Massachusetts drivers rarely see civilian flagmen to direct traffic at road construction projects because state law ensures that they're not much cheaper than hiring cops, a new Pioneer Institute report says.
A civilian flagman costs $43.44 an hour, far above the national average of $28.89, according to the Pioneer policy brief released Monday. That's not much less than state and local police officers get, and town and city officials aware that police officers use details to supplement their incomes usually hire police for road projects rather than flagmen.
Pioneer Institute in Boston recently issued an informative report criticizing Common Core's standards for the damage they have done to student achievement in this country and to the school choice movement.
The authors of this report — Ted Rebarber of Accountability Works and Neil McCluskey at the CATO Institute — urge a return not to the state's pre-Common Core standards but to the conditions that led to standards-based reforms — in the 1970s and 1980s. Rebarber and McCluskey don't quite say that, of course. They say: "We must shift standards-based reforms away from government central planners in order to disrupt the status quo and leverage innovative, ambitious curricula."
