Maryland is the nation’s second best educated state with 36.9 percent of its population aged 25 or over holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, 24/7 Wall St. reported, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s’ American Community Survey. Read More →

Earlier this year, Johns Hopkins announced their partnership with online platform Coursera, which allows universities to host free classes online, complete with lectures, videos, notes, and readings. “It just got easier to get a free education,” Will Oremus writes in Slate. “These aren’t just videotaped lectures. They’re streamed in real-time, and they’re increasingly interactive… They include regular assignments and multiple-choice tests.” And now the University of Maryland is joining some of the other elite schools (including Caltech, UVA, Stanford, and Princeton) in offering free classes online, in subjects as diverse as quantum physics, startup formation, and the civil rights
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Kennedy Center chooses Baltimore for Any Given Child arts education program - Washington Post
Maryland tax revenue estimates for 2013 raised by $180M - Baltimore Business Journal
Columbia teen pleads guilty to fatal stabbing in Long Reach - Baltimore Sun
Historically black Md. universities win federal grants - Baltimore Sun
Obama Campaign Pounces on Romney Fundraiser Video - Real Clear Politics

I just got back from a wedding, and so I’m in the mood to celebrate unions of all kind. The new partnership between T. Rowe Price and Towson University may be a bit less romantic than what I witnessed up in New Hampshire, but it’s still an exciting example of how Baltimore’s education and business communities can benefit from one another in unexpected ways.
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The new hot thing in the education world is Common Core State Standards — a movement to get all the diverse educational requirements across the United States aligned and consistent. (So far, 45 states have signed on; the holdouts are Texas, Virginia, Alaska, Nebraska, and Minnesota.) But as national standards change, that means teachers have to change, too — which is where Towson University’s new program steps in.
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Every year Newsweek (via the Daily Beast) ranks America’s smartest cities, and this year we Baltimoreans can stand up a little straighter, knowing that we out-brain Pittsburgh, Richmond, Nashville, Chicago, and Providence. That’s the good news.
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Look, I know that climate change is just a hoax, and even if it’s real, it’s not man-made, and anyway, so what — the earth goes through changes, man — massive changes in the weather never hurt anyone.  But being something of a left-wing nut I’m happy that Maryland schools is receiving funding from the National Science Foundation to teach about the pathological disaster fantasies of a few wacked-out, atheist scientists — you know, “global warming.” Read More →

After Green Party convention wraps up, challenges remain for local affiliate – Baltimore Brew
Grand Prix of Baltimore signs Giant, Sunoco, Dr Pepper as sponsors – Baltimore Business Journal
Md. students lead nation in test gains over past 20 years – Baltimore Sun
Water main break disrupts downtown Baltimore – Baltimore Sun
Shocker: Americans Are Still Confused About Healthcare Reform – The Atlantic
Scientists apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to world of music – Washington Post

At the Johns Hopkins School of Education, it’s not all book-learning and airy ideas; with a new community elementary school on the way, Hopkins-trained educators will be able to put into practice everything they’re learning.

The project may have a clunky name (officially, it’s Elmer A. Henderson:  A Johns Hopkins Partnership School; it used to be known as the East Baltimore Community School), but its goals are lofty. The $43 million state-of-the-art school, a partnership with Morgan State University’s School of Education and Urban Studies, is scheduled to open for the 2013-14 school year, and will host 540 students when it’s at capacity. Students will be drawn from the so-called “East Baltimore Development, Inc.” area — the neighborhoods around the sprawling Johns Hopkins Medical complex, many of whom have had a fraught relationship with the school and its approach to development. (Former residents who were relocated out of the area so Hopkins could expand will also have priority.) If space remains, the school will also serve siblings, children of nearby employers, and children from surrounding East Baltimore neighborhoods.
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Today, the New York Times reports on a study showing that “a centrifugal force… is concentrating the nation’s college graduates into a set of metro areas” — and, as a consequence, leaving others behind.

First things first:  know that Baltimore, a city dominated by its education industry, is benefiting from this trend. A full 35 percent of residents in the Baltimore-Towson region have a college degree, up nearly 25 percent from 1970. That puts us in the top-15 of cities nationwide. And, as the Times reports, cities where college graduates cluster tend to reap the benefits of longer life expectancies, higher average incomes, and fewer single-parent families. Ideally, this is a rising-tide-raises-all-boats situation:  More college graduates leads to higher regional income, which in turn results in a higher tax base and better public services.

But (of course) there’s a dark side to the success that cities like Baltimore, DC, San Jose, and Boston have seen — and it looks like Dayton, Ohio.

As college grads increasingly cluster in certain regions and avoid others, certain cities get left behind. Forty years ago, Dayton and Chicago’s populations had similar rates of college graduation; these days, that gap has widened significantly — and Dayton is just one of the rust belt cities that’s feeling the negative effects.

It can be strange to look at a list like this one and see Baltimore held up as a place that’s doing things right, when our city’s name so often gets used as shorthand for “crime” or “urban decay.” But the New Republic is encouraging residents of Dayton and other areas moving down the educational-attainment ladder to look to places like Baltimore and Pittsburgh as models. Our economy was hit hard by the loss of manufacturing, an economic whammy that the city’s still recovering from. But because those losses happened earlier than the rust belt’s subsequent collapse, Baltimore (and Pittsburgh and Charlotte, etc.) have had more of a chance to rebuild economies based around things like health, higher education, and technology. No one’s arguing that it’s been easy, or that the transition is complete. But Baltimore’s long-term economic transition has been going on for a while — and it seems that finally, people are noticing that we’re doing something right.