Commentary

Gov. Wes Moore’s decision to reduce funding to Maryland’s Broadening Options and Opportunities for Students Today or BOOST program, which spends tax dollars to underwrite private school education for selected K-12 students from low-income families, has drawn the kind of criticism that administration officials must have anticipated.

Many of the babies who wanted for infant formula during the U.S. shortage in 2022 have moved on to solid foods. But a year on from the events that left shelves empty for months, the possibility of a repeat disaster remains. Last year, hundreds of members of Congress rushed to address the most immediate impacts of the shortage — and to advance short-term fixes. But lawmakers have yet to tackle the issues that matter most: the extreme concentration of the formula market, and regulators’ inability to safeguard the U.S. formula supply.

It’s easy to let your imagination run wild when it comes to the unidentified flying objects now making frequent appearances over North America. At least one object was reported to be cylindrical, eerily suggestive of past imagined visitors. “The cylinder was artificial — hollow — with an end that screwed out!” wrote H.G. Wells in “The War of The Worlds.” “Something within the cylinder was unscrewing the top!” Maybe the Martians really are coming.

There has been a long running controversy about the value of adding toll lanes to portions of I-270 and I-495. Many options and alternatives have been proposed in place of present plans, but the approach driven by controversy has been unsystematic – lacking a serious dialogue. In contrast, I was recently on a Zoom call that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the November 30, 1972, decision by the Republican Governor of Massachusetts Frank Sargent to eliminate all the proposed urban highways in the Boston region except for one in construction and substitute mass transit. In addition, associated with that decision was a successful bipartisan campaign to open the federal Highway Trust Fund to permit mass transit funding.

“The coronavirus caused by far the biggest disruption in the history of American education,” Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovits wrote in The Atlantic last year. Things have not reverted back to normal as COVID has gradually lost its grip on American life. Today’s teachers and students are living with a set of altered realities, and they may be for the rest of their lives: Shrinking enrollments. In the first full academic year of the pandemic, K-12 public school enrollment fell by 1.1 million students and fell by about an additional 130,000 students the following fall. New Stanford-led research finds that 26% of that decline was caused by students switching to homeschooling and 14% by students leaving for private schools. Another 34% of the decline is hard to track, but some students were probably going truant, doing unregistered home-schooling or simply opting out of kindergarten.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted cert in January for a case arguing violations of the Fifth Amendment due to unlawful taking without just compensation by the government and the Eighth Amendment for excessive fines and fees (Tyler v. Hennepin County). The case based in Minneapolis challenges the government’s ability to seize a property because of delinquent taxes, and profit from any remaining equity. The case stems from a tragic circumstance, when Geraldine Tyler fell behind on her property taxes of $2,300 in 2010. By the time all penalties, interest and fees were added in 2015, she owed $15,000.