Author: James A. Bacon
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The Rise of Personalized Learning
IBM has just published five big predictions for the next five years. A couple of them are germane to Bacon’s Rebellion, but none more so than this. Personalized learning is a very different vision from Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which teach the same material to potentially thousands of students, but it’s just as revolutionary:…
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Game Changer for Medicaid Debate
by James A. Bacon The debate over Medicaid expansion took a major left turn yesterday when the McDonnell administration revealed that the VCU Medical Center and the University of Virginia Medical Center will lose about $500 million in federal funds to offset uncompensated care between 2017 and 2022. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) will phase…
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McDonnell Budget: Touches all the Bases
by James A. Bacon In his last hurrah as governor, Bob McDonnell has submitted his proposed biennial budget for 2014-2016. The document has won bipartisan praise, including from Sen., Janet D. Howell, D-Fairfax, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. While quibbling with a few details, she told the Times-Dispatch, “Overall, for a budget, this…
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Smart Growth Comes to the Military
by James A. Bacon My dad was a naval officer and, as consequence, I spent a good part of my youth in Norfolk. Although we lived off base, we regularly drove to the naval station to frequent the commissary, the doctor, the movie theater and the barber shop (25 cents bought you any kind of…
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Idealism Crushed by Bureaucratic System
by James A. Bacon One of the obstacles to enacting school reform is the difficulty in ascertaining and apportioning responsibility for Virginia’s failed schools. Is the root problem aging school buildings and unequal resources for poor school districts? Is it the inability to get rid of bad teachers? Is it the disruptive behavior of students,…
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The High Cost of Free Parking
by James A. Bacon As parking guru Donald Shoup has long argued, there is a very high cost to “free” parking. Typically, those costs are hidden, so people are unaware that they exist. While Shoup’s theory is gaining traction among urban planners, particularly the smart growth set, it hasn’t caught on with the general public,…
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Oops, Long-Term Health Spending Crisis Not Averted After All
There has been much prattling of late that the cost increases for health care are slowing, that the long-term cost curve for Medicare and in the United States is bending downward and that Obamacare may even deserve some of the credit. Liberals everywhere are hopeful that health care expenditures somehow, miraculously, will not drive the…
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Teen Pregnancies Down, Way Down
Here’s the best news you’re likely to read all day, maybe all week: Mirroring national trends, the number of teen pregnancies in the City of Richmond has dropped from 1,024 a decade ago to 487 in 2012. The 2012 numbers represented “the lowest teen pregnancy rate in Richmond in decades,” Dr. Donald Stern, Richmond City Health…
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Core Confusing Words: Rural and Metro
Some interesting data from Wendell Cox by way of the New Geography blog… We think of metropolitan areas as being urbanized, whether at inner-city densities or “suburban” (post-World War II development-pattern densities) but, in fact, they contain a lot of “rural” area. A majority of “rural” residents in the United States, observes Cox, actually reside…
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Hokies Crack the No. 40 Spot… in the National R&D Rankings
Virginia Tech’s football team periodically earns a Top 25 spot in the NCAA college football polls, but the ranking that really matters is the annual National Science Foundation (NSF) listing of the nation’s top research universities. Although university spending on research and development was flat nationally in fiscal 2012, Virginia Tech managed to inch ahead…
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MOOCs: Hyped, Humbled, Hardy
Not unexpectedly, after two years experience, the purveyors of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are re-evaluating their model for delivering educational services, according to the New York Times. It turns out that the jaw-breaking numbers of students enrolled in some MOOC courses — 160,000 in the case of on Stanford University professor’s course on artificial…
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The Metro Premium
How much is a location near a Metro station worth? In a fall 2013 study examining the economic impact of the Silver line on Tysons, researchers Cushman & Wakefield took a look at rents paid for commercial real estate and multifamily residences in Arlington County’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor. The answer: Office tenants pay as much as…
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Time for Some Tactical Suburbanism
by James A. Bacon Tactical urbanism is the term used to describe small, inexpensive, often temporary, urban improvements that make life more colorful, fun or livable. They include such things as guerilla gardening, parklets, pavement to parks, pop-up retail, pavement-to-plaza, de-paving and chair bombing (the latter would be the creation of public seating, not the…
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No Easy Answers for NoVa’s I-95 Corridor
Traffic flow in the Interstate 95 corridor in Northern Virginia has improved since completion of the “Mixing Bowl” project (at the intersection with the Interstate 495 Capital Beltway) and travelers could see even more improvements when the I-95 express lane projects open for service. But several sections of I-95 still will operate at failing levels…
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New Questions about the Shockoe Stadium Proposal
by James A. Bacon I’m heartened to see someone on the Richmond City Council ask tough questions about big headline-grabbing deals. Councilman Jon Baliles (son of the former governor) has raised substantive issues about Mayor Dwight Jones’ proposal to build a new baseball stadium for the Flying Squirrels in Shockoe Bottom. In particular, the analysis…