Talk:Government of Massachusetts

Education

I am adding some content to the 'Education' piece of this article and struggling with how much detail to put in it. I think that the subsection on Education Funding and School Construction Funding should probably have their own articles. These are large topics and , while they are certainly part of Massachusetts Government, they would dominate this article if they were included.

Thoughts ?? --LWV Roadrunner 21:00, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I corrected some information in 'Education' and the Proposition 2 1/2 section (along with sundry minor edits elsewhere). I agree that ed. funding and school construction should be here; perhaps the whole 'Education' section shuould be split off -- "Massachusetts Government" dealing only with non-education matters, and "Massachusetts Education Administration" in a second entry?

Wiki Wistah 01:14, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea; I would suggest "Education in Massachusetts" or "K-12 education in Massachusetts". -- Beland 20:06, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Deleted some text

I have deleted this text: After passage of the Home Rule Procedures Act of 1967, it is no longer possible for a municipality to adopt one of these plans. However, 14 cities still have Plan A, B, or E governments because they have not changed their form of government since then. Plans C, D, and F are no longer used.

I have also deleted this reference which was the basis and source for the deleted text: Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development. "Massachusetts Communities Operating Under Home Rule Charters" (prepared and adopted under provisions of the Home Rule Amendment and M.G.L., c. 43B)

Although the publication was prepared by a unit of Massachusetts Government, the preparer only read through Sections 3 and 4 of Article 89 of the Massachusetts Constitution amendments. Section 8 states: "Subject to the foregoing requirements, the general court may provide optional plans of city or town organization and government under which an optional plan may be adopted or abandoned by majority vote of the voters of the city or town voting thereon at a city or town election;..." Those optional plans are the plans referred to in the article.

HL Menken 11:59 28 October 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by HL Menken (talk • contribs) 04:00, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Open Standards

The Open Standards section is badly written. It almost certainly has way too much detail for a page about the Government of Massachusetts. It appears to have been copied from another article, complete with footnotes for which the references were not transplanted into the Wikipedia article. The author clearly has a non-neutral point of view that excluding OOXML from the initial lists of acceptable formats was inappropriate. Despite the legislative report (which some have questioned the impartiality of), many people have other views. See e.g. http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/07/03/massachusetts_adopts_microsoft_ooxml_standard/

Examples of inappropriate POV text:

• Use of "so-called" in "so-called open formats"
• '"Standard" is in quotes above because PDF was no more a "standard" at the time than Microsoft's Office formats' - this is debatable, not at all obvious.
• "The effort to freeze Microsoft out of such procurements" - imputing motive to the commission without any basis.
• "the issue of document format standards is, as it should be," (emphasis mine - words that have no business in any wikipedia article).
• Implying that Sun/IBM were lobbying without commenting on the widespread perception that the legislative report and subsequent inclusion of OOXML were the result of heavy lobbying by Microsoft. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.120.117.2 (talk) 19:34, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

At the time that I became aware of the issue of software capability to read official documents 100 years hence, I was regularly attending a monthly software quality assurance/quality control professionals' group in MA. My recollection is that this would have been circa 2002 or 2003, earlier in the process than seems to be the perspective of the article. At this point the state second chief information officer had resigned or was about to resign because of the politics that had emerged. Both officers had determined that it was crucial that state documents created now as software-readable documents be compatible, meaning readable, 100 years from the date they were created. Adobe PDF and a small number of others made a commitment to this criterion. It seemed to all to be a reasonable criterion if anyone was willing to meet it. Microsoft would not make a commitment. Once the decision was made to implement this, according to those presenting and those in the audience who corroborated, Microsoft initiated a political effort to get the policy changed, although it continued to be unwilling to make the 100 year commitment. (I personally have been somewhat skeptical that a 100 year commitment would be feasible except maybe for simple text documents, because the technology changes too much and too fast, and organizations go out of business, but that was not part of the discussion.) We were told that the technical leaders whose work was challenged by this political process reacted by resigning. On the basis of this recollection, I would agree that there is bias in the article. I do not have enough direct information about how it all played out to consider rewriting the article myself.

I would argue that the issue addressed in the article is extremely interesting and useful both technically and historically. It therefore should be either left in the article, or presented in a related article.

John Carlton-Foss — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.20.130.86 (talk) 01:17, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

County government in the United States

Hello, Massachusetts! To defuse the edit war that has started at Category:County government in the United States, I'd appreciate some additional input on the topic of whether U.S. counties are (1) a level of local government or (2) an arm of state government. Discussion thus far is on my User talk page at User_talk:Orlady#County_government, but we could move it to a content-oriented talk page if desired. --Orlady (talk) 00:28, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Hello MA. I am the other side of the edit war. My claim is that although county officials may be elected or appointed locally (i.e. not statewide), the actual county government itself is an arm of the state government. This is consistent with the powers they exercise (elections, law enforcement, etc.). If we could have some academically informed input, I would appreciate it, because the general impression and intuition that people have is that county government is "local government," but to those who actually study political science formally, the difference is known. The compromise that I propose is the persons should be categorized under "local politicians" while the offices should be categorized under "state government." Greg Bard (talk) 8:39 pm, Today (UTC−4)

I have posted this issue to WikiProject United States, and WikiProject Politics. Please take your input to one or the other so I don't have to have 50 discussions. Greg Bard (talk) 01:26, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

User:Gregbard started discussion of this matter at User_talk:Orlady#County_government. Please don't start a whole new discussion at some WikiProject page. If there is a desire to move the discussion, let's copy the pre-existing discussion to the new location. --Orlady (talk) 02:24, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Charter schools

Could we consider revising and/or expanding the statement regarding money sent with students who transfer to charter schools? It's over-simplified. For example, if a student were to transfer to another public district before October 1st, the per-pupil amount would move with the student in that case as well; students who go to private schools cause the district to lose that money from the state; public voc-tech schools have the same effect. I can find a citation or two to support a more detailed answer. Rjp422 (talk) 00:29, 16 May 2013 (UTC)