Lawrence Eagle Tribune
Gov. Deval Patrick pledged yesterday to work directly with Lawrence, Haverhill, Methuen and other “gateway” cities to improve schools in those towns.

Patrick addressed a gathering of town and school leaders from the state’s so-called gateway cities — former mill and factory towns — at a MassINC-sponsored conference in Worcester.

New Bedford Standard Times
Gov. Deval Patrick on Friday challenged Gateway Cities educators and leaders to use the tools at their disposal — in creative, innovative, community-specific ways — to close the student achievement gap.

“We’ve been on this path of ed reform and educational improvement for 17 years, and for that whole time the achievement gap has persisted,” Patrick said. “To let it persist for 17 years is a moral question.”

Worcester Telegram and Gazette
Gov. Deval L. Patrick told representatives of the state’s “gateway cities” today that many of their poor and minority students are not doing well enough in school, and the time has come to get creative.

The 11 mid-size gateway cities, which include Worcester and Fitchburg, receive the bulk of the state’s education aid but not the creative focus of grant-makers, he said.

Patriot Ledger

Drawing new legislative district lines isn’t easy, especially when, as in our case, you have to reduce by one the state’s delegation to Congress. Districts must be contiguous, meet numeric guidelines, and may not disenfranchise minority voters.

But it’s not that hard. Computer programs make the number-crunching easier. And it’s not difficult to group communities of interest together – if the map-makers don’t get caught up in other traditional redistricting priorities: Protecting incumbents, hurting Republicans and punishing Democrats who have bucked the party’s leadership.

The Salem News
Calling it “another form of taxation,” House Speaker Robert DeLeo on Sunday snuffed a budget proposal embraced by Gov. Deval Patrick to encourage recycling and raise $20 million a year to defray water and sewer costs.

In an interview on WBZ-TV, DeLeo rejected the proposal known as the “bottle bill,” which would add a five-cent deposit to the cost of water, tea and juice bottles.

Dedham Transcript

Calling it “another form of taxation,” House Speaker Robert DeLeo on Sunday snuffed a budget proposal embraced by Gov. Deval Patrick to encourage recycling and raise $20 million a year to defray water and sewer costs.

In an interview on WBZ-TV, DeLeo rejected the proposal known as the “bottle bill,” which would add a five-cent deposit to the cost of water, tea and juice bottles.

The Springfield Republican

A survey of registered voters in struggling mill cities shows nearly half give their city schools a grade of B or above, despite high dropout rates and low test scores.

The Boston think-tank MassINC, surveyed 400 registered voters spread among the 11 cities to learn their perception of local schools. Gateway cities, which include Springfield and Holyoke, are former manufacturing centers with high poverty rates.

Boston Globe

Union-News and Sunday Republican
A survey of registered voters in struggling mill cities shows nearly half give their city schools a grade of B or above, despite high dropout rates and low test scores.

The Boston think-tank MassINC, surveyed 400 registered voters spread among the 11 cities to learn their perception of local schools. Gateway cities, which include Springfield and Holyoke, are former manufacturing centers with high poverty rates.

Sentinel and Enterprise

A new study claims residents in 11 of the state’s mid size cities, including Fitchburg, Worcester and Lowell, give school systems good grades despite poor test scores and graduation rates.

About half the residents polled gave their community’s public schools a grade of A or B, while just 12 percent gave the schools a D or F, according to a MassINC poll released Tuesday.

Lowell Sun

Brockton Enterprise

About half of the voters polled in Massachusetts’ Gateway Cities give their community’s public schools a grade of A (12 percent) or B (37 percent); 83 percent give them a C or higher, according to a new poll conducted by the MassINC Polling Group. 

Just 12 percent gave the schools a D or F. These positive ratings contrast sharply with the overall poor performance of Gateway Cities schools on metrics like reading proficiency and graduation rates.

MetroWest Daily News

Politicians want to give us what we want, and what we want are jobs. But what jobs should they give us, and what should the taxpayers pay for them?

How about a nice job in high tech, in a new industry with unlimited potential? A job in green energy, building solar panels that can be sold around the world?

MetroWest Daily News

Drawing new legislative district lines isn’t easy, especially when, as in Massachusetts’ case, you have to reduce by one the state’s delegation to Congress. Districts must be contiguous, meet numeric guidelines, and may not disenfranchise minority voters. Community leaders and politicians have strong preferences for where they’d like to see the lines drawn.

But it’s not that hard. Computer programs make the number-crunching easier.

Boston Globe

Worcester Magazine

Brockton Enterprise

New Bedford Standard Times

Last spring, in the days before Portia Bonner resigned as New Bedford’s superintendent of schools, a small group of community leaders came together to examine not only the multiple mistakes that led to Bonner’s failure but also to do what they could to improve public education.

Its first report, issued last week, indicates the serious achievement problems of city schoolchildren as they progress through the grades. It shows that New Bedford children score fairly well as elementary schoolchildren on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests and then do worse and worse as they go through middle and high school.

A new act in foreclosure circus – Boston Globe

Last week’s Supreme Judicial Court decision, in which the court upended a pair of Springfield foreclosures and upbraided Wells Fargo and US Bank for maintaining sloppy records is great news for homeowners facing foreclosure.

Mortgage-servicing banks, which were in the habit of trading mortgages around like cheap baseball cards, will be forced to slow the pace of foreclosures even more, and carefully verify that they actually own the mortgages on the properties they want to foreclose on.

Boston Herald

Massachusetts legislators are terrific at giving lip service to public opinion – and then going off and doing exactly as they damn well please.

So we’d be surprised if the poll released yesterday by MassINC has any impact on the redistricting plans already being set in to motion on Beacon Hill. But it really, really should.

Salem Evening News

It may already be too late for this decade, but lawmakers ought to give serious consideration to the idea of having an independent commission, rather than their partisan selves, redraw congressional and legislative districts.

A new MassINC poll shows that’s the clear preference of an overwhelming majority of voters in the Bay State.

Patriot Ledger

Belmont Citizen-Herald

Sixty-two percent of Massachusetts residents favor using an independent redistricting commission to redraw the political boundaries before the 2012 elections compared to just 23 percent who said they prefer to have the Legislature handle the task, according to a new poll conducted by MassINC.

Massachusetts is poised to lose one of its 10 Congressional seats in the decennial redistricting process based on 2010 Census data that showed the state’s population growing more slowly than other parts of the country, namely the south and west.

Boston Globe

Putting money where jobs are

The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe

Right now, state officials rarely enmesh themselves in a struggling city’s financial affairs until it’s in deep trouble, and then they improvise a solution on the fly. That’s how Chelsea ended up in receivership in 1991, and how the Legislature came to put Springfield under a tough financial control board in 2004. And that was the situation last year when Lawrence’s newly elected mayor, William Lantigua, went to Beacon Hill for help after inheriting a budget deficit that was estimated at $20 million.

The Worcester Business Journal

Getting the public more focused on transportation investment begins with empowering communities to shape this vital infrastructure. In contrast to many other states, transportation in Massachusetts is largely financed by the state. The gas tax, sales tax, and tolls are all collected statewide and redistributed around the commonwealth. In a number of ways, this centralized approach has undeniably contributed to the difficult challenges Massachusetts now faces.

Boston Sunday Globe

In Boston, many middle-class people struggle, even in a soft housing market, to pay the going rate for homes and apartments. In the gateway cities, the problem is precisely the opposite: Affordable housing abounds even in what might seem like prime central locations, and market-rate housing is either dilapidated or lacking altogether.

The Boston Globe

As policymakers in Massachusetts have come to grips with the possibilities of “smart growth,’’ an answer has emerged: By beefing up the MBTA commuter rail system, Massachusetts could spur the transformation of old factory buildings near train stations in mill cities into complexes that mix residential and commercial uses, while taking pressure off the state’s ever-diminishing amount of open space. In this spirit, Governor Patrick has vowed to start work on the long-planned commuter rail line to Fall River and New Bedford.