are fortunate enough to have an opportunity to participate. Students in the 35 state-designated early college high schools are 53 percent more likely than their peers to enroll in college immediately after high school and remain persistently enrolled two years later. However, these programs must scale dramatically to have impact in the aggregate. At present, they serve less than 2 percent of students of color and just 1 percent of low-income students in Massachusetts.

Up until now, lack of funding has been the primary obstacle preventing far more students from benefiting from early college. With billions of dollars in one-time federal recovery aid flowing into Massachusetts, we have an extraordinary opportunity to quickly expand access to early college to tens of thousands of high school students around the state. School districts can draw on these resources to cover additional expenses, including program administration, advising, tutoring, and transportation. When these federal resources are spent down, they can turn to state Student Opportunity Act aid, which is steadily ramping up each year, giving high-need districts significantly more funding to better serve students.

The only remaining obstacle preventing growth is predictable dollars to reimburse colleges and universities for the instructional expenses that they incur providing courses to high school students. Last year the Legislature made funds available to cover these costs in a particularly difficult budget. With programs expanding, next year the bill will increase by more than 50 percent to over $6 million. Setting a strong precedent of fully covering these expenses as they grow is critical to ensuring that school districts, colleges, and state government are aligned when it comes to executing on this strategic initiative.

Rep. Jeff Roy of Franklin, former chair of the higher education committee, filed amendments to ensure that the House budget fully funds early college. He is joined by Reps. Alice Peisch of Wellesley and David Rogers of Cambridge, current co-chairs of the education and higher education committees, and Rep. Kate Lipper-Garabedian of Melrose, who served in a leadership role at the Executive Office of Education before she was elected. Support for early college among these senior leaders shows a serious commitment in the legislative branch from a policy standpoint. Responding to a flood of community support, dozens of representatives have signed on as cosponsors of these amendments and leaders in the Senate are gearing up to advocate for early college in their branch.

As the budget debate begins, it is crucial to reflect on how Massachusetts built one of the world’s most knowledge-intensive economies without a parallel effort to address large disparities in access to higher education. This miscalculation has come at a real cost. When rigorous research reveals an effective remedy, we must act with urgency. In this spirit, we should all lean into the state’s Early College Initiative.

Ben Forman is the research director and Simone Ngongi-Lukula is an education equity fellow at MassINC, the public policy think tank that is publisher of CommonWealth.  They coauthored the report Early College as a Force for Equity in the Post-Pandemic Era.

The post It’s time to scale up early college in Mass. appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM rolled through state legislatures with unusual bipartisan support throughout the 2010s. There was rare consensus on what would happen: Rolling back tough-on-crime-era policies that spiked prison populations would generate savings, which could prudently be reinvested in behavioral health treatment and other services to reduce recidivism, which would drive down demand for prison beds further still.

While Republicans and Democrats remain committed to this basic formula in principle, in practice, most states have failed to realize and repurpose substantial savings. Many believe so-called justice reinvestment will meet the same fate in Massachusetts, especially given the absence of provisions to capture savings in the state’s 2018 criminal justice reform package.

Perhaps a new legislative commission charged with examining correctional expenditures will prove these prognosticators wrong. Chaired by state Sen. William Brownsberger of Belmont, an architect of the 2018 reform law, the commission is probing the budgets of the Department of Correction and 14 county sheriffs departments. While naysayers point to the lackluster record of recent criminal justice reform commissions, there are signs that this body could succeed. For starters, the group has been meeting regularly, providing the public with advance notice of meetings, and transparently sharing information on a website.

A major test will be how the commission tackles the data challenges it is bound to face. A 2013 report from a commission charged with exploring consolidation of sheriffs departments highlighted the “pressing need to identify and implement best practices in human resources management” in order to ensure more transparency and uniformity across agencies. Unfortunately, this need was left unaddressed.

Across the 14 sheriffs departments, there are thousands of different staff position titles, which makes it difficult to gauge what is happening and at what cost to taxpayers. To make matters worse, there is no consistent way to classify tens of millions of dollars in contracts to vendors providing various services.

MassINC has spent a considerable amount of energy trying to organize correctional payroll and expenditures figures such as they are. While our best efforts offer only a murky understanding of what’s happening in correctional facilities across the state, they give the commission a head start by raising two central questions.

First, why do nearly all of the sheriffs departments appear to be hiring additional correctional officers when their inmate populations have declined steadily since 2011? Payroll records obtained through the Office of the Comptroller’s CTHRU system indicate the 14 sheriffs departments added nearly 700 security and supervision staff between 2011 and 2019. This 17 percent increase in security and supervision headcount occurred over a period in which the number of individuals held in county correctional facilities fell by 24 percent. Adjusting for inflation, the additional hiring pushed expenditures on salary for security and supervision staff up by 30 percent, or $76 million, between 2011 and 2019.

The charts below show the largest increases were appropriately in Essex and Plymouth, where inmate-to-security and supervision staff ratios were, and continue to remain, higher relative to the other departments. But county sheriffs departments now have an average of just 1.8 inmates for each security and supervision staff member, down from 2.9 in 2011 and well below national averages.

Getting a handle on the appropriate number of security and supervision staff for each facility will be one of the most difficult issues for the commission to address. Perhaps facilities need these additional officers to allow inmates to spend more time out of their cells receiving services. It is also possible that many of these officers are working out of title, delivering services, as opposed to simply watching over inmates.

On the other hand, one could argue that as commitments fall and facilities have fewer inmates, administrators should close units and replace correctional officers providing security and supervision with professionals trained to deliver rehabilitative services (either by hiring new staff or using more of their budget appropriation to purchase services from outside providers).

Department of Correction staffing patterns suggest this kind of realignment is achievable. The agency responded to a 22 percent drop in its custodial population by reducing security and supervision staff by about 10 percent from 2011. However, closer analysis of the Comptroller’s payroll and contractual expenditure data suggest savings from these staff reductions went primarily to salary increases for incumbent workers, rather than additional hiring or procurement to provide more rehabilitative services.

This brings us to the second matter the commission must address. Do agencies have sufficient resources to provide rehabilitative services that prevent crime and save taxpayers money in the long run, and are they using their resources accordingly?

Sheriffs departments get the vast majority of their funding through individual line items in the state budget. As illustrated in the figure below, these line items appear to be wildly unequal. In fiscal year 2018, the most recent year for which complete expenditure figures are available, the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Department spent over $83,000 per inmate, more than double neighboring Bristol County, where expenditures were just shy of $40,000 per inmate. The interactive figure below shows how per inmate expenditures have changed over time. It is clear that these longstanding and relatively stable disparities are not driven by some facilities experiencing larger population declines than others in recent years.

A variety of other factors could explain these persistent differences in spending per inmate. For instance, some sheriffs may operate facilities with layouts that require more staff to secure. Others may have responsibilities outside of corrections, such as running regional 911 call centers.

Putting these factors aside, variation in actual spending on rehabilitative services across agencies suggests disparities in the state budget appropriation does mean some facilities have far less money to deliver rehabilitative services that prevent repeat offending.

Franklin County spent $8,566 per inmate on health services, but just to the south in Hampshire County health services expenditures were 40 percent lower at $5,050 per inmate. Suffolk ($8,371) and Middlesex ($5,140) counties show similarly wide disparities in health expenditure per inmate. The differences across agencies are even larger when comparing program services, a category that includes education, job training, counseling, and reentry support. On a per inmate basis, Franklin County ($5,468) spent 6½ times more on program services than Essex County ($831); inmates in Barnstable ($4,609) received three times more expenditures on program services than those in neighboring Bristol ($1,342).

Pointing to these disparities, some argue that electing sheriffs creates “justice by geography” and the state should provide individuals with the same standard of care by consolidating the agencies and managing them with professional staff. Others believe the sheriffs are the bright spots in Massachusetts, and the state-run Department of Correction is the entity most in need of an overhaul. Both sides in this argument rely on anecdote rather than evidence. If Massachusetts wants better results from justice reinvestment than other states have posted, the correctional expenditure commission must address the need for budgets based on reliable data, a consistent understanding of the evidence-based services all correctional facilities should uniformly provide, and the resources each facility requires to deliver them effectively.

Ben Forman is the research director of MassINC, the corporate parent of CommonWealth. Forman is a member of the Special Commission on Correctional Funding.

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GATEWAY CITY EDUCATORS returned to school following the winter break pinching themselves. Just before the holidays, Gov. Baker signed the Student Opportunity Act (SOA), a landmark bill that promises to deliver $1.4 billion annually in new state aid. Districts now have until April 1 to file spending plans with the state detailing how they will use the funds they will receive in increasing installments over the next three years. If state education commissioner Jeff Riley provides strong guidance with respect to how districts deploy these resources and monitor success, these documents will go a long way toward ensuring that schools maximize the opportunity the SOA presents. Here are five ideas to help the commissioner hone his thoughts.

First, offer guidance on what portion of the new funds should go to general unmet needs versus new strategic initiatives. Gateway City leaders will be under pressure to use new dollars to backfill basic needs, such as reducing class sizes and rehiring custodial staff, librarians, and nurses that were let go during the lean years. They will likely also encounter calls to raise salaries. Spending in these areas is not inappropriate. However, the intention of the SOA is to close opportunity gaps by offering disadvantaged students more robust learning experiences than ever. From the outset, schools and districts must devote some portion of the new funds to transformative initiatives.

Second, offer guidance on reserving funds for school-level initiatives. The SOA’s fast-approaching April 1 deadline will make it difficult for both schools and districts to identify and align strategic priorities. The risk here is districts will produce plans that encumber all of the anticipated new revenues for the next three years. This would be unfortunate. These new funds are an opportunity for school communities to improve their planning processes and assume more autonomy for identifying and meeting their unique needs and aspirations.

Districts can empower principals and school councils to rise to the opportunity the SOA presents by reserving a portion of the new dollars for strategic initiatives established independently by each school over the coming year.

Third, clarify that schools and districts have the freedom to set their own goals and determine multiple measures to demonstrate their progress. The SOA presents an ideal moment to depart from past practice. Standardized test scores and graduation rates, the baseline performance measures dictated by state and federal law, have been the overwhelming focus of school improvement efforts for the past two decades. Many district leaders believe the state will continue to look for them to structure their plans around this narrow accountability framework. This is not the case. The SOA explicitly asks communities to provide students with a wider array of learning experience, which means coming up with new and different measures.

For example, districts that choose to direct new resources to early education cannot wait five or more years until students take the third grade MCAS to demonstrate success. They will need robust early learning indicators. Similarly, districts that want to increase post-secondary completion by investing in early college programs must utilize measures that can gauge success after high school.

In return for the flexibility to devise their own performance measures, the state should ask communities to identify independent auditors who can ensure that the data they employ are statistically valid and reliable. This may sound fanciful, but we must remember that these are relatively large urban districts making significant investments in a handful of high-priority strategic initiatives.

In addition to ensuring that all parties have confidence in the data they report, outside assistance will enable communities to make informed choices in selecting their measures and determining their goals. Equally important, this assistance can ensure that districts can demonstrate progress with multiple measures. For instance, a decline in the number of out-of-school suspensions cannot demonstrate the effectiveness of a restorative justice initiative on its own; schools must show simultaneous improvements in school climate as reported by students, parents, and teachers.

Fourth, offer guidance on how communities account for spending on strategic initiatives. By investing in programs with documented results, educators should be able to defend their program budget and back up their calculation with respect to the learning gains the program can produce when implemented with fidelity. Planning and goal setting in this manner would represent a marked departure from the past, when leaders regularly established goals simply based on whether or not their target appeared sufficiently ambitious.  

Finally, the commissioner should encourage districts to use the measures identified in their plans for principal and superintendent evaluations as appropriate. Prior guidance by the department leads districts to evaluate the performance of principals and superintendents using entirely subjective rubrics rather than actual improvement in student achievement. In order to position communities to hold their leaders more accountable for results, they must make measurable progress on strategic initiatives a central component of annual evaluations.

While this step is fraught with the risk that data will be used inappropriately, the new era introduced by the SOA is an opportunity to depart from the past. Strategic initiatives will be backed by evidence that they can deliver, implemented with sufficient resources, and evaluated using reliable metrics and assistance from an external audit team.

Education reform leaders who believed the SOA should include strong accountability provisions discounted the ability of plans to call attention to underperformance and prompt corrective action. This concern was not unwarranted. Last year, MassINC published a series of reports drawing attention to the history of poor compliance with school improvements plans required by the state’s 1993 Education Reform Act.

This pattern is certainly cause for concern, but research indicates strong strategic plans lead to positive outcomes for students. A prime example is the turnaround plans generated by low-performing schools designated by the state for intensive intervention. Evaluators have found that these documents laid the groundwork for sustained progress with well though-out strategic priorities, mutual understanding among all parities responsible for executing an aspect of the plan, and regular and transparent monitoring and reporting of results.

The SOA will send an unprecedented amount of new dollars to Gateway City districts. The guidance Commissioner Riley provides these communities in the coming days will provide us with an important early indication of how much benefit for students we can expect this new investment to yield.

Ben Forman is the research director at MassINC, the nonpartisan public policy think tank that publishes CommonWealth.

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AS MASSACHUSETTS IMPLEMENTS last year’s sweeping criminal justice reform package, we must stay focused on justice reinvestment—the effort to squeeze more public safety from limited resources by reducing prison terms and redirecting the savings to behavioral health treatment, education, training, and reentry services. The state budget signed last week by Gov. Charlie Baker includes promising new provisions suggesting that state leaders are treating the 2018 bill as a solid foundation for additional reforms, not the last word on the issue.

Over the past decade, the potential for justice reinvestment to lower repeat offending drew bipartisan interest to criminal justice reform and propelled the issue to the top of the policy agenda in state legislatures all across the country. But what works on paper is often much harder to accomplish in practice; many states put their toes in the reinvestment waters, only to draw them back when wavelets ripple past.

Criminal justice reformers recognized from the very beginning that winning resources for reinvestment in Massachusetts would be difficult once the spotlight moved on to other issues. To gain better footing for the long term, they lobbied unsuccessfully for provisions in last year’s bill that would have required budget-makers to direct savings from reductions in the prison population to a justice reinvestment fund.

While reformers lost that fight, their champions in the Legislature vowed to come back to reinvestment this session, and the 2020 budget contains several provisions that suggest they are making good on their word.

The most significant provision is a change to the $25 million community corrections line item. Under current law, the Probation Department’s 17 community corrections centers are unable to provide services to those charged with violent crimes and firearm offenses. These restrictions prohibit a majority of formerly incarcerated individuals from receiving reentry support in their communities when they come home.

The exclusion of these higher-risk inmates – the very group that stands to benefit most from reentry support – epitomizes how tough-on-crime era policies remain deeply engrained in law. The 2020 budget eliminates this counterproductive statutory prohibition, incorporating language modeled on legislation filed by Rep. Frank Moran of Lawrence and Sen. Will Brownsberger of Belmont.

Probation now has $25 million available to help ensure that those returning to communities from correctional facilities have access to the support systems they need to be successful. It is hard to overstate how transformative this change could be, especially in the hands of the capable team Probation Commissioner Ed Dolan has built in his agency. Working creatively, Probation can see that cities receiving large numbers of formerly incarcerated individuals are able to build and sustain community-based reentry programs like the Boston Reentry Initiative and the Worcester Initiative for Supportive Reentry, highly-effective models that unraveled over the past few years when grant funding expired.

The second promising development is a provision creating a commission to examine correctional expenditures in Massachusetts. This language is very similar to language that died last year when the Legislature chose not to act on an amendment Baker offered, which would have slightly changed the commission’s makeup.

Tried and true criminal justice reformers are understandably skeptical when they hear the word commission. However, in this instance, there are at least two reasons to be optimistic. First, in contrast to many commissions led by agency heads, this body will be co-chaired by appointees of the House speaker and Senate president. This makes it possible to build a commission that can exercise more independence. Second, the budget also contains a $100,000 appropriation to support the work undertaken by the commission. While modest, these funds allow the body to cover staffing and analytical expenses.

By identifying and validating ways to realize significant savings from declining prison populations, the commission can provide a blueprint for scaling and sustaining new initiatives, including $4.5 million that the budget appropriates for residential reentry programs and $2 million for emerging adult reentry services. These new accounts, which represent small justice reinvestment victories in their own right, have real potential to amplify the work of newly empowered community corrections centers. Equally important, they put community-based organizations in a better position to demonstrate their ability to deliver services that reduce recidivism. If they get the job done, criminal justice reformers will be able to make a very strong case for acting on the commission’s reinvestment blueprint.

It’s important to recognize the full potential of this strategic victory. Many members of the criminal justice reform community are rightly concerned about lack of progress on a slew of other reform measures. However, change never comes all at once. Money is often key to driving transformation, and the 2020 budget provisions are a meaningful win.

Ben Forman is the researcher director at MassINC, the publisher of CommonWealth.

The post Justice reinvestment gets seed funding in budget appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

BEACON HILL LEADERS are searching for ways to provide public schools with a significant infusion of new dollars. Taking a page from Massachusetts’s landmark 1993 Education Reform Act, some have proposed attaching higher levels of accountability to any new funding. Others are not so hot on this idea. After all, they reason, the state skirted its responsibilities to provide adequate resources for years, why should communities face more layers of compliance as a result?

If you take a step back and look at the experience with increasing state involvement in schools over the past two and half decades, it is clear that there is still a place for additional accountability. However, rather than applying more pressure from the outside, the time has come for the state to position communities to provide more accountability on their own.

Pursuing this path means fashioning a state and local partnership to improve the bodies responsible for public school governance, beginning with school councils. Every school in Massachusetts is required to have a school council under the state’s 1993 education reform law. Unfortunately, education policymakers never rallied citizens to serve in this governing capacity and they never pushed principals to empower these bodies so that serving would be worthwhile.

This is a big loss because school councils are a fabulous entry point for those who want to be more involved in local governance. By design, they include seats for both parents and community partners looking to lend their talents to school improvement.

Charter schools and pilot schools have strong governing bodies that make a major difference by developing strategic plans and overseeing their implementation. Under current law, school councils are charged with these same responsibilities, but they can’t deliver on them when they range from defunct to totally disempowered.

As a result, the strategic plans Massachusetts schools prepare today are anything but strategic. New MassINC research shows that these plans don’t allocate resources to meet priorities, they don’t contain measurable goals to hold leaders accountable for results, and, perhaps most tellingly, they aren’t clear and accessible. In most schools, parents have no idea what exactly the school is trying to improve upon, and how they can support the effort.

The same is equally true, or worse, when you look at school committees responsible for district-level strategic plans. School committees also fail to set priorities and establish measurable goals, which makes for a totally subjective process when it comes time to evaluate superintendents. In part, this is why relationships between school committees and superintendents sour, leading to unnecessary turnover and instability.

Why aren’t school committees doing a better job? One reason is school site councils aren’t producing a leadership pipeline, which leaves communities with fewer residents qualified to serve in more prominent roles. Worcester has 185,000 residents. In the last municipal election, the city’s six at-large school committee seats drew a total of just seven candidates.

For diverse Gateway Cities like Worcester, this leadership void contributes directly to achievement gaps. Two-thirds of Gateway City students are nonwhite, yet nonwhite members hold just 10 percent of seats on Gateway City school committees. Despite a mountain of academic research demonstrating the serious consequences this imbalance has for students of color, there is little urgency to address it. Like other issues surrounding weak governance at the school and district level, the problem has long been overlooked.

This neglect is at least partially tied to the heavy focus on state and federal accountability. Ed reformers lost faith that urban districts could muster the drive to improve locally. After 1993, they pushed for a series of laws to establish targets for improvement, along with mechanisms for the state to step in when schools repeatedly failed to meet them.

These accountability policies have shown that when you set measurable goals and apply pressure, schools make progress. However, the experience also demonstrates the limits of state accountability. Standardized tests that allow the state to compare performance across all communities provide an incomplete picture of how well students are prepared to navigate the world. Massachusetts students beat their peers around the globe on these tests. But when it comes to completing college, holding a good job, and participating in civic life, by all accounts, they are not where they need to be.

Gateway Cities have been under the most intense pressure to narrow their focus to improve results on state tests. This is particularly problematic because Gateway City students have the furthest to climb on the economic ladder. They must emerge from K-12 with a range of skills and experiences to mount this difficult ascent. However, this is not just a Gateway City problem. Communities of all stripes face considerable pressure to improve in tested subjects. If schools aren’t providing balance by articulating their own priorities and progress measures, their students are likely missing out as well.

For instance, a suburban school designed to feature experiential learning may want to focus on rigorously assessing the performance of students in courses that feature collaborative, project-based learning, while a Gateway City school with large numbers of Latino students may decide to assess the development of Spanish language reading and writing skills, in addition to English language acquisition.

Local accountability holds tremendous promise for Gateway Cities and many other Massachusetts school districts. Since 1993, the state’s public schools have become increasingly divided between haves and have-nots. The Beacon Hill policy debate around more funding for K-12 education threatens to devolve into a fight not just over accountability, but also over who gets what. Re-centering the discussion around governance, and how we make Massachusetts public schools a model for democratic decision-making in the 21st century would serve us all well.

Ben Forman is research director at MassINC, the non-partisan think tank that publishes Commonwealth

The post A third way on the school funding/accountability debate appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

Massachusetts’s criminal justice reform legislation is arguably the most wide-ranging and comprehensive in the country, at least as far as progress in a single legislative session goes. However, unlike most states that have pursued comprehensive reform, our legislation was largely crafted without independent technical assistance from the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI). One of the key services JRI provides is estimating both the costs and the savings attached to reform legislation.

In the absence of an independent estimate, it is unclear how much money will be required to implement the reform bills Governor Baker signed in April.

The supplemental appropriation Governor Baker filed recently includes $33 million to implement the new laws through FY 2019. The Governor’s language specifies that these funds will support newly mandated programs in prisons and jails, new protocols for testing and tracking Sexual Assault Evidence Kits, expanded oversight of forensic laboratories, and new responsibilities at the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, the Parole Board, the trial courts, and district attorneys’ offices.

While the Governor’s request does not include a detailed breakdown of how these funds would be allocated, through line items, the spending bill directs the largest share to the DOC ($10.7 million), followed by the Sheriff’s Association ($6.6 million) and the State Police Crime Laboratory ($6 million). EOPPS ($2.3 million), the DA’s Association ($1.4 million), the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services ($1.3 million), the Parole Board ($1.2 million), Probation ($1.1 million), and Community Corrections ($1.1 million) receive smaller shares.

So far, the Legislature has provided little indication of how it will approach funding implementation. The House did provide $3 million for residential reentry programs as a down payment (and an attempt to address the defunding of reentry programs over the past few years) in its FY 2019 budget. The Senate budget did not fund reentry, so it is now a matter of negotiation for the conference committee.

However, the Senate budget did include vital language (Section 131) creating a new commission to study spending by correctional agencies. These provisions are more extensive than the correctional expenditure language the Senate offered in last year’s budget, which was released on the heels of a MassINC report revealing stark disparities between rising correctional expenditures and falling correctional populations. While last year’s Senate language did not survive the conference committee, this year is different in two respects.

First, the language creating a commission does not restrict the ability of agencies to spend above their budget appropriations, as MassINC’s latest research shows, such a provision would represent a significant reduction in funding for most Sheriff’s departments.

Second, the legislative component of criminal justice reform is now complete. The only thing that we are lacking is an understanding of what it will mean in terms of costs and savings. Convening an independent commission would provide us with this essential information.

From young adult justice to criminal justice data infrastructure, the reform package included numerous commissions to study critical questions that remain unanswered. But there is no issue more fundamental to the whole concept of Justice Reinvestment than the proper allocation of limited public safety resources. Moving swiftly to establish an expenditure commission would surely be a positive step toward the successful implementation of the Legislature’s landmark criminal justice reform package.

The post Finding Better Ways to Allocate Limited Public Safety Resources appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

WHEN I WAS in graduate school studying urban planning in the early-2000s, there was a lot of talk about how cities need “good” schools, but surprisingly little discussion or study about how you build community to nurture a good school, and vice versa. Luckily, I had the opportunity to work for a professor engaged in social network research. He encouraged me to read sociologists like Herbert Gans and Mark Granovetter, which is how I developed an appreciation for why both individuals and communities depend on social relationships to thrive. More so than any other institution in our cities today, schools are positioned to nurture these social ties.

Unfortunately, our school improvement strategies rarely take community development principles into account. In fact, the methods we employ to turnaround failing schools often slice the delicate social fabric of our most vulnerable neighborhoods by relying heavily on outside expertise, culture, talent, and governance; by severing the ties between schools and community through school assignment processes; and by failing to engage families and neighbors. Even the full-service schools that work hard to provide wraparound support through community-based organizations often fall short—delivering a patchwork of services that respond to distress in a community is not a substitute for fostering strong social organization.

Detaching community development from education policy has also led to an education reform movement that tacitly accepts high-poverty schools, encouraging educators to find ways to increase student learning in these settings, rather than directly confronting concentrated disadvantage. While cities like Boston with lots of flashy appeal are an exception, for most cities, it is extremely difficult to reverse decades of residential disinvestment when high poverty schools are the norm and nobody is advancing viable strategies to remedy this condition.

With these problems perpetually nagging my sensibilities as a planner, I was particularly excited when Chris Gabrieli and his team at Empower Schools approached MassINC to enlist our help stimulating a conversation around a Third Way. The Third Way builds on Chris’s experience working collaboratively with the Springfield Public Schools to develop an Empowerment Zone, an approach that recognizes disadvantaged communities need external resources and support, but that they also must be a full partner in the effort to bring about lasting change.

At a forum held in Boston on Tuesday, Chris explained that the Third Way terminology implies a strategy that offers a detente between the charter school and public school camps. The Third Way seeks to marry the scale of public schools with the relentless drive of charter school innovators. By working collaboratively to implement Third Way strategies, the hope is that we could finally take a whack at large achievement gaps.

Speakers at the forum offered examples of how this is already happening in small pockets. Springfield Education Association president Tim Collins noted how teachers felt real ownership of the Empowerment Zone strategy because they played a leading role in devising the approach. Komal Bhasin, tapped by Jeff Riley to run the UP Academy Leonard in Lawrence, described how she’s been challenged by working at a much larger scale than the small charters she led previously, but also energized by the ability to have greater impact by serving more students, leveraging district resources that were previously unavailable to her.

These testimonials were a great introduction to a long overdue Third Way conversation. But my dream is that the Third Way movement does not stop at the education border. Changing the paradigm means addressing the vital connection between schools and community health with those who fundamentally understand these dynamics. The conversation Tuesday flirted with this notion. For instance, Denver was thrown out as an example of where Third Way strategies have been applied not just for the lowest performing schools, but also to make good schools great. Along these lines, I could see Gateway City leaders recruiting an innovative education organization to partner in creating an extraordinary neighborhood learning community, which then becomes a strong selling point to prospective homeowners in a residential area targeted for revitalization.

As much as I believe in the neighborhood lens, I also think Gateway Cities should mine opportunity in Third Way strategies when it comes to mustering expertise and money for more systemic innovation, such as building strong early learning systems and reinventing college and career pathways. The new governance and accountability structures Third Way partners are developing to collaborate on the reinvention of a single school or group of schools could serve as useful templates for these larger systems change challenges.

Despite the many reasons to be energized by the possibility of Third Way strategies, the heartfelt positions of those on both sides of the charter debate and the pending ballot question will make it extremely difficult for a productive conversation to take hold. This is where Gateway City leaders can make a real difference. For years, Gateway City educators have lamented that their voices have been underrepresented on policy matters that disproportionately affect their communities. At the forum this week, we heard loudly that they are open to any and all approaches that produce better outcomes for their students. Let’s hope that they continue to speak out and that their actions and words begin to attract the consideration they well deserve.

Ben Forman is the research director at MassINC.

The post Harnessing the ‘Third Way’ to improve communities appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.