Massachusetts and the world lost a real pioneer in public policy last week. We refer to Lovett C. Peters, founder of the Pioneer Institute. Peters passed away on Veterans Day after a fall. He was 97.

After a long and successful career in business, Peters founded the Pioneer Institute in 1988 to promote free market solutions to Massachusetts’s public policy problems. Peters was especially interested in finding ways to improve education opportunities for Massachusetts’s children. Peters and the Pioneer Institute played important roles in the development of charter schools in Massachusetts, which are credited with helping the commonwealth turns its test scores around. By the turn of the millennium, Massachusetts’s test scores were among the highest in the country.

Jim Stergios, Executive Director of the Pioneer Institute, remembers Peters this way:

Pete always saw opportunity, and he was uniquely suited to succeed in a land noted for its freedoms. He was extremely goal-oriented — and once his initial goals were achieved, he always looked for newer and farther reaching ones. Certainly, this aided him in his trajectory from humble origins to economic success. But the values he learned from parents who were educators — and his ability to keep true to those values — marked him for success in private life and friendships as well.

At the age of 75 he dedicated himself to improving his community and his state. Naturally, given his view of opportunity and given the opportunities private scholarships afforded him, Pete understood the important implications of improving our schools.

And as one learned to expect from Pete, he brought a laser-like focus to the cause.

There’s more remembrances of Peters at the Pioneer Institute’s blog.