Jennifer Levitz writes in the Wall Street Journal (look to your right for the article) about the tension between large nonprofits who use city services like police and fire but as nonprofits are exempt from paying property taxes. They use City services but don't pay for them.

Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island recently signed legislation that grants the town of Smithfield, RI, " ... the ability to charge private Bryant University an annual fee for taxpayer-funded police, fire and rescue response. The law may be the first of its kind, and the university's president has said he plans to challenge it in court."

The article goes on to say, " ... public sentiment has begun to shift over granting special [tax] status to nonprofits - especially large institutions with healthy endowments - when local budgets are squeezed."

In Newton, Boston College and Newton-Wellesley Hospital have long been considered ripe targets for payments in lieu of taxes (known as PILOTs). PILOTs are voluntary or negotiated payments made by tax-exempt organizations to local governments.

Digital-Based Curriculums and the Transformation of Learning

A Boston Globe article on March 31, 2013 about an educator at Harvard's Kennedy School caught my attention. Todd Rose offers insights into the powerful future of education. This sentence sums it up: 

“Today he’s at the forefront of a movement to reimagine the education system around what he calls the science of the individual—a growing body of research that points to our brain networks, hormones, and even gene expression as being in a constant state of interplay with our surroundings, not predetermined or fixed. As schools increasingly abandon textbooks and move into an era of digital-based curriculums, Rose argues, educators have a rare opportunity to transform learning and create rich, highly flexible environments that can adapt to each child’s natural variability.” Look for the link on the right.

CitiStat Meets Big Data

Check out the article to the right from the New York Times titled, "The Mayor's Geek Squad." Mayor Bloomberg has married CitiStat with Big Data to fix problems and get action.