Happy Birthday, Lily

Happy 12th

More on the Sheriff

If you recall, I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago, The Sheriff and Secure Communities, about Worcester County Lew Evangelidis and his then-recent publicity regarding the Secure Communities program.
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Continue reading More on the Sheriff  at Telegram Towns.

Fox 25 undercover reporter uncovers non-story. Film at 11.

Mike Beaudet, reporter for "FOX Undercover" on WFXT in Boston, broke a story over the weekend. He teased it a bit on Saturday and gave the it full treatment on Sunday evening. (His report, Boston schools seek pricey consultant, is on the station's website.)
Let's review, starting form the end. The Boston Finance Commission turned down a request by Boston school superintendent Dr. Carol Johnson to hire a consultant, Dr. Rudy Crew, at a reported $1500 per day. Because the total contact was above $10K, the FinCom gets a chance to review the proposal. They decided against it. As a result, Dr. Crew probably won't be hired.
The rest of the story is as follows:

• Dr. Crew would have charged $1500/day. Beaudet used the number in the sub-headline and six times in the story.
• Dr. Crew, a nationally recognized education leader, was "fired" from two jobs.
  One, in the Miami-Dade County system, was for, as Beaudet reported, "after being accused by critics of mismanaging the budget."
  Beaudet didn't report that Crew and the school board agreed to sever his contract, that the district is one of three finalists in a national competition. (Awards will be announced on October 14.) Beaudet also didn't report that Crew, according to A U.S. News and World Report article,   removed under-performing principals and corrected previously wasteful construction practices.
• Dr. Crew would have charged $1500/day. Beaudet wishes he was making  that kind of money.
  

  With all due respect Dr. Johnson, $1,500 a day. I'd love to be making that much money. Is he really worth all that money?” asked Beaudet.

• Dr. Crew lost his job with the New York City school system in 2000 after repeated run-ins with Mayor Rudy (no relation) Guiliani over the issue of school vouchers to private schools. The mayor wanted vouchers; the superintendent refused.
• There's no disputing that the daily rate is a lot of money. It's also in the range of his 2010 Miami salary,  The New York Times reported. Salaries at that level are reserved for the superintendents of the largest school systems. Miami-Dade is the fourth largest system in the nation. According to the survey by District Administration magazine, a CEO of a comparably large company would make more than $1M annually.

Crew has a long, successful, complicated, and controversial record of effecting improvement in difficult school systems. He gets a good wage for that. An organizational consultant in private business gets that kind of money.
We want outstanding schools on the cheap. We want to have schools run efficiently and meet goals, just like businesses must do, but we'll only pay one-third the going rate for the education, skills, and experience.
I can't make the determination if Dr. Crew is worth that kind of money. Neither, it appears, can Mike Beaudet. We learned very little about Dr. Crew's past work as a consultant or the value of consultants in reforming education. We learned nothing about what consultants and professionals earn in education or any other field. What we heard was a number that Beaudet envied. (The average salary for a news reporter in Boston in $42K.)

For the locals: Dr. Crew worked as a teacher in the Worcester school system in 1972-73.

Fallon Clinic - new name, same stock photography doctors

Fallon Clinic is changing its name to Reliant Medical Group on October 1. The goal is to help remove confusion between the clinic, where medical services are provided, and the Fallon Community Health Plan, which provides medical insurance. The two have been separate businesses since 2004. Patients and others continued to confuse the two.
As a result of a new alliance affiliation with Atrius Health Group, the clinic decided it was a good time for a name change. It would help to eliminate the confusion between the clinic and the insurance provider.
Naturally, patients are showing up at the clinic saying, "I guess I'll have to get a new doctor now that you're not longer part of Fallon." Or, "Does this mean I have to change health plans?" Or, "I changed to Harvard Pilgrim. Do I need to get a new doctor." Just exactly the kind of confusion that Fallon was hoping to eliminate.
The reassuring tent cards places around the clinic tell the patients that they'll still have the same great doctors and service providers that they did before.

 Nice, except that none of these smiling folks are Fallon providers. They are models. The picture is commercial stock photograph. A Google image search will show these good folks practicing all around the world.

via Studio shot of medical professionals smiling by Tetra Images

Take a class in Photoshop and call me in the morning.