credit: americablog.com

Too often, local governments resist spending money to adequately fund their future leaders, leaving teachers to try to compensate for their stinginess.

You see it in Baltimore’s public school system, where school capacities practically have to double, and parents rant and rave, before local governments fund new, larger school buildings that adequately accommodate bulging student populations. In the meantime, teachers soldier on in sub-par conditions.

A perfect, terrible example of this type of faultiness was displayed this past Monday, as a tornado ripped through Moore, Oklahoma. Inadequately prepared elementary schools stood directly in its path.

At the town’s Plaza Towers Elementary School, seven students were killed. The aging school building, erected in 1966, lacked a tornado shelter—despite the area’s history of tornadoes. The town’s Mayor, Glenn Lewis, reportedly told a CNN reporter on Tuesday morning that few of Oklahoma’s schools possess built-in storm shelters, in part because of the cost. Not having such a shelter proved enormously costly on Monday. Read More →

“We were America’s first research university and the model for higher education in this country and beyond,” Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels announced this week. “The time has come for a definitive book that chronicles our remarkable history.” So the school decided to commission one — from one of its own professors. What do you think are the chances that it’ll be anything close to objective?
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A federal audit determined that Baltimore city schools misspent thousands of dollars of federal grant money during 2009 and 2010. That includes $4,352 from Title I funds spent on Inner Harbor dinner cruises for parents, staff, and volunteers, $2,413 spent on chicken dinners for 28 people, $1,336 spent on theater tickets for 30 people, and $500 spent on a makeover day for mothers and daughters.

The audit also found hundreds of thousands of dollars that may have been spent on legitimate expenses, but were poorly accounted for — incomplete time sheets, invoices with no description of services, that kind of thing.

As much as Republicans (and some Democrats) in the state legislature are using the findings as an opportunity to sneer at typical liberal spendthrifts who have squandered our hard-earned tax dollars (and on what? Makeovers?! Cruises?!), the reality is probably a little more complicated, and a little less politically convenient. Read More →

Step one:  Raise a gazillion dollars.

Step two:  Dominate academia. (That is, make sure that at least two-thirds of the school’s PhD programs are among the top 20 in their fields.)
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In just 2 1/2 years as Towson’s athletic director, Mike Waddell grew the men’s football and basketball programs so big they ate up men’s soccer and nearly devoured men’s baseball. Or at least that’s my unfair version of it.

The man whom many blame, along with university president Maravene Loeschke, for turning Towson’s baseball program into a statewide political issue is leaving the position to join the athletic department at Arkansas. Read More →

Michelle Harner and Robert Rhee, Co-Directors at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. Photo by Steve Ruark.

Courtesy Bmore Media – Law professor Daniel S. Goldberg takes a moment to chat in his faculty conference room before he begins his scheduled classes at the University of Maryland. He outstretches his hand, carrying a ceramic coffee mug bearing the logo East Coast Coffee Co.

It’s not the name of his favorite coffee shop. East Coast Coffee Co. doesn’t’t even exist. Goldberg’s students invented it for his course on business planning at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Limited to 25 law students at the downtown Baltimore campus, there is always a waiting list to get in.

Goldberg makes the course as real-life as you can get in a classroom. Students develop a company —  in this case, a coffee shop empire reminiscent of Starbucks, down to official namesake mugs. They take it from startup to the business world’s version of a happy ending — a successful initial public offering. Read More →

Here’s your awww for the day: last week, students at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing traded TLC pointers with some of the nation’s most in-demand therapists:  volunteer therapy dogs from Pets on Wheels. The volunteer organization brings therapy dogs to places like Sandy Hook Elementary School, where they help heal trauma by, well, just being themselves. (The two golden retrievers in the photos were part of the Sandy Hook pet therapy team.)

Her last spring concert.  There she stands, on the stepped up bleachers, facing the darkened auditorium, so many spring concerts behind her.  She is beautiful.  Radiant.  With the light of possibility streaming from her.  Standing in heels she could not have balanced in a few short years ago.  Her heart sings in tune with the other young women in her a cappella group. Sweet harmony among friends made through the sometime painful years of growing up.  We stare at Grace, our own hearts so full of love, and hope, and the melancholy acceptance of the passage of time.

This is her season of lasts.  The last gym class, the last day of high school, the last AP test, the last spring concert.  The seniors are excited.  They all know where they are going in the fall, and their only thought now is to celebrate their friendships, and the accomplishments of their high school careers.  They are focused on being together, creating those final memories of this time of growth and learning, in the classroom and out, knowing that everything is about to change.  They are excited, but they are also a little nervous.  At least Grace is. Read More →

Leland Shelton is the one who looks like he’s just been mentioned in a speech by the president of the United States.

Leland Shelton has an inspiring biographical abstract. The Baltimore native was taken away from his mother at age four to live with his grandparents before entering the foster care system at 14. And yet, here he is, graduating from the prestigious Morehouse College and headed to Harvard Law School, and all with an eye toward helping keep foster-care kids from “fall[ing] through the cracks.”

But I wouldn’t know any of that about Shelton had President Barack Obama not recounted it in the keynote address he delivered at Morehouse commencement on Sunday. Read More →

In the fight against obesity, many cities and states have begun asking restaurants to prominently post the calorie count of each menu item. The idea is that once you know how many calories are in that order super-size fries, you’ll think twice about scarfing them down. But, according to two Johns Hopkins public health researchers, calorie-posting doesn’t actually do that much — and so they’ve come up with a better way.
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