www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-school-construction-20120301,0,1047591.story State should not agree to commit vast sums over decades to a questionable building plan By George W. Liebmann 4:18 PM EST, March 1, 2012 Advertisement On the important issue of school construction, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has displayed refreshing common sense by demonstrating skepticism about a vastly inflated — indeed […]
Science Education Revisited Once again.the Maryland State Department of Education. which has done virtually nothing to relieve the State’s chronic shortage of qualified high school science teachers. has released its biannual Teacher Staffing Report. Pages 87 through 90 of the Report contains statistics showing that the state’s high schools offer only 355 physics classes. as […]
Maryland is known as a strong union state, and it would seem improbable to Marylanders that the current battle in Wisconsin could be replicated here. Maryland’s budget deficit is less pronounced than that of Wisconsin, though its combined state debt and pension deficits place it among the top 20 states in debt burden. It retains […]
Fresh from its advocacy of the Thornton Plan, which exploded current expense spending for schools in the name of a supposed constitutional imperative, the A.C.L.U. now seeks to duplicate this experience with school capital spending. It will be recalled that the A.C.L.U. brought a lawsuit, Bradford v. Board of Education, asserting that the education clause […]
George Liebmann talked about his November 22, 2010 article in the Baltimore Sun, The Youth Employment Conundrum, that suggests policy changes to create jobs for young people may be needed to avoid social unrest. http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/11/26/WJE/A/41208/George+Liebmann+Calvert+Institute+for+Policy+Research.aspx
White House economic adviser Christina D. Romer tells us [“Keeping teachers in the classroom,” op-ed, May 28] that by “preventing layoffs we would save on unemployment insurance payments, food stamps and COBRA subsidies . . . and we would maintain tax revenues.” So much for productivity in the education system or anywhere in government. A […]
The Obama Administration’s education reform effort continues Washington’s enthusiasm for intellectually bankrupt ‘top-down’ reforms. As in foreign policy and policies relating to financial regulation, there is essential continuity between the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. The Obama reform approach essentially abandons any significant effort to alter failed grant in aid programs. The Individuals With […]
The recent, ringing defeat of a referendum on school vouchers in Utah – generally thought of as America’s most conservative state – should be a wake-up call to critics of our public school system. The proposal failed for several reasons apart from the might of the teachers unions. Chief among these is that it was […]
The Baltimore Schools Readers of the Baltimore newspapers have been regaled by a series of advertisements placed by the Baltimore Teachers’ Union, which has reached an impasse in contract negotiations with the school board. The school board proposes to slightly reduce the allowed weekly amount of what is quaintly called ‘preparation time’, in order to […]
The only indication of the Governor’s thinking, if it can be called that, about the school system, is that supplied by his task force on education, whose report was publicized by, and not repudiated by, the Governor’s office. The three co-chairmen of the task force were selected so as to be totally protective of existing […]