On the nippy side?
Doesn't faze Demetria Newsome, a chemistry teacher at Dunbar High School who just returned from six weeks on a scientific expedition near the South Pole.
Ms. Newsome was one of five teachers nationally to be chosen in a rigorous National Science Foundation competition to join scientists on Mount Erebus, the most active volcano in Antarctica. After three weeks of training at McMurdo Station, the largest of the U.S. communities on the continent, her party set up camp at the base of Erebus, traveling each day by snowmobile and foot to the volcano crater, where they collected gas samples to study this spring back in the United States.
Ms. Newsome also returned with a rare volcanic rock found only on Mount Erebus and Mount Kenya in Africa.
She had to pass a Navy physical and be trained to work in sub-zero temperatures and in altitudes well above two miles.
But it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and daytime temperatures, Ms. Newsome said, sometimes reached into the 30s, above yesterday's high in Baltimore. Moreover, the sun shone 24 hours a day. "My tent was bright yellow and blue," she said. "It was strange to wake up at 2 a.m. and see things as bright as a summer afternoon in Baltimore."
Ms. Newsome, who declined to give her age, is a graduate of Milford Mill High School in Baltimore County and daughter of a Baltimore City teacher. She earned degrees from Morgan State University and the Johns Hopkins School of Continuing Studies. "The participation of African-Americans in science like this is slim," she said. "I'd like to help it along through my experience."
Ms. Newsome is on the lecture circuit now and working to incorporate what she learned in Antarctica in her teaching at Dunbar. "It might have been the most thrilling of my life, but it might not," she said. "People catch the Antarctic bug, and I'd like to go back next summer."
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A simple amendment to the state Education Department's rules on forced school improvement could take the department past some nasty political battles with Baltimore City while keeping all of the state's schools -- even those with relatively high test scores -- on their scholastic toes.
In the first two years of the program, the department designated for self-improvement the worst performers by a variety of measurements -- ranging from attendance to test scores -- and ** said also that the schools must be in decline. Thus, last year it could choose Patterson and Douglass high schools in Baltimore because both were among the lowest performers in the state -- and slipping. Other Baltimore high schools had similarly dreadful statistics but were not in decline.
Apparently, the bottom of the heap among Maryland schools belongs to Baltimore. Reliable reports have it that two weeks ago, the state Education Department was ready to announce as many as 10 candidates for reconstitution, nine from Baltimore City. When city Superintendent Walter G. Amprey and school board President Phillip H. Farfel screamed bloody murder, the state negotiated, and the list was whittled to three -- Calvert and Arnett Brown middle schools and Templeton Elementary School.
This means that in the next couple of years, the dishonor roll, at least for middle and elementary schools, will belong to Baltimore City.
So why not create a separate list for schools that may still have respectable scores and attendance statistics but that are in steady decline? Announce those schools in January, as well, and force them to reform in the same way the five schools in the first two years of the program -- all from the city -- have to rewrite their scripts. In this way, a middle-class suburban high school might find itself in the same pickle as a Douglass or a Patterson.
The state now has five years of statistics, plenty enough to spot a school that has been resting too long on its laurels, whose principal and staff might have become complacent. Some districts already are doing this. St. Mary's County has published a list of schools that are slipping.
Superintendents and other officials will argue that these schools shouldn't be subject to the public opprobrium that results from a public announcement. But which is worse: near the bottom and declining or near the middle (or even top) and declining? The obstacles to learning are abundant in Baltimore, the chances of failure greater, public blame steady and long-lived. If these schools are to be singled out, why not schools in decline elsewhere?
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The Johns Hopkins University again has been ranked No. 1 in the nation in total spending on research and development and federal receipts for R&D.;
In fiscal year 1993, Hopkins got $674 million from the federal government and, adding from other sources, spent $746 million, far ahead of the University of Michigan ($250 million and $426 million), the University of Wisconsin, Madison ($214 million and $372 million) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($267 million and $366 million.)
As usual, a huge asterisk needs to be placed beside Hopkins. Much of its federal research money goes to the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, while other universities with big labs consider them government installations run on a contract basis.
Still, that's a hefty income for Maryland and Baltimore. The University of Maryland College Park, incidentally, ranked 40th in federal funding and 20th in R&D; spending in the same 1993 list.
HTC