Monday January 30th Mary Z Connaughton former GOP candidate for State Auditor spoke to an audience of 35 people attending the monthly meeting of the Twin City Tea Party at the Border Grille & Bar in Leominster Mass 2010.
Connaughton, who had the best showing of all the GOP statewide candidates spoke about the Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts based think tank where she is now employed and their attempts to inform and educate the public on the state of various Massachusetts institutions.
Even before she began her speech, while being introduced ,one of the attendees suggested to the crowd that she would be the ideal candidate for Senate to oppose John Kerry in 2014. Although the crowd approved, Connaughton demurred saying that she is very happy doing what she’s doing now but would not definitely rule out a future in elected politics.
Connaughton talked about specific sites sponsored by Pioneer such as MassOpenBooks.org where citizens can browse a searchable database of every payment by the state over the last three fiscal years, searchable by agency, account, payment type and recipient. She noted that Pioneer managed to not only produce this data before the newly elected treasurer who had promised to make it available, but did it at a fraction of the expense of the state.
She also talked about their efforts to promote educational choice commenting on charter schools, virtual schools and tax credit programs that allow parents educational alternatives to traditional public schools. She mentioned Pioneer’s site massreportcards.org that provides comparisons between different school districts providing info from truancy and suspensions to expenditures and funding to graduations plans and rates and more.
After her speech Connaughton took questions from the audience for quite a while fielding inquiries on topics on spending and judicial conduct to casinos and healthcare when talking about business she stressed "you don't cut the pie into smaller pieces you make a bigger pie”.
She sat briefly for an interview and talked about changing the culture by education: “A well informed public leads to a better society” stressing that the institute is “fact driven and data driven” and that the response to her talks has been quite positive.
The response of the Twin City Tea Party crowd would certainly support that assertion.
Update: A previous version of this article suggested Mary Connaughton & the Pioneer Institute claimed Charter and/or Catholic schools were superior to public schools. She in fact implied that having diverse choices in education was advantageous.. I regret the error
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