When I first heard that Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando (D) was writing an autobiography, with the title “My Seven Black Fathers,” the cynic in me raced to a couple of conclusions. There was something a little too Obamaesque about the title to make me think this was anything but a calculated political document by a very ambitious politician whose own history, with a white mother from Kansas, an African father and a Black wife named Michele, aligns very neatly with the 44th president’s. I was wrong.

 

Two decades ago, the Maryland Department of Transportation unveiled plans to study a much-needed east-west transit link in Baltimore that could ultimately connect the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and U.S. Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn to the west with Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center to the east. Not long after, the Red Line received the official greenlight from then-Gov. Martin O’Malley, the effort boosted by nearly $1 billion pledged by federal authorities to help build a light rail line. What happened next became Exhibit A for anyone making the case that Baltimore has been treated poorly by a Republican governor who hails from the D.C. suburbs: In 2015, Larry Hogan killed the project calling it a “boondoggle.”

Just shy of 30 years before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln was grappling with severe melancholy, often telling those around him that he was thinking about suicide and wandering in the woods alone with his gun. On two separate occasions, those around him became so concerned that they took Lincoln in, cared for him, and kept him safe through his crises. Imagine how different our country — and the world — would look today if Lincoln’s loved ones had not intervened. And he was only one person.

Like so many aspects of pre-pandemic life, COVID-19 continues to reshape how we think of education in radical and unexpected ways. Nowhere has this been more relevant than in the field of summer learning. Owing to the historic challenges and opportunities posed by the virus, summer learning providers engaged an unprecedented number of students with meaningful learning experiences and provided essential services to the young people who needed it most. Over 120,000 Maryland public school students attended summer learning programs between June and September of 2021, amounting to the largest expanded learning initiative in the state’s history.

s the COVID-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United States, young adults are facing the consequences of becoming emancipated from foster care. Once a young person turns 18 years old, they are legally no longer a child and cannot be considered as a foster placement. Those who age out of foster care must adjust to living independently and facing a great deal of adversity. They are expected to move out and start their lives on their own amid an ongoing pandemic.

A conversation with Stanford economist Nick Bloom on a surprising find from the pandemic: remote work is fueling economic growth. This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve the world’s most pressing policy challenges. It has been edited for length and clarity. Justin Fox: The remote work revolution unleashed by the pandemic has brought huge changes in the labor market, with social and economic implications that we’ll be dealing with for generations. You’ve been one of the most important chroniclers and analysts of this phenomenon.

The Hogan administration has launched the first steps to recoup roughly $220 million in funds from Maryland’s mental health and addiction treatment providers. The recoupment of these funds is unfair and dangerously destabilizing to Maryland’s public behavioral health system. The Hogan administration selected Optum as the vendor to manage the state’s Administrative Services Organization, which pays claims for publicly funded mental health and addiction treatment. Optum’s claims processing system launched in 2020 and promptly failed, causing MDH to issue advances – or estimated payments – for a seven-month period that overlapped the disruption and chaos caused by the onset of COVID-19.

Our trade imbalance with China and others has compounded to a cumulative value that rivals our national debt. We layer on tens of thousands of pages of regulations on our businesses (wage, safety, environmental) and allow, in the name of “free trade,” our foreign trading partners to avoid these costs. China plows its profits into the military and industrial base that we will have to counter to defend Taiwan from intimidation and threatened invasion.

As officials in Carroll County government continue their work to preserve 100,000 agricultural acres it is a good time to reflect on the history of master planning in the county and the community leaders who have worked hard to provide us with the firm foundation we have today, which allows us to confidently plan our future. Then again, when it comes to master planning, leadership is something that comes quite naturally to our county. We have a history of excellence. It is a story that needs to be told over and over again. Portions of this discussion have been published before.